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 we announced some fantastic news. The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community.  With the full approval of our Board of Trustees, this now means that the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system on all of our project’s content. The new dual license will begin to come into effect in June.

A Q&A about the announcement has been posted on the Foundation wiki.  You can also find considerably more information, discussion, and details about the license change and the work of the license update committee on their meta page.

A huge thanks to the committee, to the folks at Creative Commons (who have also blogged on the topic), to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to thousands of Wikimedia volunteers from around the world who both authored the content and voted to help make the proposal a reality.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

From late October to early November 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit conducted the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors in 20 languages. In total, more than 130,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors completed the extensive survey questionnaire (out of more than 300,000 people total who took at least part of the questionnaire).* This level of response far exceeded our expectations, and the data that was collected provides a wealth of information about the Wikipedia community. English, German and Spanish were the most responsive Wikipedia editions and together make up two thirds of the responses.

The UNU-Merit team has spent the previous months cleaning and preparing the data, and is now making available first results for some of our priority questions. Key outcomes of this first analysis include:

• 65% of respondents self-described as readers, and 35% as (mostly occasional) contributors. Former contributors are analysed separately.
• Respondents came from over 200 countries, ranging from 10 to 85 years completed the survey; their average age is 26 years, and 25% of the respondents are younger than 18 years. Female respondents are a bit younger than the average (24 years)
• Among these, readers and contributors are on average in their mid-twenties, and predominantly male (75%)
• Women, with a share of 25% in all respondents, are more strongly represented among readers (32%) and less strongly represented among contributors (13%).
• Both educational levels and age are slightly higher among contributors than among readers.
• Regarding their motivations to contribute, respondents mentioned as their top two reasons that (1) they liked the idea of sharing knowledge, and (2) that they had come across an error and wanted to fix it.
• The concern that they might not have enough information to contribute is the main reason holding back potential contributors, mentioned by 51% of this group. Fourty-eight percent mentioned they were happy readers of Wikipedia, and saw no reason to get involved as contributors.
• The most common reason why respondents have not donated money to the Wikimedia Foundation, mentioned by more than 42% of respondents, is that they don’t know how. (If you happen to be one of them, we suggest you go to donate.wikipedia.org ;-) )

Ruediger Glott and Philipp Schmidt from UNU-Merit have made available additional data in the online workbook of their analysis (PDF file), and we’re planning to give you regular updates with new data every couple of weeks from now on. The survey team also maintains its own website at wikipediastudy.org.

This is a landmark moment in the history of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. These and future findings that will result from this data will help to shape our efforts to reach new contributors and new readers.  The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank everyone who has made this survey possible, especially the UNU-Merit Team and the community of translators.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

* In addition to the 130,000 responses overall, we’ve received 40,000 responses from the Russian Wikipedia, which very significantly overrepresents this group in the total response set. The survey team has excluded this group from the data until the possible causes for this overrepresentation can be fully understood.

[UPDATE 4/16] Naoko Komura, who project-managed the survey translation and launch on the Wikimedia Foundation side, sent a list of translators who helped us to run this survey in 20 languages. They are: Jeandré du Toit, Mohamed Magdy, Meno25, Toni Pulido, Jordi Roqué Figuls, Xavier SMP, Zirland, MF-Warburg, Tim Landscheidt, Michael Bimmler, Arno Lagrange, Ariel T. Glenn, Ziko van Dijk, Verónica Rivero, Salvador Espada, Sébastien Beyou, Plyd, Delphine Ménard, Philippe Verdy, Daniel U. Thibault, Maximilian Hasler, Rex Alberto, Morris Mastini, Federico Leva, Hatukanezumi, Henrdrik Maryns, Robin P., Wojciech Pędzich, McMonster, Jennifer Hobbs, Thomas Buckup, Aleksandr Sigachov, Ilya Haykinson, Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai, BalaSundaraRaman, C.R. Selvakumar, Manop Kaewmoracharoen, Nguyễn Thanh Quang, Trần Vĩnh Tân, Ting Chen, Andrew Leung. Thanks to all of them for their help — it’s wonderful to have so much volunteer support in a project like this. Thanks also to Naoko herself, who helped to create the Japanese translation, and to the UNU-Merit webmasters, Herman Pijpers and Mourik Jan Heupink. :-)<

Yesterday, Wikimedia Germany announced an extraordinary collaboration with one of the largest libraries in Germany, the Land Library of Saxony – State and University Library Dresden (SLUB). The collaboration will see roughly 250,000 images from the library made available to Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons license.

A translation of the German chapter press release (with huge thanks to user:Weasel for the translation) can be found below.  The info can also be found posted in German and English on the Wikimedia Commons:

Berlin, March 31, 2009
Meeting Point Wikipedia

Cooperation deal with one of the largest libraries sealed.

