SOS Children’s Villages presents Wikipedia for Schools
October 22nd, 2008Earlier today the Wikimedia Foundation, along with the UK charitable organization SOS Children’s Villages announced the 2008 edition of Wikipedia Selection for schools. Our own Wikinews has also covered the announcement and offers a great interview with Wikipedian and SOS Children’s CEO, Andrew Cates.
David Gerard, a UK-based Wiki(m/p)edian shared the following on Slashdot later in the afternoon:
“SOS Children’s Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 14,000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date.”
Update: BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.<
October 23rd, 2008 at 18:12
Great project, but I think that the statement “see http://www.wikipedia.org for details of authors and sources” and the disclaimer are not enough: GFDL is not respected, authors are not credited.
October 24th, 2008 at 08:00
I do not wish to try to answer this categorically but rather help you to see how complex the issue is. Your thought is arguable but does not seem to be the consensus of opinions given on the issue. There is a lot of discussion in the project page archives on en on this. The trouble is that the GFDL was not written to cover electronic publishing, and does not say what “crediting” exactly is required. We read the licence carefully, and have tried to ensure appropriate credit is due. As far as we can reasonably tell:
1) We are the only offline project in any language to include the image pages for all the images to allow full credit to creators of images. Inclusion of images pages was at the direct (polite) request of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007 (although this request does not seem to have been made to all offline derivatives and the Release Version project does not, we are happy to do it, since we wish to give credit to creators). Some individuals who contributed photos (from Wikiproject Geography) also requested this after the 2006 edition just carried a name on an alt tag. Even image pages give minor problems on child friendliness since image uploads often contain profanities along the lines of “maybe I can get this *** thing to upload this way” and some uploader’s descriptions of good images are obscene. Also of course it means including phone numbers etc of photographers who include these on the image details.
2) There is no single agreed was of crediting authors in any Wikipedia derivation online and offline. The only really safe way would be to include the entire article history locally on each DVD but apart from a serious size issue (some included articles like Global Warming have more than 10,000 versions in their edit history), inevitably the history contains all the vandalism and obscenity which we wish to exclude from this audience. No one anywhere does this. Online there is an urban myth that linking the article back to its copy on wikipedia is required but this is not in the license, and doesn’t seem to be practically different from giving the URL. The German DVD lists the names of contributers to a given article, but does not contain the article history and so does not allow authors to be credited with their particular contribution. We considered this (it is technically easy) but does not seem to match license requirement and it is also arguable that this comes close to implying the authors are in some way endorsing the final version.
Therefore we decided that our best endeavour to fully credit authors was including reference to the article history on Wikipedia. This credited the authors in a way in which was practically as good as Wikipedia’s own respect of licenses (at present on wikipedia itself badly executed page moves lose edit history so not all authors are always credited). The only authors whose contribution is missed in this credit are those where the article has been moved or merged without a redirect but we try to minimise this with periodic updates. We felt that the vast majority of authors who strongly support this move to make material available to schools would support this interpretation of the licence on their work. If there are any authors who would prefer their content to be excluded from the DVD selection then if they contact us with a list of diffs establishing their content is present we will remove it from the selection.
Out of interest any snapshot like this inevitably accidentally includes some material which was submitted to WP but was actually a copyvio. In the last year we received notice of two of these, one image and one text block, both of which were removed from the online copy and the downloads with 96 hours (it takes time taken to rerun all the scripts after article and image reselection).
October 24th, 2008 at 22:44
I will read the project page archive if I find it. But let me say this. Articles usually don’t have 10k versions…, but it may still be difficult to find all “good” authors, and maybe the space to list all of them. However, as an author, I would deeply appreciate if any page had just the direct link to the article on Wikipedia _and_ the one to the history of the page. GFDL may be not the most appropriate license for Wikipedia, I agree with this, but one can’t just take the text and say “it comes from Wikipedia”; IMHO this has to do with common sense, not with a specific license.
October 25th, 2008 at 22:24
I believe you’re making a couple of errors here and are presenting the situation as more complicated than it actually needs to be. Most importantly, the fact that it’s difficult to say whether one’s fully complying with the GFDL should not be a valid excuse for not making _any_ effort to comply with the GFDL. There are shades of grey here, “better” and “worse” levels of compliance, and I assure you that if you strive for better without managing to achieve perfection you’ll still receive kudos for the effort. I like the idea of this project and I hate to see it getting bad press over a technicality that should be easy to fix.
The need for a link to the article history isn’t an “urban myth”, IMO it’s simply the absolute _minimum_ level of effort a mirror can go to in attempting to show that it respects the requirements of the GFDL. I don’t actually think this is fully sufficient, it won’t be accessible when browsed offline, but it still makes it a heck of a lot easier to find the history than a vague “go to Wikipedia and search for it” suggestion like your footers currently use. And it should be really easy to do in a fully automated manner, too.
Better would be to include a link to a locally-stored author list. This would _not_ have to be the “entire article history” as you suggest above; I don’t know why you think this would be necessary. Just collect the list of usernames that have contributed, remove duplicates and anonymous IP numbers, and there you go – full compliance. The article on global warming may have 10,000 revisions but it doesn’t have anywhere near 10,000 _authors_; this would not be as big as you fear. And again, it would be a fairly easy thing to generate automatically.
Yes, these require extra steps and in the latter case a bit of extra disk space. That’s the price you have to pay for using Wikipedia’s content at no monetary cost; abiding by Wikipedia’s licencing terms to the best of your ability. Failing to do so makes the _entire mirror_ into a copyright violation since the licence is the only thing that’s giving the right to mirror it in the first place. This isn’t something that can be waved off as a minor detail.
October 28th, 2008 at 13:01
Lovely, we hope a hugest success for the 2008/9 edition
November 3rd, 2008 at 17:25
Just to mention that following a request from Erik Moeller we have put at the foot of every page the exact URL of the version on wikipedia from which each particular version is taken. That was a polite simple request from WMF which we implemented immediately. This is not needed for licence but makes it easier to find authors (although not simple), and is also something which the community have expressed some preference for. It also allows a transparent inspection of what content we have taken out.
As has also been discussed elsewhere, the idea that an author list per page is needed is based on an interpretation of GFDL with which the English Wikipedia itself does not comply. However, we have said that if someone is fine enough to produce an author list per article (which is not available directly at the English Wikipedia) we will look at including it in the future.
Andrew
November 10th, 2008 at 22:35
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html, section 4.B.
Nothing more was due, although one sees it’s not that easy to obtain.
But the link is a nice move. Bye!