Yesterday .ORG, the public interest registry, announced the major milestone of seven million officially registered .org domains across the web.  Wikipedia was featured in the press release as one of the major organizations hosted as a .org.

In fact Wikimedia houses .org sites for all of its projects, as well as wikimedia.org, the website of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Jimbo Wales perhaps said it best:

Congratulations to .ORG and the millions of sites in the family.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Sebastian Moleski, Interim Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland offers up the following post on the German chapter’s blog.  He’s kindly provided a translation below.  This is fantastic news and major recognition for Wikimedia in Germany and abroad.  The German chapter and German Wikimedia volunteers around the world deserve a huge thank you for this achievement.

The Quadriga Award (CCBYSA from the Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s some excellent news: Wikipedia is one of this year’s recipients of the Quadriga, a German award handed out every year to recognize four people or organizations that “try to create a better world through courage, dedication, and responsible action.” The award comes with a 25,000 euro cash prize for each recipient. Werkstatt Deutschland, the non-profit organization sponsoring the award, had this to say about Wikipedia:

“We recognize Wikipedia this year for its ‘mission of enlightenment’. Wikipedia makes true an ancient dream of humankind: to collect all the knowledge of the world in one place. Collaboration, participation, and voluntary contribution lie at the root of Wikipedia’s effectiveness. The vision of founder Jimmy Wales: every woman and every man can become an author anywhere, anytime simply by clicking the “edit” button. No gatekeepers and free access make up the secret of success for this network of now 262 languages and more than 10 million articles.”

Besides Wikipedia, this year’s recipients also include British singer and activist Peter Gabriel, Franciscan Eckart Höfling, and Serbian president Boris Tadić (a Wikipedia article details previous recipients).

The award ceremony will take place in Berlin on October 3, the German national holiday celebrating the country’s reunification in 1990. The award for Wikipedia will be presented by David Weinberger and accepted by Jimmy Wales.

Sebastian Moleski
Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Deutschland

“Do you know that Wikipedia is a Non-Profit?â€

This year, we have come to learn the importance of asking this simple question when we talk to the Wikimedia community, the general public, or prospective donors. The key message - “We are a Non-Profit†- is inherent in all that Wikimedia does. It signifies that we are a mission-driven charity that depends on the good will and philanthropy of others. However, many people do not know that we are a non-profit. This may be because the actual “work†of creating educational content is done by a global community of thousands of volunteers.

While this collaborative effort is the key to our success, the Wikimedia Foundation provides the backbone of support and organizational structure that keeps Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects up and running. The Foundation is responsible for supporting the community through wide ranging program initiatives, hardware, technology, and the like. In doing so, we ensure that quality content is made available to the public – free of charge and free of advertising. However, we would not be able to support this global collaborative venture without financial resources. And this is where fundraising comes in.

Our most important job in fundraising this year has simply been to build awareness that we are a charity - and that gifts and grants account for over 90% of our revenue. Until this year, we did not have a staff dedicated to fundraising who could spread this message and encourage donations. As with any non-profit, a fundraising program and staff is central to our efforts because it produces the revenues that keep us running. One of our key goals – building organizational maturity – has been partially achieved through the hiring of dedicated fundraising staff, and the development of a fundraising program that has three key focus areas: community giving, major gifts, and foundation giving. We are also building a partnerships program which will allow us to work more with like-minded foundations to maximize our impact.

Overall, we think that there is great strength in numbers: whether it is increased contributions and edits on the site; more people participating in the projects; increased funding to bolster our activities; or the formation of new partnerships to increase the availability of free, quality, educational content. We will continue to raise our sights on all fronts!

And on the topic of contributions, you can always donate to Wikimedia through our on-line giving portal.  We’ll have more to say about the next annual giving campaign in the coming weeks.

Sara Crouse,
Head of Foundation Relations and Partnerships

Wikimedia’s in-house tech staff has always been assisted by a fantastic volunteer infrastructure, from which most of us have been hired over the last few years. That relationship with our community also involves maintaining some important projects via contract positions…

Erik Zachte will be maintaining and improving our site statistics — integrating new page view counts and other valuable data in with the traditional edit stats he’s maintained for some time.

Aaron Schulz is working on Flagged Revisions, improvements to the CheckUser system, and many other tasks on editing and administrative workflow.

David McCabe is coming back to polish up his LiquidThreads project for us, a more flexible way to manage discussion pages which could be a big help especially for those large, ongoing forum-style pages like the Village Pumps.

We also get some great help from David Strauss who’s been getting our fundraising data integrated more solidly into a CiviCRM system, which is replacing the multiple different versions of custom-rolled fundraising databases we’ve gone through in the past.

Brion Vibber

Chief Technical Officer

It’s tech hiring season again at Wikimedia!

We’re looking for at least some people to be here at our San Francisco office, but remote development and system administration is also available (especially making sure we’ve got stronger timezone coverage for our sysadmins).

So all you out there who’ve been toiling in secret on your wikis and websites o’ doom, but always secretly (or not so secretly) wanted to work for Wikipedia — send yourself in to jobs at wikimedia.org.

Brion VIBBER

Chief Technical Officer

This week, the German language version of Wikisource started the transcription of a precious manuscript with the title “Bemerkungen über den Feldzug gegen Rußland in den Jahren 1812 und 1813” (Remarks on the campaign against Russia in the years 1812 and 1813).

The manuscript from the early nineteenth century was written by an eye witness of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Contrary to other accounts of the march of the Grande Armée on Russia it is focussing on the landscape, places and inhabitants along the itinerary.

The precious and up to now not entirely published manuscript had been digitized by the State and University Library of Göttingen, Germany, and then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The travelogue gives new and invaluable insights in the daily life of a Saxon Hussar Regiment on his way to Russia in the years 1812/1813.

Wikisource is a free library of source texts which are in the public domain or legally available for free redistribution. Wikisource is an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister project of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public outreach