Press kit/Wikimedia Projects

Wikibooks

The Wikibooks project was initiated after a request by Karl Wick on 10 July 2003. Wikibooks aims to create a collection of free textbooks for study and with educational contents published under GFDL license. At the beginning all languages shared one domain name - and only at the end of June 2004 the first subdomains for the single langues were created.

For further info please see Wikibooks

Wikinews

Wikinews is a free-content news source and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikinews allows anyone to report news on a wide variety of subjects. Its mission, as stated on the main page of the English version of its website, is to "create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events".

Unlike Wikimedia's other projects, Wikinews contents are mostly available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or later.

For further info please see Wikinews

Wiktionary

Each Wiktionary aims to include all words in all languages. It serves to explain the meanings of words, multi-word terms, idiomatic phrases, and abbreviations, act as a thesaurus by showing synonyms and related terms, explain etymologies of words and translate words from one language to another.

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. There are 144 Wiktionaries in languages from Afar (aa) to Zulu (zu), with more than 900,000 words entered project-wide.

For further info please see Wiktionary

Wikisource

Wikisource is an online library of free content publications collected and maintained by the community. Originally a multi-lingual effort called Project Sourceberg as a play on words for Project Gutenberg, it began in November 2003 as a collection of supporting texts for articles in Wikipedia.

The rapid growth of the number of text units and the needs of its many language-based communities led to moving the languages into independent sites: there are now 50 different languages supporting more than 100,000 primary source articles!

For further information see Wikisource.

Wikiquote

The Wikiquote project aims to be a free online compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, including sources, translations of non-English quotes, and integrated with Wikipedia's in-depth articles.

Initially created in June 2003, the project has grown to more than 40,000 articles and more than 100,000 different quotations in 51 languages.

For further information please see Wikiquote.

Wikispecies

Wikispecies is an open, wiki-based, species directory that provides a solution to the problem that there is no central registration of species data. Wikispecies will provide a central, more extensive database for taxonomy. Wikispecies is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general users.

With 58,764 articles since August 2004, this multi-lingual project is already an important tool in the field of biology.

For further information please see Wikispecies.

Wikimedia Commons

Originally envisioned as a central repository for media files to support the Foundation's projects, Commons has become a major source for freely-licensed audio, video, image, and other multi-media files on the internet. Since Sept. 2004 the project has had more than 650,000 media files amounting to more than 300 GB of material uploaded. Files stored at the site are directly available to any of the Wikimedia Foundation projects in any language, leveraging file storage resources.

For further information, please see Wikimedia commons.