Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2008

The first round of voting has begun for the annual Wikimedia Commmons Picture of the Year Contest, and Wikimedians of all kinds are invited to help select the winner for 2010. If you created an account before January 1, 2011 and have made at least 200 edits to any Wikimedia project, then you’re eligible to vote for your favorite pictures. All 784 images that reached Featured Picture status in 2010 are in the running.

A volunteer-led contest, Picture of the Year is run by an organizing committee of Wikimedians. Since its inception in 2006, thousands of photos from people all over the world have been selected as Featured Pictures, and all of them are free for anyone in the world to reuse, remix and share.

The first round of votes will conclude Wednesday, May 4 at 11:59PM UTC  and the top photo in each category in addition to the top ten photos across the board will advance to Round 2 during the third week of May.

In 2008, a record of 994 voters participated and last year, 742 Wikimedians showed up to vote. This year, the committee is hoping to beat that record and recruit at least 1,500 Wikimedians to participate.

The Picture of the Year Contest is just as much about celebrating talented photographers and beautiful images as it is about celebrating those who have contributed to the cultural commons and inspiring more people to do the same. If you missed the deadline this year, please consider contributing your work today.

Moka Pantages, Global Development

Wikimédia France recently announced a new partnership with the Palace of Versailles.

This partnership will be the third “Wikimedian residency” and the second time that a Wikimedian will work closely with a cultural institution of world-wide renown. French Wikipedian Benoît Evellin follows in the footsteps of Liam Wyatt who was the first Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum.  Benoît will spend six months at the Palace of Versailles to help produce and include cultural and scientific data on the Wikimedia projects.

The partnership originated at the GLAM-Wiki Paris event in early December 2010 where Adrienne Alix, president of Wikimédia France, met Laurent Gaveau, Deputy Director of Information and Communication of Versailles and started talking about possible ways to bring Versailles cultural riches to the Wikimedia Projects.

Benoît’s residency will focus on:

• Facilitating the exchange of best practice between the Wikimedia contributors and the teams of the Palace of Versailles, including researchers and scientists;
• Developing effective communication and distribution channels to broaden access to cultural and scientific content of the Palace of Versailles through Wikipédia in French, but also in all other languages, as well as through Wikimedia Commons with images and multimedia content;

Laurent Gaveau explains that, “Wikipedia is the second source of information in France on the Palace of Versailles, after the official website, it might even be the first abroad.”

This partnership follows other partnerships secured by Wikimédia France with similar institutions, including partnerships with the City of Toulouse, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which have brought a wealth of high-quality material to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, but also a growing number of initiatives around the world with institutions working to make their information available to the general public through the Wikimedia Projects.

As Adrienne Alix puts it:

“This partnership with the Palace of Versailles confirms that something has changed between cultural institutions worldwide and Wikimedia: The World of Culture is starting to understand that criticizing by saying “Wikipedia is not complete” is not as constructive as working with Wikipedia to make it better. This is the result of tireless work from Wikimedians, and I am happy to see that the Wikimedia Projects are now seen by professionals as an essential conduit to the dissemination of culture.”

Delphine Ménard
Member, Wikimédia France

Today, we’re launching a new upload wizard in beta phase to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia Commons. “Commons” is the free, collaborative media repository associated with all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Although Commons contains over 7 million images, videos and sounds, uploading a file has long been an arduous path reserved to the most adventurous souls. The new upload wizard aims to make the uploading experience simpler and more pleasant for all users.

The upload wizard allows multiple files to be uploaded at the same time.

The new upload tool consists of a step-by-step wizard guiding the user through the successive stages of the process, rather than presenting a huge complicated form. It allows the user to upload multiple files at once, and grant permission for them in batch.

The wizard integrates our brand new illustrated licensing tutorial to help new participants understand the basics of copyright and free licenses. Since its publication, the tutorial has been translated and localized into about eighteen languages, and more are underway.

This new feature is one of the main outcomes of the Multimedia Usability project, a one-year project funded by the Ford Foundation, aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites. Although the grant is now officially over, the Wikimedia Foundation will fund subsequent development of the wizard to make it more robust and feature-rich.

We unveiled a prototype version of the wizard a few months ago, and we’ve got a lot of useful, constructive feedback from Commons testers. Since then, many bugs have been fixed, and the interface is much cleaner. The other main accomplishment has been the development of a private temporary holding area for files missing mandatory information.

