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.

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.

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After the recent SOPA/PIPA blackout, many media outlets characterized the debate as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood for clout in Washington DC. Lost in this myopic narrative is the truth: the millions of regular Internet users who called and wrote their congressional representatives were giving a collective voice to their individual demands that Congress not enact legislation, written by industry, that would harm the free and open web. They spoke up to support those innovative websites and online communities that are possible only through a free exchange of ideas and information.

Congress, the media, and many others do not always understand or appreciate the meaning and power of the free-knowledge movement, nor the community that nurtures and supports it. For this reason, we offer a summary on free knowledge. Much will be familiar to Wikimedia project contributors and our peers in the free-knowledge community, but we hope to say something useful for our other readers — and legislators — who have not previously explored the issue or who have found themselves surprised by the backlash when they have ignored it.

As you can guess, we are quite protective of the Internet, which is a great facilitator of the free-knowledge movement, and we are suspicious when others seek to ram through legislation in their private interests without proper reflection on the values that are vital to our mission.

What you need to know about free knowledge

The mission of the free-knowledge community is to create and share informational resources and cultural works in full compliance with copyright laws. When offering works to the world, however, their creators guarantee five freedoms: the freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to copy, the freedom to redistribute, and the freedom to improve those works.[1] Authors, artists, photographers, researchers, and others who have joined the worldwide free-knowledge community are committed to these freedoms, and in turn they produce media that hundreds of millions of people can use. The result: freely-licensed and valuable materials for education, business, technology, science and culture around the world.

The creators in the free-knowledge community are in fact copyright holders, just like the creators in the media industry, but unlike most industries, creators in the free-knowledge community volunteer to promote progress and innovation by releasing their content under a free license that provides their creations to the world for no cost.

The free-knowledge community is worldwide, diverse and growing. There are nearly 200 million free-knowledge works now available, and the amount of new, freely-licensed content is growing rapidly.[2]  Many organizations[3] now have large repositories of freely-licensed content, including C-Span,[4] YouTube,[5] Vimeo,[6] and Flickr.[7] Wikipedia has more than 21 million articles in 283 languages.[8] The Wikipedia community is built on the work of hundreds of thousands of contributors from around the world. Wikimedia Commons hosts over 12 million files, including more than 10 million images and photographs, more than 100 thousand sound files, and more than 20 thousand scans of freely-licensed and public domain documents.[9]
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Yesterday, we wrapped up our visit to Tunisia, which comes as part of our Arabic language initiative that WMF launched earlier in October 2011 with the Doha convening. Our initial outreach activities mainly rely on meetings with the small Wikipedia community scattered in Arabic speaking countries and exploring the possibilities of expansion of those communities, by connecting them to like-minded groups/communities that can help facilitate on ground activities and workshops in their geographies. Our first stop in this tour was Tunisia. Our first day included a lecture that was hosted by the national school of engineering. A Wikimedia staff and two Arabic Wikipedia volunteers (Ciphers and OsamaK) were part of the lecture organized by WMF on open licenses, free acess to knowledge and the use of Wikipedia in education. It was a good chance to answer questions and misconceptions related to the use of Wikipedia in education and the general status of the Arabic Wikipedia. It was also a great opportunity to meet with students of open source clubs who will form a starting point of Wikipedia clubs in their schools. Tunisia has an internet penetration of nearly 35%; with 3.5 million people having access to the internet, the country contributes 1.4% of Arabic Wikipedia content, which comes as the 3rd most viewed language after French and English. The current numbers aren’t high, however, with regard to support of open source policies (such as opengov) and the expansion of open source and open content activities that have grown recently (thanks to the revolution!), it looks like Tunisia has a good potential to increment Wikipedia contributors on Arabic and other languages, especially on mobile, which has 105.5% penetration rate.

Our visit was promising on many levels: In addition to kicking off the start of Wikipedia awareness activities in universities and other independent spaces (thanks to Nawat that agreed to host Wikipedia workshops), and helping connect current editors with new enthusiasts, we also met with the managers of the national library of Tunisia and agreed on a numbers of steps, including releasing the collection of digitized old books, periodicals, postcards and magazines to Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, adopting a system on all their public computers that displays Wikipedia as the default search option, and on a longer term, release all their collection of digitized Arabic books (nearly 3000) to be used as sources for Wikipedia articles. In line with adding content to Commons, we also met with a consultant to the president for cultural affairs who is excited about releasing the presidential photography collection under a CC license, however, still pending digitization of the material themselves.

Wikimedia’s visit was recognized by Radio Maliss, which interviewed our WMF staff (interview is in Arabic)

Tunisia came first in our tour, and it was a good start with lots of promising steps that need our follow up, which we will keep you updated with. Coming up next will be Jordan then Algeria, please drop us a line if you will be there. :-)

 

Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

Today (Wednesday, November 16, 2011) is an important day in Washington, DC.

This morning, hearings take place regarding the “Internet Blacklist Bill” – a bill that, if approved, would overturn laws relating to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor, and would allow any government or corporation to block a website, remove it from a search engine, and/or cut it off from payment processors or advertisers. In response to these hearings, organizations like Wikimedia, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and many more are joining together to declare American Censorship Day.

If approved, this bill would have disastrous effects for Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Why is this bill an issue for a project like Wikipedia?

In a nutshell, Wikipedia relies on Creative Commons licenses and a series of established, community-led open collaboration processes to ensure that its information and media are a part of free culture, and that copyrighted materials (which may inadvertently end up on Wikipedia or its sister projects) can be quickly and effectively removed so we remain in compliance with US copyright law.  Our global, volunteer community understands these laws well – maybe better than any other online community on the net – and they work hard to ensure that everything on Wikipedia and its sister sites complies with the law.

The Internet Blacklist Bill would change all of that.  The bill would allow corporations, organizations, or the government to order an internet service provider to block an entire website simply due to an allegation that the site posted infringing content.  In addition, sites like Wikipedia could be required to monitor for any “banned” links, resulting in delegated proactive censorship of the Web, not to mention significant additional costs to Wikipedia, a site of a non-profit charity.  Useful international sources of knowledge and information – which often serve as a basis for our articles and projects – could be blacklisted if rights owners simply felt that there was some infringing content. Individual contributors could face criminal liability for posting or sharing a copyright work for what we consider to be common fair-use situations.  The DMCA system, which allows Wikimedia and its volunteer community to quickly remove copyright-violating material at the request of the copyright owner, would be overturned.  In short, our users and all of our projects, would be forced to operate in an untenable legislative environment, putting Wikipedia at the beck and call of the rights owners as opposed to the distribution of free knowledge. Simply put, this bill is a reckless and burdensome model in Internet censorship.

The future of Wikipedia, the free knowledge movement, and tens of thousands of open and free projects is at stake, and we must stand up to oppose this bill.  Join us in these efforts by spreading the word.  If you are in the United States, contact your local government representative, and take a stand on American Censorship Day.

Jay Walsh, Communications

 

 

 

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

 

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments

The open science movement is fighting to make scientific research – especially publicly funded research – more transparent, freely accessible and reusable. The goals of open science are closely aligned with our mission, yet for years there has been little institutional contact between our movement and initiatives such as Open Access and Open Data. Joining forces with individuals and organizations who are working to promote a culture of openness in the scientific community should be high on our agenda.

How can we achieve this goal? The Wikimedia Foundation is currently working on a set of policies to enforce the release of its research data and research output in the open and to incentivize researchers who seek our support or collaboration to do the same. More importantly, today we are thrilled to announce that our community is in a stronger position to bridge the gap with the open science movement. Daniel Mietchen – a biophysicist based in Germany, outspoken open data and open access advocate, and active member of the Wikimedia Research Committee – is the recipient of a grant from the Open Society Foundations and will become the first Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science with a focus on Open Access (OA).

The WiR program has been an immense success in the context of other initiatives such as GLAM. But what exactly is the mission of a Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science? In Daniel’s words, “a Wikimedian in Residence is someone trusted by and in good contact with both the Wikimedia and the partner communities who can guide article development on the target topics and help to keep in focus the common goals, in our case: improving Open Access coverage and reuse
in WMF projects”.

