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)

Figure 1. One of the feedback forms tested in the AFTv5 experiments (Option 1).

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) in October 2011. The original version of the tool, which allows readers to rate articles based on a star system, launched in 2010. The new version invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. We hope that this tool will contribute to the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goals of increasing participation and improving quality.

Testing new feedback forms

On December 22, 2011, we started testing three different designs for the AFTv5 feedback forms:

• Option 1: Did you find what you were looking for? (shown above)
• Option 2: Make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question
• Option 3: Rate this article

The purpose of this first experiment was to measure the type, usefulness and volume of feedback posted with these feedback forms. For example, does asking a reader to describe what they were looking for (option 1) provide more actionable feedback than asking them to make a suggestion (option 2)?

We enabled AFTv5 on a small, randomly selected set (0.6%) of articles on the English Wikipedia, as well as a second set of high-traffic or semi-protected articles. A feedback form, randomly selected from the above three options, was placed at the bottom of each page. The feedback form was also accessible via a link docked on the bottom right corner of the page.  The resulting comments were then analyzed along a number of dimensions.

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Having just returned from a weeklong trip to Cairo, I am happy to report that the Cairo education pilot project is off to an exciting start! As one of the newest wings of the Wikipedia Education Program, the Cairo Pilot aims to increase the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia by working with university professors who incorporate Wikipedia-editing into their classes. As described in my earlier blog post, to keep this pilot small we are involving only the top 5-15 students from a small number of classes this term (see the detailed Cairo Pilot program plan).

Cairo University students practice editing Wikipedia in a workshop led by Campus Ambassadors, March 2012.

The academic term began last month, and already the participating classes are showing great enthusiasm and promise. After participating in a faculty workshop in January — where the Cairo professors learned more about how Wikipedia works and tips around designing Wikipedia assignments from local Wikipedians and a Wikipedia Education Program faculty veteran (Rochelle Davis of Georgetown University) — the participating faculty members have incorporated innovative Wikipedia projects into their respective classes. For example, in Professor Hany Hosseiny’s mathematics class at Cairo University, students will do extensive research and write Arabic articles about famous mathematicians and mathematical concepts. Most of the students in the Cairo Pilot will do the majority of on-wiki editing in April and May, although Professor El-Toukhy’s postgraduate French students at Ain Shams University have already begun translating entire Wikipedia articles from French to Arabic (they plan to finish translating the entire 12-page-long article Civil Disobedience within the next ten days, after which they’ll move on to translating at least three other long articles). It is also worth mentioning that the vast majority of students in the pilot are women.

The Wikipedia Ambassadors in Cairo have been doing a great job explaining Wikipedia policies and editing skills to students, and the participating professors and students are very excited to play such a big role in growing Arabic free knowledge.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

Students are widely using Wikipedia as a source for their school projects and as a learning tool. However, what happens if we change this procedure of just “using Wikipedia” and also engage students in writing Wikipedia? This is the main idea behind the worldwide spreading of Ambassador programs on Wikipedia projects all over the world. One promising method for an Ambassador program was tested by students who participated in cooperation with Czech WikiProject Protected areas.

The Czech WikiProject Protected areas represented by Chmee2 ran in winter semester 2011/2012 in cooperation with Jiří Reif, university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. For the project, 30 bachelor’s students participated in writing articles on the Czech Wikipedia. Students had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several pictures of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. The presented task was comprehensive, varied and focused on individual work of participating students. We did not just want to attempt to enrich Wikipedia projects with new articles and images, but we also wanted to prepare students for future scientific work and give them the opportunity to try creative writing and critical work with references. This knowledge will soon come in handy when they start writing their bachelor’s work and prepare the defense of their bachelor’s academic degree.

Natural monument Břestecká skála, one of chosen protected areas. Students documented damage by growing tourism at this location.

The project enjoyed high popularity among students, according to the results of a survey. A full report with results from this cooperation is available on Czech Wikipedia in English. Here we present only a short summary of this cooperation and main lessons that we learned.

