The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. , abbreviated WMF , is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco , California , and registered there as a charitable foundation . It is the host of Misplaced Pages , the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki , the wiki software that underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales , as a non-profit way to fund these wiki projects. They had previously been hosted by Bomis , Wales's for-profit company.
70-600: The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results . This allows the user to see the answer in a glance, as an instant answer . The data is generated automatically from a variety of sources, covering places, people, businesses, and more. The information covered by Google's Knowledge Graph grew quickly after launch, tripling its data size within seven months (covering 570 million entities and 18 billion facts). By mid-2016, Google reported that it held 70 billion facts and answered "roughly one-third" of
140-423: A Knowledge Vault project. After publication, Google reached out to Search Engine Land to explain that Knowledge Vault was a research report, not an active Google service. Search Engine Land expressed indications that Google was experimenting with "numerous models" for gathering meaning from text. Google's Knowledge Vault was meant to deal with facts, automatically gathering and merging information from across
210-478: A PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Misplaced Pages by Magnus Manske . The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Misplaced Pages shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker . Some MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005, an Apache Lucene extension
280-617: A transclusion system for templates , and URL redirection . MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Misplaced Pages began running on
350-538: A "Knowledge Equity Fund", to provide grants to organizations whose work would not otherwise be covered by Wikimedia grants but addresses racial inequities in accessing and contributing to free knowledge resources. In January 2016, the Foundation announced the creation of an endowment to safeguard its future. The Wikimedia Endowment was established as a donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation , with
420-666: A caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore , the first of its kind in Asia. The operation of Wikimedia depends on MediaWiki , a custom-made, free and open-source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MariaDB database since 2013; previously the MySQL database was used. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language , variables ,
490-470: A feeder project to supplement Nupedia . The project was originally funded by Bomis , Wales's for-profit business, and edited by a rapidly growing community of volunteer editors. The early community discussed a variety of ways to support the ongoing costs of upkeep, and was broadly opposed to running ads on the site, so the idea of setting up a charitable foundation gained prominence. That addressed an open question of what entity should hold onto trademarks for
560-538: A grant agreement was reached with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build a search engine called the " Knowledge Engine ", a project that proved controversial . In 2017, the Sloan Foundation awarded another $ 3 million grant for a three-year period, and Google donated another $ 1.1 million to the Foundation in 2019. The following have donated $ 500,000 or more each (2008–2019, not including gifts to
630-588: A more easily consumable way, the data of the Wikimedia projects, including Misplaced Pages . It allows customers to retrieve data at large scale and high availability through different formats like Web APIs , data snapshots or streams . It was announced in March 2021, and launched on October 26, 2021. Google and the Internet Archive were its first customers, although Internet Archive is not paying for
700-641: A move as letting down those who elected me." He subsequently added that while on the Board, he had pushed for greater transparency regarding the Wikimedia Foundation's Knowledge Engine project and its financing, and indicated that his attempts to make public the Knight Foundation grant for the engine had been a factor in his dismissal. Heilman was reelected to the board by the community in 2017. In January 2016, Arnnon Geshuri joined
770-791: A significant drop in search engine referrals. We also have a continuing dialog with staff from Google working on the Knowledge Panel". In his 2020 book, Dariusz Jemielniak noted that as most Google users do not realize that many answers to their questions that appear in the Knowledge Graph come from Misplaced Pages, this reduces Misplaced Pages's popularity, and in turn limited the site's ability to raise new funds and attract new volunteers. The algorithm has been criticized for presenting biased or inaccurate information, usually because of sourcing information from websites with high search engine optimization . It had been noted in 2014 that while there
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#1732780572852840-787: A single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture . Server downtime in 2003 led to the first fundraising drive. By December 2009, Wikimedia ran on co-located servers, with 300 servers in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam . In 2008, it also switched from multiple different Linux operating system vendors to Ubuntu Linux . In 2019, it switched to Debian . By January 2013, Wikimedia transitioned to newer infrastructure in an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia , citing reasons of "more reliable connectivity" and "fewer hurricanes ". In years prior,
