Today is the 15th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia, commonly referred to as Wikipedia Day. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on lessons from the free, international collaborative encyclopedia for our work with government, citizen engagement and the future of civic tech.
Open Source and Transparency
Wikipedia is open source! It might seem obvious, but it’s important to recognize that opening your activities and work to the community helps build trust for a project dependent on contributions. Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation behind the project, opens their code for MediaWiki, their financial reports and even the minutes of organization meetings. Here at The OpenGov Foundation, we publicly share all our legal and human resource documents to practice our core belief of transparency. And, of course, all our software code is open source too.
Open Licenses
Wikipedia is a project built on use, adaption and sharing so it makes sense they are very focused on licenses that are open and free. The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is to bring free educational content to the world and license restrictions are a barrier to fulfill that mission. The OpenGov Foundation deals with licensing to ensure our code is free for others to use and through our efforts in the Free Law Founders to help free our nation’s laws and legal codes.
Structured Government Data and Wikipedia
One big opportunity for government data is to get the information in front of Wikipedia’s audience and as Congress makes more of their information machine-readable, this becomes faster, more reliable and increasingly automated. The Cato Institute and Wikimedia DC have held events about improving how legislative data gets onto Wikipedia and it underscores how important structured data is for official information.
Happy 15th birthday, Wikipedia! Go celebrate by learning how to edit an article or just donating to the cause.
Nicko Margolies is the Communications Director of The OpenGov Foundation.
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