http://www.good.is/post/the-most-important-occupy-wall-street-photographer-…
An interview with David Shankbone that's actually about the joys of
contributing good, useful, original free content to the general
commons. A very good advertisement for the concept.
"You may not know his name, but if you've been paying attention to the
Occupy Wall Street protests for the past several weeks, you've no
doubt come across David Shankbone's photographs. They've run in New
York magazine, Gawker, Business Insider, and The New York Observer,
and here on GOOD—not to mention on countless blogs from around the
world. With so many major outlets running his OWS documentation, one
would think Shankbone would have amassed a small fortune in the past
several weeks. And he probably would have, if he charged any money for
his photographs.
For years now, well before OWS was a glimmer in anyone's eye,
Shankbone, a native New Yorker, has been taking photos of famous
people and events and uploading them to his Flickr account and
Wikimedia Commons. From those sites, all of his pictures are in the
public domain by way of Creative Commons licensing, meaning anyone can
download them and use them for free for whatever purposes they'd like.
Shankbone believes it adds to the greater good to distribute his work
this way, and if any photographer represents the spirit of OWS, it's
him."
- d.
Hey Everyone,
I wanted to let everyone know that earlier today, we launched the Feedback
Dashboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard
This dashboard is a running list of comments that new editors submitted via
Moodbar (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MoodBar). The idea behind this
feature is to capture, in a lightweight fashion, the editing experience of
folks that are just starting out. After either attempting or submitting an
edit, new editors get an invitation in the upper left hand corner inviting
them to provide feedback on their editing experience. The Feedback
Dashboard provides a feed of these comments.
This feature is still experimental, so please excuse any wonkiness and let
us know of any bugs you find.
Take a look to find out what makes new editors Happy, Sad, or Confused!
Also, if you'd like to either comment on the feature or participate in its
further development, please leave a message here [1] or here [2].
Howie
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Feedback_Dashboard
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:New_editor_feedback
Hey guys
So, Office Hours for the AFT is now over; thanks to all who attended. The
logs can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2011-10-27 for
those who missed it - we're talking about trying to hold a second session at
a more North America-friendly time. Is that something that interests anyone?
Meanwhile, the plans for the new AFT version can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFT5 - if you have any opinions, just
drop a note on the talkpage. All comments and perspectives are welcome :).
Thanks
Oliver Keyes
Community Liason, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
On 10/27/2011 6:43 AM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> On 26 October 2011 14:15, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
>> > And apparently that's fine, if you are making a faithful reproduction
>> > of the image in its original context. ?But tagging an image PD does
>> > not imply "you may only make faithful reproductions of this image in
>> > their original context".
> However in some cases that is what it can actually mean.
Exactly so.
Remember - much of what we now define as copyright in law is based on
our morality and ability to make decisions for the good of all. Our
intent is the basis of the doctrines of Fair Use.
Forwarding from Wikimedia Italy, mailing list (we have an ongoing project
called WikiAfrica with an association called Lettera27
Dear all,
I'm forwarding a call for applications for a Wikipedian in residence in
Cape Town. It is a one year position, offering expenses refund and implies
living in Cape Town. Information can be found below. Please do not hesitate
to forward the message to anyone may be interested.
Marco (Cruccone)
p.s. I am not really involved with this call, so do not send applications to
me!
*Da: *Isla Haddow-Flood <islahf(a)africacentre.net>
*Oggetto: **Re: WikiAfrica Wikipedian-in-Residence*
*Data: *27 ottobre 2011 08:08:03 GMT+02:00
*
*
Dear All
The wikipedian-in-residence call that I sent through two weeks ago has been
vetted by the Wikipedian cultural partners group and has been very
enthusiastically accepted. It is now ready to be released. Please find below
the link to the call:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18yAZxGcBuRO2Zp7vHGHV0q5aM1XaCzqIRSgQWm8…
The Africa Centre will be funding this position. Please can you get it out
to your networks so that we can get as many applications as possible.
I look forward to working closely with you in the future.
Warmest
Isla
: :
Isla Haddow-Flood
Marketing and Communications Manager
Project Manager : WikiAfrica
*a.* 1st Floor, 44 Long Street, Cape Town *w.** *www.africacentre.net
*t.* +27 21 422 0468 *f. *+27 21 422 0446 *skype. *islahaddow
The Africa Centre is a non-profit social innovator that creates platforms
to explore contemporary Pan-African artistic practice and knowledge
creation as catalysts for social change.
_______________________________________________
Mailing list dell'associazione Wikimedia Italia
Associazione(a)wikimedia.it
http://mailman.wikimedia.it/listinfo/associazione
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:11:57 +0100
> From: Oliver Keyes <scire.facias(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <CAPYupWA34CujYan_vV_cHgYxWfCT3EJnb4d-Nrav_U20QejZ1A(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> No, the data will remain; you can find it at
> http://toolserver.org/~catrope/articlefeedback/ (we really need to
> advertise
> that more widely, actually).