As the first German library, the Land Library of Saxony – State and
University Library Dresden (SLUB) has concluded a cooperation agreement
with Wikimedia Germany e.V. In a first step, the German Photo Collection
of the SLUB makes available ca. 250,000 image files from its repository
for free use to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

The photos, the correspondent captions and further meta data will be
uploaded to Commons during the common months by voluntary helpers of
Wikimedia, then connected step-by-step with personal identification data
(? literally “personal norm data”, some kind of formalized assignment of
identification) and the relevant Wikipedia articles. Apart from that,
the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection can be enriched,
commented on and supplied with geographical detail by Wikipedia users.
All results of this work are flowing back to the database of the German
Photo Collection. In this way, the SLUB too directly profits from the
new collaboration.

No rights of third parties concerning the image material supplied are
standing in the way of using it under the free license “Creative Commons
BY-SA 3.0″. The cooperation will, in the words of Dr Jens Bove, the
director of the German Photo Collection, “enhance the publicity and
reach of the photographic treasures of the German Photo Collection”. At
the same time, the SLUB is a clear testament to the support of the
international Open Access Initiative, which seeks open access to
scientific information. “The collaboration with one of the largest
scientific libraries in Germany with Wikimedia and the free media
repository Commons is another important step towards the free
availability of knowledge.”, explains Sebastian Moleski, director of
Wikimedia Deutschland.

“This cooperation is therefore exemplary for the strategy of Wikimedia
to make the knowledge of humanity accessible to anyone worldwide,” Free
Access to information, is the motto that is on top, too, of the
political agenda of the International Federation of Library Associations
and Institutions (IFLA). President of the IFLA, Prof Dr Claudia Lux, who
at the same time serves as general director of the Central and State
Library of Berlin, is therefore very pleased about the cooperation
between SLUB and Wikimedia: “This cooperation enables many people
worldwide to use library resources and thereby expand their knowledge.
That is a benefit for everyone!”

This is a great victory for SLUB, Wikimedia Germany, the Commons, and perhaps most importantly for all the users of the web, for now and, well . . . forever.

We know Wikimedia German has been very active in this space, and we can only expect more incredible partnerships like this to unfold in the coming months.  A special thanks to Mathias Schindler who has been particularly active and vocal in pushing these kinds of partnerships forward.  Prost!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Wikimedia Commons’ four-millionth image ‘View of Masca at sunset,’ public domain from the Wikimedia Commons)

Last week the folks at Wikimedia Commons were very pleased to announce the milestone of four million images on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia site that hosts the vast majority of image, sound, and video data for the Wikimedia projects.

The four millionth file is a public domain image of the “view near Masca in sunset,” uploaded by user:Kallerna. Masca is a small mountain village in the Canary Islands.

The Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to act as a central repository for the thousands of images that were being uploaded to a very-quickly growing Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons is most certainly now one of the largest repositories of freely licensed media files on the web.

A huge congratulations to the dedicated volunteers at the Commons, and to the tens of thousands of contributors.

Check out the hundreds of other amazing featured images on the Commons.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Yesterday we discovered that WikiHow, a wiki neighbor of ours that provides user-generated ‘how-to’ info has hit the admirable 50,000 article milestone.

WikiHow provides their content freely in a creative commons license, they publish in multiple languages, and they run MediaWiki, the same open-source software that powers Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis around the world.  They’ve also been a hugely generous financial sponsor of previous Wikimania conferences.

Congrats to WikiHow and their dedicated volunteers.  Here’s to 50K more how-to articles!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

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.

We’re extremely pleased to be sharing the news that the 5th annual Wikimedia on-line fundraising campaign in support of Wikipedia and our sister projects has burst past its $6million USD goal.  Today we issued a press release, and later today we should have some further correspondence to share.

We will aslo be rotating the site banners on Wikipedia and the other projects later today to point to a new thank you note from Jimmy Wales.

This is a great day for Wikipedia, and for the more than 125,000 supports of the project.  You’ve helped us raise over $6.2million – and we’re still seeing donations come in.  Thank you for showing extraordinary support, and for helping to sustain and grow Wikipedia.

Happy New Year!  What a great way to kick it off.

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Today marked the single most active fundraising day since the beginning of our campaign, and maybe in the history of fundraising at Wikimedia. People have come out in great numbers, and with a great total: Over $283K USD was raised in one day, from 8,186 donations!  That’s up from 800 contributions yesterday – or an 892% increase in the number of donations  (see the green spike):

Why the jump? It can very likely be attributed to the intro of our banner inviting users to read a donation appeal letter from founder Jimmy Wales:

This is a tremendous gesture from all the supporters of Wikipedia from around the world. A huge thanks to all of you – here’s to a few more days like today so we can keep pushing for our $6million goal!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

• Free Software Foundation FAQ on the FDL 1.3 release
• Creative Commons blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by CC VP Mike Linksvayer
• Blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig

Erik Möller
Deputy Director<