On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the licensing change that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the GNU Free Documentation License as the primary content license to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig tweeted that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “free culture win” in the Creative Commons blog.

A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all our projects in all languages reflect the new terms (see this message for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use MediaWiki, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Today Google is announcing the release of Google Translator Toolkit, a new application that extends their well known translation tool, Google Translate.  The Tool kit may change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages (from Google’s announcement today):

At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

Google Translator Toolkit allows users to help the system learn adaptively – and it has built-in functionality that will allow rapid translation of pages from Wikipedia.  Readers can correct mistakes, add context, and generally improve the translator’s ability to provide stronger first drafts of translations. This is a tremendous step towards free culture and the expansion of free knowledge on behalf of Google.

Volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia have been working with Google to translate over 100,000 words into from the English Wikipedia into Arabic to help build the Toolkit and pave the way for further translations of Wikipedia content, a strong showcase for the Toolkit (more from Google):

These articles were among most widely searched articles throughout the Middle East, and they were either previously unavailable in Arabic or they were short relative to the English article. We are now reviewing and posting these top articles back to Wikipedia, in order help to make Wikipedia even more useful in Arabic. As Saudi Arabia’s HRH Princess Lolowah Al-Faisal said, Effat worked with Google “to solve the problem of making a huge amount of online information available to Arabic speakers, all over the world.”

You can try out the toolkit here.  Google has also posted a video to provide a quick tutorial. We look forward to seeing even more active translation within Wikipedia and beyond over the coming months.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

I’m delighted to tell you that John Broughton’s book “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” has been made available for free on the English language Wikipedia. O’Reilly Media announced this the other day. This is terrific news and will not only enable Wikipedia users around the world to read John’s book but also to edit it.

John first contributed to Wikipedia in August 2005 and his biggest accomplishment so far was the writing of the Editor’s index to Wikipedia, a comprehensive list of reference pages and links to useful information and tools for Wikipedia editors.

“Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” teaches new users how to contribute to Wikipedia and gives practical advice on how to collaborate with others to improve the free encyclopedia’s content. The book has first been published at O’Reilly’s in January 2008 and can now be found on Wikipedia’s help pages.

Please join me in thanking John for this great gift!

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach

A printed book ordered through PediaPress.com

A few weeks ago, we rolled out a feature to allow users to generate PDF files, OpenDocument word processor files, and on-demand printed books in one of our smaller sister projects, Wikibooks. This same technology has now also been experimentally enabled on the German Wikipedia (thanks to Frank Schulenburg for creating a beautiful help page). Essentially, you can compile a wiki-book from any number of Wikipedia articles, download a PDF or OpenDocument version, or order a printed version from our technology partner, PediaPress. And if you like your book remixes, you can save them for others to use and share.

If you want to take your favorite Wikipedia articles with you on the go, or if you want to have a nicely formatted PDF version, or you want to edit them further in a word processor, this technology is for you. The reason this is being tested on the German Wikipedia, in case you were wondering, is that PediaPress is a German company, and they will be able to respond quickly to feedback directly from the German Wikipedia community. With more than 1.4 billion pageviews a month, the German Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition, right after English with 5.2 billion pageviews. We’ve dedicated some hardware to this feature, and testing it on the German Wikipedia will give us a good idea how it behaves under high traffic characteristics.

It should go without saying that all the code developed through this partnership is open source. In other words, if you want to set up your own wiki with PDF support, OpenDocument support, or connectivity to the PediaPress on-demand printing service, you can install the Collection Extension and enable it on your wiki. When we say free, we mean it.

If all goes well, this feature will become available in all Wikimedia projects where it makes sense. This technology has been developed with the generous support of the Commonwealth of Learning and the Open Society Institute.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

PS: In unrelated tech news, our CTO Brion Vibber has blogged about the AbuseFilter extension, an important tool whose development we’re supporting, which will help Wikipedians to deal more effectively with spam, vandalism, and other destructive user behavior. And if you haven’t seen it, also note his recent post about the Drafts feature that’s being tested, and which should help against accidental loss of edits.

This afternoon the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the Internet Watch Foundation has taken Wikipedia off of the United Kingdom internet ‘blacklist.’  We’re very pleased with this development, and happy that editing and viewing in the United Kingdom is returning to normal.

We’d like to thank the thousands of Wikipedia supporters who have spoken out about this situation or taken the time to contact us with their concerns.  We’re thankful as well to the IWF for acting quickly to resolve the block.

—

This weekend has seen quite a bit of coverage of an unfortunate situation for Wikipedia users in the United Kingdom.  The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based self-regulatory body, has taken action to block access to specific Wikipedia content in the UK, and in turn has caused a major issue for the UK Wikipedia community.  The censoring has dramatically affected the way UK traffic is handled by Wikipedia, and in short, about 95% of the UK is barred from editing Wikipedia.