As Daniel reports in his programmatic blog post, content from Open Access publishers is already widely used on Wikimedia projects, yet traditional publishers still receive way more citations from Wikipedia articles than their open counterparts. There are lots of one-time image and media donations to Wikimedia but ongoing donations from reusably licensed OA sources have not received adequate attention yet. Likewise, contents from suitably licensed text sources are systematically being used in WMF projects, but OA sources much less so.

Daniel’s mission is to facilitate the reuse of materials from Open Access articles in WMF projects, to improve coverage of topics related to Open Access in the English Wikipedia, to support the implementation of the WMF’s Open Access policy and to explore the potential for the WMF community to collaborate with Open Access, Open Science and Open Knowledge initiatives in general. In the long run, the project is designed to extend beyond Open Access and into Open Science proper, as well as into other languages and possibly other collaborative projects. The directions this project ultimately aims to explore, and how to go about the exploration, will be determined in part on the basis of community feedback received during the pilot phase. The host of the project is the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which will also act as a content partner and as a contact point for external expertise on matters of Open Knowledge, especially Open Data.

How can you help support this initiative?

• submit requests for illustrations of articles on scientific topics, to help identify suitable images from OA sources
• share your views on the Open Access and Open Data policy draft
• help us understand how to coordinate OA activities across languages and projects
• check out OA journals as a potential source for articles and media and for Picture of the day/month/year
• help connect this project with other GLAM and outreach projects

You can follow the development of the OA movement via the OA Tracking Project and Daniel’s work via his dedicated blog, the WiR-OS page on Meta and Twitter: @EvoMRI

Daniel Mietchen, Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science
Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst

Next Sunday, 20 Israeli students will leave for humanitarian work in Africa, equipped with portable offline Wikipedia thanks to a coordinated effort between Wikimedias from Israel, Switzerland and France.

Every year, the Africa Center at BGU, headed by Dr. Tamar Golan, sends a group of students on a three-month humanitarian expedition to developing countries in Africa. This year’s group is going to the Republic of Benin and the Republic of Cameroon.

To help, Wikimedia Israel decided to equip the students with computers running free software and containing an offline (static) version of the French Wikipedia, so that the students can bring free knowledge to Africans without access to the Internet. The students also have portable installations of the offline Wikipedia, so that they may install it on any other computers they may run across in Africa

We reached out to Hamakor, the Israeli Free and Open Source Software NGO, and Hamakor helped obtain computer donations, refurbished them and installed the Linux operating system on them.

Wikimedia Israel collaborated with members of Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France to produce an up-to-date static version of the French Wikipedia (numbering about 1 million entries, and including images), French being a major language of reading and writing in Cameroon and Benin.

Incidentally, the Linux version installed on those computers is called Ubuntu Linux, ‘Ubuntu’ being an African word (in the Zulu language) roughly translated as “unity of mankind” or “mutual reliance”.

We are very excited about this project that continues the Wikimedia Movement mission of supporting and promoting the distribution of free knowledge to everyone in the world.  We can’t wait to hear an update from the students next month.

Itzik Edri

Spokesman, Wikimedia Israel

Earlier in June, Germany’s first Skillshare conference took place under the patronage of Edelgard Bulmahn (Member of Parliament, former Federal Secretary of Education).  The conference set new standards for community events in the German-speaking Wikimedia universe. More than 150 volunteers from free content projects met in the picturesque town of Lüneburg; the attendees included young artisans, university members, politicians, media, and Lüneburg citizens. The conference aimed to strengthen the free content community, gain attention from media, and recruit new authors to free content projects, which do not fall into the category of usual suspects for male computer scientists in their twenties. Skillshare was conceptualized as an open platform for exchanging ideas between free content communities.

The conference featured a three-day in person meeting between 34 open space workshops  on topics like OpenStreetMap, programming bots, quality management, conflict resolution,  and effective use of sources. But community building involves not only formal training, but also informal chats. Lueneburg’s pubs were brimming with excited Wikipedians chatting about the latest monobook extensions, neutral point of view in advertising cell phones, or their favorite beers. No less than 150 of the most active volunteers thus learned that there is life beyond the keyboard.

Likewise, the citizens of Lueneburg and the regional small artisans association (the event’s host) learned that real people write Wikipedia. Some even got hooked on writing Wikipedia entries about their own trade or town. More than 1400 photos and 40 old maps from the city’s archive were some of outcomes of the conference.

