Dear all,

I’m thrilled to share with you something very unusual:

This is a call for participation to all Wikipedians all over the world. Today, we set up a global community discussion about taking Wikipedia to the Moon – yes, in the literal sense. It is a special birthday gift in the year of Wikipedia’s 15th anniversary. Please find all the details on Meta-Wiki[1], where you can also contribute immediately and on-wiki. The following is a nutshell of the project, containing some additional information regarding communications:

At Wikimedia Deutschland’s we’ve been contacted by Berlin-based Google Lunar XPRIZE competitor “Part-Time Scientists”, who are among the few remaining teams preparing to send their own lunar vehicles to the Moon by 2017. They’ve asked us for support, because they love Wikipedia and would like to include it in their Moon rover’s scientific payload as a gift. According to the rules of the Lunar challenge, their rover must make it safely to the Moon surface, drive 500 meters and transmit images to earth. However, the Part-Time Scientists, whose motto is “Hell yeah, it’s rocket science!”, thought it would be even cooler to also preserve the sum of all knowledge on the Moon. So that’s why they’ve offered Wikimedia Deutschland 20GB of disc space on a ceramic-made medium, provided that we handle the selection of Wikipedia content. That, however, is something we feel we cannot do on our own/alone:

After 15 years of free knowledge, approaching 40 million articles in almost 300 languages, it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to take the responsibility and decide on a selection of the work of tens of thousands of volunteers. We believe that any preparation of Wikipedia content for such a symbolic purpose ought to be community-driven, and necessarily even on a global level: This is bigger than single language communities or single groups or organizations within our vast movement. So we’ve decided to be bold and make every step of the process open for anyone who wants to contribute. It is up to the international community of editors how to move forward. Again, please find more information on Meta-Wiki (and all the links)[1].

Today we are kicking off the initial discussion of possible scenarios. It will be open until June 3. In order to match payload deadlines we need to prepare our data long before the actual launch date. Our goal is to finish the Wikipedia anniversary year with a successful Moon project on International Volunteers Day, December 5.

Wikimedia Deutschland’s spokesperson Jan Apel will be handling press inquiries and media planning with the Part-Time Scientists here in Germany. We’ve been in contact with the WMF Communications team (thanks guys for your support!) and hereby extend a warm invitation to communications people all over the movement to join in[2]. It would be great to coordinate internationally, serving as many language communities as possible. Beginning at Wikimedia Conference, we’ll reach out and coordinate in person, but you can sign up right away on Meta-Wiki and become part of the Moon team yourselves.   

Let’s take Wikipedia to the Moon together!