Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to try the new skin ‘Vector‘ that the Usability Team has implemented as part of our first release, also known as Acai!  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to check it out by going to Appearance > Skin in your preferences and selecting ‘Vector’.  As you play with the new skin and enhanced toolbar, the Usability Team is looking forward to our next release – codename Babaco – the next alphabetical tropical fruit in what we expect to be a delicious series.

We hope to continue adding features to enhance the editing process – including but not limited to further toolbar enhancements; dialogs for the creation of links, tables, and references; and tools to aid in navigation of article content during editing.  Our research, design, and development depends on feedback from users, community members, and interested parties like you.  We invite you to take a look at our work and if you have any opinions, praise, concerns, or criticism, please let us know here.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Parul Vora, Wikimedia Usability Initiative

The open source movement is not only about software and knowledge base creation. There are active movements in user interface design as well. tango! is one of the neatest projects in design collaborative world, contributing in the creation of open source software such as Open Office and Ubuntu. We, the usability team, also benefit from such open source design projects which allow us to reuse their icons by modifying to meet our needs. For example the icon on the right is the new reference tool icon which can be found in the enhanced toolbar. It is the reuse of Gnome Desktop icons from Wikimedia Commons.

The first set of usability enhancements, new tab layout, enhanced toolbar, and reorganized search page, are now available in MediaWiki projects except for right-to-left language wikis such as Arabic and Hebrew. The support for right-to-left languages should be available in a few weeks, so just hang in there. We welcome you to try out the usability enhancements by going into your preferences and enable ‘Vector’ and the enhanced toolbar from Appearance and Editing menus.

I hope you find the new interface easy to interact. Let us know your feedback in the discussion page of the most recent release page.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

The fact that a publicly funded institution sent a threatening letter to a volunteer working to improve a non-profit encyclopedia may strike you as odd. After all, the National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856, with the stated aim of using portraits “to promote appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture.” [source] It seems obvious that a public benefit organization and a volunteer community promoting free access to education and culture should be allies rather than adversaries.

It seems especially odd if seen in the context of the many successful partnerships between the Wikimedia community and other galleries, libraries, archives and museums. For example, two German photographic archives, the Bundesarchiv and the Deutsche Fotothek, together donated 350,000 copyrighted images under a free content license to Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation’s multimedia repository. These photographic donations were the successful outcome of thoughtful negotiations between Mathias Schindler, a Wikimedia volunteer, and representatives of the archives. (Information about the Bundesarchiv donation ; Information about the Fotothek donation)

Everybody ended up winning. Wikimedia helped the archives by working to identify errors in the descriptions of the donated images, and by linking the subjects of the photographs to accepted metadata standards. Wikipedia has driven new traffic to the archives. And the more than 300 million monthly visitors to Wikipedia have been given free access to amazing photographs of historic value they would otherwise never have seen.

More examples:

• During the past few months, Wikimedia volunteers have worked with cultural institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to take thousands of photographs of paintings and objects for Wikimedia Commons. This project is called “Wikipedia Loves Art.” Again, everybody wins: the museums and galleries gain greater exposure for the images, Wikipedia is better able to serve its audience, and people around the world are able to see cultural treasures they might otherwise never have had access to. (See the English Wikipedia page about the project and the Dutch project portal.)
  

• Individual Wikimedia volunteers work with museums and archives to restore digital versions of old images by removing visible marks such as stains and scratches. The work is painstaking and difficult, but the results are terrific: the work is returned to its original glory, with its full informational value restored. Audiences can appreciate it once again. (Restoration work is coordinated through the “Potential restorations” page, and many examples of restoration can be found among Wikimedia’s featured pictures.)
  

Three Wikimedia volunteers have summarized these opportunities in an open letter: Working with, not against, cultural institutions. On August 6-7, Wikimedia Australia is organizing an event to explore these and other models of partnership with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

Why do Wikimedia volunteers donate their time to painstaking restoration work, the photographing of art, and the negotiation of partnerships with cultural institutions? Because Wikimedia volunteers are dedicated to making information – including images of historic or informational importance – freely available to people around the world. Cultural institutions should not condemn Wikimedia volunteers: they should join forces with them in a shared mission.

We believe there are many wonderful opportunities for Wikimedia to work together with cultural institutions to educate, inform, and enlighten, and to share our cultural heritage. If you would like to get involved in the discussion, we invite you to join the Wikimedia Commons mailing list. Subscribe and introduce yourself – the list is read by many Wikimedia volunteers and by some volunteers associated with Wikimedia chapters as well as some Wikimedia Foundation staff. Alternatively, if there is a chapter in your country, you may want to get in touch with them directly. You can also contact the Wikimedia Foundation. Please feel free to send me your first thoughts at erik(at)wikimedia(dot)org, and I will connect you as appropriate.