Unlike other ambassador projects where ambassador is supporting students mainly virtually in the Wikipedia environment, our ambassador was personally present at each class. This gave us the opportunity to directly interact with students, easily giving feedback about articles and answering their questions about Wikipedia. And of course, the ambassador was active also on Czech Wikipedia, correcting student’s edits. We realized that this in-person approach is more time-consuming for an ambassador than virtual assistance is. But it is better for the community on Wikipedia and for students. The ambassadors are able to help students understand all standards and rules of Czech Wikipedia without relying on the greater Wikipedia community. As a result, Wikipedia was enriched with high-quality articles containing references with only minor effort from the community. And students were able to directly and easily ask questions and get their answers.

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When a text is written, when it is printed for a first time, it will have a contemporary look. When you then look at historic texts, at a first publication, you will notice the many details that show its age. It can be in differences in orthography, differences in vocabulary and also differences in the layout, the fonts used.

When sources are published in Wikisource, maintaining the atmosphere of the original text is very important. It is why the original orthography and vocabulary are maintained and with the availability of the  WebFonts extension there is a potential to use fonts that give this impression of age.

In the Office hours of the Localisation team, the question was raised if we could support cuneiform. The answer to that was that we can when there is a freely licensed font. We found a freely licensed cuneiform font and it is made available on the Wikis that support WebFonts. The bigger question however is about all the other scripts that are of  historic significance. This is of particular relevance to the Sanskrit Wikisource; the Sanskrit language is written in many scripts and it is only recent when the Devanagari script became the default script.

For sources like the Quran maintaining the original orthography and characters is an article of faith. It is for this reason that characters were added to Unicode because alternate representations of the same characters were missing. We do have a beautiful freely license font, the Amiri font and we would love to support it in MediaWiki but we are struggling with technical issues.

For the Wikimedia Localisation team, it is impossible to identify all the needs for fonts, for historic text representation. This is why we have language support teams. They know their language, they can identify a need and hopefully they can identify usable freely licensed fonts. When they do, we can and will support fonts. In the mean time we will continue our work on a unified language selector.  This will make the use of WebFonts easy and obvious. At this time it works, but it is hard work for you as a user.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

A photo of the Panská skála used in the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game. Photo: Miloslav Rejha, Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedians around the world are looking for ways to convert readers into new editors and encourage new people to join our common effort to produce a freely accessible encyclopedia for everybody to use. Wikimedia Chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation continually search for ways to increase the base of active editors, which is now consistently around 80,000-90,000.

As part of our programs, Wikimedia Czech Republic has recently created a memory game showcasing free images from Wikimedia Commons as a simple and enjoyable way to reach out to families, educational institutions and photographers. After all, we asked ourselves, is there a better way to make people excited to join than seeing the happy faces of both children and their parents?

Many Wikipedians who have similar hobbies or fields of interest have organized around their area of focus, which gave birth to WikiProjects. The Czech Wikipedia’s WikiProject Protected Areas tries to coordinate editors who are interested in protected areas, nature habitats, traveling and photography.

For the creation of the WikiProject Protected Areas game, we chose colorful and wonderful images, which were taken by dozens of authors and are freely available on Wikimedia Commons. We sorted them and included information about our WikiProject. That gave us an opportunity to tell the story to recipients and made a small advertisement, which hopefully will attract their interest to Wikipedia, too. Our idea was that adults will read the story while cutting out the game pieces for their children. At a minimum, we can share knowledge in an entertaining way!

After uploading the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game [available as a pdf] on Commons, we printed 1000 editions of it with support from Wikimedia Czech Republic. We distributed the game for free to interested parties, including schools and other institutions. We also delivered copies to administration of Czech Krkonoše National Park (KRNAP), to the Czech Union for Nature Conservation, to several elementary and high schools and to the wide range of Wikimedia Czech Republic’s fans on Facebook.

