Wikipedia:Press releases/May 2004

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[edit] Wikipedia Wins Eighth Annual Webby Award for Best Community

May 2004 (World Wide Web): Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org), a free multilingual online encyclopedia, announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community, competing against sites like Friendster and Livejournal.com. This is the second international accolade awarded to Wikipedia for its community in as many weeks: it won the top prize for Digital Communities in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica.

This year marks Wikipedia's first appearance in the Webby Awards, also known as the Webbys or the "online Oscars." Nominated in the categories of Best Community and Best Practices, it was one of few sites to receive multiple nominations. Since 1996, awards in thirty categories have been presented to the best sites on the Web. The Webbys are sponsored by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS), a diverse organization comprised of nearly five hundred leading experts in related fields. Nominees are evaluated in a three-tiered process over a period of six months, during which IADAS members evaluate the sites according to six criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience. Other notable winners include Google and the BBC.

[edit] About Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been online since January 2001. In the past three years, its volunteer community has written over half a million reference articles in over 50 languages. In 2003, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. was formed to manage and fund the operation of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The foundation plans to release abridged print editions of the encyclopedias later this year.

Wikipedia's strong international community has now been recognized for the second time this year. The community observes core principles of cooperation and objective writing from a neutral point of view. An international newsletter, voluntary member associations, and special community pages help to maintain ties among Wikipedia's diverse participants.

The accuracy of the information in the encyclopedia is maintained by community members who review the work of their peers for incorrect information and vandalism. Conflicts between contributors are resolved by open discussion and consensus.

The text of all WikiMedia pages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, which permits anyone to create derivative works in any way, including commercially, as long as the works are released under the same license and credit is given to the authors of the previous work. The WikiMedia software, which runs the sites, is freely available under similar terms.

[edit] Additional information

For questions and interviews, please contact:

Jimmy Wales, Chairman, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (English only)
Phone: (+1)-727-527-9776
Email: jwales@bomis.com

Andrew Lih, Asia region press contact, Hong Kong, China (English, Chinese Putonghua)
Phone: (+852)-9759-0220
Email: alih@hku.hk

For further background information, please see:

Wikipedia's article about Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia)
Wikipedia's article about Wikimedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia)
Past press coverage of the project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_coverage)

This press release was collaboratively written within a WikiWikiWeb on the Wikipedia site.

[edit] Related links

List of Webby Award winners, 2004 (http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/winner_list.html)
The Winners of the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica (http://www.aec.at/en/prix/winners2004.asp)

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