[Foundation-l] Heads up: Wikipedia on Facebook

[Kul Takanao Wadhwa]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know about new features Facebook is planning on 
launching later today that involve articles from Wikipedia. Facebook is 
going to begin integrating Wikipedia’s free knowledge into a new part of 
the Facebook.com site experience to help users be more connected and 
informed about the topics and activities that interest them. They're 
calling this service Facebook Community Pages, portal pages which will 
be owned and managed by the Facebook community.

Wikipedia articles on Facebook will further increase the reach of free 
knowledge on the internet.  Facebook has hundreds of millions of users, 
and now more than 70% of their traffic is coming from outside of the US. 
Our hope is that many Facebook users (if they are not already) will also 
be inclined to join the large community of Wikipedia contributors. 
Facebook will follow the free licenses (CC-BY-SA) and help us find more 
ways people can share knowledge. Furthermore, we will be looking at 
other ways that both parties can cooperate in the future.

Initially it looks like this service will be focussed on English 
Wikipedia, but considering Facebook's multi-lingual community it seems 
likely that other languages will be brought in quickly. Because Facebook 
members build the Community Pages, they will be able to suggest or add 
more Wikipedia articles (as well as other relevant content from the 
web).  They will also have a built-in feedback system in case the 
article provided is not correct or has any display problems.

It's going to be a learning situation for both us and them so we'll see 
how this goes.

--Kul

-- 
Kul Takanao Wadhwa
Head of Business Development
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
kul at wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885 ext. 603