910-691: A stated goal to raise $ 100 million in the next 10 years. Craig Newmark was one of the initial donors, giving $ 1 million. Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing , of Arcadia Fund , donated $ 5 million in 2017. In 2018, major donations to the endowment were received from Amazon and Facebook ($ 1 million each) and George Soros ($ 2 million). In 2019, donations included $ 2 million from Google, $ 3.5 million more from Baldwin and Rausing, $ 2.5 million more from Newmark, and another $ 1 million from Amazon in October 2019 and again in September 2020. As of 2023,
980-545: A trustee recently elected to the board by the community, was removed from his position by a vote of the rest of the board. This decision generated dispute among members of the Misplaced Pages community. Heilman later said that he "was given the option of resigning [by the Board] over the last few weeks. As a community elected member I see my mandate as coming from the community which elected me and thus declined to do so. I saw such
1050-521: A way to significantly enhance the value of information returned by Google searches. Initially available only in English, it was expanded in December 2012 to Spanish , French , German , Portuguese , Japanese , Russian and Italian . Bengali support was added in March 2017. The Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase . In August 2014, New Scientist reported that Google had launched
1120-659: Is B60 ( Adult , Continuing education ). The Foundation filed an application to trademark the name Misplaced Pages in the US to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences on September 14, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded also by Japan on December 16, 2004, and by the European Union on January 20, 2005. Subsets of Misplaced Pages were already being distributed in book and DVD form, and there were discussions about licensing
1190-527: Is a technology used to store complex structured data used by a computer system . The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems , which were the first knowledge-based systems . The original use of the term knowledge base was to describe one of the two sub-systems of an expert system . A knowledge-based system consists of a knowledge-base representing facts about the world and ways of reasoning about those facts to deduce new facts or highlight inconsistencies. The term "knowledge-base"
1260-489: Is concerned. All that's up for grabs are traffic stats. And as a nonprofit, traffic numbers don't equate into revenue in the same way they do for a commercial media site". After the article's publication, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation , which operates Misplaced Pages, stated that it "welcomes" the knowledge panel functionality, that it was "looking into" the traffic drops, and that "We've also not noticed
1330-501: Is organized by a committee supported usually by the local national chapter, with support from local institutions (such as a library or university) and usually from the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimania has been held in cities such as Buenos Aires , Cambridge , Haifa , Hong Kong , Taipei , London , Mexico City , Esino Lario , Italy , Montreal , Cape Town , and Stockholm . The 2020 conference scheduled to take place in Bangkok
1400-453: Is part of Google search engine result pages, presents an overview of entities such as individuals, organizations, locations, or objects directly within the search interface. This feature uses data from Google Knowledge Graph, an extensive database that organizes and interconnects information about entities, enhancing the retrieval and presentation of relevant content to users. By May 2016, knowledge boxes were appearing for "roughly one-third" of
1470-489: Is the work of a knowledge-base. Representing that George, Mary, Sam, Jenna, Mike,... and hundreds of thousands of other customers are all humans with specific ages, sex, address, etc. is the work for a database. As expert systems moved from being prototypes to systems deployed in corporate environments the requirements for their data storage rapidly started to overlap with the standard database requirements for multiple, distributed users with support for transactions. Initially,
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#17327805728521540-565: The Charities Aid Foundation , scheduled to be funded in five equal installments from 2012 through 2015. In 2014, the Foundation received the largest single gift in its history, a $ 5 million unrestricted donation from an anonymous donor supporting $ 1 million worth of expenses annually for the next five years. In March 2012, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation , established by the Intel co-founder and his wife, awarded
1610-571: The San Francisco Bay Area . Considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners, a better talent pool, as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel. The move was completed by January 31, 2008, into a headquarters on Stillman Street in San Francisco. It later moved to New Montgomery Street, and then to One Montgomery Tower . On October 25, 2021,
1680-758: The Wikimedia movement 's websites. WMF is now the registrant of the domain wikipedia.org , owner of the trademark and operator of the wiki platform. It runs projects like Wikibooks , Wikidata , Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons ; it raises money, distributes grants, controls the servers, develops and deploys software, and does outreach to support Wikimedia projects, including the English Misplaced Pages . It also engages in political advocacy regarding copyright, press freedom and legal protection of websites from liability related to user content. The Wikimedia Foundation mainly finances itself through donations from
