Bursty edits; how politics beat religion but then lost to sports; notability as a glass ceiling

With contributions by: Brian Keegan, Piotr Konieczny, and Tilman Bayer

As part of the WikimediansSpeak interview series, Odia Wikisource’s most active contributor Pankajmala Sarangi shares her ideas about growing the community.

Last year around this time, we announced the arrival of a new tool that evolved out of an experiment aimed at making the editing process easier for our users. The tool in question—Content Translation—has been used by more than 11,000 editors across 289 Wikipedias to create more than 50,000 new articles.

Google Code-in 2015 is over. As a co-admin and mentor for the Wikimedia Foundation—one of the 14 organizations who took part and provided mentors and tasks—I can say it’s been crazy as usual.

Following a string of celebrity deaths, Wikipedia’s editors work to polish biographies to serve as ready-made obituaries providing readers with a depth of insight about entertainers’ lives and careers.

Here are highlights from across the Wikimedia movement, as reported on this blog in December 2015: Wikipedia celebrates 15 years of free knowledge; Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different place: Magnus Manske; Making our pageview data easily accessible; and more.

The Wikimedia Foundation works to expand free and open access to knowledge everywhere, including areas where affordable access to the internet is a fundamental barrier. In some regions, the Foundation has utilized “zero-rating” to make mobile traffic to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites entirely free. This approach removes the barrier of cost for those wishing to read, learn, and contribute to Wikipedia, in any language. We call this program Wikipedia Zero.

On December 29, 2015, the Urdu Wikipedia community achieved a major milestone with a new article on the tiger shark.

The libraries community has a huge number of opportunities to help solve gaps on Wikipedia.

Magnus Manske, a Wikipedia contributor since 2001, was born and went to university in Cologne, Germany. The city’s famed cathedral is pictured here. Photo by Thomas Wolf, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Germany. Update, January 25: today is Magnus Manske Day. On this day in 2002, Wikipedia switched over…