This year Wikipedia turned 10. Since its birth we have witnessed an amazing growth in its content, quality, diversity and readership. To celebrate this landmark event in the history of the project, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) are jointly launching WikiViz 2011 – a competition calling on data/information visualization experts, computational journalists, data artists and data scientists to create the most insightful visualization of Wikipedia’s impact.

WikiViz 2011 is about visualizing the impact of Wikipedia. We want to see the most effective, compelling and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture and open collaboration model. Potential topics include: the imprint of Wikipedia on knowledge sharing and access to information; its impact on literacy and education, journalism and research; on the functioning of scientific and cultural organizations and businesses, as well as the daily life of individuals around the world. In the same way, we want to see visualizations of areas of knowledge, geographical regions, organizations and people Wikipedia has not been able to reach or has impacted less than one would have expected. In summary, the main goal of this competition is to improve our understanding of how Wikipedia is affecting the world beyond the scope of its own community.

Please, refer to the WikiViz call for participation to learn more details about:

• Terms and conditions to participate.
• Submission instructions.
• Selection rules and evaluation criteria.

• June 29, 2011: Challenge starts accepting submissions.
• August 28, 2011: Submission deadline (extended).
• September 12, 2011: Winner and finalist submissions announced.
• October 4, 2011: WikiViz awards session, WikiSym 2011 (Mountain View, CA).

The WikiViz 2011 Awarding Ceremony will take place on October 4, at WikiSym 2011 main venue, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley campus (Mountain View, California). The ceremony will be introduced by a keynote by Jeff Heer (Stanford University), on the impact of emerging visualization techniques to understand open collaboration today.

Three finalist teams (1 winner, 2 runners-up) will be invited to present their work at WikiSym 2011, in Mountain View (California). Travel expenses and registration fees will be covered for one delegate per finalist team. The works from these three teams will be showcased at the WikiSym 2011 exhibit, presented during the WikiViz awards ceremony and featured by our Knowledge and Media Partners (Unidad Editorial, Periscopic, Information Aesthetics, Visualizing.org and Flowing Data).

Furthermore, Spanish media group Unidad Editorial will run a voting process in September, among the visitors of El Mundo.es, the largest digital newspaper in Spanish by readership worldwide, to select the “Public's choice” visualization among the top 10 submissions received. The winner will be featured on the digital edition of El Mundo.

The finalists will be selected by a jury composed by world-class experts in data visualization and social computing:

• Moritz Stefaner (Well Formed Data).
• Kim Rees (Periscopic).
• Andrew Vande Moere (KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics).
• Edward Lee (Visualizing.org)
• Erik Zachte (Wikimedia Foundation).
• Gregorio Convertino (Xerox PARC and WikiSym 2011 Symposium Committee)

For any questions, comments or interest in supporting or collaborating with this challenge, please contact the co-organizers at: wikiviz2011 [at] easychair [dot] org

• Felipe Ortega (WikiSym)
• Dario Taraborelli (Wikimedia Foundation)

You can also follow us on Twitter: @WikiViz (tag your tweets with #wikiviz11)