The upload wizard is available in beta version as an additional uploading option. It’s far from perfect, and there are still bugs and missing features. But we do think it will provide a useful alternative to participants who want to use it and help us improve it.

The new wizard will eventually become the default uploading option on Commons, but it won’t replace the regular upload system until it provides a satisfying (and hopefully improved) coverage of the use cases currently supported by the “old” one.

You’re warmly invited to try the new system (you’ll need an account on Commons) and report issues you encounter with it. Please be sure to save your time by checking the Questions & Answers page and the list of open issues first.

If your issue hasn’t been reported yet, you can enter it directly in our tracker, or leave a note on the feedback page.

Since this concludes the Multimedia usability project, we’ll publish a full project report shortly for people interested in the details. In the meantime, you may be interested in two behind-the-scenes articles about the licensing tutorial: one by our illustrator, Michael Bartalos, and one by myself, focusing on the collaboration with the Wikimedia community.

Guillaume Paumier, Product Manager − Multimedia usability

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our 2010 annual fundraising drive, which we are referring to as a ”contribution campaign”. This year marks a major milestone for Wikipedia.  Ten years of revolutionizing access to knowledge.  Ten years of our joint commitment to deliver the sum of human knowledge to every human being on the planet.  For free.

Wikipedia and its sister sites champion a mission of effectively disseminating knowledge, free for use, free of copyright, and free of external advertising. Since its founding in 2001, the site has grown to 17 million articles in over 270 languages, and for many of those languages, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia ever written. Wikipedia, and all the Wikimedia projects, are always there when we need them; for students, educators, professionals and curious minds worldwide, these projects are simply the most convenient and readily accessible sources of information.

This year’s fundraising goal is an ambitious one – $16 million over two months. Wikimedia sites are the 5^th most visited web properties worldwide (visited by about 400 million people each month), and Wikimedia is the only non-profit organization in the top 10. Since 2007 our readership has doubled, with this past September seeing our highest traffic yet.  With this incredible feat comes an enormous duty: to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep these sites free, stable, and running smoothly, while also continually improving the systems and architecture behind them.

For more information about where your donations go, see this year’s annual plan.

Since the beginning, our fundraising model has been based on the support of our community of readers and editors – we have received more than 500,000 donations in the lifetime of the Foundation, averaging about $33 each.  Will you join us today by making a donation to financially underwrite Wikipedia and its sister sites?

We have worked with almost a thousand community volunteers to develop this year’s fundraiser as a community driven contribution campaign. These exceptional volunteers have helped to develop messaging, design banners, write appeals, and conduct tests of our ideas.

Since August we have been testing these messages and tweaking our campaign to reflect the data and feedback from our community. Due to the introduction of new technology, we now have the ability to target particular banners and donation pages based upon geographic location, and to optimize the pages donors see.

In addition to new technology, we’re introducing a new perspective;  this year’s contribution campaign is designed to invite not only financial contributions, but to also encourage people to contribute their expertise and knowledge to the projects. We want readers to make their first edit, upload their first photograph to Wikimedia Commons, write their first article, and through this, to become more deeply affiliated with the projects.

For updates throughout the fundraiser continue to check our blog, and follow us on identi.ca and Twitter (as @Wikipedia, or the community-run contribution handle @WikiContribute).  After you’ve made a contribution, please tell the world using the hashtag #keepitfree!

This year marks a significant milestone for us, so I hope you will join me – and the diverse community of volunteers that make up the Wikimedia projects – in celebrating and supporting the mission that has brought us all together.

Stay curious!

Philippe Beaudette,
Community Department

Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.

You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites.

One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them.

Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format.

This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and suggested many changes to the illustrator.

Sample from the tutorial

You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best.

Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help pages.

The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy.

I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert at.

The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of November.

In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text. We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized artwork.

Guillaume Paumier,
Product Manager – Multimedia Usability Project

The Wikimedia chapter in the Netherlands is organizing the photo scavenger hunt “Wiki Loves Monuments” in September. Take photos of national monuments, share them, and you may win a prize! Our sponsors have offered rewards like an iPad, an Android smartphone, WikiReaders and magazine subscriptions to a cultural heritage magazine.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2010.

