Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited free knowledge platform hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia attempts to collect all human knowledge in the form of encyclopaedic articles. It exists in almost any written language.

History and background

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 (the same day as Creative Commons) and has become one of the largest websites in the world. See for the larger history of Wikipedia the article History of Wikipedia.

Responsibilities

Wikimedia Belgium has no authority on Wikipedia as it is the community on the local Wikipedia who makes the decisions; the website infrastructure is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Belgium is founded to support local volunteers and organisations to work with Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia platforms. We have years of experience in helping organisations to use Wikipedia and adding knowledge from collections or archives to Wikipedia and related platforms.

Timeline

15 January 2001 - Start of the English Wikipedia
June 2001 - Start of the Dutch, French, and German language Wikipedia (together with some other main languages)
7 September 2004 - Start of Wikimedia Commons, images are from now on hosted on this separate platform
2009 - Switch from GFDL license to CC BY-SA
30 October 2012 - Start of Wikidata

Projects in Belgium

Below is an incomplete list of projects done in Belgium on Wikipedia.

4-17 April 2016 - Writing weeks about Brussels on Wikipedia (info)
2016 - Art project Dutch language Wikipedia printed in Ghent (info)
22 April-6 May 2017 - Writing weeks about Brussels on Wikipedia (info)
August-September 2017 - Writing sessions during the TheaterFestival in Brussels as part of the project Wikify het Theaterfestival! (info)
9 December 2017 - Edit-a-thon about Vorst and dance (info)
8 March 2018 - GenderGap edit-a-thon in Brussels (info)
1-31 March 2018 - Mois de la contribution 2018 (info)
20 May 2018 - Amnesty edit-a-thon in Brussels (info)
13 October 2018 - Women in Tech edit-a-thon in Brussels (info)
26 January 2019 - Public domain day edit-a-thon 2019 in the Royal Library of Belgium (info)
29 January 2019 - Hack The Gender Gap edit-a-thon in Brussels (info)
Since 2021, an automated list (ListeriaBot query)

Programs

Wikipedia writing sessions

To improve and expand Wikipedia, often Wikipedia writing sessions are organised. These writing sessions can be organised internally for only the staff of an organisation or open for anyone interested to learn about Wikipedia and willing to edit. Wikipedia writing sessions open to the public are often referred to as edit-a-thons.

Wikipedia Education Program

In Belgium we also organise the Wikipedia Education Program. In this program we work together with all kinds of educational institutions and has as purpose to have students write Wikipedia articles instead of throwaway assignments. See for more information the project pages in Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Education Program main page in the English Wikipedia
Wikipedia Education Program main page in the Dutch Wikipedia

External links

wikipedia.be