In addition to printing the memory game, we have coordinated activities with Charles University, where students contributed articles for about 30 protected areas in the Czech Republic. Through our Facebook and Google+ pages, we’ve worked with photographers to photograph 40 protected area localities and upload their images to Commons. We are coordinating a photo walkabout with wiki-photographers to improve our photo skills and capture images of protected areas in the process. And finally, we have even made the national news, where we highlighted the coordination with Charles University and brought more attention to the project.

We are happy to say that, through this game, we have connected with groups of people who support the conservation of nature and who like to travel a lot. They represent potentially good editors for our WikiProject about protected areas because they have both a wide range of knowledge and photos from their trips. We deeply believe this small gift together with our other activities can bring new editors to Wikipedia projects. And, in the process we brought a lot of smiles to children’s faces and we strengthened the good name of Wikipedia in lots of families and public circles.

Thank you,

Petr Brož
Wikimedia Czech Republic

Wikimedia Foundation staff play the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game. Photo: Matthew Roth, Wikimedia Commons

This March, the Community Department will be heading to Brazil to talk with supporters of Wikimedia’s mission. Our aim is to better understand how Portuguese-speaking editors and donors, many of whom are located in Brazil, view Wikipedia and the projects, in order to better tailor the fundraiser and all our programs to them.

First up, Maryana Pinchuk and I will be holding four meetups with active editors, in order to talk with them about what makes Portuguese Wikipedia unique. They are in…

• Rio de Janeiro
• São Paulo
• Curitiba
• Natal

Our colleagues in Global Development and at Wikimedia Brasil are working hard on several initiatives to reach out to new editors in the country. The Wikimedia Engineering team also has a number of large scale projects, such as the Visual Editor, that will deeply impact Portuguese Wikipedia.

The purpose of our visit is to gain a deeper understanding of the Brazilian Wikipedian community and to start a dialog with them about improvements they would like to see in Portuguese Wikipedia – something that we hope can be of assistance to everyone here at the Foundation. (To that end, Wikimedia Storyteller Victor Grigas will also be at the meetups, in order to interview interested Wikimedians one-on-one about the project and their perspective on it.)

In addition to editor meetups, Megan Hernandez will also be holding several donor focus groups in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Last year’s fundraising vastly improved on our ability to support donations from around the globe, but we still have work to do to optimize the localization and donor experience for readers in different countries.

If you’re an editor interested in joining, there’s still plenty of time to sign up for the meetup near you. We’ll be reporting back on our visit and discussions with the community, so look for a follow-up post come mid-March.

Obrigado!

Steven Walling
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation

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

Después de la versión en inglés, abajo, versión en español

Sometimes innovation is the result of being in the right place at the right time as well as being flexible. I am an English as a foreign language teacher in central Mexico and a long time learner of Spanish. Needing intensive Spanish reading practice, I discovered the benefits of writing Wikipedia articles about Mexico (researching in Spanish, writing in English) to both myself and to the encyclopedia. Wanting to share this experience with my students, in Fall 2007, I designed and taught a Wikipedia-based class for ITESM-Campus Toluca’s most advanced English students as an experiment with support of my department.

ITESM students participate in an edit-a-thon in cooperation with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

As these students were already well-versed in vocabulary and grammar, real world practice or “authentic communication” was more important. As most language learners know, the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in a situation where its use is necessary. Computer technology, especially the virtual world of the Internet, has created a number of virtual “worlds” and social groups, not the least of which is the Wikipedia community. The goal in the Fall 2007 class was to introduce this virtual world of English language Wikipedia and explore ways to participate, culminating in the writing of a complete article from scratch as a final project. Mind you, this was before the advent of many of the programs the Wikimedia Foundation has today, such as the Wikipedia Global Education Program.

The class revolved around intercultural communication – learning about potential differences and strategies for coping. For this aspect of the course, the Wikipedia community was introduced as a culture, a group of people with a shared set of values and means by which they interrelate… something the students would have to adapt to as they learned how to write articles and deal with wiki mark up. As it was very different from any other English class they had ever experienced, almost all the students struggled in some way in the course. However, most improved their English language skills, based on TOEFL test scores taken before and after the semester. These findings were presented to the MexTESOL 2008 conference in León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

Leigh Thelmadatter, Regional Ambassador for Mexico

In 2008, I transferred to the Ciudad de México (Mexico City) or CCM campus of the same school system to establish and run their self access language learning laboratory (think of a hybrid of a traditional language lab and library). Since that time, I have done smaller Wikipedia-based assignments with students, writing smaller articles in groups and moving to translation exercises – mostly English language Wikipedia articles into Spanish. Translation has proven to be a good introduction to Wikipedia editing for many students. It is one way students can improve Wikipedia in their native language. It is easier to translate from one’s non-native language into one’s native language, but it has been noted that the English of the original article still causes transference errors into the Spanish version. This problem has been dealt with through peer review – students doing translation in groups, checking each other’s work and then groups exchanging translated articles for final review. This often leads to interesting discussions about how English and Spanish differ rhetorically, that is, how each writing style prefers to express information. This, too, is part of intercultural communication.

So far, there have been two major lessons learned from the use of Wikipedia. First, the demands of acculturating oneself into the Wikipedia community is a good experience in that many students experience the real frustrations and symptoms of culture shock. But this benefit is not for everyone. It is by far best for students who see the value in the experience, despite whatever frustrations might occur. In the Fall of 2011, I worked with four such students, who led on projects such as creating articles on Mexico’s Festival Internacional Cervantino. Not only did these students research and write articles in both Spanish and English, they also contacted Festival organizers and various international artists to obtain photographs and other assistance. Second, the use of translation assignments is also extremely useful. It provides a template of how Wikipedia articles are generally set up and is a good introduction to technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It allows for learning through imitation, rather than learning abstract rules then guessing how to apply them. It also provides a way to work with Wikipedia which is less intense and easier to incorporate into classes, especially language classes.

ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México continues to be committed to developing working with Wikipedia. The campus library director, Lourdes Epstein has dedicated space in the facility for Club Wikipedia and students working on Wikipedia-related assignments. Several departments, including Global Studies, promote involvement with Wikipedia to their students and faculty. For the Spring 2012, a pilot program with the campus’s high school level International Baccalaureate program begins. A select group of students will set up semester-long projects based on their interests and abilities mentored by myself as part of their CAS or social service requirement.

Wikipedia es una cultura extranjera

A veces la innovación es el resultado tanto de encontrarse en el lugar indicado, en el momento indicado, como de ser una persona flexible. Yo enseño inglés en México y hace mucho tiempo que estudio y hablo español. Viéndome en la necesidad de practicar lectura en español de manera intensiva, descubrí los beneficios (tanto para mí como para la enciclopedia) de redactar artículos de Wikipedia sobre México (investigando en español y redactándolos en inglés). Con el deseo de compartir esta experiencia con mis alumnos, en la segunda mitad de 2007, diseñé e impartí, en el Campus Toluca del ITESM, un curso basado en Wikipedia, para los alumnos de inglés más avanzados, con el apoyo del departamento para el que trabajaba.

Como esos alumnos ya habían estudiado vocabulario y gramática en varios cursos, lo más importante, en términos de aprendizaje, consistía en la práctica de situaciones conversacionales auténticas. Como la mayoría de los estudiantes sabe, la mejor manera de aprender una lengua es la inmersión en una situación donde hablar sea imprescindible. La tecnología informática, sobre todo el mundo virtual de la Internet, ha creado muchos “mundos virtuales” y grupos sociales. La comunidad de colaboradores de Wikipedia es una de las más importantes. La meta de aquel curso de 2007 era doble: presentar el mundo virtual de Wikipedia en inglés y explorar las formas de colaboración con ese mundo; y esa meta se conseguía redactando de cero un artículo, como proyecto final. Hay que recordar que esto ocurrió antes del inicio de muchos de los programas actuales de la Fundación Wikimedia, tales como el Global Education.

El curso se centraba en la comunicación intercultural – aprender sobre las diferencias potenciales entre ambas culturas y las posibles estrategias de adaptación. Para cumplir con ese objetivo, se presentó a Wikipedia como una “cultura”; es decir, como a un grupo con valores compartidos y maneras de interactuar…algo que los alumnos debían adoptar mientras aprendían a redactar artículos y se familiarizaban con los aspectos tecnológicos del sitio. Dado que la propuesta difería mucho de cualquier otra clase de inglés que hubieran cursado previamente, casi todos los alumnos experimentaron distintos tipos de dificultades durante el semestre. Sin embargo, la mayoría mejoró su desempeño lingüístico en inglés, como lo mostraron los resultados del examen TOEFL (realizado antes y después del curso). Presenté toda la información recogida entonces en la conferencia de MexTESOL, realizada en León, Estado de Guanajuato (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), en 2008.

En 2008, comencé a trabajar en el Campus Ciudad de México con el fin de establecer y coordinar el laboratorio de aprendizaje autodirigido (self access), que es una mezcla de laboratorio de idiomas tradicional y biblioteca. Desde entonces, junto con mis alumnos, realizo tareas menores para Wikipedia, como redactar en grupos artículos más breves y encomendar la traducción de artículos, principalmente del inglés al español. A muchos estudiantes, la traducción les resultó una buena introducción a la preparación de artículos de Wikipedia. Es una manera de que ellos mejoren Wikipedia en su lengua materna. Es más fácil traducir de otra lengua a la propia, aunque todavía se nota que el inglés de los originales causa errores de transferencia en la versión española. Esta cuestión se resolvió mediante la revisión de las distintas versiones entre los mismos traductores. La traducción se realiza en grupos, revisando cada uno de los traductores los borradores de sus compañeros, y después se intercambian los artículos completos en vistas de una revisión final. Frecuentemente, esto lleva a debates interesantes acerca de las diferencias retóricas entre el inglés y el español; o sea, acerca de cómo, en cada lengua, las figuras retóricas expresan la misma información. Esto, también, forma parte de la comunicación cultural.

Hasta la fecha, se obtuvieron dos lecciones importantes gracias al uso de Wikipedia. Primero, las exigencias de aculturación de cada participante a la comunidad de Wikipedia es una experiencia valiosa, porque así muchos alumnos pueden experimentar las dificultades y los síntomas reales del choque cultural. Sin embargo, no todos se benefician de esto; los que más provecho sacan son los alumnos que perciben el valor de la experiencia a pesar de los obstáculos. En la segunda mitad de 2011, trabajé con cuatro de estos alumnos, que se abocaron a la redacción de los artículos relativos al Festival Internacional Cervantino. Estos estudiantes no solo investigaron y redactaron los artículos en inglés y español, sino que también se comunicaron con los organizadores del festival y con varios artistas internacionales para obtener fotografías y otros tipos de ayuda. En segundo lugar, las tareas de traducción son extremadamente útiles porque proveen un molde para el formato de los artículos de Wikipedia y son buenas también para introducir los aspectos técnicos de Wikipedia. Traducir permite aprender por imitación en lugar de primero aprender reglas abstractas y luego intentar aplicarlas de alguna manera. También muestra un modo de trabajar con Wikipedia que es menos intenso y más fácil de incorporar en las clases, sobretodo en clases de lenguas extranjeras.

El Campus Ciudad de México no ha cejado en su compromiso de colaborar con Wikipedia. Lourdes Epstein, Directora de la Biblioteca del campus, apartó un espacio especial, en el mismo edificio de la biblioteca, para el Club Wikipedia y para otros alumnos que colaboren en tareas afines. Varios departamentos universitarios, como el de Estudios Globales, promueven la participación de sus alumnos y docentes. En el primer semestre del corriente año, dará comienzo un programa piloto en el que participarán los alumnos del Programa del Diploma del Bachillerato Internacional del campus. A fin de cumplir con el requisito de servicio social “CAS”, un grupo seleccionado de alumnos va a idear proyectos, asesorados por mí, de un semestre de duración, basados en sus intereses y habilidades.

WMF SOPA boiler room

I’ve had ten hours of sleep in the last three days, and I just ate my first proper meal since Saturday. My inbox is clogged with messages I may never read. I am tired, but happy.

The Wikipedia blackout is over. Our goal was to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA and to encourage readers to make their voices heard — and we’ve been successful on both counts. More than eight million people used our look-up tool to find their elected representatives, and millions more made their voices heard on social media. Thousands of journalists wrote news stories featuring the Wikipedia blackout screen.

We’ve made history together, all of us. And I think it’s important we understand what’s happened here, because the ground has just shifted under our feet.

Journalists see this as a conflict between old media and new media. They are wrong.

They see it that way because it fits with how things normally work.

“Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington,” says Clay Johnson, formerly of the Sunlight Foundation. “If you had to objectively pick the winning team in Washington, pick the team with deep pockets and great lobbyists, not the team with community organizers and signed petitions. … It sucks, but those are the rules of the game.”

That’s precisely why MPAA chair and former longtime senator Chris Dodd called the blackout an “abuse of power,” and characterized it as “technology business interests resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into corporate pawns.” He can only see the issue as a clash of moneyed interests, because that’s how things normally have worked.

That’s why NPR, the Associated Press, Fox News – all label this fight as Hollywood versus Silicon Valley. It’s why stories like this one from Bloomberg compare how much money television, movie and music companies are spending in Washington, versus what Google and Facebook are spending. People are imagining that post-blackout we are playing the same game, just with new participants.

That’s not what this is.

There’s a lovely Clay Shirky talk floating around the Internet today. In it, Clay says what’s at risk with SOPA and PIPA isn’t just websites, or website owners: it’s our ability to share things with one another, as individual human beings. We are the people, Clay says, that SOPA and PIPA aim to police, because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo. It’s us.

We know that’s true, because the people who led the blackout yesterday weren’t the CEOs of Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter. It wasn’t the Wikimedia Foundation. The blackout was led by ordinary Internet users. At its centre were people like Osarius and SiPlus and FT2 and Titoxd and Fluffernutter. These are the people at the forefront of online content creation.

Wikipedia’s involvement in the fight against SOPA proves this wasn’t about powerful interest groups, and it wasn’t about money. Wikipedia is operated, and not controlled, by a non-profit — it’s got no corporate interests to protect and it doesn’t make any money from piracy or copyright infringement. It’s written by ordinary people. Reddit is a bunch of people sharing links and talking about them. Metafilter is the same. Tumblr, Craigslist, the Cheezburger network, The Oatmeal, 4chan, identi.ca. These are not mega-corporations.

The Internet has been giving ordinary people access to the means of production for more than fifteen years. Sometimes we use it to create pictures of cute cats. Sometimes it’s the world’s largest encyclopedia. Sometimes, we bring down corrupt regimes.

What happened yesterday is that around the world, Internet users found their voice — fighting back against people who wanted to threaten their freedoms. It is true that copyright infringement poses a problem, and it’s reasonable that those affected want to get their problem solved. But their problem is not more important than the ability of ordinary people to express themselves, to share and to learn.

It sounded today like Congress is starting to come back to technology firms and their users and ask what they want. What compromises to SOPA and PIPA would be acceptable. Would OPEN work. Do they need to draw up something new.

The message of the Wikipedia blackout, and the other responses to SOPA and PIPA, wasn’t “Let’s talk about how we can combat online copyright infringement.” It was: “Don’t hurt the Internet. It’s too important. Let us do our work. Let us learn and create and share.”