The NPG is angry that a Wikimedia volunteer seems to have uploaded to Commons photographs of public domain paintings that are owned by the NPG. Intitially it sent threatening letters to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking us to “destroy all the images”. (Contrary to public claims, these letters did not include an offer for compromise. The NPG is possibly confusing its correspondence with a letter exchange in 2006 with a Wikimedia volunteer, which the user published here.) The NPG’s position seems to be that the user has violated copyright law in posting the images.

Both the NPG and Wikimedia agree that the paintings depicted in these images are in the public domain – many of these portraits are hundreds of years old, all long out of copyright. However, the NPG claims that it holds a copyright to the reproduction of these images (while also controlling access to the physical objects). In other words, the NPG believes that the slavish reproduction of a public domain painting without any added originality conveys a new full copyright to the digital copy, creating the opportunity to monetize this digital copy for many decades. The NPG is therefore effectively asserting full control over these public domain paintings.

The Wikimedia Foundation has no reason to believe that the user in question has violated any applicable law, and we are exploring ways to support the user in the event that NPG follows up on its original threat. We are open to a compromise around the specific images, but our position on the legal status of these images is unlikely to change. Our position is shared by legal scholars and by many in the community of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In 2003, Peter Hirtle, 58th president of the Society of American Archivists, wrote:

“The conclusion we must draw is inescapable. Efforts to try to monopolize our holdings and generate revenue by exploiting our physical ownership of public domain works should not succeed. Such efforts make a mockery of the copyright balance between the interests of the copyright creator and the public.” [source]

Some in the international GLAM community have taken the opposite approach, and even gone so far to suggest that GLAM institutions should employ digitial watermarking and other Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies to protect their alleged rights over public domain objects, and to enforce those rights aggressively.

The Wikimedia Foundation sympathizes with cultural institutions’ desire for revenue streams to help them maintain services for their audiences. And yet, if that revenue stream requires an institution to lock up and severely limit access to its educational materials, rather than allowing the materials to be freely available to everyone, that strikes us as counter to those institutions’ educational mission. It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopedia serves any public interest whatsoever.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Today Wikimedia Foundation staff and volunteers are in the middle of the first-ever Wikipedia Academy in the United States – at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland (see Frank’s post for more info).

You can follow the twitter dialog live.  Volunteer/speaker/photographer Mathias Schindler is also uploading photos, which will make their way to the Wikimedia Commons.

The Academy runs through July 16.  We’ll post more findings and discussions from the event as they come together.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Every day millions of people access health information online. We have recently seen some new hard evidence of Wikipedia’s growing prominence as a health information resource. The rapid development and traffic on the English Wikipedia of an article on the 2009 flu pandemic demonstrates this trend.

Since the pandemic broke out in April 2009, Wikipedia has been one of the major sources of information about the topic. Click the “history” tab of the article, and you will see the fascinating story of hundreds of volunteers donating their time and knowledge to make all facts about the swine flu outbreak accessible to millions of readers around the globe. Started on April 24 as a small article of scarcely more than 200 words, the entry in its current version fills more than 21 printed pages and contains a large number of tables, charts, images, citations and references.

And that is just the story of the new article on the pandemic. A quick glance at the page requests for flu and influenza related articles on the English Wikipedia tells a larger story of Wikipedia’s significance for those seeking health-related information online. Whereas these flu-related articles got about sixteen thousand page hits on April 23, this number increased to dizzying 2.86 million page hits only a week later (see chart).

The significance of Wikipedia as a source of online health information has lately been measured by Michaël Laurent and Tim Vickers, both Wikipedia contributors. In an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (“Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter”), Laurent and Vickers showed that Wikipedia ranked among the first ten results in 71–85% of search engines.

Now Vickers and Laurent are among the volunteers organizing a Wikipedia Academy with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first to be staged in the United States (see our press release). The Academy model was pioneered by Wikimedia Germany in 2006 and has since been replicated by other Wikimedia chapters around the globe. The event series aims at engaging people who are not familiar with wiki culture or communities.

In this one-day event, to be held in Bethesda, Maryland, on July 16th, experienced volunteer Wikipedia editors will talk about Wikimedia’s mission and orient the audience to Wikipedia’s structures and community policies. Medical researchers and other staff members of the NIH will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia’s content and engage with other Wikipedians to further increase Wikipedia’s quality and credibility.

Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach

I’m very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a USD 300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading. See the press release and the grant proposal as submitted (PDF).

This should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. Wikimedia Commons , the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

We want to begin to change that, and make sure that everyone who has useful educational media to share can do so easily. As part of our partnership with Kaltura, Michael Dale has already done some great work on external repository searches and transfers, and on integration of uploading into the editing interface, so we’re hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We’ve also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany’s investment in multilingual search (German link; see Google Translation) are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we’ll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course we’re enormously grateful to the Ford Foundation for funding it. Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation