The start of Volunteer Appreciation Week in the US (April 19 to 25, 2009) seemed an auspicious time for me to introduce myself to the amazing community of Wikimedia volunteers! I started last week in the new position of Chief Program Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation and have received such a wonderful warm welcome. Thank you!

Every minute of every day so far I have been awed by the people behind all the great and nearly innumerable activities going on! My background is in management of volunteer-driven programs. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Central and West Africa, I became passionate about volunteer programs being the answer for long-term sustainable change that is most needed and most appropriate for the beneficiaries they serve.

I also had the chance to see first-hand how access to information, or lack of access could profoundly affect individuals, communities and whole societies. My work at the Wikimedia Foundation will be to help support the volunteer community in achieving their mission. I aim to help strengthen the volunteer support structure, to help provide materials and skill building opportunities for current and potential Wikipedians, and to facilitate the exploration of new projects and strategies to increase participation as well as the quality and reach of our content. I look forward to getting to know more individuals as I advance along this adventure!

Jennifer Riggs, Chief Program Officer

Some readers of the blog who subscribe via RSS may not be seeing the latest posts on the Wikimedia Blog. We switched servers recently and it may have affected how the feeds reach your reader.

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Thanks – happy reading!

Jay Walsh, 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. :-)<

One of the core principles under which Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects operate is that the knowledge contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers shouldn’t be locked into our servers. People should be able to re-use and re-purpose it in countless useful ways, commercial or non-commercial, to ensure that our work reaches the largest possible number of people. And from online mirrors to DVD editions to printed books to mobile versions, this basic principle has allowed knowledge to flow freely across all media.

When authors don’t make an explicit licensing choice, this isn’t possible: as an author, copyright law gives you maximal “protection”, unless you grant usage rights to others. Because the Wikimedia projects are an open collaboration, this grant of rights is requested from all contributors: When you make an edit to Wikipedia or most of our other projects, you’re asked to release it under a license that gives others, essentially, the right to use it for any purpose, as long as they provide credit to the authors and make any improvements freely available.

There are standard licensing documents that enumerate the rights and obligations of re-users. When Wikipedia started in January 2001, the project chose the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) developed for freely usable software documentation. The idea of giving information other than software freely away in this fashion was still relatively novel at the time,  and so it made sense to adopt a license that had been developed by the free software community, which at the time could already look back on a long tradition of sharing cultural works freely.

However, because it was developed specifically for (typically printed) documentation, the GFDL contains many passages that aren’t relevant to an online work like Wikipedia, and it also contains obligations that, when taken literally, are quite onerous. For example, it requires that the full text of the license accompany every copy of the work, and it also requires that the section entitled “history” be included with each copy. (For Wikipedia, a massively edited work, this history of changes is often much larger than the work itself.) While Wikipedia has developed a long practice of interpreting this language to facilitate easy re-use, the literal text of the license has baffled many re-users and confused them about what they can and cannot do.

In 2002, a newly formed non-profit organization called Creative Commons released a set of standardized licensing agreements to flexibly grant rights to re-users (the right to make copies, the right to commercial use, the right to distribute modified versions of a document, etc.). These licensing agreements have found rapid adoption by a growing community of authors. For example, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr integrated the option to choose one of the Creative Commons licenses directly into its uploading interface, and thousands of users have granted more permissive rights to re-users than standard copyright would give. Last month, Flickr celebrated that more than 100 million photos had been uploaded under one of the CC licenses.

Importantly, some of the CC licenses are significantly more restrictive than what Wikimedia permits: unlike Wikimedia, they restrict commercial re-use, or limit the creation of derivatives. (In the case of a photo, that would include embedding the photo into a video sequence, for example.) One license, however, is very similar to the GNU Free Documentation License in its fundamental spirit and intent: the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

Unlike the GFDL, CC-BY-SA allows simply referencing the license text instead of including it with each copy, and it does not require copying an entire history of changes with each document. And, it’s not a license written for software documentation, but for any kind of work. Moreover, it’s been specifically adapted to many international jurisdictions, and there are official translations in many languages. A more detailed comparison is available.

Because many people consider it more suitable for works other than software documentation than the GFDL, it’s also been widely adopted. Projects like WikiEducator, Citizendium, the Encyclopedia of Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life, and many others use CC-BY-SA as a content license. While GFDL and CC-BY-SA are very similar, text under one license cannot be integrated into text under another. This incompatibility barrier has presented a growing problem: As other communities have started to share knowledge freely, Wikimedia has lacked interoperability to be able to take from them, and give to them.

As early as 2004, first discussions began about harmonizing the Wikimedia license. Last year, the Free Software Foundation released a new version of the GFDL, 1.3, which specifically allows massively collaborative websites like the Wikimedia projects to also license content under CC-BY-SA. This option was developed by the Free Software Foundation in answer to a request by the Wikimedia Foundation. The request included a commitment by the Wikimedia Foundation to consult its community of volunteers before actually implementing any change.

