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

I am excited to announce that today the United States National Archives has released a new audio recording from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Wikimedia. You can find the files on Wikimedia Commons:

• Audio of Reel 1
• Audio of Reel 2

As a work of the American federal government, the recording is in the public domain. This two-hour tape recording of the communications of Air Force One personnel following the assassination is a new discovery which was recently donated to the National Archives. As part of NARA’s roll-out strategy for this high-profile item, the digitized recording was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons at the same time as it was revealed on archives.gov.  We hope that the upload of these files to Wikimedia Commons will help increase their exposure while encouraging Wikimedians to add value to them through transcribing them or using them as encyclopedic source material and subject matter.

In preparation for the release, NARA provided me an advance copy of the 1.4 GB raw WAV files from the digitization (you will only get MP3 from NARA’s site). I must also thank Wikimedia Poland, who kindly donated server space to store and convert the files to OGG before upload. According to the National Archives press release:

The Raab Collection recently discovered two ¼” open reel audio tapes containing identical excerpts from the Air Force One flight on Nov. 22, 1963… The tape also includes communication between the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) and a second aircraft of the Presidential fleet, known as 86972 (by its tail number), which was en route to Tokyo at the time of the assassination with members of the President’s cabinet.

 The recording includes references to new code names and incidents. Among them are a private conversation by head of the Secret Service Jerry Behn about the disposition of the President’s body; an expanded conversation about how to remove the body from the plane and where to take it; an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to reach General Clifton; and attempts to locate various Congressmen from Texas. (read more)

This development is part of the ongoing relationship between the US National Archives and the Wikimedia projects, which my service as Wikipedian in Residence represents. It is not NARA’s first upload to Wikimedia Commons—since I announced the first upload of over 200 high-resolution Ansel Adams photos last June, we have added tens of thousands of high-resolution historical documents to Wikimedia Commons. That press release is also not the first NARA web page to link prominently to Wikimedia projects. Some NARA educational pages reference Wikipedia articles written in response to an editing challenge, while documents that Wikisource has transcribed are linked from the online catalog.

We’re also running a multilingual featured article contest and are encouraging transcriptions on Wikisource. And when the National Archives’ new Citizen Archivist Dashboard was launched, garnering lots of buzz within the archival community, it included Wikipedia editing and Wikisource transcription missions for the public. In addition, NARA has hosted a series of on-site events for Wikipedians which included tours into the stacks, scanning parties, and even a trip on board the real Air Force One (albeit the one on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California). If you would like to get more involved, the NARA collaboration has WikiProjects on Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks

Wikipedian in Residence, National Archives and Records Administration

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce Lori Byrd Phillips as the United States Cultural Partnerships Coordinator in 2012. Through this new position within the Global Development department, the US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator will lead in building the infrastructure needed to support the growing interest in Wikimedia partnerships among cultural institutions in the United States, ultimately working to make cultural partnerships in the US self-sustaining starting 2013.

Thanks to the efforts of the global GLAM-Wiki initiative over the past two years, much inspired and aided by Liam Wyatt’s Wikimedia GLAM Fellowship, just now coming to its scheduled end, professionals from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) have begun to seriously discuss partnership with Wikimedia as a means to increase accessibility to cultural resources, and to draw new audiences to their collections. Significant press about partnerships at respected institutions such as the British Museum [NY Times], the National Archives and Records Administration [Yahoo!], and the Smithsonian Institution [Chronicle of Philanthropy] has led cultural professionals to consider Wikimedia partnerships a cutting-edge trend. This resulted in demand from museums and other institutions to establish relationships with Wikimedia through Wikipedians in Residence and other projects. In the US, however, this growing interest from cultural institutions is quickly outpacing the current capacity of the present volunteer community to support these needs.

Interest is continuing to explode in the US, with plans for grant projects and for Wikimedia-museum partnerships to be featured in a number of upcoming conferences, most significantly a dedicated panel discussion at the American Association of Museums annual conference and Museum Expo.

While there is much interest among US Wikimedians to assist with cultural partnerships, a systematic structure is needed to connect these volunteers with cultural institutions and to provide the resources needed to establish successful partnerships. In order to accomplish this, the priorities of the Coordinator’s one-year project include: (more…)

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

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

When you scan the code the language setting of your phone is also transmitted. QRpedia uses Wikipedia’s API to determine whether there is a version of the chosen Wikipedia article in the language your phone is using, and if so, displays the mobile-friendly version. If there is no article (yet!) in your preferred language it will show you the most relevant article instead.

Launched in April this year, the open source QRpedia was developed out of the partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery, England and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant. As “Wikipedian in Residence” at the Derby Museum, Roger capitalised on this system by hosting the hugely successful Multilingual Challenge (map of participants) to ensure that content of key importance to the museum was translated into as many languages as possible. Terence built the system and the museum was kind enough to install object labels incorporating the codes.

In an era when cultural funding is very constrained, the combination of QRpedia and the global Wikipedia community enabled the Derby museum to produce a multilingual visitor experience at virtually no cost. Easy mobile access to Wikipedia articles allows visitors to the museum to access unprecedented detail about the objects and their context – information that didn’t make it onto the exhibit label.

This system is now in use in other museums around the world. These include exhibitions at the on-site museum of the the National Archives of the UK, in the permanent signage of key objects at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and in a major traveling exhibition of Miró’s work in association with the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona.

 

To generate your own QRpedia codes visit http://qrpedia.org/
and simply paste the URL of any Wikipedia article into the box.
The freely licensed sourcecode can be viewed at http://code.google.com/p/qrwp/

—-

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow

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

Wiki Loves Monuments is a photo contest centered around Monuments that will take place this September throughout Europe.  In 2010 a version of  the contest was already successfully held in the Netherlands – with more than 12,500 photos submitted by more than 250 participants (see earlier blog post).

Starting in September more than 15 countries, from Portugal to Estonia, will organize their national Wiki Loves Monuments contest. In most cases, the national contests will be organized by Wikimedia chapters, but  in some countries without chapters local Wikimedians have organized the contests. During this month-long contest, people are asked to submit photos of monuments, which will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons through a dedicated interface. The best photos will win a prize, and the top 10 photos from each country will be submitted to the European contest.

After the results of all of the national contests are known, a European jury will select the best photos from all nominations from the national juries. Several European partners are supporting this initiative with their help and networks.

Wiki Loves Monuments is all about making it easy for people to participate: make it easy to find objects to photograph, make the threshold for participation as low as possible, make it easy to upload and make it easy for the images to get added to the Wikipedia articles.

We hope that we will see lots of participation–by Wikimedians and also by others– who might stick around after they find out they can really edit Wikimedia projects, and start to enjoy helping to bring the sum of human knowledge to the world. Do you want to know more about Wiki Loves Monuments? Check out the project pages on Wikimedia Commons or join our session at Wikimania! You can also follow updates on the WikiLovesMonuments.eu blog.

Maarten Dammers and Lodewijk Gelauff,

International coordinators for Wiki Loves Monuments