this movement: the past, present & future of Wikipedia

Phoebe AyersWikimedia Foundation

UC Davis Libraries

1. Edit this movement

Taipei, Wikimania 2007

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all

knowledge.

- Wikimedia’s vision statement

inter-language links

Wikimedia is global

Wikimedia chapters, 2013 (dark blue = founded)

What is Wikimedia?12 projects

280 languages

25 million Wikipedia articles

18 million media files

100,000 active editors

100s of local meetup groups

38 local/national level chapters

150 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco

1,130,000 individual financial donors (in 2011-12)

500,000,000 readers

The cultivated person’s first duty is to always be prepared to rewrite

the encyclopedia. -Umberto Eco

Wikimania 2005

[[user:Walkerma]]

Bangalore, 2010

Wikimania, Buenos Aires 2009

David Ferrieio, Wikimania 2012

Wikimania, Haifa 2011

• Free [to use and reuse]

• Volunteer-written

• Supported by readers

• Everyone can participate

• Neutral, encyclopedic, factual

• No top down editorial control:

• Community curated work

Values

2. How Wikipedia Works

Or: what is there to do today?

History of an article

compareDate of edit

username

Their other contributions

Edit summary

Revision of an article – one “edit”

Evaluating an article

Becoming an editor

…saving an edit

Why bother?

3. Wikimedia and libraries

Add a reference

Information literacy

Wikipedia in the classroom

Wikipedians in libraries

Edit-a-thon, Multnomah County Library, 2012

Opening the world’s archives

“GLAM”

Edit this page

4. The future

Planning for the next 10 years

Bridging the gender gap

Contributors everywhere

And readers, too

Kenya, OLPC school project

Keeping knowledge free

SOPA blackout, Jan 18 2012

Thank you

psayers@ucdavis.edu