We never run ads on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is funded by more than a million donors, who give an average donation of less than 30 dollars.
The second volume of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which includes a chapter on MediaWiki, is now available online and on lulu.com.
The Wikimedia Foundation today announced a partnership with DigiCert, Inc. based in Linden, Utah, to secure its web and mobile properties, using the company’s Enterprise SSL Managed PKI. The agreement supports online authentication and encryption on Wikimedia’s web and mobile properties, while enabling Foundation staff to streamline digital certificate management. “The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful for [...]
Major news in April include: substantial work on Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year; the selection of 9 Google Summer of Code students and the start of their work; the shift to a rapid deployment cycle; a new mobile skin deployed to Wikimedia sites; and the Wikipedia mobile app for iOS switching to using OpenStreetMap data.
One of the annual plan targets of the Wikimedia Foundation for 2011-2012 was to reach 2 billion monthly page views to the Wikipedia mobile site by June 2012. We’re happy to say that we hit the mark sooner, on the second-to-last day of April to be exact. April clocked in at 2.089 billion, a year-over-year [...]
Recently, technology reporter Jacob Aron wrote a blog post on newscientist.com that talks about how bloated website code drains your smartphone’s battery. He mentions how Stanford computer scientist Narendran Thiagarajan and colleagues used an Android phone hooked up to a multimeter to measure the energy used in downloading and rendering popular websites. Using their experimental setup they [...]
We received 63 proposals for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and several mentors put many hours into evaluating project ideas, discussing them with applicants and making the tough decisions. We’re happy to announce our final choices, the Google Summer of Code students for 2012: Ankur Anand, working on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into [...]
The average age of the MediaWiki developers is quite young. They often started contributing to the MediaWiki code while still in school or university. When their contributions show promise, they are sometimes asked to contribute to particular projects. This has resulted in the hiring of students and they continue to do professionally what they at [...]
Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users, a quantitative analysis shows. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as a grade for class, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. In fall 2011, 55 courses participated in [...]
For MediaWiki, the CLDR or Common Locale Data Repository, is a primary source of information. The information about languages Unicode maintains in this standard is what is most relevant to us. It registers its name in English, as well as the autonym or the name in its own language, as well as information like what a [...]
For the past year and a half we’ve been working on a project named Wikimedia Labs, which enables us to invite our community to contribute to how our sites are run. Labs is a cloud computing environment using OpenStack for development, testing and deployment of Wikimedia’s infrastructure as a whole, enabling us to treat our [...]
Wikimedia engineers have finished up the latest version of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia and its sister sites. We have begun deploying this version, labeled “1.20wmf1″, to all Wikimedia sites in stages. We started on April 10th and will continue until April 25th.
If you’d like to read Wikipedia in an airplane (of the offline variety) or in an area with no or limited connectivity, or install it in a university, or just to have it handy in case of a zombie apocalypse, you can now download a full text copy of the English Wikipedia (from January 2012) [...]
We launched the official Wikipedia application for Android almost two months ago and the response has been tremendous. We’ve had ~2.25 million installations and ~5000 ratings (with a 4.4/5.0 average). Preliminary reports also indicate about 23 million page views per month via the app. In short, it has been doing pretty well! iOS App Launch [...]
Major news in March include: the move of all our domain names from GoDaddy, a report on the first phase of Article Feedback version 5, design improvements to our mobile front-end, the move from Subversion to git, and the kick-off of our participation to Google Summer of Code 2012.
Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement, and the Wikimedia Foundation are proud to announce Wikidata, a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge and the first new Wikimedia projectsince 2006. Wikidata will support the more than 280 language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all [...]
A growing number of visitors access the mobile site of Wikipedia and it is an area the engineering team is keen to improve. To do this, we are offering a more functional and polished experience adapted for mobile users, who operate in a much more confined world compared to those on the desktop. This week [...]
Figure 1. One of the feedback forms tested in the AFTv5 experiments (Option 1). The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) [...]
Most top websites have thousands of software developers on staff, creating new features and keeping the site running securely. The Wikimedia Foundation has about forty. That’s pretty amazing, considering Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. So, what’s our secret? Well, we don’t have any secrets. We make everything free, in [...]
For the seventh year in a row, Wikimedia Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program where Google pays summer students USD 5000 each to code for open source projects for three months (read more). We hope 2012′s students will develop useful chunks of MediaWiki, [...]