After months of open discussion and development of the specific licensing terms under which Wikimedia content will be available, the Wikimedia community is now encouraged to vote on a proposal for updating the Wikimedia Foundation licensing terms on projects which currently use the GFDL. Rather than eliminating the GFDL entirely, the proposal will retain it where possible, while also making content available under CC-BY-SA and allowing it to be imported. If the proposal is implemented, licensing terms on all projects in all languages will be standardized where the GFDL is currently use. This standardization will also create  clear and understandable terms and conditions for re-users who want to remix information from our projects.

In order to vote, users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project can visit a special page which will transfer them to a third party server (the page is linked from a notice on top of all pages for logged in users).  The server is administered by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) to guarantee the integrity of the vote.  The vote will be tallied by a licensing committee made of Wikimedia volunteers. It will be concluded by May 3, 2009. After the vote result is published, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will consult regarding the outcome of the vote and next steps.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has published a clear position statement: “The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.”

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Other coverage: Creative Commons weblog<

The usability team, and Bolt|Peters, a user experience research firm in San Francisco, conducted a usability study from March 24th to March 26th. The objective of this study was to identify common interface barriers new editors face by asking participants to conduct simple editing tasks in Wikipedia.

We conducted two types of studies: in-person and remote. Ten participants (three are pictured at the right), who were selected based on their experience level of editing Wikipedia, age group, and gender, were invited to the lab for a one hour study and an interview. Five participants were recruited in real time from the Wikipedia site for remote testing. We asked them to conduct the same tasks we did for in-person study.

The analysis of the results is currently underway, and Parul will be releasing the summary on our project page soon.

One thing I want to share with you before the summary is available is that we received lots of kudos and love from our participants about Wikipedia. People just love Wikipedia. :-)

Naoko Komura, Program Manager of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative

Wikimania is an annual event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe. The conference is a community gathering, giving the editors and users an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, and collaborate on the future of the Wikimedia projects. The conference is open to the public
and is a chance for educators, researchers, programmers, and free culture activists who are interested in the Foundation’s projects to learn more and share ideas about the Wikimedia projects.

This year’s conference will be held from August 26-28 in Buenos Aires, Argentina at San Martín Cultural Center.

We are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, posters, open space discussions, and artistic works related to the Wikimedia projects or free content topics in general. Without submissions from people like you, Wikimania wouldn’t be nearly as fun!

Submissions are due April 15, see the Call for Participation for more information.

For further information on Wikimania, please visit the official Wikimania 2009 site at wikimania2009.wikimedia.org.

I am very much looking forward to seeing your presentation at Wikimania! :-)

Cary Bass, VOLCO

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A few media stories circulated today suggesting that English Wikipedia’s main page was a model example of a spoof/fake page in the spirit of on-line shenanigans.  In fact (no pun intended), there’s nothing fake or foolish about it.

According to Mark Pellegrini, long-time coordinator of the English Wikipedia front page, since 2007 Wikipedia has been running a tongue-in-cheek, but truthful smattering of wild articles on the first day of April:

Back in 2004/2005, the place was a mad-house come April fools. Highly respected people, even admins, would create fake articles. Then other people would discover them, delete the articles, and block the creators, etc. In short, come April 1, the place would go crazy.

As the person who chooses the featured articles, I was dragged into the mess. In 2005 and 2006, as a compromise, I choose the silliest featured articles I could find (Nintendo and Spoo, respectively). In 2007, Pharos had a genius idea — to  feature [[George Washington (inventor)]] — and write up the main page  blurb as if it were describing the actual George Washington. Everything in the blurb was absolutely true, but *a lot* of people were fooled.

Thus, a new tradition was born, which worked out well in 2008 (Ima Hogg)  and this year (Museum of Bad Art). Now the true-but-sounds-like-an-obvious-hoax  philosophy seems to taken root as  the de-facto policy for the day.

Thus proving it’s possible to be a fact-focussed, NPOV Wikipedian and have a solid sense of humor.

See you at the MOBA!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

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<

Last week the blog family of Wikimedia was expanded with the addition of the Wikimedia Technical Blog.  Fairly self-explanatory in its naming, the Technical blog will explore all matters software, hardware, and infrastructure relating to Wikimedia.  That includes the servers and capacity that deliver Wikipedia to hundreds of millions of users around the world every month, not to mention the open-source wiki platform MediaWiki.

Helming the blog will be our own tech team, headed by our CTO Brion Vibber, alongside the pool of volunteers who work on the code and keep our systems humming along.

The Technical Blog is also part of Planet Wikimedia, the RSS blog aggregator for all blogs Wikimedia related – a must-subscribe if wiki is your thing.

Happy blogging to the technical team!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

The Wikimedia projects have been running on the same commodity hardware for many years now and every now and then we decide to decommission some of our older machines. This not only allows us to free up space for new servers but also lets us use more energy efficient hardware.

While searching around for a new home for our old but still very useful servers we came across two linked organizations: northxsouth & San Francisco Community Collocation Project (SFCCP). Both of these groups help out their local and regional communities by using open source software to better spread information within various media spaces.

The SFCCP is active within the San Francisco community while northxsouth works with various Latin American countries.

Our donation of servers was happily received and I’m excited to report that they will soon be humming along and serving the public for a long time to come.

Tomasz Finc, Software Developer