Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce a new opportunity for Wikipedians to reach out to scholars at one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. We’re seeking an experienced Wikipedia editor for a one year, full time fellowship based at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Located at the Harvard campus in Cambridge Massachusetts, this Wikipedian will have a unique role facilitating collaboration between the faculty, staff, and fellows at the Center and the Wikipedia volunteer community, with the aim of improving the quality of encyclopedia articles.

The Belfer Center is a focal point for research on international security and policy related to science, technology and the environment. It is also part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While some experience with the subject matter is preferred, the goal of this fellowship is for a Wikipedian to help unlock the expertise at the Center and see that it is shared with the world. While English Wikipedia alone may have nearly four million articles, the depth and quality of our coverage of international affairs and policy — such as on global nuclear security — is not well known. What we do know is that we are still a long way from Wikipedia’s goal of the “sum of all human knowledge,” and that having a liaison to work with experts and volunteers will do much to improve the free encyclopedia.

This position is funded by a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation. This philanthropic institution has supported both the Belfer Center and the Wikimedia Foundation in the past. Apply now!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships Program, Wikimedia Foundation

Kristen Skogen Lund, Crown Prince Haakon, Jimmy Wales, and Minister of Development Holmas looking on as Wikipedians demonstrate editing.

On Monday, at the annual Wikipedia Academy in Oslo, Norway, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway joined with Wikimedians to promote free knowledge and to highlight the cultural institutions and businesses that have embraced Wikipedia. They focused on the Wikipedia Zero agreement between the Wikimedia Foundation and Telenor, which enables more than 135 million customers in Asia to access Wikipedia without any additional charge on their data plans.

The celebration was headed by local Wikipedians, who introduced Crown Prince Haakon, Jimmy Wales, Minister of Development Heikki Holmas, and Telenor Executive Vice President Kristin Skogen Lund. Lund opened the celebration by advocating for Wikipedia and its open source format, identifying it as the “main pillar” of Telenor’s policy of openness in Asia.

“It’s an important development we put on track together with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia movement, and we are proud to contribute to this,” said Lund

Lund then demonstrated Telenor’s commitment to the free knowledge mission by announcing that Telenor had contributed 200 photos to Wikimedia Commons with Creative Commons licensing. “There is so much work to be done globally, but we can also contribute at home,” she said. “We hope that others will do the same.”

The academy broke past participation records by attracting 99 sign-ups and 23 high school assistants, as well as the first ever royal participant. Half of the attendees belonged to GLAM institutions, mainly museums and archives. It marked the beginning of the sector’s national policy of officially acclaiming Wikipedia as a preferred channel of communicating cultural heritage.

Minister Holmas, Crown Prince Haakon, and Jimmy Wales

The 100 chairs of the academy room were all filled up, with people standing along the walls during the award ceremony for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 and the local Wikipedian of the Year. The latter prize went to meteorologist Frode Korneliussen and the Catholic parish priest Claes Tande, who has 180,000 edits and more than 13,000 new articles.

During a course on how to edit Wikipedia, we learned that Minister Holmaas is an active Wikipedia user, and editor. Ten Wikipedia editors from the local Drömtorp High School were recruited to help teach the course. The students, with assistance from Wales, taught Crown Prince Haakon, Lund and Holmaas how to patrol, supervise RSS feeds, and recognize vandalism. The Crown Prince followed the lectures intensely and expressed admiration for the elaborate tools that administrators and patrollers use on Wikipedia.

This year’s academy coincided with the last day of the trial of Utøya terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo City court house, only a kilometer away. In the local media’s coverage of the academy, they focused on the efforts of the Norwegian Wikipedia community to keep extremists from making their imprint on articles. Jimmy Wales explained the Wikipedia model as one of openness and democratic debate, which helps the project attain a neutral point of view.

The morning after, Wikimedia Norway vice chairman Erlend Bjørtvedt appeared on the morning news, explaining how a corps of 150 norwegian patrollers and administrators on four continents, have managed to uphold the neutrality of disputed articles by a mix of patrolling, reverting and limited article blocking.