>
> To be clear, we're not talking about junking the idea; we will still have
> an
> "Article Feedback Tool" that lets readers provide feedback to editors. The
> goal is more to move away from a subjective rating system, and towards
> something the editors can look at and go "huh, that's a reasonable
> suggestion as to how to fix the article, I'll go do that" or "aw, that's
> really nice! I'm glad they liked it so much"
>
> O.
>
>
As someone who was never exactly a fan of the Article Feedback Tool I'm glad
to hear that the current version is to be canned. The sort of subjective
ratings it could produce were never going to be useful at improving
articles, certainly not useful enough to justify the screen space. My fear
was that it might divert people from improving articles to complaining about
them. Since we skipped a key stage in the testing we will never know whether
it did that. I didn't realise at the time that it was going to abuse our
readers trust by collecting shed loads of data that we weren't going to use.
We took a big risk in implementing the Article Feedback Tool without first
testing to see whether it would do more harm than good. It is hard to tell
in hindsight whether it has been negative or neutral in effect. Yes
recruitment of new editors has fallen sharply - September's new editors on
EN wiki are down to levels not seen since 2005
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution but
things were on the decline anyway so we don't know whether and to what
extent the Article Feedback tool exacerbated the trend. My concern about
turning it into something that collects more meaningful comments is that
this could exacerbate the pernicious trend from improving articles to
tagging them for others to improve. I appreciate that there are various
competing theories as to why the community went off the boil circa 2007, but
for me and anyone else who considers that the trend to template rather than
improve articles has been a major cause of community decline, an "improved"
version of the Article Feedback Tool is a worrying prospect.
Can we make sure that any new generation Article Feedback tool is properly
tested, and that testing includes:
1. Implementing it on a random group of articles and comparing them with
a control sample to see which group of articles had the more edits from
newbies;
2. Whether the collecting of feedback on ways to improve the article
generates additional comments or diverts some editors away from actually
fixing the article.
3. Which group of articles recruited the most new editors to the pedia.
Please don't implement it if the testing shows that it diverts people from
fixing articles to pointing out things that others can fix.
On a broader note I suggested some time ago that for the community to give
meaningful input into article development we need a process for the
community to give feedback on the priority of various potential
developments. Wikimania does something like that in the way the program is
put together. The image filter "referendum" came close in that it asked
people to rate the image filter for importance, unfortunately it didn't
include other proposals so that people could put them in order of relevant
importance (we also need a quite separate question for whether you think
something is worth doing at all). In your new role as liaison between the
community and the development team please could you initiate something like
that, so that those of us who would give a higher priority to global
watchlists or enhancing catalot so that it works on uncategorised articles
can say so?
Regards
WereSpielChequers
On 10/25/2011 2:57 PM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> You've made quite a few incorrect assumptions there.
>
> Of course Commons editors should be deciding which images are PD. But
> when there is a dispute, it makes no sense for people who don't even
> know what a derivative work and an underlying work are, to be
> discussing the applicable law.
>
> Anyway, the deletion process obviously doesn't work. File:"Appreciate
> America. Come On Gang. All Out for Uncle Sam" (Mickey Mouse)" - NARA -
> 513869.tif is clearly not public domain. And File:"Appreciate
> America. Come On Gang. All Out for Uncle Sam" (Mickey Mouse)" - NARA -
> 513869 - cropped and tidied.png is probably a copyvio. Yet both
> remain, despite deletion discussions, marked as public domain. (The
> deletion discussion over the latter is especially humorous.)
It is fair use - here's my 2 cents worth on why.
The purpose of this image was the sale of war bonds - not the display of
a character whose image is owned by the Walt Disney Company. As a piece
of history it is NOT a derivative use of Mickey Mouse. If someone were
to remove the mouse image from context and try to pawn it off as being
ok to use in unrelated creations, they would probably be sued - because
that might be a derivative use.
NARA has many images of war bonds collateral and all were commissioned
by or for the U.S. government - which means they are public domain
unless otherwise specified. Walt Disney gave up control of this image in
this context for the public good, as did everyone in the entertainment
industry. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_during_World_War_II#P…
Hey guys
So, on Thursday we're going to be holding an Office Hours session on IRC to
discuss the Article Feedback Tool and what we're planning to do with it -
namely, scrapping it and replacing it with an entirely new version ;).
Attending will be Fabrice Florin, the contractor leading development on the
new version, Howie Fung, the WMF's product manager, and myself. If you're
interested in the AFT, whether because you think the existing version is
good or because you think it's really bad, we'd love for you to attend -
every opinion and viewpoint is welcome. The session will be held in
#wikimedia-office at 19:00 GMT/UTC, and I hope to see a lot of you there :).
Thanks
Oliver Keyes
Community Liason, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation