Wikimedia Foundation

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Alangi Derick: Wikimedia’s First African Contributor to Google Summer of Code

Alangi Derick comes from Buea, Cameroon. He joined the Wikimedia movement to develop his skills in coding, and was quickly hooked by the movement’s values and its community culture, eventually becoming a staunch advocate for it in his university. As a computer science student at the time, he joined the movement a year and a half ago, and his work booked him a place at the 2016 Google Summer of Code as one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s students. Derick passed the program, helped mentor teenage participants in Google Code-in for two consecutive years, and has helped fix bugs in the MediaWiki software...

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Big Names Like Google Dominate Open-source Funding

Jon Gold | Network World | January 9, 2015

Network World’s analysis of publicly listed sponsors of 36 prominent open-source non-profits and foundations reveals that the lion’s share of financial support for open-source groups comes from a familiar set of names. We found 673 companies on the donor rolls of our list of organizations – which was drawn heavily, though not entirely, from the Open Source Initiative’s list of affiliates. Google was the biggest supporter of open-source organizations by our count, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups we analyzed. ...

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Data From 14 Million Papers Is Now Available for Free

June Javelosa | Futurism | April 8, 2017

The Initiative of Open Citations (140C) announced today that science papers’ reference lists will now be accessible to anyone. As explained on their website, “citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge”...

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Driving The Global Conversation About “Open Source Artificial Intelligence”

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) continues the work of exploring complexities surrounding the development and use of artificial intelligence in Deep Dive: AI – Defining Open Source AI, with the goal of collaboratively establishing a clear and defensible definition of “Open Source AI.” OSI is bringing together global experts to establish a shared set of principles that can recreate a permissionless, pragmatic and simplified collaboration for AI practitioners, similar to what the Open Source Definition has done.

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French Intelligence Agency Sees Firsthand The Streisand Effect

David Perera | FierceGovernmentIT | April 8, 2013

The French government is learning firsthand about the Streisand Effect after Wikimedia France issued April 6 a press release stating that a domestic intelligence agency threatened a volunteer with arrest unless he deleted an entry about a military communications base near Lyons. Read More »

Initiative for Open Citations Making Great Progress

It is enormously satisfying when a good idea captures the imagination and takes off and that’s precisely what happened with the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) over the past 6 months. Citations are the way that researchers communicate how their work builds on and relates to the work of others and they can be used to trace how a discovery spreads and is used by researchers in different disciplines and countries. Creating a truly comprehensive map of scholarship, however, relies on having a curated machine-readable database of citation information, where the provenance of every citation is clear and reusable. With the launch of I4OC that map, and the potential for anyone to use it to explore the scholarly landscape, comes much closer...

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It’s Time for Open Citations

Press Release | Mozilla | April 6, 2017

Today, Mozilla is announcing support for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), an effort to make citation data from scholarly publications open and freely accessible. We’re proud to stand alongside the Wikimedia Foundation, the Public Library of Science and a network of other like-minded institutions, publishers and researchers who believe knowledge should be free from restrictions. We want to create a global, public web of citation data — one that empowers teaching, learning, innovation and progress. Read More »

Open Source Initiative Hosts 2nd Deep Dive AI Event, Aims to Define ‘Open Source’ for AI

Press Release | Open Source Initiative (OSI) | September 11, 2023

Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit corporation that educates about and advocates for the importance of non-proprietary software, is hosting its 2nd Deep Dive: AI event, this one focused on Defining Open Source AI. The goal is to work toward establishing a clear and defendable definition of “Open Source AI.” OSI is bringing together global experts to establish a shared set of principles that can recreate a permissionless, pragmatic and simplified collaboration for AI practitioners, similar to what the Open Source Definition has done.

Open Source Product Development Most Effective When Social

Benetech started out in the 90s without even understanding the meaning of the term open source. They just "needed an easy way to interface with different voice synthesizers" to develop readers for people who are blind and "shared the code to be helpful." Sound familiar? Opensource.com started covering stories like in 2010 and they recur more often than you might think. Stories of people sharing the code to help others—but sharing code to get help developing better code. When code is open, a community has the opportunity to form around it...

Publishers' Copyright Move 'Could Limit Use Of Research'

Paul Jump | Times Higher Education | August 9, 2014

Scientific publishers producing model copyright licences will make it harder for academic research to be a “first class citizen of the web”...

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RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe

RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules...

Wiki Project Med Foundation Launches Offline Medical Apps in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Spanish.

Press Release | Wiki Project Med Foundation, Wikimedia Switzerland and Kiwix | August 16, 2016

Wiki Project Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland have launched Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Spanish versions of Medical Wikipedia, a free app that offers offline access to thousands of Wikipedia articles. Each app contains articles related to human anatomy, pharmacology, medicine, and sanitation. It runs on Android devices version 4.0 and up. Once the app is installed, all articles can be accessed without an internet connection...

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Wikipedia Editor Allegedly Forced By French Intelligence To Delete “Classified” Entry

Megan Geuss | Ars Technica | April 6, 2013

A military compound becomes a lesson in obscurity on the Internet. Read More »

2nd Deep Dive Event: Defining Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Event Details
Type: 
Seminar/Webinar
Date: 
September 26, 2023 (All day) - October 17, 2023 (All day)

Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit corporation that educates about and advocates for the importance of non-proprietary software, is hosting its 2nd Deep Dive: AI event, this one focused on Defining Open Source AI. The goal is to work toward establishing a clear and defendable definition of “Open Source AI.” OSI is bringing together global experts to establish a shared set of principles that can recreate a permissionless, pragmatic and simplified collaboration for AI practitioners, similar to what the Open Source Definition has done. OSI is the steward of the Open Source Definition, which serves as the foundation of the modern software ecosystem, outlining the distribution terms of Open Source software. OSI also maintains a list of OSI Approved Licenses that have become a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize Open Source cooperation.

“It’s time to define what ‘open’ means in AI before it is defined by accident,” said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI. “This milestone project is essential right now. Policymakers, re-users and modifiers are confused, and developers aren’t clear on data sharing and transparency. A permission structure is needed to help fight open washing.”

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