Do you happen to have 650 GB of free diskspace? If so, you can grab a copy of Wikipedia. Don’t fret: The compressed download of all language editions only clocks in at 40 gigabytes. Thanks to our developer Tim Starling for working on this project.

As a non-profit organization and a social movement, it’s our core mission to give free knowledge away to everyone. All the text content of Wikipedia is available for free download, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. The point of offering these downloadable archives is not just to make it possible to read Wikipedia while you’re on a plane or without Wi-Fi — it’s to enable people without Internet connectivity to use our content in ways that make sense. In particular, using these copies, it becomes very straightforward to set up a copy of Wikipedia for a school or university with no or limited Internet access. And, if you’re clever, you can use the dump as a starting point to create a version running on DVDs or USB sticks. (As the download page notes, if you create a product using the “Wikipedia” trademark or logo, you need official permission from the Wikimedia Foundation.)

For the technically inclined: The static HTML dumps are an alternative offering to our XML dumps in the original wiki syntax. The key advantage is that they don’t require any additional software to be useful: You can literally simply download them (provided you can handle the amount of data) and open them in your web browser. The wiki syntax format, on the other hand, offers third party users more flexibility in the ways they want to render the output.

Go ahead and download the data while it’s fresh. And if you have interesting stories about the ways in which you’re using your static copy, please drop a note to our Head of Communications, jwalsh(at)wikimedia(dot)org.

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

German Wikipedians discovered a road sign citing Wikipedia. The road sign is located at Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany. It denotes the “Erika-Mann-Bogen”, a street named in 2006 after Erika Mann (1905–1969) (article in English), the eldest daughter of Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann.

Members of the German Wikipedia community assume that the Hamburg municipality, by explicitly citing Wikipedia, wanted to express its esteem for the Wikimedia project, which is in Germany comparably high. Others raised the question if the usage of the text complies the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). One participant of the discussion joked that the GFDL had perhaps been printed on the backside of the sign which can not be seen on the photo.

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public outreach

(contributed by Kizu Naoko [user:Aphaia] from the Foundation Communications Committee)

On 25th June, around 12:36 UTC (21:36 in the Japan Standard Time), Japanese Wikipedia has reached its 500,000 article milestone and has become the first non-European and non-Latin script Wikipedia to pass
over this milestone. The exact 500,000th article is unknown but is very likely one of the following:

フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford),

国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day),

ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways) or

南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (South Aso Rail Line MT-2000 Diesel Engine).

While this wiki was set up in mid 2001 already, its activities began substantially years later, late 2002, and has steadily been growing. Now it is the 5th biggest Wikipedia and still one of fastest growing Wikimedia projects. In Japan, where the most Japanese speakers dwell, Japanese Wikipedia is known as one of major online references. In 2007  2.7 million people in Japan, roughly over 20% of the whole population of the nation, used Wikipedia from their home, and the number of users has steadily growing since 2005 when the first research was done,  CNET Japan reports.

With a degree of friendly rivalry, the Japanese Wikipedia chases sibling project, Polish Wikipedia, which is 4th largest and reached half a million articles in May. Both projects continue to show steady growth.

The Polish Wikipedia is 9th of the most popular sites in Poland (April 2008). New stats (look on the graph):

http://www.webinside.pl/news/5001

Every day volunteers write ~300 new articles, with average size 1,5 kb

pl wiki (the Polish Wikipedia) has 340 featured articles and more than 200 good articles.

In the beginning of 2008 the Polish Wikipedia started schools and university projects. The first 4 ended with good results (interview with prof. Czachorowski - Polish entomologist, who started 2 projects).

01.07. 2008 will be started new initiative “Holidays with Wikipedia” Wikipedians will work for better quality and they will invite (by sitenotice) readers to collaboration.

—

Congratulations to the Polish and Japanese Wikipedia editors!  May the friendly rivalry continue, and here’s to doubling this milestone in the next few years.

On Monday the Wikimedia Foundation started a qualification program to train senior citizens of the 50-plus age group as “Wikipedia trainers”. The future Wikipedia trainers shall be enabled to run their own Wikipedia workshops in internet cafés for older people. The long-term goal is to raise contributions from older people, who are still underrepresented in the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects.

The course will last six weeks. During the first weeks the participants will learn the basics of how to edit Wikipedia articles. In a second phase the participants will collaboratively develop a concept for Wikipedia courses for senior citizens. Subsequently, the participants should be able to act as Wikipedia evangelists and motivate other people of their age to contribute to Wikipedia.

The qualification program is part of the Foundation’s attempt to encourage contributions from targeted underrepresented groups.

Frank Schulenburg

Public outreach coordinator

UPDATE: Frank has written up some additional information about this program here.

In July 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with UNU-Merit, plans to launch the first general survey of Wikimedia readers and contributors (with a focus on Wikipedia). This survey will ask questions on:

• demographics (gender, profession, etc.)
• factors which influence whether people contribute or not
• topic and activity areas of interest for readers and contributors
• awareness of Wikipedia sister projects and the Wikimedia Foundation

The more languages we can present this survey in, the better! It will give us invaluable information about who our audience and our contributors are to different language Wikimedia projects, allowing for comparisons across languages and cultures. The anonymized data from this survey will be freely licensed.

If you speak and write languages other than English fluently, please help us to translate the survey.

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia fans and Google maps users may have heard recently that Google has unveiled a handsome new feature for its ubiquitous mapping system.

Alongside the familiar ’satellite’ and ‘terrain’ viewing options for maps, you can know click on ‘more’ then click the Wikipedia check box. In a flash the big serif W you know and love blankets mother earth, offering thousands of links to articles with geographic coordinates.

A great feature, and another novel way to explore the depths of Wikipedia’s millions and millions of articles.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Over at his fine blog, Jakob Voss has highlighted some neat work by design students at Texas State University.

From Jakob’s blog:

Mike Perez, design student at Texas State University, and his fellow students Mark Decker and Jacob Brubaker have created a wonderful campaign for Wikipedia in their design class. The posters or ads each show a straight view of an everyday person as an expert on a specific subject and a mind map of their thought process. This are the best ads for Wikipedia that I have seen since the Wikipedia promotion images that André created back in 2005 for the German Wikipedia. Just have a look (photos at flickr only because of copyright restrictions) and enjoy if you like Wikipedia as much as I do!

Nice work! Let us know if you’ve seen any other creative treatments…

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

This is not a very exciting title for a post, granted, but this little file contains quite a bit of power, especially on the Wikimedia websites. The little lines of command found in this file tell us what pages should not be included when search engines like Google or Yahoo! spider Wikimedia content.

Many of the commands in robots.txt are there for technical reasons. For example, we do not want search engines to index dynamically-generated pages, such as the Search page, because this would put too much of a load on our servers.

However, we have also included some discussion pages in robots.txt. The issue here is not so much article content but rather all the bickering, flamewars, and name-calling that we often find on discussion pages.

Consider this one aspect: Search engines are used constantly by employers hunting for information about prospective employees. Imagine a candidate being rejected because of an unanswered late entry to a year-and-a-half old conversation telling Joe Q. Lastnamehere that he is a liar and con man and his authority is fraudulent. You may believe that such an employer would be legally wrong to base a hiring decision on such a frail source, but people make these sorts of decisions all the time by using search engines.

Robots.txt already keeps search engines from spidering several types of discussion, including page deletion discussions on several wikis. By excluding those pages from search engines, we can keep the discussion on-wiki without broadcasting “non-notable” or “spammer” on every search. This has dramatically reduced the number of complaints our OTRS volunteers have received about these discussions.

As some of our users have discovered, though, there is another hazard of search engines: user discussion pages. These pages often contain users’ real names, and often call those people “vandals” or “plagiarists” or “biased”. These can be as bad as deletion discussions, if not worse.

All projects should be aware of the potential hazards of not including these pages in spidering. It may be time to coordinate your language namespaces so that you may be able to prevent any hazardous issues resulting from non-mainspace discussions about people. You can request that the developers add items to the robots.txt file by filing a bug at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org.

Very truly yours,
Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

El Señor Presidente is the 2,000th featured article on the English Wikipedia. Featured articles are considered the best Wikipedia has to offer, and are selected through a collaborative peer review and editing process, coordinated on a page called “Featured Article Candidates”, under application of the featured article criteria. From the article:

El Señor Presidente (The President) is a 1946 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias also makes early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author’s home town.

This article is particularly interesting in that it has largely been developed as part of a university project by professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who asked his student to write Wikipedia articles as a course assignment. Wikinews has a fascinating interview with Beasley-Murray and two participating students.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director