This is particularly bad news for the entire Wikipedia project and the millions of users from around the world who visit Wikipedia every day.  On the English Wikipedia alone edits and contributions from the UK account for at least 25% of overall editing activity.

The Wikimedia Foundation has distributed this statement to the press and internally among its global community of volunteers to explain the situation and the reasons behind the blocks in the UK.  We’ve also prepared a series of Questions and Answers.

We are hopeful that discussions with the IWF will continue, and that all actions and measures against Wikipedia in the UK will be suspended.  Please share your support for Wikipedia and let others know how you feel about this situation.

Thanks,

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Multimedia on the web is dominated by closed formats, encumbered by patents owned by large companies. This means that any advanced technology to create video and audio is subject to licensing fees, and innovators face threats of patent lawsuits. Even multi-billion dollar companies are at risk: one court ruling, which was later overturned, ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion for alleged MP3 related patent infringements. How can we bridge the digital divide and bring rich content to people all over the planet when patent threats loom over key technologies?

The Wikimedia Foundation only hosts videos and audio files that are available in open formats, most notably the open source standards Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video) developed by the non-profit Xiph.Org Foundation. These standards are unencumbered by patents and can be used by anyone freely to build any kind of video or audio technology. As such, they provide a secure baseline for innovation.

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox web browser, agrees. We’re very happy to share the message below, posted by Wikimedian and long-time free software supporter Greg Maxwell on the Foundation-l mailing list.  Some background about Ogg, Theora, Vorbis, and free software in general can be found on Wikipedia. You can also view some samples of Ogg Theora videos on the Wikimedia Commons.

(thanks also to the WM UK Chapter’s David Gerard for keeping us posted on the development)

[Foundation-l] Theora and Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1a2
Gregory Maxwell
Wed Jul 30 22:27:15 UTC 2008

“Mozilla is committing to include native support for OGG video and
audio in its next release that includes support for the video element
tag.” [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=492]

This is an announcement that Mozilla will be supporting the WhatWG
HTML5 multimedia tags as well as including Xiph’s unencumbered media
codecs as part of Firefox.

The WHATWG HTML5 <video/> and <audio/> tags allow supporting browsers
to naively display multimedia content just as they display still
images: without the need for plugins or extensions and with full
integration. Mozilla’s commitment to including a set of reasonably
performing and unencumbered codecs as a baseline means that web
developers and users have an opportunity to have multimedia that Just
Works without licensing obligations adding friction to the free flow
of knowledge. Together the native multimedia support and the baseline
inclusion of unencumbered multimedia codecs are an essential step
forward in preserving the open and unrestricted qualities of the web
which are so important to our mission.

The Wikimedia projects have long had a strong commitment to free media
formats, and Wikimedia Commons is probably the largest repository of
videos in Ogg Theora on the web. But our commitment has, at times,
been a costly one: As an early adopter of free media technology we’ve
suffered from more than our share of complications and incompatibilities.
After years of effort driving adoption and our own work improving the
state of the art for free media formats we’re now seeing the beginnings
of a true mainstream adoption which will allow these multimedia formats
to be truly costless for producers and consumers of knowledge. I know
from my own involvement that Wikimedia’s adherence to free formats has
been essential in moving things this far, and everyone who has worked
on multimedia within the Wikimedia projects should be proud of our
collective contribution here.

This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups
developing and promoting these free codecs — particularly Xiph.org,
spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF’s PlayOGG campaign. The W3C’s policy
of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential
role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but
there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free
baseline codec set. Because of this, I’d like to personally extend
thanks to the Mozilla Foundation for joining our leadership in this
important area of web standards. Without their help Web Video would
have no hope of escaping the environment of incompatible, proprietary,
“de facto standards” with their related costs.

The Wikimedia projects have had integrated video playback support
for some time now via the OggHandler extension. OggHandler supports a
multitude of playback methods (such as a Java player using Cortado, and
the VLC browser extension) in an effort to get unencumbered multimedia
format support working for as many people as possible. OggHandler has
been a great success, already working for a vast majority of readers, but
the native support in a popular browser will make OggHandler even better
(smoother performance, zero install or an easy upgrade to FireFox, etc).

The new <video/> tag in Firefox has been supported as a playback method
in OggHandler since day zero so the new Firefox builds will automatically
use their native playback ability on the Wikimedia sites.

The code for native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis
was checked into the Mozilla mainline last night and is
already available in nightly builds marked 3.1a2pre or later
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ - be sure to grab versions marked 3.1a2, not 3.1a1!].
The support is new and pretty raw: There are obvious outstanding issues
with things like timing and audio access on some platforms (such as many
GNU/Linux distros). Once the known bugs are fixed I’ll be soliciting
Wikimedians to check for bugs in both our own player code as well as
the Firefox test releases.