I want to thank everyone involved with the blackout. Below is a quick list of people I worked with, or saw working. If you helped but you’re not named here, please consider yourself thanked :-)

In completely random order: Dario Taraborelli, Lori Phillips, Moka Pantages, Nicholas Bashour, Luke Faraone, Jan Ainali, Puki, André Savik, Dcoetzee, Vituzzu, Stacey Merrick, Dan Rosenthal, Michael Snow, Sumana Harihareswara, Wikitanvir, Jim Redmond, Kaganer, PeterSymonds, Mikołka, ZeaForUs, Spiritia, Iliev, Anubhab91, Ali, Haidar Khan, Joan manel, Davidpar, Cameta, Mormegil, Okino, Sir48, Giftpflanze, Rbmj, Tecsie, BreadMaker, Antonorsi, Mariadelcarmenpatricia, Huji, Tommikovala, Nikerabbit, Lamiot, Seb35, Zetud, Amire80, Rekp, איש המרק, Eranb, עידן ד, Trần Nguyễn Minh Huy, Itzike, Vibhijain, Ruy Pugliesi, Roberta F., Tgr, Kelly Kay, Pagony, Alensha, William Surya Permana, Gombang, Gregorovius, Civvì, Gnumarcoo, Austroungarika, Miya, Whym, Takot, Melberg, Omshivaprakash, Idh0854, Freebiekr, Diagramma Della Verita, RajeshPandey, Mathonius, Romaine, Mwpnl, Whaledad, Wpedzich, Sp5uhe, Przemub, Ency, Przykuta, Teles, Vitor Mazuco, Lvova, OC Ripper, Euriditi, Maduixa, Wikiwind, Јованвб, A1, Олег-літред, Violetbonmua, Prenn, Cheers!, Sameboat, Tbayer (WMF), OhanaUnited, Tom Morris, Wdchk, Sarah Stierch, Risker, Billinghurst, NuclearWarfare, Jimmy Wales, Orionist, Ryan Kaldari, John Du Hart, Aaron Schulz, Kat Walsh, Cherian Tinu, Mike Godwin, Jim Burger, David Gerard, Johnuniq, James Forrester, Prodego, Fluffernutter, Dana Isokawa, Fae, Andrew Lih, Brandon Harris, Jeremyb, Michelle Paulson, DeltaQuad, Pete Forsyth, Fetchcomms, Heather Walls, Rachel Farrand, CMBJ, Erik Moeller, Fifelfoo, James Alexander, Itzik Edri, Katie Horn, Iván Martínez, Matthias Schindler, Ben Hartshorne, Jon Davies, Anthere, Slobodan Jakoski, Victorgrigas, Dimce, Jerry-Yuyu, Patricia Morales, Stephen LaPorte, Varnent, Lennart Guldbrandsson, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Greg Maxwell, Ian Baker, Jeandré, Howie Fung, Ryan Faulkner, Beatriz Busaniche, Philippe Beaudette, Ziko van Dijk, Oliver Keyes, Dimce Grozdanoski, Keegan, André, Guillaume Paumier, Maggie Dennis, Mentifisto, Phoebe Ayers, Arne Klempert, Mike Peel, Gorilla Warfare, Geoff Brigham, Swarm, Peter Gehres, Megan Hernandez, Leslie Harms, Tomasz Finc, Pretzels, Jay Walsh, Whenaxis, Liberaler Humanist, Sam Klein, Andrew Gray, Fifelfoo, Zack Exley, Katie Filbert, Victor Vasiliev, Guy Chapman, Avi, Kenneth/MD, Stu West, Harry, Ryan Lane, Josh Lim, Matthew Roth, Richard Symons, Gayle Karen Young, Yuvaraj Pandian, Evangeline Han, Milos Rancic, James Hare, Adrienne Alix, Samat, Tomasz Ganicz, FT2, Alessio Guidetti, Galileo Vidoni, David Richfield, Alison Wheeler, Siska Doviana, Erlend Bjoertvedt, Анастасия Львова, Steven Walling, Casey Brown, Tim Starling, Patrick Reilly, Arthur Richards, Asaf Bartov, Alolita Sharma, CT Woo – and of course, the 1,800 English Wikipedians who made the decision to black out the site.

I am happy to add new names to this list — if you want to nominate anyone, just say so in the comments :-)

Thanks also to the sister projects that chose to support the enWP blackout with their own protests: the Albanian Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Georgian Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Norwegian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukranian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Sue Gardner
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation