Danny Wool mentioned this on his blog today, and I had not noticed it myself
at first--doesn't the current thing we've created, for example, at
http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/f/F-35_Lightning_II.htm violate GFDL? It
actually says,
"This Wikipedia Selection is sponsored by SOS
Children<http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/c/Children_Charity.htm>, and
consists of a hand selection from the English Wikipedia articles with
only minor deletions (see www.wikipedia.org for details of authors and
sources)."
But is this compliant with the GFDL?
- Joe
Hello,
in collaboration with the the Collaborative Creativity Group at
UNU-MERIT (www.merit.unu.edu), we want to invite you to take the first
multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors. For the
first time, this survey will provide an overview of the Wikipedia
community and how the content of Wikipedia is created, used, and
perceived. We therefore encourage everyone to participate in this
survey and to fill in an online questionnaire that will be made
accessible to you in the coming two weeks. We have prepared survey
versions in more than 20 languages. In order to keep the traffic
manageable we have chosen a staggered approach for the surveys.
The survey is currently running in Dutch, Vietnamese, and Tamil, and
we have received more than 2500 complete responses already. (We can
track the responses by language, so we can choose to examine any
subset we want.)
The following language versions will be launched in the coming days:
Russian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Esperanto, Czech,
Japanese, Italian, Russian, Afrikaans, Indonesian, French, Thai,
Spanish, German, English, Chinese-simplified and Chinese-traditional.
The survey will be featured in the sitenotice of those languages.
We're currently using the local notices, but we may use the
CentralNotice system that is used for fundraising messages for the
coming languages, because it has some features which make it more
manageable for us.
I want to extend a BIG thank you to all the volunteers who have worked
on this survey, especially all the translators. We will compile
translation credits for the press release when the survey is
completed. Thanks also to the UNU-Merit team (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,
Rüdiger Glott, Herman Pijpers, Jan Philipp Schmidt), and to Naoko
Komura, who has been project managing the survey since September.
And, thanks to all colleagues who have given feedback along the way.
We've tried to design questions that make sense. Please feel free to
send any and all feedback to <info(at)wikipediastudy(dot)org>.
Translations have been reviewed by multiple people, but if anything is
an obvious error, we will try to fix it. We will not be able to
address all feedback in this first run, but we will try to learn from
it for future surveys. This one won't be perfect, but it will tell us
lots of things we've never been able to talk about with any degree of
confidence.
Finally, a note on the coming analysis, and on privacy.
In terms of analysis, UNU-Merit will collect and analyze the data, and
publish analyses of the results, available under a Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-Alike License on a public website as well as in
established academic journals. Anonymized data will be published under
a CC-BY license for other researchers to study.
In terms of privacy, no personally identifiable information will be
released by UNU-Merit or the Wikimedia Foundation without permission
of the respondents. Personally identifiable data will also only be
retained for a year from closure of the survey, except for
participants who provide express permission to be included in a panel
for a follow-on survey.
I'm looking forward to seeing the first results, and I hope many of
you will take the survey. :-)
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
As I have shown at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Historiograf/GNU_FDL_Highway_to_Hell_…
it is a myth that only the 5 main authors have to be mentioned
according the GFDL. This refers only to the title page and I cannot
see such a thing like a title page in the Wikipedia.
You have to read the license carefully. The principle of attribution
is codified in the preamble. "Secondarily, this License preserves for
the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not
being considered responsible for modifications made by others." If
there would be only an obligation to mention the 5 main authors this
wouldn't make sense.
The ADDENDUM gives the model for attribution for GFDL contributions:
"To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and
license notices just after the title page:
Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License"."
If you are verbatim copying you have to copy 1:1, id est to keep all
sections including the section history with the collection of
copyright notices according the ADDENDUM. In the notices are fields
with the names of the authors.
For modifications there are the following relevant rules:
"D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document."
"I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there
is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating
the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
stated in the previous sentence."
The WMF opinion that the version history isn't the section history is
clearly wrong. After each modification something has to be added to
the section history OR the section history has to be created. Thus one
can only conclude that the section history is the version history.
A line in the version history is both copyright notice and part of the
section history.
Wikipedia is a de facto anonymous colloborative work with the wrong
license. CC-BY-SA would be the right license if and only if BY only
refers to Wikipedia but not to the myriad of authors.
Klaus Graf
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
>> all those overbearing legal questions.
