Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/The sibling projects

So the first idea I want to share is that Wikimedia is not just a misspelling of Wikipedia. Wikimedia is much broader, much bigger than Wikipedia. Wikimedia is the umbrella term or the overall term for the series of free knowledge and free culture and free software projects that the Wikimedia Foundation supports. And in the Wikimedia ecosystem there are many different wikis, different projects that offer different tasks, different kinds of work. And also have kind of different atmospheres, so that if you don't find yourself integrating well on one project, or if you have had a negative experience and are demotivated in one corner of the Wikimedia world, it doesn't mean you will have the same experience in another corner of the Wikimedia world.

What does Wikimedia include beside Wikipedia? It includes many other projects; They're called the sister projects, sister projects to Wikipedia, and I will just mention a few of them in detail: Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository; We will talk about that. Wikidata, the structured data project; We'll talk about that a little. Wikisource, the free digital library of texts; We will talk about that a little.

Mediawiki, which is the free software that runs all of these wikis, including Wikipedia; They all run on software called Mediawiki, which we develop -- we, the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer developers, are developing Mediawiki, the world's most sophisticated wiki software. It doesn't run only these projects, but also thousands of other wikis around the world that aren't related to Wikimedia. So that itself is a free knowledge project because the software enables other people to create free knowledge projects as well.

And there are other projects: Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, which we won't cover today, but that I encourage you to explore if they sound interesting anyway.