The first ever Wikimedians’ conference is taking place in Tokyo this weekend. A group of Wikimedians, who were inspired by Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, gathered in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan in the late summer of 2008. Those who traveled to Alexandria shared their excitement and inspiration gathered from Wikimania, and others listened. The excitement in the room turned into collective will power, determined to form a Wikimedians’ conference in Japan within a year from the meeting.

Wikimedia Conference Japan (WCJ) is happening this Sunday, November 22nd, at the University Tokyo’s Hongo Campus. The Center for Knowledge Structuring of the University Tokyo offered the space for this conference. Japanese National Institute of Informatics also supports this conference and invited Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, to give the keynote speech. WCJ will cover a number of topics including academic research, wiki workshops, introduction of Wikimedia projects, language support and education.

The goal was to draw 150 participants, however due to overwhelming interest, 180 have already registered with more expected on the day of the conference. As a volunteer organizer, I am sending my cheers to WCJ organizers from San Francisco. I hope this conference will create synergy among Japanese Wikimedians and who knows, Wikimania 2011 could take place in Tokyo.

Naoko Komura

We’re excited to learn today that the Webby Awards have chosen Wikipedia as one of the ten most influential “Internet moments of the decade.” The timing is excellent as we’re now well-underway with our 6th annual fundraising drive.  It’s a great time to think about the extraordinary efforts of thousands of volunteers to make Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to make a donation to help ensure Wikipedia forever.

Alongside the other major hallmarks of a decade of the web, including protests in Iran, the 2008 presidential election, the expansion of craigslist, and the debut of the iPhone, Wikipedia is profiled – highlighting early beginnings in 2001 with 20,000 articles and 18 languages to its status today as a top-five web property used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Thanks to the Webby’s for such esteemed recognition, and congrats to the other big projects and story-makers of the year. Here’s to another big decade of influencing the web and promoting free knowledge!

Jay Walsh, Head of communications

Founded by Susan Crawford in 2006, One Web Day aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and principles of an open, participatory web. From the official site:

OneWebDay was founded by Susan Crawford, cyberlaw scholar, former Board Member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and current technology policy advisor to President Obama. According to Ms. Crawford, “Earth Day was the model when I founded OneWebDay in 2006. In 1969, one man asked the people to do what their elected representatives would not: take the future of the environment into their own hands.” Today, a worldwide citizens’ movement has put the environment front and center politically. According to Crawford, “peoples’ lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted, and we must advocate for the Internet politically and support its vitality personally.”

This is a cause any Wikimedian can appreciate and understand – they live it every day.  Millions of people access Wikipedia and the Foundation’s sister projects daily, and hundreds of thousands of small (or large) edits pile up thanks to the tireless work of editors and volunteers from all over the world.  By increasing the overall amount of high quality information, in hundreds of languages, Wikimedians are working to reduce the digital divide and provide high quality, free information.

Although editing Wikipedia or its sister projects can be easy, the act itself is nothing short of brave.  Millions around the world still cannot edit or access our projects. Thousands of volunteers are building language projects for their peers who are otherwise unable to author or contribute due to internet access barriers or due to political censorship.  And Wikipedians are never shy to tackle the toughest and most challenging topics in human history, not to mention the task of writing neutral, high quality information about emerging news.

On this One Web Day we are especially excited to recognize our enormous volunteer force, and the millions of other brave contributors to free knowledge around the world.  We thank them, and we’re looking forward to an infinite number of One Web Days in the future.

Jay Walsh
Communications

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

Five years ago, Wikipedia celebrated its third anniversary by reaching one million total articles across 105 different languages. The Wikimedia Foundation was barely a year old and had a grand total of two employees.

Can you remember what it was like five years ago?

Would you have imagined that, five years later, English Wikipedia would have over three million articles?

Would you have imagined that Wikimedia sites would be the fifth most visited on the Internet?

Would you have imagined that there would be 10 different Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia) in over 270 languages?

Would you have imagined that about 30 employees would be working at the Wikimedia Foundation, with 24 independent chapters all over the world?

Think about all of the amazing things we’ve accomplished in the last five years alone. Now imagine where we might be five years from now. Where should we go? How much closer can we get to our vision of the sum of all knowledge freely shareable by all people? And how can we get there?

These aren’t just interesting questions. They’re critical. If everyone who cares about Wikimedia — from the casual reader to active volunteers — could come to a shared understanding of where we want to go, we would have a much better chance of actually getting there.

Over the next year, we’ll be exploring these questions, and in true Wikimedia spirit, we are going to Be Bold in how we do it. Simply put, we are embarking on the biggest, most inclusive open strategic planning process ever.

We are asking everyone and anyone who cares about the future of Wikimedia to help collaboratively develop and write a five year strategic plan for the entire movement.

As you would expect, we have a wiki where this work will happen. But that won’t be the only way to participate. Blog your ideas. Share them on Identi.ca, Facebook, and Twitter. Host meetups, and share what happened. Or volunteer to get more deeply involved.

Because of the scope and ambition of this process, it will be a long, messy, thrilling journey. The process itself should be a fascinating story, and I and others will be telling that story regularly here on this blog.

One way or another, please participate! I’ll see many of you on the wiki!

