wikimedia

Wikimedia, Internet Brands settle Wikivoyage lawsuits

The Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Brands have agreed to settle all litigation between the two over the recently launched Wikivoyage travel information site.

Wikivoyage is a free, user-generated travel help and information site that anyone can edit. However, a large portion of the content on the site was copied from Wikitravel under the Creative Commons license.

After Internet Brands purchased Wikitravel in 2006, many volunteers on the formerly not-for-profit project grew disillusioned and left, taking much of the site's content with them. In response, Internet Brands filed a lawsuit last August against two volunteers on the Wikivoyage project, claiming … Read more

Wikimedia Foundation launches travel site 'Wikivoyage'

Want to know more about the German spa city called Baden Baden, or "Bathing Bathing?" Or how to get to Khajuraho -- an Indian town known for its ancient erotic rock carvings? All this and more will be in the Wikimedia Foundation's new travel site, called Wikivoyage.

A bare-bones version of the site has already been up and running since September, but the official launch of the filled-out site is tentatively scheduled for January 15, according to Skift.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales appeared on The Colbert Report yesterday and confirmed that the site would be launching "… Read more

Wikipedia now totally free to mobile users in the Middle East

A full 25 million mobile users in the Middle East can now use Wikipedia without worrying about data charges.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Saudi Telecom (STC) have teamed up to offer the free access through a program known as Wikipedia Zero. The goal behind this initiative is to help people in developing countries more easily get information through Wikipedia. Many users in these countries surf the Internet via mobile devices, so the Wikimedia Foundation tries to work with local carriers to eliminate data charges and other obstacles.

The foundation has given high priority to Arabic-language countries but has reached out … Read more

Wikimedia U.K. faces ethics probe, funding squeeze

Two weeks ago, a Wikimedia U.K. trustee named Roger Bamkin was exposed in a paid PR scandal that embarrassed the organization behind the Internet's community encyclopedia. Bamkin was accused of doing special favors on Wikipedia for a paid client, the tiny territory of Gibraltar.

A week later, Bamkin quit, but was not exactly apologetic.

But that's not the end of the story. Wikimedia U.K. has had control of its funding taken away and is under investigation by the parent Wikimedia Foundation.

A joint statement issued by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia U.K. said an ethics … Read more

Wikipedia to debut revolutionary travel site?

Online travel information can be very difficult to gauge.

Sometimes, you have no idea if the person who posted about a hotel's supreme service works for the hotel itself or whether the person revealing the presence of cockroaches just happens to be a competitor.

Yet now the bastions of objectivity at the Wikimedia Foundation seem to be getting into the travel business.

For, as Skift.com tells it, the boys from Wikipedia are to set up their own, as yet unnamed, travel site.

It seems that this travel site will be a guide for all who wish to depart … Read more

World's first 'Wikipedia town' covered in QR codes

The Internet continues to escape from its virtual confines. Clothing hangers hook into Facebook. Twitter comes printed on toilet paper. And now, Wikipedia has its own town.

Monmouth in South Wales has a population of less than 9,000, but plenty of tourists come to see the local castle and walk the historic streets. Those tourists will be able to plug into Wikipedia articles about the town through special QR code plaques placed in strategic locations.… Read more

Wikidata to provide structured data for all Wikipedia versions

With more than 280 different language editions of Wikipedia often sharing data elements like people's birth dates and definitions, there has never been a single central data repository from which each version could pull such information. Until now.

Today, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation pulled back the wraps on Wikidata, a project that is aiming to be a single common source of structured data that can be used across all versions of Wikipedia. By December, that should allow editors of each individual language version of a Wikipedia article to pull data from that repository rather than adding … Read more

Wikipedia gone daddy from Go Daddy

The Wikimedia Foundation has completed the process of transferring its domains away from Go Daddy in response to Go Daddy's initial support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, the foundation said this week.

"As the provider of the 5th most visited Web properties in the world, the Foundation cares deeply about who handles our domain names. We had been deliberating a move from GoDaddy for some time--our legal department felt the company was not the best fit for our domain needs--and we began actively seeking other domain management providers in December 2011. GoDaddy's initial support of (SOPA)...… Read more

Wikipedia considering joining SOPA blackout protest

Count Wikipedia among the growing number of sites that are likely to take action against SOPA.

As anger towards the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act grows, more and more people and organizations are joining the fight against the bipartisan Congressional legislation. (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

Earlier this week, the news site Reddit announced it would shut down for 12 hours on January 18 in a bid to make its displeasure known about SOPA and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act. And now, there are strong signs that Wikipedia may express its community's protest sentiment, although it'… Read more

At 10, highlighting Wikipedia's past and future

With just 20 simple words and two entries, it began: "Hello, world." And "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes."

Written by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, those four sentences ushered in one of the most widely used and important reference projects in history, let alone on the Internet: Wikipedia.

Tomorrow, Wikipedia turns 10 years old. It's hard to imagine that a tiny, user-created project founded by two unknowns behind the online expert-written encyclopedia Nupedia could have grown into a … Read more