Wikipedia

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New Wikimedia Enterprise API Enables Public Data Access

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, launched Wikimedia Enterprise on Monday. Its API was first announced in March.

Wikimedia Enterprise makes the process of leveraging, packaging, and sharing content from Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects more efficient for large scale content reusers. In most cases, commercial entities that reuse Wikimedia content at a high volume have product, service, and system requirements that go beyond what Wikimedia freely provides through publicly available APIs and data dumps. The information panels shown in search engine results and the information served by virtual home assistants are examples of how Wikimedia content is frequently used by other websites.

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Wikipedia Wants Big Tech to Pay for its Content

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Tech giants use Wikipedia to power their assistants, like Siri and Alexa. But they don’t pay the non-profit. Now, Wikimedia Enterprise wants to change that.

The Foundation says it doesn’t expect Enterprise ever to become the primary source of funding for the foundation’s roughly $100 million budget. User donations, supplemented by grants, should still carry most of the load, Seitz-Gruwell says, but having a reliable additional revenue stream from companies would offer stability for the foundation, particularly as it embarks on an ambitious agenda for the year 2030 to reach more parts of the world and more communities with “free knowledge.”

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US Teen Wrote 27,000 Wikipedia Entries in Language he Doesn’t Speak

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Consider this filed under “wacky Friday news”. A teenager in the U.S. created or edited 49% of the Scots language Wikipedia, despite having no understanding of the language.

[…] Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, takes a more ameliorative approach and says he is now in conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation about the prospect of properly re-editing the teenager’s contributions.

“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”

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How the Internet Archive Makes Wikipedia More Reliable

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Many of Wikipedia’s citations are from books, and to check the book citation against the article requires that you hunt down the book. But now the Internet Archive is making the process easier.

Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you’d borrow a book from your local library.

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North Face is Really Sorry for Spamming Wikipedia

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

North Face as issued an apology over its manipulating campaign to spam Wikipedia pages and game Google search results.

We believe deeply in @Wikipedia’s mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we’ll commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on the site policies.

If the idiots didn’t openly brag about it, they probably could’ve gotten away with it, at least for a while longer.