The Princess of Asturias Foundation

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an open-access digital encyclopedia written in a variety of languages by volunteers around the world, whose articles can be edited by anyone.

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The free-access digital encyclopedia Wikipedia has been bestowed with the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation, as made public today in Oviedo by the Jury responsible for conferring said Award.

The Jury for this Award –convened by the Princess of Asturias Foundation– was chaired by Gustavo Suárez Pertierra and composed of Enrique Barón Crespo, Eugenia Bieto Caubet, Rosa María Calaf Solé, Pedro Duque Duque, Gloria Fernández-Lomana García, Enrique Fernández-Miranda y Lozana, Duke of Fernandez-Miranda, Anna Ferrer, Emilio Lamo de Espinosa Michels de Champourcin, Jerónimo López Martínez, Ricardo Martí Fluxá, Rafael Matesanz Acedos, Jaime Montalvo Correa, Juan Carlos del Olmo Castillejos, Marcelino Oreja Aguirre, Marquis of Oreja, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Alfonso de la Rosa Morena and Alicia Castro Masaveu (acting as secretary).

The candidature was put forward by Hans Meinke, Jury member for the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts.

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an free-access digital encyclopedia written in a variety of languages by volunteers around the world, whose articles can be edited by anyone. It uses wiki technology, which facilitates content editing and storage of the page’s history of changes. Founded by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, with the help of philosopher Larry Sanger, it has been overseen by the Wikimedia Foundation since 2003.

Wikipedia started on 15th January 2001 as a complementary project for Nupedia, an encyclopedia written by experts whose articles were peer-reviewed. The latter was designed to create articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias thanks to the participation of scholars, mainly PhD students and academics, who were asked to contribute on a volunteer basis. Due to the slow progress made on the project, a wiki linked to Nupedia was created in 2001, initially intended to expedite the creation of articles in parallel before undergoing the peer-review process. Both projects coexisted until the success of Wikipedia ended up eclipsing Nupedia, which ceased operations in 2003. Figuring among the ten most visited websites in the world, the encyclopedia has continuously grown. It currently offers more than 35 million articles in 288 languages, including some indigenous languages, other invented ones, like Esperanto, and even dead languages, like Latin. Twelve of its language editions surpass one million articles (English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, Cebuano and Waray-Waray, both spoken in the Philippines) and three others have more than 700,000 (Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese). English Wikipedia is the most extensive, with over 4,800,000 articles. Wikipedia currently has more than 25 million registered users, about 73,000 of whom are active editors, and receives about 500 million single visits a month.

Created in 2003 with headquarters in San Francisco (USA), the Wikimedia Foundation controls and manages Wikipedia. It also has other projects that complement the encyclopedia, all of which are multilingual, open and supported by wiki technology: Wiktionary, aimed at creating an open dictionary; Wikibooks, which makes open-content textbooks, manuals and instructional guides available for free to any Internet user; Wikiversity, a free and open online education platform allowing the creation of learning projects at all levels of education or the development of didactic material such as examinations and practical exercises; Wikiquote, a compendium of quotations and sayings in every language, which also includes their sources; Wikinews, an open-content news source; Wikisource, an online library of original texts that have been published under a free licence or in the public domain; Wikimedia Commons, a database of images and multimedia material for other projects; Wikispecies, a free and open directory of biological species; Meta-Wiki, a website to support other Foundation projects; Wikidata, a database; and Wikitravel, a travel guide.

Twenty-four nominations ran for the Award this year, from Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Morocco, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Portugal, the United States and Spain.

This is the seventh of eight Princess of Asturias Awards to be bestowed this year, now in their thirty-fifth edition. The Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts went to American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences was given to French-American economist Esther Duflo, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities went to Spanish philosopher Emilio Lledó Iñigo, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research was jointly bestowed on the biochemists Emmanuelle Charpentier (France) and Jennifer Doudna (USA), the Princess of Asturias Award for Sports was jointly bestowed on the Spanish basketball players Pau and Marc Gasol and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature was given to Cuban-born, Spanish-nationalized writer Leonardo Padura.

The Princess of Asturias Award for Concord will be announced in September.

Each of the Princess of Asturias Awards comprises a Joan Miró sculpture – representing and symbolizing the Awards–, a cash prize of 50,000 euros, a diploma and an insignia. The awards will be presented in the autumn in Oviedo at a grand ceremony chaired by TM The King and Queen of Spain.

HM King Felipe VI has been the Honorary President of the Foundation since it was established in 1980. Following his proclamation as King of Spain on 19th June 2014, HRH Leonor de Borbón y Ortiz, Princess of Asturias, is now the Honorary President of this institution which annually convenes the Princess of Asturias Awards. The Board of Trustees of the Foundation decided at an extraordinary meeting in Oviedo last October to rename the institution and its awards, which are now called the Princess of Asturias Foundation and Princess of Asturias Awards, respectively.

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