>>
>>
This is only radical in the fashion ("radical" is based on
the word "root"), that it is reasonable to root ones head
in the sand. That is the common metaphor for ignoring
questions of significant import.
>> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
>> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>>
Why not assume the moon is made of green cheese? The
significant point is that wikipedia articles will not be offered
in the same form as they are now, for very much longer.
There will be an increasing number of folks who will think
of fixed forms to market wikipedia articles, where a simple
internet link will not be a practical solution.
>> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
>> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
>> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
>> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
>> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>>
>> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
>> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
>> articles.
>>
Attribution for wikipedia articles offered only in the form
that they are on the wikimedia sites, perhaps.
Do not make the mistake of extrapolating from that into
fixed media.
>> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
>> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
>> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
>> simply be:
>>
>> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
>> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
>> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license
>>
>> That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
>> new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
>> more by keeping it simple.
>>
This is completely false and misleading. You simply can not
practically link from a fixed media to the internets. You can
tell people what to type into the browser, which will bring
you the right history etc. Sure, technically that is one form
of compliance, but that is going the route of "small print"
stuff that one employs, when one is not too particular about
the ethics of what is doing. That does not work for people
who actually do the editing in chief of articles. This approach
would really give them the shaft.
>>
>> Now I suspect there are about three dozen reasons why defining
>> attribution as simply a link to the history page is legally impossible
>> and incompatible with the GFDL. But even so, doesn't it make some
>> sense to start with: How are Wikipedia articles being used? and work
>> backwards backwards to construct the licensing scheme that best
>> resembles actual practice while still being legally rigorous?
>> Wikipedia authors don't seem to want or expect prominent and overt
>> acknowledgements when writing articles, so why should our licensing
>> scheme require reusers to add more overt statements than even we
>> ourselves have?
>>
>>
I will let that statement stand by itself, and let intelligent
readers draw their own conclusions...
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Thanks for the report. I guess with having this one and the previous one
so close together we're getting lots of exciting news all together.
>We provided feedback to Luca de Alfaro regarding his trust computation
>tool and potential integration into Wikimedia Foundation websites.
This is a really exciting project that I've been following on
wikiquality-l
(https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiquality-l). If we can
get it integrated satisfactorily with MediaWiki, it will be a great tool
to use beside FlaggedRevs (speaking of which, where are all the
sysadmins, cough, cough?!).
>Further refinements have been made to the PediaPress Wiki-to-PDF tools
>to get them ready for production usage.
Again, some exciting developments here. I'm not thrilled with how this
has been implemented, but it gets the job done, and that's a helluva lot
better than the position we were in before (/me recalls the hours spent
with LaTeX for one PDF version of a wikibooks).
>We have developed one primary grant proposal related to usability and
>public outreach.
Can we get more details on this? Usability and public outreach are hot
topics right now, for myself especially.
Again, thanks for keeping us updated.
-Mike
--
Mike.lifeguard
mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm
[Sending this on Sue's behalf, who is on vacation until Monday. -- Erik]
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: September 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
1. Board meeting prep
2. Funders' briefing follow-up: prioritizing and strategizing re
major donors and foundations
3. Online fundraiser prep
4. Gearing up for travel/presentations throughout October and November
5. Ongoing major donor solicitation and stewardship, foundation
proposal follow-up
6. Bits and pieces (Wikimania postmortem, office space revamp,
launch of NomCom, etc.)
THIS PAST MONTH
OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS
In the first week of September, a mailing list was created for
potential Brazilian and Belgian chapters. Work was also done to
finalize our bid for the European e-Inclusion Award, and preparations
began for the next on-line course for the 50+ age group that will
start on Nov. 3. Work continues on development of WikiProject videos
with the first German Wikipedia video in production. An international
workshop on photos and videos is in the planning stages.
At the end of the month, WMF said goodbye to Delphine Ménard in her
role as Chapters Coordinator. Delphine had been Chapters Coordinator
for three years: first as a volunteer, and since February 2007 as a
paid external contractor. Delphine is leaving the role to enable a
"reboot" of the relationship between the chapters and the WMF: to
encourage the chapters to self-organize, and to interact directly with
the staff of the Foundation without an intermediary. The Wikimedia
Foundation is extremely grateful to Delphine for her help over the
years: she plans to continue as a volunteer (including her chapters
committee work), and we look forward to working with her in that
capacity.
The international survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors is
expected to launch in October. We are working with a contractor to
help us project manage the translations and the deployment of the
survey.
Wikimedia community member Andrew Whitworth, with help from Chapters
Committee members, has developed a briefing paper looking at
U.S.-based chapters development. Based on that work and some legal
research from Mike, Sue and Erik developed a proposal called A
Framework for Encouraging Sub-National Chapters. Both will be
submitted to the Board of Trustees at its meeting in October, where
next steps with regards to development of sub-national chapters will
be determined.
On September 25, Wikimedia contractor Naoko Komura released the
results of the Wikimania 2008 postmortem survey here:
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Survey
Thus far, the postmortem project has received input from participants
and speakers via the survey and from the staff of the Foundation and
21 planning volunteers; it currently awaits specific recommendations
from the local planning team, the program committee, and scholarships.
Frank has begun working on templates for different kinds of events,
such as a "Wikipedia in the classroom" event. For that purpose, he
has also worked closely with a group working on such an event in
Germany.
TECHNOLOGY
The migration of existing and deployment of new servers in a new data
center (in the same building as our primary data center) continues.
Brion has begun development of a code review tool, which is planned to
be integrated into MediaWiki.org and to become a central part of the
MediaWiki development process.
Hiring interviews for three technology positions took place, and top
candidates were identified. As per the standard hiring process, offers
will be extended once the reference checking process is complete and
will be contingent on successful completion of background checks.
We provided feedback to Luca de Alfaro regarding his trust computation
tool and potential integration into Wikimedia Foundation websites.
Work has begun on new fundraising campaign management tools for the
online fundraiser (for example, to systematically test and compare
different sitenotice designs during the course of the fundraiser). We
also continue to invest significant time in auditing and improving the
fundraising database CiviCRM.
Further refinements have been made to the PediaPress Wiki-to-PDF tools
to get them ready for production usage.
We're in the process of inventorizing and cleaning up our domain name
registrations.
We experienced some brief site-wide outages in September; Brion has
blogged about the relevant issues here:
http://leuksman.com/log/2008/09/22/wikipedia-downtime-2x-today/http://leuksman.com/log/2008/09/24/why-is-everything-broken-this-week/
COMMUNICATIONS
The early part of September was spent finalizing the Annual Report and
working on the budget. Work began on the online fundraiser PR
strategy and going over RFPs from prospective branding agencies.
There were no press releases, but we responded to media inquiries from
the San Francisco Bay Area public television station KQED; Connecticut
newspaper the News Times; Danish newspaper Dagbladet Børsen; the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website CBC.CA; the Associated
Press; Washington D.C.-based website America.gov; the New York Times;
Australian news site News.com. au; the Washington Times and the
Washington Post.
FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
On September 11, the first formal Funders' Briefing was held in New
York, hosted on our behalf by the Sloan Foundation. On September 12,
Sue & Erik did a presentation for the Ford Foundation as a part of
Ford's lunchtime speakers series. The San Francisco Funders' Briefing
was held at Kapor Enterprises on September 23. Both briefings were
well attended and well received. The agenda included endorsements by
Wikimedia supporters and board members, a presentation by Sue and Erik
walking through Wikimedia basics, and a wide-ranging discussion about
goals and funding. Some immediate donations were received as a result
of the briefing, and the groundwork was laid for cultivation of new
supporters.
Work has begun in earnest on many fronts to prepare for the online
fundraiser. Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving, is managing the
project, working mainly with the technology team, Jay Walsh and Cary
Bass. For the first time, a formal agreement is being developed for
chapters which are interested in participating in the fundraiser.
We've also continued to improve the database, document procedures, and
streamline processes.
We have developed one primary grant proposal related to usability and
public outreach.
FINANCE AND ADMIN
The Audit Committee met on September 29 with the audit firm to review
the draft 07-08 audited financial statements. The statements are
expected to be finalized shortly and then will be sent to the Audit
Committee for its official approval. Once the board has received and
approved them, they will be published. This will also trigger their
inclusion in the 2007-08 Annual Report, which will enable us to
publish it on the Wikimedia Foundation website.
A Wikimedia Foundation Employee Handbook is in development by Mike and
Veronique.
LEGAL
A number of policies were revised and/or finalized prior to review by
the Board of Trustees at its October meeting. These included: the Gift
Policy, the Privacy Policy, and the Board of Trustees' Pledge of
Personal Commitment.
Michelle Paulson is our new law clerk volunteer for the fall.
OTHER
The Nominating Committee continued its work to identify, research and
recommend candidates for the appointed Board positions involving
"specific expertise." Its members are board member Ting Chen,
community member Milos Rancic, community member BirgitteSB, advisory
board member Melissa Hagemann, Executive Director Sue Gardner and
board chair Michael Snow. The Nominating Committee has now
brainstormed names for potential board members, and generated criteria
for potential "specific expertise" board members here:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Nominating_Committee/Selec…
In October, Michael Snow will update the board on the work of the
Nominating Committee, and the board will send the Nominating Committee
feedback. The four "expertise" seats are expected to be filled by
January 2009.
Sheryl Roman, an external HR consultant, is working with individual
staff members to help them develop goals and timelines.
IN COMING WEEKS
* Board meeting being held October 4, 5, & 6 at WMF office.
* Sue speaking in Mainz, Germany
* Sue speaking in Orlando, Florida
* All-staff meeting being held November 6 & 7 at the WMF office
* First production deployment of wiki-to-print technology
* Launch of multilingual Wikipedia general survey in mid-October
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Thomas Dalton writes:
> To be more precise, it's as if you showed up to a programming
> conference and said that to someone who had just dismissed OOP
> principles as unimportant.
When you say "to be more precise," can you say what you mean, precisely?
It doesn't seem "more precise" to imply that anyone has dismissed
moral rights as unimportant.
A more careful reading -- yes, I know it is unreasonable to expect
careful reading -- might lead to an understanding that the particular
problem set relating to moral-rights jurisprudence is not terribly
applicable in a context in which the free licenses in question strive
for attribution (rather than attempting to dodge attribution or
misattribute creative works). Similarly, greater care might lead one
not to make grand pronouncements either about the number or diversity
of lawyers required to address the moral-rights issue (especially if
one is not a lawyer and not an expert on the issue), or about the
qualifications of a particular lawyer about whose background one may
know next to nothing.
Just a suggestion. (And I encourage anyone who hears me making
pronouncements about object-oriented programming to take me down a
notch.)
--Mike
Gregory Maxwell writes:
> Another point about attribution which we need to be mindful of is the
> proposed Orphan Works law in the US which is getting closer and closer
> to passing: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?
> bill=s110-2913
>
> I expect it to make attentive copyright holders far more aggressive.
> We can expect to get perfunctory complaints about many of our valid
> fair use images just as we already receive from trademark holders.
I would be surprised if the Orphan Works Act led to copyright holders'
being more aggressive, especially since the institutional copyright
industry is already hyper-aggressive. (They oppose the Orphan Works
Act.) The thrust of the Act is to address cases in which copyright
holders are difficult or impossible to determine. Aggressive
copyright holders almost by definition fail to fall into that class.
--Mike
geni writes:
> Worse than that. Technically most EU countries should have identical
> moral rights clauses. Implementation of the clauses is inconsistent
> and in many cases there is a lack of caselaw (although the lawsuit
> over changing a bridge design failed).
There's a reason for the lack of caselaw, even though implementation
among Berne signatory countries is inconsistent -- it's that truly
problematic moral-rights problems don't come up very much. What's
more, even if our own follow-through on attribution requirements of
GFDL (or CC-BY-SA) is less than it might be, the thing to note is that
we're actively trying to maintain attribution, even though a massively
collaborative environment such as Wikpedia makes such an effort both
difficult and (arguably) less than meaningful. Most moral-rights
disputes arise in cases where someone is actively trying to *remove*
attribution or to *misattribute* a work. That's not normally our
problem.
> For the average wikipedian on the ground the issue is less one of what
> you can handle or find people to handle (I generally assume that the
> foundation can deal with pretty much any copyright issues should it
> have to)
It's nice to know somebody assumes that.
--Mike
Michael Bimmler writes:
> Thomas, Mike, as much as I'm amused by this debate, can we drop this
> here? It's getting unproductive, really.
I confess I am amused too, which is why I indulge myself. It's a bit
as if I were to show up at a programming conference and say something
like "You know, that C++ stuff is very complicated -- it requires a
knowledge of object-oriented-programming principles, you know."
If I were really self-important, I'd repeat this C++ pronunciamento
two or three times, ideally in front of a large group.
--m