Erlend Bjørtvedt, Vice Chairman, Wikimedia Norway 

(This is the first in a series of profiles of editors who we have recently thanked for reaching their 1,000th edit to articles on English Wikipedia.)

Kawah Putih Lake in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. (Image courtesy user Amelia guo, cc-by-sa-3.0)

Indonesia is the third largest developing country (behind China and India) and the fourth most populous country in the world – but many English-speaking people don’t know that, or anything about the country itself. This is in part because, according to Wikipedia editor Peter McCawley, Indonesia “does not explain itself to the outside world very well.” He believes that many Indonesians don’t feel comfortable contributing to the English Wikipedia, and the few articles that do exist are still too short or have gaps that should be filled. That’s what Peter is trying to change.

Peter was born in Australia but got interested in Indonesia in the 1970s. In 1972, he completed his PhD on Indonesian economics and now works as an economic adviser in Indonesia. He also volunteers for an Australian NGO that promotes the development of very poor areas in the country. He started editing Wikipedia in 2010 because he saw gaps in information that, with his expertise, could fill in.

“When I see useful text that seems to need improvement, I’m inclined to see if I can edit it a little,” he said.

“Wikipedia is an important source of information for many people. Good information is a public good. Part of my job as a university scholar and teacher is to contribute to information in areas where I have expertise,” Peter said when asked why he contributes to Wikipedia. “Further, I have personally benefitted greatly myself from the global public good that is ‘information and learning.’ I have, in a broad sense, a debt to the world of information and learning. I should repay my debt!”

Peter has improved and expanded many articles on Indonesian people, places, organizations. He has also created two new articles: Widjojo Nitisastro, an Indonesian economist, and Kawah Putih (pictured above), a volcanic crater lake on the island of Java. Other volunteer editors have come along and expanded those articles even further, adding references, copyediting, and bringing in images from Wikimedia Commons.

“It’s important to add to information on Wikipedia because lots of key people (scholars, policy makers, students, journalists, and so on) look for information on the web, and they often look at Wikipedia. It’s a pity when the information on Wikipedia is wrong or incomplete or poorly presented,” said Peter. “The world in general is likely to be a better place in all sorts of ways if people are well-informed.”

Indonesia isn’t just a place for Peter. “Indonesia is fascinating in just about every way that one might mention – society, politics, culture, economics, religion, environment, international relations, and so on,” he said. “Across the world today, around five billion people or more have decided that they don’t want to be poor any more – they want to have decent standards of living, and they want their countries to grow and to modernize. For me, Indonesia is a prism onto this remarkable change in human life on the planet. And if I can explain just a little of all of this on Wikipedia, that seems to me to be a useful thing to do.”

To get involved in improving Indonesia-related content on English Wikipedia, please visit WikiProject Indonesia, or browse all articles on Indonesia and pitch in where you can.

Maryana Pinchuk, Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation

Community Fellow Peter Coombe, CC-BY-SA

It is my great pleasure to introduce our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow of 2012, Peter Coombe! As a Wikimedia Community Fellow, Pete will be working with the community to improve help documentation on English Wikipedia. He’ll be leading a 6 month effort and taking a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages in order to make them more usable for new and experienced editors alike.

Like the encyclopedia itself, Wikipedia’s help documentation has grown organically over the years. Wikipedians have produced a great deal of useful documentation, but today’s help system has a vast number of pages that range from introductions addressing beginner needs to highly advanced technical documentation. Some pages are written in a clear style and some are not, and the path to find information on any given topic can be baffling, particularly to new editors. Pete feels that improving the main help landing page and other key help pages could have significant benefits for editor retention, and we agree.

Pete comes to the fellowships program with an impressive Wikipedia and academic resume. He’s been editing English Wikipedia as The wub since 2005, he’s an admin with over 75,000 global edits, and an active member of Wikimedia UK. Pete volunteered on the Social Media Team in the 2010 Fundraiser, and worked as a Production Coordinator in 2011. He’s also got a B.A. and M. Sci. with honors in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

But what really piqued our interest at the Wikimedia Community Fellowship Program is Pete’s experience breaking down complex topics into clear written information. He’s participated twice in a program at Cambridge to create online teaching and learning modules on materials science and engineering topics. In his projects, Pete introduced users to atomic force microscopy and raman spectroscopy. He’s also worked at The Helpful Book Company, publishing books that teach senior citizens how to use computers.