Now would be a good time to start building up some material on commons
to showcase this support for Firefox’s official release. Although
we’ve had video on our projects for a long time it’s still largely a
new and unexplored territory for us. There are many opportunities to
make important contributions and to have a lot of fun.

–Greg Maxwell<

Do you happen to have 650 GB of free diskspace? If so, you can grab a copy of Wikipedia. Don’t fret: The compressed download of all language editions only clocks in at 40 gigabytes. Thanks to our developer Tim Starling for working on this project.

As a non-profit organization and a social movement, it’s our core mission to give free knowledge away to everyone. All the text content of Wikipedia is available for free download, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. The point of offering these downloadable archives is not just to make it possible to read Wikipedia while you’re on a plane or without Wi-Fi — it’s to enable people without Internet connectivity to use our content in ways that make sense. In particular, using these copies, it becomes very straightforward to set up a copy of Wikipedia for a school or university with no or limited Internet access. And, if you’re clever, you can use the dump as a starting point to create a version running on DVDs or USB sticks. (As the download page notes, if you create a product using the “Wikipedia” trademark or logo, you need official permission from the Wikimedia Foundation.)

For the technically inclined: The static HTML dumps are an alternative offering to our XML dumps in the original wiki syntax. The key advantage is that they don’t require any additional software to be useful: You can literally simply download them (provided you can handle the amount of data) and open them in your web browser. The wiki syntax format, on the other hand, offers third party users more flexibility in the ways they want to render the output.

Go ahead and download the data while it’s fresh. And if you have interesting stories about the ways in which you’re using your static copy, please drop a note to our Head of Communications, jwalsh(at)wikimedia(dot)org. :-)

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation<

It’s a great day to download Firefox 3 and edit your favorite wiki!

Earlier today a small consortium of wiki-developers, including our own Brion Vibber here at the Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Universal Edit Button.  With this little Firefox 3 extension users will be able to click one button, located conveniently in the Firefox address bar, to instantly access the ‘edit’ page for an increasing number of participating wikis, including Wikipedia.  A MediaWiki extension has been created so other wiki operators can implement the button into their own site.

At this time the button is exclusively available on FireFox (get help with the install), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect to see similar functionality in other browsers down the road.  Further proof that that the web is quickly shifting to become an ‘edit this page’ kind of place.  The power of public collaboration at work!

The Universal Edit Button was first discussed at the 2007 Recent Changes Camp, and again explored at the recent Recent Changes Camp in Palo Alto.  The button is a great example of the product of open-source collaboration and the mutual commitment of wiki developers to foster a community of interoperability and interconnectedness.

Here’s to the new age of the edit-powered web!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications<

Wikipedia fans and Google maps users may have heard recently that Google has unveiled a handsome new feature for its ubiquitous mapping system.

Alongside the familiar ’satellite’ and ‘terrain’ viewing options for maps, you can know click on ‘more’ then click the Wikipedia check box. In a flash the big serif W you know and love blankets mother earth, offering thousands of links to articles with geographic coordinates.

A great feature, and another novel way to explore the depths of Wikipedia’s millions and millions of articles.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Wikipedia in a book? That’s right! I know it may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Wikipedia but our mission at the Wikimedia Foundation is make all human knowledge accessible to everyone, and that includes bringing that knowledge to the offline world.

Wikimedia Germany (the German Wikimedia chapter) spent a lot of time and energy pulling this project together and was able to get the weight of publishing powerhouse Bertelsmann behind the project. Furthermore, they helped Bertelsmann to understand and support our mission because the GFDL would require Bertelsmann to contribute the changes back to Wikipedia. This makes this a unique endeavor in the publishing world and could be considered a success just for getting this off the ground.

Here is a quick summary and the main stats of the book project:

Title: The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia in one volume (”Das Wikipedia
Lexikon in einem Band”)
Size: 993 pages
Illustrations: approx. 1,000
Keywords and definitions: approx. 50,000
Index: WIKIPEDIA’s most frequently accessed keywords
Content: Abstracts/first paragraph of the online-edition; countries
given with basic key facts
Format: 17 x 24 cm
Get-up: Hardcover, four-colour
Target retail price (VAT included): EUR 19.95
Publication date: Autumn 2008

The book is only in German for the German market but we will be watching this innovative project closely because…who knows? You can’t change the world unless you push the limits and try to break existing paradigms. Much of the credit for this arrangement belongs to Mathias, Arne and everyone involved with the German chapter – they did all the hard work. Danke!

Time to celebrate with some schnitzel and a large Dunkel (or an Apelsaft, if you prefer)!

Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business Development