Big politics and the media joined the event for a discussion on New Media, attended by Kai Gniffke, chief of staff of main German evening news TV program, three members of the Parliamentary subcommittee for new media, University of Lüneburg, and Wikimedia’s own Ting Chen.

The event also broke new ground in its funding model. Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland covered a small part of the costs, while local businesses and associations contributed the bulk of the funds. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Austria offered travel stipends. The funding model created effective ties to the universe outside of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, which means additional funds, but more importantly, new blood for a larger open content community. The event also strengthened connections between Wikipedians, many of whom had never met in person. It also brought together members of different free content projects like Wikisource, Wikiquote, and OpenStreetMap.

It certainly was the most effective and lively event for the German-speaking community to date, and, bar the not-invented-here-syndrome, it might serve as a pilot project for other languages.

Nadine Stark, co-organizer, Skillshare

Ed Chi, Principal Scientist, Area Manager of Augmented Social Cognition(ASC) at Palo Alto Research Center is a prominent pioneer in social computing and a prolific researcher in the underlying mechanisms in online social systems such as Wikipedia and social tagging sites. Ed gave the keynote talk on Modeling Social Media at the Hypertext 2010 conference a few days ago.

Last October, I had the privilege to share the panel with Ed at BayCHI, where he presented the findings from his joint research, “The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia”. In addition to the discussion about the possible reasons behind the slow growth, Ed described Wikipedia as “knowledge-ware”, “people-ware” and “tool-ware” in his presentation. This prompted me to reflect on the focus beyond the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. The objective of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative supported by Stanton Foundation was to improve the usability of the editing tools for novice editors.

I had been struggling with competing priorities. Often times investing in future opportunities was postponed due to immediate problems. When the Stanton Wikipedia Usability Initiative approached its project end, I visited Ed with Erik Zachte and Howie Fung to discuss the next user experience endeavor of how to make Wikipedia a more social place. Ed shared his wisdom and suggested to focus on optimizing resources rather than focusing on growth. Growth cannot be expected when resources are not optimized. We also need to know how resources are allocated before optimizing them.

WikiDashboard was developed by the ASC team almost three years ago. It is a great tool to provide dynamic visualization of Wikipedia editing activities. For example, you can see the editing activity of the relatively new article about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, by editor and number of edits over time, at a glance. You can also find out about edit activities by a certain editor by clicking the editors’ user name. Wikidashboard’s social transparency helps readers to see who is writing what, and editors can discover the most active contributors visually before diving into the details listed in the history page.

Facebook implemented Community Pages, a concept of using articles as catalysts to connect people. Community Pages embed Wikipedia articles from the publicly available MediaWiki API into Facebook to connect people to their interests, and they create links inside the user’s profile. Facebook users can discover people with common interests whether they are in their friends network or not.

Wikimedia projects draw over 375 million unique visitors and roughly 100,000 editors edit articles more than five times monthly. Detailed monthly reports can be found here. This huge gap indicates that we are not succeeding in converting visitors to editors. It requires certain skills to write an encyclopedia article, so connecting people over the same interests can be a first step to introduce new contributors into the existing Wikimedia editor community.

Wikimedia projects are about collecting knowledge to share with everyone on the planet. Connecting people with similar interests can help enrich both the reading and the editing experience of this process.

Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs

This week, Wikimedia Sverige announced an important ongoing partnership with international media group, Bonnier, releasing freely-licensed photographs to Wikimedia Commons. The media group has released 27 photographs of notable Swedish authors to Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and plans to continue releasing photographs in the future. Authors included in the first release include: Inger Alfvén, Karin Johannisson and Martin Widmark.

This partnership was the result of important educational outreach and relationship building conducted by representatives of Wikimedia Sverige. The relationship was sparked by Bonnier’s curiosity about how to edit Wikipedia and interest in understanding how free licensing works on Wikimedia Commons. The partnership with Bonnier is just one example of the important educational outreach work Wikimedia Sverige has conducted. This September, for the third year, the chapter will conduct outreach activities at the Gothenburg Book Fair, the largest in Scandinavia.

Congratulations to Wikimedia Sverige!

Moka Pantages, Communications