08 August 2011 | Author: L Boyd Media Intern
The message at the heart of this year's International Wikimania Conference - held in Haifa, Israel - was a bid to be taken more seriously and a plan for expansion to new users in previously untapped markets.
At the conference, Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in Israel Tomer Ashur outlined new plans to make Wiki services more easily accessible to those in third world countries and to improve the content of the site via reliable sources.
Ashur described the site's new goals as "improving our quality in all languages, which means technically better writing and the use of more reliable sources in order to increase our reliability."
Previously, Wikipedia has come under scrutiny from critics who claim the openly editable model is unreliable and leads to inaccurate information on the web-based, free-content encyclopaedia. Yet the popularity of the site is undeniable, with upwards of 400 million people using it each month.
In addition to Wikipedia, internet users can also gain access to other sites under the Wikimedia banner such as historical texts on the Wikisource site, or Wikimedia Commons - a free media repository.
The Wiki brand may also soon branch out to developing countries, and project leader Asaf Bartov explained how more remote communities may be reached.
"There are many people who are still not online, and who can only get on the Internet once a week - when they have electricity. These people could be helped by an offline version of Wikipedia, on a DVD or memory stick," Bartov said.
This ambitious step may well bring the Wikimedia Foundation a step closer to its goal of collecting "the sum of all human knowledge," a stated goal of one of the site's founders, Jimmy Wales,
when speaking to Slashdot in 2004.
Wiki conference unveils plans for third world outreach
The message at the heart of this year's International Wikimania Conference - held in Haifa, Israel - was a bid to be taken more seriously and a plan for expansion to new users in previously untapped markets. At the conference, Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in Israel Tomer Ashur outlined new plans to make Wiki services more easily accessible to those in third world countries and to improve the content of the site via reliable sources.
Ashur described the site's new goals as "improving our quality in all languages, which means technically better writing and the use of more reliable sources in order to increase our reliability."
Previously, Wikipedia has come under scrutiny from critics who claim the openly editable model is unreliable and leads to inaccurate information on the web-based, free-content encyclopaedia. Yet the popularity of the site is undeniable, with upwards of 400 million people using it each month.
In addition to Wikipedia, internet users can also gain access to other sites under the Wikimedia banner such as historical texts on the Wikisource site, or Wikimedia Commons - a free media repository.
The Wiki brand may also soon branch out to developing countries, and project leader Asaf Bartov explained how more remote communities may be reached.
"There are many people who are still not online, and who can only get on the Internet once a week - when they have electricity. These people could be helped by an offline version of Wikipedia, on a DVD or memory stick," Bartov said.
This ambitious step may well bring the Wikimedia Foundation a step closer to its goal of collecting "the sum of all human knowledge," a stated goal of one of the site's founders, Jimmy Wales,
when speaking to Slashdot in 2004.
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