Pete’s talent for making the complex seem simple, combined with his experience A/B testing in the fundraiser and 7 years editing Wikipedia, make him a great fit for his fellowship project. To follow his work or get involved in the redesign project, please visit his project page. Welcome, Pete – the Wikimedia Foundation is looking forward to partnering with you to make help more accessible for all!

More Spring 2012 Fellows will be announced in the coming weeks – we can’t wait for you to meet them!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

The most important question currently facing the Wikimedia movement is how we can continue to grow our communities by attracting new editors, while helping current editors stay engaged. With all this talk of stagnating community growth, however, one thing that we haven’t focused on as much is the remarkable fact that every single day, tons of amazing volunteers are still working away on the projects, unseen and often unrecognized.

Should we use this image in our next fundraising banner? (We kid.)

We’ve decided to remedy this lack of recognition by finding and personally thanking Wikipedians who make their 1,000th edit to articles on the project. This may not be their 1,000th edit overall, but we feel that such a milestone merits a barnstar that recognizes their contributions to free knowledge.

The overwhelming size and diversity of the Wikipedia community today means that it’s harder than ever for other contributors to notice and congratulate each other. Many of these editors probably aren’t even aware they’ve made they’ve passed such a milestone, partially due to our community’s (entirely admirable) distaste for “editcountitis“.

Our first step in the process of recognizing these editors depends on the analytical wizardry of Ryan Faulkner, formerly a data analyst for the fundraiser and now part of the team working on editor retention. Using a mirror of the live English Wikipedia database, we built a system of logging every time an editor makes his or her 1,000th edit to the article space.

Another way we’ve described this conundrum — where there’s lots of work being done but not nearly enough recognition for good editors — is that we need more Kirk and less Spock. At the Foundation, we took this somewhat literally, as we decided to mark each 1,000 edit milestone that we log by playing the transporter sound effect from Star Trek in the sixth floor of our San Francisco office. As far as work interruptions go, getting an extremely loud (and yes, nerdy) reminder that people are donating so much of their time and energy to the encyclopedia is a great one.

This experiment likely won’t last forever or work for all 280 languages of Wikipedia. But it’s important for us as staff members to stay connected to our communities, and we have a not-so-secret hope of making this kind of appreciation something that every Wikimedia project does for itself. Look out for future announcements about how community members can take charge of this list of accomplished editors.

Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling
Community Organizers, Wikimedia Foundation

P.S. A special thanks to R. Stuart Geiger for helping build our logging system, and Zack Exley for inspiring and supporting this idea.

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

Ruben Hilare-Quispe. Photo by Matthew Roth, CC-BY-SA

In English

Among the nearly 90,000 active contributors to Wikipedia, there are many different motivations for editing. For some, it’s a hobby; for others it’s a mission to advance free knowledge. For Ruben Hilare-Quispe, contributing to Wikipedia is a way to promote and protect his language and culture.

“It’s a kind of inward love for your language,” said Hilare-Quispe, who contributes to Aymar Wikipidiya, one of 284 language versions of the free encyclopedia. Aymar Wikipediya has just under 2,000 articles, with 30 active users, many of whom Hilare-Quispe has helped organize.

“You write because you love your language and you belong to that culture, because your family doesn’t have content already on the Internet,” he said. “It happens frequently that when you want content in Aymara, it just doesn’t exist.”

Hilare-Quispe lives in El Alto, Bolivia, where he works part-time for the Bolivian Quaker Education Fund. Like many younger Aymaras, he grew up bilingual, learning Spanish in school and speaking Aymara at home with his family. Aymara is an indigenous language to South America, with 3 million speakers worldwide, primarily concentrated in the Andes. It has been recognized as an official language of Bolivia and Peru.

