ReadWriteWeb

Many of us take cheap high-speed Internet access for granted. I think nothing of downloading an MP3 album from Amazon MP3 while streaming a movie from Netflix on the Roku and browsing the Web on a powerful computer. That's not a luxury that's available to everyone, and in some parts of the world data charges prove prohibitive for going online for information.

To help counter that, the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange have come up with a plan for free Wikipedia access. Overall, the deal looks like a win for users, but it does raise a couple of questions as well. How is Wikipedia access going to change Africa and the Middle East?

The Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia and nearly a dozen other wiki-based projects, announced its five-year strategic plan today. The plan is the product of a collaborative effort that began in 2009 and involved more than 1,000 participants from around the world. In it, the organization lays out a number of goals it hopes to reach by 2015, including increasing the number of editors, articles, users and more.

After more than a year in the making, Wikimedia released the final version today, saying that it is "energized and enthusiastic about where Wikimedia is heading."

Ryan Lane, an operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote a blog post about how he is using OpenStack to build a cloud infrastructure for testing and development. OpenStack is the open-source initiative that provides an infrastructure for building cloud environments.

Lane wants an infrastructure that does not require operations to manage user accounts, virtual machines, DNS entries or IP addresses. Lane also wants an environment in which developers can add additional infrastructure without operations support. Sound to good to be true? Lane seems to have it all worked out.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced earlier this week that it would need to raise $16 million to keep Wikipedia ad free, double the amount that it raised last year. That sounds like quite the challenge, right?

Well, according to the real-time statistics on its fundraising effort, Wikimedia has managed to raise in a week what took a month last year and it has a few guesses as to why.

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation managed to raise more than $8 million in its yearly fundraiser. On Monday morning, the non-profit behind Wikipedia is announcing that it aims to raise $16 million this year "so that Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to people around the world."

Keeping Wikipedia free is no small feat, however, and the foundation has released a few stats about the world's fifth most popular Web property that help illustrate the challenges it faces.

Jimmy Wales has withdrawn from actively editing, as a "founder," (ie, under a "Founder's flag") Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia he helped to create, and its allied and subsidiary websites. (Wales remains the Founder-Member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees and has all the same editorial rights as any other of the organization's volunteer editors. )

Last week, Fox News started asking representatives at companies that have donated to the group's Wikimedia Foundation for comment on their discovery that Wikimedia Commons had a large collection of photographs that could be described as pornography, even as child pornography. On hearing this, Wales apparently began unilaterally to delete images from the group's servers. This set off a great argument among the encyclopedia's editors.

Wikipedia is rolling out new changes this month to all its users. They include a new theme (Vector), an editing toolbar and a simplified navigation and search.

Wikipedia started testing these changes and others in March, according to the Wikipedia blog.

Wikipedia, the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit.

In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.

Brion Vibber, CTO of Wikimedia and lead developer for Wikipedia and MediaWiki, announced today that he's leaving the company to work for StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as their chief architect.

StatusNet is the open-source microblogging platform that powers sites such as identi.ca, which impressed us from its inception as a "framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services." Read on for more details on what Vibber will be doing there.