1750-415: The 100 billion monthly searches the company processed. Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation , told The Washington Post that Google's omission of sources in its knowledge boxes "undermines people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions". The publication also reported that the boxes are "frequently unattributed", such as a knowledge box on
1820-793: The 100 billion monthly searches they handled. By May 2020, this had grown to 500 billion facts on 5 billion entities. There is no official documentation of how the Google Knowledge Graph is implemented. According to Google, its information is retrieved from many sources, including the CIA World Factbook and Misplaced Pages . It is used to answer direct spoken questions in Google Assistant and Google Home voice queries. It has been criticized for providing answers with neither source attribution nor citations . Google announced its Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012, as
1890-523: The Foundation announced what was then its largest donation yet: a three-year, $ 3 million grant from the Sloan Foundation . In 2009, the Foundation received four grants. The first was a $ 890,000 Stanton Foundation grant to help study and simplify the user interface for first-time authors of Misplaced Pages. The second was a $ 300,000 Ford Foundation grant in July 2009 for Wikimedia Commons , to improve
1960-465: The Foundation approved, finalized and adopted the thematic organization and user group recognition models. An additional model for movement partners, was also approved, but as of May 19, 2022 has not yet been finalized or adopted. Wikimania is an annual global conference for Wikimedians and Wikipedians, started in 2005. The first Wikimania was held in Frankfurt , Germany, in 2005. Wikimania
2030-568: The Foundation as affiliates officially when its board does so. The board's decisions are based on recommendations of an Affiliations Committee (AffCom), composed of Wikimedia community members, which reports regularly to the board. The Affiliations Committee directly approves the recognition of unincorporated user groups. Affiliates are formally recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation, but are independent of it, with no legal control of or responsibility for Wikimedia projects and their content. The Foundation began recognizing chapters in 2004. In 2012,
2100-438: The Foundation launched Wikimedia Enterprise , a commercial Wikimedia content delivery service aimed at groups that want to use high-volume APIs, starting with Big Tech enterprises. In June 2022, Google and the Internet Archive were announced as the service's first customers, though only Google will pay for the service. The same announcement noted a shifting focus towards smaller companies with similar data needs, supporting
2170-590: The Foundation received a $ 40,000 grant from the Open Society Institute to create a printable version of Misplaced Pages. It also received a $ 262,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to purchase hardware , a $ 500,000 unrestricted grant from Vinod and Neeru Khosla , who later that year joined the Foundation advisory board, and $ 177,376 from the historians Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin ( Arcadia Fund ), among others. In March 2008,
Google Knowledge Graph - Misplaced Pages Continue
2240-561: The Foundation's "awards and grants" expenses. In September 2021, the Foundation announced that the Wikimedia Endowment had reached its initial $ 100 million fundraising goal in June 2021, five years ahead of its initial target. In January 2024, the endowment was reported to have a value of $ 140 million. The Foundation summarizes its assets in the "Statements of Activities" in its audited reports. These do not include funds in
2310-586: The Internet into a knowledge base capable of answering direct questions, such as "Where was Madonna born?" In a 2014 report, the Vault was reported to have collected over 1.6 billion facts, 271 million of which were considered "confident facts" deemed to be more than 90% true. It was reported to be different from the Knowledge Graph in that it gathered information automatically instead of relying on crowd-sourced facts compiled by humans. A Google Knowledge Panel which
2380-585: The Stanton Foundation pledged to fund a $ 3.6 million grant of which $ 1.8 million was funded and the remainder was to come in September 2012. As of 2011, this was the largest grant the Wikimedia Foundation had ever received. In November 2011, the Foundation received a $ 500,000 donation from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation . In 2012, the Foundation was awarded a grant of $ 1.25 million from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin through
2450-508: The Wikimedia Endowment): The Foundation's board of trustees supervises the activities of the Foundation. The founding board had three members, to which two community-elected trustees were added. Starting in 2008 it was composed of ten members: Over time, the size of the board and details of the selection processes have evolved. As of 2020, the board may have up to 16 trustees: In 2015, James Heilman ,