Hilare-Quispe first started contributing to Aymar Wikipidya as part of the Jaqi Aru project, which he helped establish. Jaqi Aru, which means “voice of the people” in Aymara, is a community of approximately 40 young Aymarans dedicated to promoting the use of the Aymara language on the Internet. Jaqi Aru’s efforts are focused on making Aymara content available online, and their activities include uploading Aymara videos on Youtube, participating in the Global Voices Online Project Lingua as Aymaran translators, and of course, writing for Wikipedia in Aymara.

“We had been looking for some opportunity to write and make content online,” said Hilare-Quispe. “If someone wants to look for information in Aymara, Wikipedia is the first page which appears, so that’s cool.”

Hilare-Quispe says the collaborative nature of Wikipedia sets it apart from Jaqi Aru’s other projects. “Wikipedia can be edited and completed later, or corrected by another person from anywhere, so that’s a big difference from what we do on blogs or on Facebook or even for Global Voices, which is just information–you can’t modify it.”

In the early days of the project, they had to go to painstaking lengths to edit. In-home Internet access in Bolivia is not widespread, so Hilare Quispe and his community went to Internet cafes, where they found articles in Spanish, English or French Wikipedias, and clicked the “edit” button and copied the full text of the article, including the wiki-markup. They saved the articles offline and took them home or to school to translate into Aymara, then returned to Internet cafes to upload the new articles to Aymar Wikipediya.

Now, Hilare-Quispe and the Jaqi Aru team create new articles directly in Aymara on the Aymar Wikipedia. Thanks to workshops from the group of editors seeking to form an official Wikimedia chapter in Bolivia, they understand wiki-markup, including formatting text and uploading images. Hilare-Quispe even has in-home Internet access via modem, so he no longer has to trek over to the internet cafe to download article text.

“I think Jaqi Aru as a team has had a great influence,” he said. “Now many other young people think to create websites in Aymara, most of them write on Facebook in Aymara, and they share information about their communities in Aymara.”

He also said that Wikimedia Foundation initiatives to simplify the editing process would have a positive impact on their work. Hilare-Quispe said the he hopes the Wikipedia visual editor will significantly increase the editorship for Aymar Wikipediya.

“A huge group of people already know how to write on the computer,” he said, “so that could be perfect if Wikimedia works in an easier way to edit.”

Beyond Aymara, Hilare-Quispe hopes Wikipedia will be widely used by other minority language communities to help preserve their knowledge and culture. “The goal is to spread to other native languages in Bolivia like Guaraní, Mosetén, Chipaya, or Quechua,” he said. “We can share this information [about Wikipedia] and strengthen those minority languages.”

According to Hilare-Quispe, Wikipedia has played an important role in helping Jaqi Aru accomplish its mission.

“Wikipedia allows you to participate in the worldwide population with your language, and so that’s really really important for us, for Aymaras,” he said. “When you look for something in Aymara, maybe tomorrow or in the future, someone is going to look for the same information, so when you know something you can write it. It’s just that kind of process, and that’s why I like it.”

Story and reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern
Additional reporting by Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager 

(more…)

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to build momentum around activities focused on the Arabic language region. At the end of March, Barry Newstead visited the region and Moushira Elamrawy (Consultant, Arabic Language Initiative) conducted a number of outreach activities in various Arabic speaking countries. The Arabic Language initiative is a strategic priority for the movement and the Foundation. The visit sought to establish relationships with potential partners and to begin a dialogue on the importance of building Arabic Wikipedia as part of regional efforts to expand Arabic language content on the Internet.

The first stop was at the Dead Sea in Jordan.  Moushira was invited by the e-mediat program to conduct a workshop for participants from more than 20 NGOs from Lebanon and Jordan.  Several Lebanese and Jordanian NGOs working in the areas of history preservation, video blogging, and human rights showed interest in organizing Wikipedia sessions for their members and incorporating their up-to-date, sourced data from their research into Wikipedia articles. According to a recent study, Jordan’s contribution to online content is mainly in Arabic, and the country is one of the main contributors to the 3 percent of global online content that is in Arabic, an interesting fact which opens doors to fruitful activities.

Session about Wikipedia in Tetouan

Next Moushira traveled to Morocco, which, despite its reputation as a francophone country, is the 4th largest content contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia. Her first stop was Tetouan, in northern Morocco, where she hosted a session at The National School of Education, a government-funded higher education institute. It included a talk about Wikipedia by Fayssal, a local of Tetouan and a longtime Wikipedian (formerly a member of the English Wikipedia’s arbitration committee), and Zack, a significant contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia from Meknes, who led a workshop on how to edit Wikipedia. The attendees asked rich and diverse questions, e.g. on neutrality, fundraising, and how the Arabic Wikipedia could be improved. The school administration was excited about hosting more sessions and about considering how Wikipedia could be efficiently incorporated in their curriculum.

(more…)

As Women’s History Month wraps up, we should all remember an especially significant figure in tech: Ada Lovelace. In 1843, Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer by writing an algorithm intended to be understood by a machine, which became what is arguably the world’s first open source code.

An illustration of Ada Lovelace. Public domain

While women are involved in tech and occasionally head prominent companies, 170 years after Lovelace’s achievements, we are still discussing the ways women are under-represented in the industry. Despite the attention that Lovelace’s legacy brought to the role of women in technology in 2009, when the first Ada Lovelace Day was declared, she would probably not be happy with the status quo of women in tech today.

Inspired by Lovelace and concerned by the scarcity of women in open source and open culture, Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora co-founded The Ada Initiative (TAI) in 2011. Gardiner and Aurora, both advocates and developers with a long history in open source, started the organization not only to honor Lovelace’s memory, but also to elevate the role of women in open source and open culture and to address issues that women in the open source community face.

Aurora said she realized the need for a formal organization after a mutual friend of hers and Gardiner’s was sexually assaulted, for the third time in a year, at an open source conference. After writing about her experiences on her blog, Aurora’s friend was the product of blame and derision, rather than sympathy. Aurora felt the only solution to combat this type of behavior was to substantially increase the involvement of women in tech and open source, one of TAI’s primary objectives.

“I have also been assaulted at open source conferences, as well as many of my friends,” said Aurora. “It hit me then: this problem isn’t going away, it’s just getting worse. I decided to try forming a non-profit to pay people to work full-time on the problem, since volunteer work clearly wasn’t enough to fight the tide.”

Aurora quit her job as a Linux file systems developer and threw herself headlong into TAI, and Gardiner was her first pick as co-founder. The two had been friends for more than 10 years. Gardiner, who had already been a strong advocate for women in open source, was the perfect partner.

Gardiner had previously founded AussieChix, the first and largest open source organization for women in Australia, which she later helped expand to all of Oceania as Oceania Women of Open Technology. Gardiner and Aurora recruited prominent members of the open source and open culture community to serve on TAI’s advisory board, including Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation; Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation; and John Ferlito, President of Linux Australia.

Since its founding a little more than a year ago, TAI has developed and led initiatives and programs that have solidified the organization’s role as a leader of the movement for women in open source and open culture. One of these initiatives is the “Ada’s Allies” workshops, where participants learn how to be good allies for women in open source.

“Many of us want to speak up when we see something sexist or offensive happening, but we don’t know what to say,” says Aurora. The workshop helps Allies learn how to respond to scenarios through role-playing and discussion.

TAI has also been a leader in working with open source tech and culture conferences to adopt policies to ensure a healthy and safe environment for all attendees, such as the Wikimedia Foundation’s “Friendly space policy.”

“What we’ve found over and over again is that people who behave in embarrassing and harassing ways believe that their behavior is acceptable,” says Aurora. “Ninety-percent of the battle is simply telling them how you expect them to behave in clear, specific terms.”

With Gardiner’s recent selection by the Wikimania 2012 Program Committee as the keynote speaker at Wikimania 2012 this July, she will certainly bring more attention to the issue. Coupled with the upcoming WikiWomenCamp 2012 and AdaCamp DC, 2012 will be the year to both honor the historical role of women in the tech and computer industries, and to promote their greater involvement in the future.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, Ada Initiative Advisory Board Member

The proportion of quality newcomers over time. (2006-2011)

As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bots and automated tools, which started in 2006.

For those of us studying editor trends, the following question has continued to puzzle us: did the change in communications to new users lead to the decline, or can the rise in warnings be explained by a decrease in quality contributions from new users? Perhaps, as some Wikipedians have argued, the new users of today are being reverted and warned more aggressively than those who entered the project in 2001-2006 because their edits are qualitatively worse (e.g., more self-promotional or spammy, less serious and encyclopedic) than those of previous generations of editors.

While the complexity involved in determining what constitutes a “good” contributor to Wikipedia may never allow us to definitively answer this question, our research argues against the theory that today’s newbies just plain suck.

The proportion of rejection for quality newcomers over time.

To test the hypothesis that new contributors who entered the project in recent years have been more harmful and less interested in positively contributing to the encyclopedia, we randomly sampled the first edits of newcomers to the English Wikipedia from the earliest days of the project to the present. With the help of some experienced Wikipedians, we hand-categorized the edits of 2,100 new users according to a four point quality scale – blatant vandal (obscene language, obvious vandalism), bad faith (jokes and nonsense), good faith poor-quality edit (bad formatting, unreferenced, but trying to add value), and golden (good faith good edits that should not be reverted).

What we found was encouraging: the quality of new editors has not substantially changed since 2006. Moreover, both in the early days of Wikipedia and now, the majority of new editors are not out to obviously harm the encyclopedia (~80 percent), and many of them are leaving valuable contributions to the project in their first editing session (~40 percent). However, the rate of rejection of all good-faith new editors’ first contributions has been rising steadily, and, accordingly, retention rates have fallen. What this means is that while just as many productive contributors enter the project today as in 2006, they are entering an environment that is increasingly challenging, critical, and/or hostile to their work. These latter findings have also been confirmed through previous research.

Survival rate of newcomers over time.

This study has many important implications for community and Wikimedia Foundation efforts to engage and retain new editors. To begin, it reasserts the centrality of one fundamental policy on the project, “Assume good faith.” This research strongly supports efforts in the community and at the Foundation to do a better job of integrating new editors into Wikipedia and its sister projects, not simply for the sake of gaining new editors, but for the quality of these new editors’ contributions overall.

At the Foundation level, this includes major software changes like the creation of a visual editor to lower the technical barrier to entry, as well as more experimental pilot projects like template A/B testing, an attempt to make the template messages received by new users more personalized and clear, and the Teahouse, which gives new users a friendly, low-pressure space to seek help from experienced Wikipedians. With better software and an inviting and supportive atmosphere, the encyclopedia can continue to grow both in quality of material and quantity of dedicated contributors.

• Find out more about this study at Research:Newcomer quality
• This work is part of a journal article in submission to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on Wiki Research
• A special thanks to R. Stuart Geiger from UC Berkeley, as well as Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Oliver Keyes from the Wikimedia Foundation, for their assistance with this study.

Aaron Halfaker,
Wikimedia Foundation Research Analyst and University of Minnesota PhD candidate

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster, turns 80 this year. To celebrate it has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

While this is the first collection of broadcast “packaged” footage released to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, the leader in the field for several years has been Al Jazeera, which has been sharing some of its contemporary footage on its own Creative Commons portal. With the Open Beelden project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has also shared online many historical newsreels. Both of these collections have since been copied into Wikimedia Commons. The ABC is also following in the footsteps of Radio y Televisión Argentina, which has previously released some of its archival recordings and parliamentary speeches.

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons – all are available to be used, remixed and shared — at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and the blog post by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

As a non-profit operated collection of educational and freely-licensed media,  and as the repository that serves the 283 language editions of Wikipedia, we believe that Wikimedia Commons is a perfect place for broadcasters and other GLAMs to share their archival content. Hopefully this release from the Australian public broadcaster will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community,  and will encourage other broadcasters – especially those that are publicly funded – to join us.

Sincerely,
Liam Wyatt / Wittylama – Project officer, ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi)