Torre de Belém, Portugal. Photo: Joaomartinho63

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

A young participant of Wiki takes Cologne. Photo: Elke Wetzig

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments

Growing at a steady pace of about 100 articles a day, the Hungarian Wikipedia was recently propelled into warp-speed by a shower of 350 articles about asteroids, helping the encyclopedia hit a 200K article milestone this weekend. On Saturday, September 10 at 02:08 UTC the 200,000th article was added to the encyclopedia. Interestingly, the record-breaking article was *not* about asteroids, but about Crankshafts. Contributed by User: Pakos, real-name Ákos Pásztor, the Crankshaft article has been edited more than 40 times by 14 editors. Pakos, also the volunteer editor responsible for the asteroid articles, has a keen interest in astrology, motor sports and topics covering his hometown of Dorog, Hungary.

The eight-year-old encyclopedia is a top-20 encyclopedia among the more than 270 Wikipedia language encyclopedias. Initially founded by user: Grin (Péter Gervai) who, when surfing the internet back in 2003 for information about Hungarian kings, came across English Wikipedia. He started by translating Wikipedia policies and guidelines and later created the first mainspace article on the Hungarian band, Omega.

Today, Hungarian Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive encyclopedia in the history of the language. The Big Pallas Encyclopedia, completed in 1897, included 150,000 entries, Révai Encyclopedia, completed in 1935, included 230,000 entries and the Hungarian Great Encyclopedia, completed in 2004, contained about 150,000 entries. Although the work of the editors is impressive, according to volunteer editor and WMHU Executive Vice President, Bence Damokos, there’s still a lot missing. Bence, username bdamokos, mentioned that articles covering basic topics like Oscar-winning movies are still yet to be written. And even Hungarian films like Pál Adrienn, which won the 2011 Hungarian Filmweek Award and was screened at Cannes, strangely has an article in the English Wikipedia but not Hungarian Wikipedia.

Volunteers have planned a celebration and new editor outreach event set for October 1 in the town of Győr. If you’re in that part of the world, plan to join them! We wish the Hungarian Wikipedia well in their quest to invite more people to edit and help drive the enyclopeida to the next milestone.

Gratulálunk!

Moka Pantages

Global Communications

People throughout the world are gathering at more than 450 events in 120 countries to celebrate Wikipedia’s 10th birthday.  I’m amazed and thrilled and humbled by the significant support Wikipedia has in every corner of the world.  When I started Wikipedia a decade ago, I  never imagined that everyday people in places like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Bolivia, Ethiopia and Algeria would come together to celebrate Wikipedia in such an extraordinary way.

In ten years, Wikipedia has become so much to so many people.  Millions of people came together because they believed that access to free information was important and needed.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed. Thank you to the editors, donors and supporters. Thank you to those who believed in our mission and helped us along the way.  It’s because of you that Wikipedia exists: thank you for believing in the power of ordinary people to come together to do something remarkable.

It’s my hope that more people are now inspired to join the movement and help us reach our mission: a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.  I look forward to working with all of you over the next ten years to reach our goal.
Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

–Jimbo

Ten years ago today, Jimmy Wales typed Hello World! into a wiki, and Wikipedia was born.

Today, Wikipedia’s the fifth most-popular site on the internet, and the only site in the top 25 that provides a wholly non-commercial public service, backed by a non-profit. It’s the largest collection of information ever assembled in human history: free to use, and free of advertising. If you’re reading it, it’s for you :-)

The anniversary’s an opportunity for us all to reflect on Wikipedia: its social impact, and what we want to accomplish in the next ten years. There’s been a lot of thoughtful media coverage over the past few weeks: you can read a lot of it here.

What makes me happy about the coverage is that it seems like people’s attitudes towards Wikipedia have finally turned an important corner.

In its early years, Wikipedia was one of our culture’s dirty little secrets: everybody used it, but very few were comfortable saying so. For the longest time, the only people who openly admitted loving Wikipedia were early adopters and iconoclasts.

Today though, journalists, educators and culture critics are finally embracing Wikipedia, acknowledging that its strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses, and that its fundamental premise works. (A reporter told me the other day that mocking Wikipedia is “so 2007.” LOL.)

So today, we celebrate all the people who built this extraordinary thing. The engineers who made the code. The people who write the articles, fix the typos, smooth the text, localize the software, answer readers’ mail, and fight off vandals and POV-pushers. The donors, who pay the bills.

I invite you to check out this page, where there are listed (at last count) 454 Wikipedia anniversary parties, conferences, film screenings and other events. If you can come to one –even if you’ve never edited or even ever met a Wikipedian– please do!

And if you can’t be with us in person, why not do a little celebratory editing? Wikipedia wants your help: here’s a really great place to get started.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped to build Wikipedia. What you’ve done is amazing. Happy anniversary!

Sue Gardner, Executive Director

Today we’ve seen a wide range of media outlets around the world cover the news about Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary.  Some stories recount the history of the project from its humble beginnings, and others collect the viewpoints of big thinkers on the topic of web and technology.  The Foundation’s Executive Director also published an op-ed piece in the Guardian that looks into the project and its pioneer beginnings. It’s wonderful to see so many media outlets, blogs, and great institutions probe deeply into the stories of Wikipedia, and start to ask big questions about Wikipedia’s considerable impact on society and the internet.

Wikipedia 10 celebrators around the world are documenting the coverage on ten.wikipedia.org, a wiki specially created for the occasion. Some of the highlights of the day:

The Times of India out of Bangalore discusses Wikipedia’s push for more local language content.

The Atlantic from New York prepared a wide-ranging package of content about the anniversary, including insights from Wikimedia advisory board members Craig Newmark, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Ethan Zuckerman.

Read Write Web asks readers what Wikipedia will look like in ten years.

The Washington Post featured a lengthy piece on the history and future of Wikipedia, including an interview with Jimmy Wales.

Italy’s La Repubblica covered the occasion, and made a visit to the Foundation’s San Francisco offices earlier this week.

Wired UK and the US Wired are in the midst of ‘Wikipedia week‘ and have included some great Wikipedia lists.

The Guardian‘s feature op-ed by Wikimedia ED Sue Gardner ran earlier today.

We’ll update the media coverage page over the next week as more global coverage emerges, and as we cross the threshold of the big anniversary.

Jay Walsh
Communications

We’re only a few days away from celebrating Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary on Saturday, January 15th, and today the Wikimedia Foundation has officially announced it to the world.

Recently, I let you know that there were about 65 events happening. Today, there are more than 300. That growth is amazing, and as usual the dedication and creativity of the volunteers that make Wikipedia work is nothing short of astounding.

Numbers alone really fail to tell the story of just what we’re doing to commemorate “Wikipedia Day” in 2011 though. Of the hundreds of events on six continents, they all demonstrate a passion for free knowledge. Many more events combine our movement’s unique mission with activities that really suit the local community. From a Campus Party in São Paulo to a workshop and kite flying festival in Bangladesh, all of these events are powerful examples of the diversity we’re striving for in our movement. Many of these events have their own localized 10th anniversary designs – the Chinese Wikipedia 10 logo on this post is one.

I encourage you to browse the full list of events on ten.wikipedia.org, and to include editors, readers, and donors as you reflect on Wikipedia’s first 10 years. Wherever or however you choose to celebrate, this is a historic moment, and we’d like to thank you for making it happen.

Steven Walling
Community Dept. Fellow

Congratulations to Ukrainian Wikipedia on reaching 250,000 articles! The milestone article was officially created on Tuesday, December 21 at 8:45pm, Kyiv Time by user Anatoliy-024.  Anatoily-024, a Wikipedian since 2008, has created 206 articles and made 6,000 edits to the Ukranian Wikipedia making this user the 110^th most active contributor to this language Wikipedia.

Since it started in 2004, Ukranian Wikipedia has grown at a steady rate, adding 50,000 articles in just the last nine months, making it the sixteenth largest language Wikipedia.  This year, the Ukrainian encyclopedia experienced a 64 percent increase in page views– 860,000 people have viewed 30 million articles in December alone.

The wonderful thing about this accomplishment is that each bit of information found on Wikipedia has been included by volunteers– everyday people committed to sharing free information with others.  Although Wikipedia is available in over 270 languages, only 35 language Wikipedias have reached the 100,000 article milestone.  It’s important that more people join the movement and contribute to this valuable, public resource.

We thank all the volunteers who helped Ukranian Wikipedia advance this far.  We hope that others will take the time to join them!

Moka Pantages

Communications

This week we watched our projects hit two big milestones.  Russian Wikipedia has just slipped past the 500,000 article mark.  It continues to remain in the top ten largest Wikipedia.  Wikinews has a short write-up on the achievement, and thankfully explains why Russian Wikipedians are celebrating the milestone with… a lemon (or half a lemon).

Also this week we saw the cumulative total for all Wikipedia articles, across all languages, cross the astonishing 15,000,000 mark.  You can see the live-updated data on the volunteer-created Wikistats page (bookmark for frequent statistical wonderment and of course Erik Zachte’s essential-reading, stats.wikimedia.org). For the last few months we were excited to say we had broken 14,000,000.  Just when we got this number in our heads, another million articles flood in.

Both are incredible achievements, demonstrating the continuing and sustained growth of our projects across hundreds of languages.  Congratulations to all of the project contributors.

Jay Walsh, Communications

On this day in 2001, Wikipedia, a small, experimental project with a big mission was introduced to the world by Founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years later, growing at unprecedented speed, due to the dedicated and enthusiastic support of volunteers and contributors, Wikipedia has evolved into one of the most important sources of free information and knowledge in the world.  Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

In 2002, only celebrating one year of existence, Wikipedia grew to over 20,000 articles– and in its second year,  130,000 articles in 28 languages. To wax nostalgic, you can turn back the hands of time and rummage through “vintage” Wikipedia here. Since then, over 14 million articles in 270 languages have been created.  For millions of people everywhere, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of their daily lives– a resource relied on by hundreds of millions of  visitors a month — and growing.

In celebration of this milestone, Wikipedians in Bangalore, India and New York City have planned events.  If you’re celebrating with us, post a comment and tell us how, or even better, add photos to Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Here’s to another year wiser!

Moka Pantages, Communications