2520-453: The Wikimedia Endowment, however expenses from the 2015–16 financial year onward include payments to the Wikimedia Endowment. A plurality of Wikimedia Foundation expenses are salaries and wages, followed by community and affiliate grants, contributions to the endowment, and other professional operating expenses and services. The Wikimedia Foundation has received a steady stream of grants from other foundations throughout its history. In 2008,
2590-689: The Wikimedia Foundation a $ 449,636 grant to develop Wikidata . This was part of a larger grant, much of which went to Wikimedia Germany, which took on ownership of the development effort. Between 2014 and 2015, the Foundation received $ 500,000 from the Monarch Fund, $ 100,000 from the Arcadia Fund and an undisclosed amount from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to support the Misplaced Pages Zero initiative. In 2015,
2660-425: The Wikimedia movement, such as regional conferences, outreach, edit-a-thons , hackathons , public relations , public policy advocacy, GLAM engagement, and Wikimania . While many of these things are also done by individual contributors or less formal groups, they are not referred to as affiliates. Wikimedia chapters and thematic organizations are incorporated non-profit organizations. They are recognized by
2730-660: The Misplaced Pages Education Program (and the spin-off Wiki Education Foundation ). In March 2011, the Sloan Foundation authorized another $ 3 million grant, to be funded over three years, with the first $ 1 million to come in July 2011 and the remaining $ 2 million to be funded in August 2012 and 2013. As a donor, Doron Weber from the Sloan Foundation gained Board Visitor status at the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. In August 2011,
2800-508: The advisory board consists of Jimmy Wales , Peter Baldwin , former Wikimedia Foundation Trustees Patricio Lorente and Phoebe Ayers , former Wikimedia Foundation Board Visitor Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation , investor Annette Campbell-White , venture capitalist Michael Kim, portfolio manager Alexander M. Farman-Farmaian, and strategist Lisa Lewin. The Foundation itself has provided annual grants of $ 5 million to its Endowment since 2016. These amounts have been recorded as part of
2870-440: The age of actress Betty White , which is "as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God". According to The Register in 2014 the display of direct answers in knowledge panels alongside Google search results caused significant readership declines for Misplaced Pages , from which the panels obtained some of their information. Also in 2014, The Daily Dot noted that "Misplaced Pages still has no real competitor as far as actual content
Google Knowledge Graph - Misplaced Pages Continue
2940-825: The board before stepping down amid community controversy about a " no poach " agreement he executed when at Google , which violated United States antitrust law and for which the participating companies paid US$ 415 million in a class action suit on behalf of affected employees. As of January 2024, the board comprised six community-and-affiliate-selected trustees (Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Dariusz Jemielniak , Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight , Victoria Doronina, Mike Peel and Lorenzo Losa); five Board-appointed trustees ( McKinsey & Company director Raju Narisetti , Bahraini human rights activist and blogger Esra'a Al Shafei , technology officer Luis Bitencourt-Emilio, Nataliia Tymkiv, and financial expert Kathy Collins); and Wales. Tymkiv chairs
3010-426: The complexity that comes with requiring transactional properties on data. The data for the early expert systems was used to arrive at a specific answer, such as a medical diagnosis, the design of a molecule, or a response to an emergency. Once the solution to the problem was known, there was not a critical demand to store large amounts of data back to a permanent memory store. A more precise statement would be that given
3080-592: The demand could be seen in two different but competitive markets. From the AI and Object-Oriented communities, object-oriented databases such as Versant emerged. These were systems designed from the ground up to have support for object-oriented capabilities but also to support standard database services as well. On the other hand, the large database vendors such as Oracle added capabilities to their products that provided support for knowledge-base requirements such as class-subclass relations and rules. The next evolution for
3150-711: The earliest work of the Knowledge-Based Software Assistant program by Cordell Green et al. The volume requirements were also different for a knowledge-base compared to a conventional database. The knowledge-base needed to know facts about the world. For example, to represent the statement that "All humans are mortal", a database typically could not represent this general knowledge but instead would need to store information about thousands of tables that represented information about specific humans. Representing that all humans are mortal and being able to reason about any given human that they are mortal
3220-414: The end of its first fiscal year, ending June 30, 2004, to $ 53.5 million in mid-2014 and $ 231 million (plus a $ 100 million endowment) by the end of June 2021; that year, the Foundation also announced plans to launch Wikimedia Enterprise, to let large organizations pay by volume for high-volume access to otherwise rate-limited APIs. In 2020, the Foundation donated $ 4.5 million to Tides Advocacy to create
3290-527: The following properties: The first knowledge-based systems had data needs that were the opposite of these database requirements. An expert system requires structured data . Not just tables with numbers and strings, but pointers to other objects that in turn have additional pointers. The ideal representation for a knowledge base is an object model (often called an ontology in artificial intelligence literature) with classes, subclasses and instances. Early expert systems also had little need for multiple users or
3360-505: The hurricane seasons had been a cause of distress. In October 2013, Wikimedia Foundation started looking for a second facility that would be used side by side with the main facility in Ashburn, citing reasons of redundancy (e.g. emergency fallback ) and to prepare for simultaneous multi-datacenter service. This followed a year in which a fiber cut caused the Wikimedia projects to be unavailable for one hour in August 2012. Apart from
3430-561: The interface for uploading multimedia files. In August 2009, the Foundation received a $ 500,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation . Also in August 2009, the Omidyar Network committed up to $ 2 million over two years to Wikimedia. In 2010, Google donated $ 2 million and the Stanton Foundation granted $ 1.2 million to fund the Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program for what later became
3500-430: The logo and wordmark. On December 11, 2006, the Foundation's board noted that it could not become a membership organization , as initially planned but not implemented, due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida statutory law. The bylaws were accordingly amended to remove all references to membership rights and activities. In 2007, the Foundation decided to move its headquarters from Florida to
3570-483: The product. A New York Times Magazine article was reporting that Wikimedia Enterprise made $ 3.1 million in total revenue in 2022. Wikimedia affiliates are independent and formally recognized groups of people working together to support and contribute to the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia Foundation officially recognizes three types of affiliates: chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. Affiliates organize and engage in activities to support and contribute to
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#17327805728523640-502: The project. The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated in St. Petersburg, Florida on June 20, 2003. A small fundraising campaign to keep the servers running was run in October 2003. In 2005, the Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity, making donations to the Foundation tax-deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code
3710-431: The public image of the language. Google promptly changed the featured snippet for the search query and issued a formal apology. Knowledge base In computer science , a knowledge base ( KB ) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language , with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces might use inference . It
3780-1049: The public to develop wiki-based content in languages across the world. The Foundation does not write or curate any of the content on the projects themselves. Instead, this is done by volunteer editors, such as the Wikipedians . However, it does collaborate with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations, such as Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups and other partners. The Foundation finances itself mainly through millions of small donations from readers and editors, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Misplaced Pages and its sister projects. These are complemented by grants from philanthropic organizations and tech companies, and starting in 2022, by services income from Wikimedia Enterprise . As of 2023, it has employed over 700 staff and contractors, with net assets of $ 255 million and an endowment which has surpassed $ 100 million. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Misplaced Pages in 2001 as
3850-674: The public, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Misplaced Pages, as well as grants from various tech companies and philanthropic organizations. Campaigns for the Wikimedia Endowment have included emails asking donors to leave Wikimedia money in their will. As a 501(c)(3) charity, the Foundation is exempt from federal and state income tax. It is not a private foundation, and contributions to it qualify as tax-deductible charitable contributions. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, Charity Navigator gave Wikimedia an overall rating of four out of four possible stars, increased from three to four stars in 2010. As of January 2020 ,
3920-497: The rating was still four stars (overall score 98.14 out of 100), based on data from FY2018. The Foundation also increases its revenue through federal grants , sponsorship, services and brand merchandising. The Wikimedia OAI-PMH update feed service, targeted primarily at search engines and similar bulk analysis and republishing, was a source of revenue for a number of years. DBpedia was given access to this feed free of charge. An expanded version of data feeds and content services
3990-482: The second facility for redundancy coming online in 2014, the number of servers needed to run the infrastructure in a single facility has been mostly stable since 2009. As of November 2015, the main facility in Ashburn hosts 520 servers in total which includes servers for newer services besides Wikimedia project wikis , such as cloud services (Toolforge) and various services for metrics, monitoring, and other system administration. In 2017, Wikimedia Foundation deployed
4060-414: The second wiki-based project hosted on the original server. The Foundation's mission is collection and distribution of educational knowledge under free licenses or public domain and promised to keep these projects free of charge. All intellectual property rights and domain names about Misplaced Pages were moved to the Foundation after its inception, and it currently owns the domain names and maintains most of
4130-418: The service through "a lot paying a little". The Foundation owns and operates 11 wiki-based content projects that are written and governed by volunteer editors. They include, by launch date: The Foundation also operates wikis and services that provide infrastructure or coordination of the content projects. These include: Wikimedia Enterprise is a commercial product by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide, in
4200-421: The technologies available, researchers compromised and did without these capabilities because they realized they were beyond what could be expected, and they could develop useful solutions to non-trivial problems without them. Even from the beginning, the more astute researchers realized the potential benefits of being able to store, analyze, and reuse knowledge. For example, see the discussion of Corporate Memory in
4270-545: The term "knowledge-base" was the Internet . With the rise of the Internet, documents, hypertext , and multimedia support were now critical for any corporate database. It was no longer enough to support large tables of data or relatively small objects that lived primarily in computer memory. Support for corporate web sites required persistence and transactions for documents. This created a whole new discipline known as Web Content Management . The other driver for document support
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#17327805728524340-569: Was a Knowledge Graph for most major historical or pseudo-historical religious figures such as Moses , Muhammad and Gautama Buddha , there was none for Jesus , the central figure of Christianity . On June 3, 2021, a knowledge box identified Kannada as the ugliest language in India, prompting outrage from the Kannada-language community; the state of Karnataka , where most Kannada speakers live, also threatened to sue Google for damaging
4410-436: Was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Misplaced Pages switched from MySQL to Lucene and later switched to CirrusSearch which is based on Elasticsearch for searching. The Wikimedia Foundation also uses CiviCRM and WordPress . The Foundation published official Misplaced Pages mobile apps for Android and iOS devices and in March 2015, the apps were updated to include mobile user-friendly features. The Wikimedia Foundation
4480-661: Was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic , along with those of 2021 and 2022, which were held online as a series of virtual, interactive presentations. The in-person conference returned in 2023 when it was held in Singapore, at which UNESCO joined as a partner organization. The Wikimedia Foundation maintains the hardware that runs its projects in its own servers. It also maintains the MediaWiki platform and many other software libraries that run its projects. Misplaced Pages employed
4550-418: Was coined to distinguish this form of knowledge store from the more common and widely used term database . During the 1970s, virtually all large management information systems stored their data in some type of hierarchical or relational database . At this point in the history of information technology , the distinction between a database and a knowledge-base was clear and unambiguous. A database had
4620-521: Was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales so that there would be an independent charitable entity responsible for company domains and trademarks, and so that Misplaced Pages and its sister projects could be funded through non-profit means in the future. The name "Wikimedia", a compound of wiki and media , was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English Misplaced Pages mailing list in March 2003, three months after Wiktionary became
4690-417: Was launched in 2021 as Wikimedia Enterprise, an LLC subsidiary of the Foundation. In July 2014, the Foundation announced it would accept Bitcoin donations. In 2021, cryptocurrencies accounted for just 0.08% of all donations and on May 1, 2022, the Foundation stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations, following a Wikimedia community vote. The Foundation's net assets grew from an initial $ 57,000 at
4760-422: Was primarily for the use of an automated system, to reason about and draw conclusions about the world. With knowledge management products, the knowledge was primarily meant for humans, for example to serve as a repository of manuals, procedures, policies, best practices, reusable designs and code, etc. In both cases the distinctions between the uses and kinds of systems were ill-defined. As the technology scaled up it
4830-439: Was rare to find a system that could really be cleanly classified as knowledge-based in the sense of an expert system that performed automated reasoning and knowledge-based in the sense of knowledge management that provided knowledge in the form of documents and media that could be leveraged by humans. Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of
4900-411: Was the rise of knowledge management vendors such as HCL Notes (formerly Lotus Notes). Knowledge Management actually predated the Internet but with the Internet there was great synergy between the two areas. Knowledge management products adopted the term "knowledge-base" to describe their repositories but the meaning had a big difference. In the case of previous knowledge-based systems, the knowledge
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