Wikimedia press releases/Wikimania Awards

See also: text-only Awards release || General Wikimania release (draft)

Wikimedia Foundation announces 2006 Wikimania Awards competition

Boston, MA - July 22, 2006

Wikimedia, the foundation behind the online encylopedia Wikipedia, is proud to announce the 2006 Wikimania Awards competition. Nominations will be accepted until August 3, 2006. The Wikimania Awards were created to promote the creation of excellent free content around the world.

The Awards are being held in conjunction with Wikimania 2006 (August 4-6, at Harvard University), the second annual international conference celebrating Wikimedia's projects and the use of wikis to organize knowledge.

In the last few decades, copyright laws have become more restrictive and automatic than ever, and more and more of our culture is now inaccessible. The goal of the Wikimania awards is to raise awareness for and celebrate the great art and writing generously released under licenses that allow their free reuse by other artists or projects like Wikipedia. The contest has 9 categories of media open for submission right now, including artwork, maps and diagrams, photography, audio, video, and animation. A final category exists for media created on the way to or at the actual conference, and will not be open until August 2nd. Any piece of media created after August 8th of last year is eligible, as long as it has been released under a sufficiently free license (or into the public domain). The final winners will be picked by an international panel of judges familiar with free content, including Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing.net and members of the Creative Commons and Participatory Culture Foundation teams.

In addition to the contest, the conference will also include presentations from Jimmy Wales, Lawrence Lessig, Brewster Kahle, and some of the most active contributors to the Wikimedia projects. The conference will be a chance for those most interested and invested in Wikimedia to discuss the present and future of the projects (including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and more); as well as their unique social dynamics; technical updates; and how to improve and verify information created in free knowledge projects.

Please visit http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Awards for details about the rules and categories.

About Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., is a non-profit corporation based in Florida, USA. It was founded in 2003 to maintain and develop free-content projects like Wikipedia, and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. It is supported primarily by small donations from its broad userbase, and currently has national chapters in Germany and France.

Contact

For questions and further information, please contact the Wikimania team:

Email: wikimania-press@wikimedia.org Phone: (North America) +1-778-386-1059 Fax: (North America) +1-727-823-8961