Next up was Steve Virgin, a member of the United Kingdom chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the group behind Wikipedia. After sharing some arresting statistics about the site’s impact (347 million people — 35% of the online population –use Wikipedia, while 40,000 English speakers make at least five edits each per month) he talked about the work that is going on with the organization’s nine other projects which cover, among other topics, news, books, quotations and the classification of species.
The biggest growth is in Wikimedia Commons, a project to collect copyright-free media resources such as photographs and videos. The big push this year is to encourage museums to follow the example of the Dresden University Library which donated 250,000 images. One tactic is to promote the potential benefits of such donations, such as releasing part of an archive as a promotional tool to boost sales of other images. There is also work in progress to reduce the technical hassles involved in donating images, which may include a tie-in with Flickr."
