From November 6 to 8, a group of about thirty people met in Paris to discuss how to improve the processes and technologies for contributing multimedia to Wikimedia projects. It was the first meeting of its kind, sponsored and organized by one of Wikimedia’s chapter organizations, Wikimedia France, in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation.

In July, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to make it easier to add multimedia to our projects (see previous blog post). The purpose of our meeting in Paris was to support the kick-off of this initiative, and to bring volunteers doing multimedia-focused work together with software developers. Beyond the scope of activities within the Ford grant, we hope to see a large number of volunteer projects flourish that will enrich the Wikimedia experience beyond text.

We used the three-day meeting to both plan specific projects and activities, and to actually develop working code. Among the outcomes:

• Increased awareness of our shared activities through demonstrations and discussions (list of projects we reviewed).

• Experimental roll-out of functionality to track usage of media from Wikimedia Commons across other Wikimedia projects; a first implementation of wiki-editable subtitles for videos, and smaller hacks and improvements.

• Draft ideas and concepts for improving the user experience on Wikimedia Commons as a whole: upload, site experience, metadata, search, third party use of Commons content, education about the project mission.

• A clearer articulation of the needs that are specific to working with cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – “GLAM”): case studies and success stories (a first case study was developed at the meeting), metrics, mass uploading tools, support processes, etc.

Developers developing

Summaries and notes from the respective work groups are available. If you’re interested in participating in any of these efforts, feel free to add yourself to the relevant “movers” section.

Unlike Wikimania and other larger Wikimedia gatherings, this meeting was a rare opportunity to focus on one specific problem area, and the first international gathering of this type. This approach turned out to be highly productive, and we hope to be able to use it in other problem areas in the future.

Because it’s rare for such an international and diverse group to meet, some participants met prior to the multimedia meeting to support the Wikimedia-wide strategic planning process; notes from this pre-meeting can be found on the StrategyWiki.

We want to thank all the participants of the Multimedia Usability Meeting for attending, and hope to organize similar meetings focused on other challenges and opportunities in the future. The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank Wikimédia France for sponsoring and organizing the meeting. Furthermore, we are grateful to Wikimedia Nederlands, Wikimedia Deutschland, and Wikimedia Polska for additional travel sponsorships. Your donations to the Wikimedia Foundation and to Wikimedia chapters help us to support future meetings like this one.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Delphine Ménard, Treasurer, Wikimédia France

And the 5,000,000th file?  Although it’s tough to pinpoint, contributors on Commons seem to have agreed that a digital scan (at right) of the 1838 Danish news paper Kjøbenhavnsposten, is the winner, uploaded by User:Saddhiyama.

Wikimedia UK, the international chapter based in the United Kingdom, marked the occasion with an announcement and other chapters and volunteers around the world are celebrating this major milestone.  News also came from the Dutch chapter.

Commons is made possible by the work of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world, in over 250 languages.  Contributors upload free or public domain images, enhance and improve older scanned files, provide detailed illustrations, and increasingly upload free video and sound files.

The Foundation is looking forward to expanding usability of the Commons projects, thanks in large part to a recent grant from the Ford Foundation.

Congratulations to the Commoners on the Commons!

Jay Walsh, Communications

The open source movement is not only about software and knowledge base creation. There are active movements in user interface design as well. tango! is one of the neatest projects in design collaborative world, contributing in the creation of open source software such as Open Office and Ubuntu. We, the usability team, also benefit from such open source design projects which allow us to reuse their icons by modifying to meet our needs. For example the icon on the right is the new reference tool icon which can be found in the enhanced toolbar. It is the reuse of Gnome Desktop icons from Wikimedia Commons.

The first set of usability enhancements, new tab layout, enhanced toolbar, and reorganized search page, are now available in MediaWiki projects except for right-to-left language wikis such as Arabic and Hebrew. The support for right-to-left languages should be available in a few weeks, so just hang in there. We welcome you to try out the usability enhancements by going into your preferences and enable ‘Vector’ and the enhanced toolbar from Appearance and Editing menus.

I hope you find the new interface easy to interact. Let us know your feedback in the discussion page of the most recent release page.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

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

Yesterday on the Wikimedia Commons discussion mailing list. the winners of the 2008 Picture of the Year Competition were announced.  Every year Wikimedians vote on the thousands of newly posted, free (under a creative commons, GFD, or public domain license) images to choose winners from hundreds of distinct categories.

This year’s winner is a cc-by-sa 2.0 shot, ‘Horses on Bianditz mountain.’ by Mikel Ortega, with touch-ups by user Richard Bartz.  The runners-up can be found on the results page.

Congratulations to the photographers (and re-touchers!) for their extraordinary contributions, and to the organizing committee.

The Wikimedia Commons contains over 4million freely reusable images.  All of the images in Wikipedia and the Foundation’s other projects live in the Commons.  Like Wikipedia, anyone can participate by uploading images, editing content, categorizing media, and generally making the project better.

Jay Walsh, Head of 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

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.

The event opened up last Sunday at London’s  Victoria and Albert Museum, and is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the V & A, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art. There are totally 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.
Fred Benenson of  Creative Commons spoke with Jimmy Wales about the event, and produced this quick video where Jimmy explains how excited he is about the event.

For details, and to see if a museum near you is participating, see the Wikipedia page devoted to the event.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

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<

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)、‎国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day)、‎ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways)、南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

When browsing Wikipedia, we may often take for granted that so many articles include photographs and high quality illustrations. But just like the text, much of the multimedia in our projects is the result of the passionate dedication of our contributors. Identifying the most valued images in Wikimedia Commons is a good way to honor these contributions.

Erik Möller, Deputy Director<