Eugene Eric Kim,
Program Manager, Wikimedia Strategic Planning

Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

The fact that a publicly funded institution sent a threatening letter to a volunteer working to improve a non-profit encyclopedia may strike you as odd. After all, the National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856, with the stated aim of using portraits “to promote appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture.” [source] It seems obvious that a public benefit organization and a volunteer community promoting free access to education and culture should be allies rather than adversaries.

It seems especially odd if seen in the context of the many successful partnerships between the Wikimedia community and other galleries, libraries, archives and museums. For example, two German photographic archives, the Bundesarchiv and the Deutsche Fotothek, together donated 350,000 copyrighted images under a free content license to Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation’s multimedia repository. These photographic donations were the successful outcome of thoughtful negotiations between Mathias Schindler, a Wikimedia volunteer, and representatives of the archives. (Information about the Bundesarchiv donation ; Information about the Fotothek donation)

Everybody ended up winning. Wikimedia helped the archives by working to identify errors in the descriptions of the donated images, and by linking the subjects of the photographs to accepted metadata standards. Wikipedia has driven new traffic to the archives. And the more than 300 million monthly visitors to Wikipedia have been given free access to amazing photographs of historic value they would otherwise never have seen.

More examples:

• During the past few months, Wikimedia volunteers have worked with cultural institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to take thousands of photographs of paintings and objects for Wikimedia Commons. This project is called “Wikipedia Loves Art.” Again, everybody wins: the museums and galleries gain greater exposure for the images, Wikipedia is better able to serve its audience, and people around the world are able to see cultural treasures they might otherwise never have had access to. (See the English Wikipedia page about the project and the Dutch project portal.)
  

• Individual Wikimedia volunteers work with museums and archives to restore digital versions of old images by removing visible marks such as stains and scratches. The work is painstaking and difficult, but the results are terrific: the work is returned to its original glory, with its full informational value restored. Audiences can appreciate it once again. (Restoration work is coordinated through the “Potential restorations” page, and many examples of restoration can be found among Wikimedia’s featured pictures.)
  

Three Wikimedia volunteers have summarized these opportunities in an open letter: Working with, not against, cultural institutions. On August 6-7, Wikimedia Australia is organizing an event to explore these and other models of partnership with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

Why do Wikimedia volunteers donate their time to painstaking restoration work, the photographing of art, and the negotiation of partnerships with cultural institutions? Because Wikimedia volunteers are dedicated to making information – including images of historic or informational importance – freely available to people around the world. Cultural institutions should not condemn Wikimedia volunteers: they should join forces with them in a shared mission.

We believe there are many wonderful opportunities for Wikimedia to work together with cultural institutions to educate, inform, and enlighten, and to share our cultural heritage. If you would like to get involved in the discussion, we invite you to join the Wikimedia Commons mailing list. Subscribe and introduce yourself – the list is read by many Wikimedia volunteers and by some volunteers associated with Wikimedia chapters as well as some Wikimedia Foundation staff. Alternatively, if there is a chapter in your country, you may want to get in touch with them directly. You can also contact the Wikimedia Foundation. Please feel free to send me your first thoughts at erik(at)wikimedia(dot)org, and I will connect you as appropriate.

The NPG is angry that a Wikimedia volunteer seems to have uploaded to Commons photographs of public domain paintings that are owned by the NPG. Intitially it sent threatening letters to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking us to “destroy all the images”. (Contrary to public claims, these letters did not include an offer for compromise. The NPG is possibly confusing its correspondence with a letter exchange in 2006 with a Wikimedia volunteer, which the user published here.) The NPG’s position seems to be that the user has violated copyright law in posting the images.

Both the NPG and Wikimedia agree that the paintings depicted in these images are in the public domain – many of these portraits are hundreds of years old, all long out of copyright. However, the NPG claims that it holds a copyright to the reproduction of these images (while also controlling access to the physical objects). In other words, the NPG believes that the slavish reproduction of a public domain painting without any added originality conveys a new full copyright to the digital copy, creating the opportunity to monetize this digital copy for many decades. The NPG is therefore effectively asserting full control over these public domain paintings.

The Wikimedia Foundation has no reason to believe that the user in question has violated any applicable law, and we are exploring ways to support the user in the event that NPG follows up on its original threat. We are open to a compromise around the specific images, but our position on the legal status of these images is unlikely to change. Our position is shared by legal scholars and by many in the community of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In 2003, Peter Hirtle, 58th president of the Society of American Archivists, wrote:

“The conclusion we must draw is inescapable. Efforts to try to monopolize our holdings and generate revenue by exploiting our physical ownership of public domain works should not succeed. Such efforts make a mockery of the copyright balance between the interests of the copyright creator and the public.” [source]

Some in the international GLAM community have taken the opposite approach, and even gone so far to suggest that GLAM institutions should employ digitial watermarking and other Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies to protect their alleged rights over public domain objects, and to enforce those rights aggressively.

The Wikimedia Foundation sympathizes with cultural institutions’ desire for revenue streams to help them maintain services for their audiences. And yet, if that revenue stream requires an institution to lock up and severely limit access to its educational materials, rather than allowing the materials to be freely available to everyone, that strikes us as counter to those institutions’ educational mission. It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopedia serves any public interest whatsoever.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

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<