Wikimania 2012 will take place in Washington DC from 12.7. to 15.7. 2012.

Accepted submission:

• Angelika Adam: “Supporting tools for a diversified Wikipedia“

The Wikipedia Academy 2012: Research and Free Knowledge (29.6. – 1.7.2012) conference is organized by Wikimedia Deutschland in cooperation with FU Berlin and Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

The RENDER Project will be presented during the Speed Geeking Session: http://wikipedia-academy.de/2012/wiki/Schedule#Speed_Geeking

Accepted papers from RENDER partners:

• Guillermo Garrido, Enrique Alfonseca, Jean-Yves Delort and Anselmo Peñas: Extracting Wikipedia Historical Attributes Data
• Fabian Flöck and Andriy Rodchenko: Whose article is it anyway? – Detecting authorship distribution in Wikipedia articles over time with WIKIGINI

Find the program of the event here.

Gerrit Holz (Wikimedia Deutschland) is giving a poster presentation concerning the RENDER toolkit at the WebScience 2012 (22-24.6.2012) in Evanston, IL.

• Felix Leif Keppmann, Fabian Flöck, Angelika Adam, Elena Simperl, Delia Rusu, Anselm Metzger and Gerrit Holz. “A Knowledge Diversity Dashboard for Wikipedia” (available here)

more Information on the event is available at: http://www.websci12.org/program

Wikidata will be the first new Wikimedia project since 2006

Wikimedia Deutschland is starting the development of a new Wikimedia project, called Wikidata. Wikidata will provide a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge. Its first goal is to support the more than 280 language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles of the free encyclopedia.

For example, with Wikidata the birth date of a person of public interest can be used in all Wikipedias and only needs to be maintained in one place. Moreover, like all of Wikidata’s information, the birth date will also be freely usable outside of Wikipedia. The common-source principle behind Wikidata is expected to lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions. At the same time, Wikidata will decrease the maintenance effort for the tens of thousands of volunteers working on Wikipedia.

Read the full press release here: English | German

RENDER was mentioned in the news of two major German Web sites.

Heise online and taz.de reported about Wikimedia’s plan to build a centralized database that will be shared over all language versions of Wikipedia where the RENDER project is involved.

Read full article on heise online and taz.de