With over 50,000 national monuments (“rijksmonument“) throughout the Netherlands, there are plenty of photo opportunities. These are buildings or objects of general importance because of their beauty, importance to science, or cultural history – like archeological sites in Drenthe, the canal houses in Amsterdam, and the Royal Palace in The Hague.

The Dutch language Wikipedia has worked hard to prepare for this project by building articles with lists of these monuments organized by municipality. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (National services for Cultural Heritage) provided additional data, such as the physical address of all the monuments. The next step is to complete every monument with one or more photos – Wikipedia volunteers already taken photos of over 12,000 monuments.

With this project, we tried to incorporate best practices from Wiki Loves Art/NL 2009 and similar projects in other countries. Uploading images will be possible both through a simplified uploading form on Wikimedia Commons, as well as with a Flickr group. Many cultural heritage organizations were contacted and asked to spread the word.

The contest is in September, and coincides with Open Monument Day on 11 and 12 of September, when many monuments open their doors to visitors which are normally closed. For more information, please visit our website at www.wikilovesmonuments.nl (in Dutch) and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also join the Flickr group or our Facebook event if you plan to participate.

Lodewijk Gelauff
Board Member, Wikimedia Nederland

If you’ve ever tried to upload a file to Wikimedia Commons, you may have grown frustrated. Our new upload wizard aims to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia projects, and the first test results look promising.

Wikimedia Commons is the media library associated with Wikipedia; it is a central repository for all Wikimedia projects, and any media file shared there can be used in any Wikipedia page in any language. Wikimedia Commons is curated by a multilingual community and recently reached 7 million files.

Wikimedia Commons relies on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Because MediaWiki was primarily developed for text-based content like Wikipedia articles, contributing multimedia works has always been a challenge.

In July 2009, the Ford Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve the tools and workflows related to multimedia participation. The following Multimedia usability project started in October with a phase of preliminary research, and we worked with the Wikimedia community to identify the key issues and design solutions.

Over the past few months, Neil Kandalgaonkar (NeilK) has been implementing the interface we designed. The result is a prototype upload wizard that we’re happy to share now with the community.

Screenshot of the Upload wizard

We recently conducted a User experience study, both to evaluate the current upload interface and to make a first check on our prototype. Our first results look promising and show a clear improvement over the current interface (watch the videos); we’re hoping to share the full videos in the coming weeks. We’ve also taken into account the informal feedback already provided by the first community testers.

The prototype isn’t finished yet, but we feel it’s important to continue to include the Wikimedia community in the ongoing development of our tool. We would like to invite you to test the prototype, read the Questions & Answers page, and share your comments and questions on the feedback page (after checking the list of existing bugs and improvements we’re already working on).

We thank in advance every user who will help us provide better tools and interfaces for the Wikimedia contributors. The prototype is located at http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org.

Guillaume Paumier, Multimedia Usability Team

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

Late last week Fox News ran a news story about Wikimedia projects, focusing on Jimmy Wales, which included quite a bit of false information. We would like to clarify some of those details

Jimmy is the founder of Wikipedia and of the Wikimedia Foundation. He plays a key editorial role in our projects, by virtue of his special status as our founder, and due to his continued active engagement in the projects. Jimmy is not the President of the Wikimedia Foundation nor is he President of Wikipedia: there are no such roles. The chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is Michael Snow, and the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation is Sue Gardner. They have both been in those positions for several years. Jimmy is Chair Emeritus of the Board of Trustees, as he has been for several years now.

Last weekend Jimmy voluntarily relinquished some technical user-account privileges he has historically held, but that in no way affects his official status with Wikimedia, nor his editorial position. It was false to claim that Jimmy ever held final editorial control on our projects — his decision to change the technical details of his user account should not be interpreted as changes to his status in general.  Jimmy is actively engaged in discussions with other Wikimedia editors about sexually-explicit materials on Wikimedia Commons: discussions like that are part of his normal role, and are part of the normal work of being an active volunteer. He is a thought leader in the Wikimedia projects, and although the discussions over the past week have been unusually intense, we don’t consider them problematic. Discussion is how Wikimedians work through policy development and policy interpretation: active argument and debate are normal for us — they are how we do our work. The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful for Jimmy’s involvement, and we’re glad he continues to be an important part of the Wikimedia movement.

Jay Walsh, Communications