Wikimedia-l March 2009

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

133 participants
93 discussions

Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing transition: opposing points of view
by Mike Godwin 21 Mar '09

21 Mar '09

Milos writes: > > Again, personally, I don't have problems with it. However, I think > that the present construction of the attribution issue is far from > well defined and that it leaves WMF projects in extremely vulnerable > position. Just a small group of malicious persons may make a real mess > with attribution conditions. And probability for that is huge. I disagree that there is a "huge" probability of legal exposure with regard to this question. I follow moral-rights jurisprudence reasonably closely, and I have yet to see any reason to believe that the risk of legal action against the Wikimedia Foundation (or anyone else) is going to be increased by the new licensing scheme. (Indeed, if the probability were huge, we would already have seen such cases, since the GFDL prescriptions are more exacting than the CC-BY-SA prescriptions.) If something is not legally valid, it may not pass as an argument at > the court. I'm known to be risk-averse with regard to legal exposure for the Foundation, but I am not terribly troubled by the prospect you raise here. Moral-rights doctrine is grounded in assumptions about authorship that don't map well to massive collaborative enterprises like Wikipedia. Explaining to a court how we do handle attribution in the context of such enterprises -- including the fact that we make an effort to do reasonable attribution -- should convince most reasonable courts that the purposes for which moral-rights doctrine was invented are being served. I lose sleep over other kinds of legal issues relating to Wikimedia projects, but not this one. --Mike

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[Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
by Erik Moeller 21 Mar '09

21 Mar '09

Here's a first crack at revised attribution language. When the language is completely finalized, I'll send a separate note explaining some of our reasoning for this general approach in more detail. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you could point out any bugs in this specific language, given its intent which should be self-evident. To keep the discussion focused, please read it from the perspective of a "from scratch" attribution model, i.e., imagine that a new encyclopedia wiki that you'd contribute to had these terms. Which problems would they cause? Are there specific third party uses that would be significantly hampered by these terms? Thanks for any constructive feedback, Erik Attribution: To re-distribute an article page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by, at your choice, including a) a link (URL) to the article or articles you are re-using, b) a link to an alternative online copy which is freely accessible and conforms with the license and includes a list a list of all authors, or c) such a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) Rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) that are the result of substantive collaborations between at least five people can be credited in the same fashion, but must otherwise be attributed in the manner specified by the uploader. These attribution requirements apply to content developed and uploaded by the Wikimedia community. Text and rich media contributions that come from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you on the article or the description page for the file(s) in question. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Project to create offline-wikipedia DVD distribution
by shantanu choudhary 20 Mar '09

20 Mar '09

Hello all, I am working on this project from past few months http://code.google.com/p/offline-wikipedia/, i have presented a talk related to this in freed.in 09 too. My aim with this project is: - To create DVD distribution for English wikipedia up to the standards that it can make match to http://download.wikimedia.org/dvd.html. - Making it easy to install and usable straight from DVD. Target Audience are: - Those who don't have Internet access. - Those who want to access content to wikipedia irrespective of Internet connection. - Those who use existing proprietary encyclopedias available in market. Present status: - Apart from source code hosted at google, whole setup is also available at http://92.243.5.147/offline-wiki there are two parts, for complete English wikipedia you have to get blocks.tgz and offline-wikipedia.tgz, there are instructions in README file available there. There is also also a small prototype sample.tar.bz2 available, in case one wants to check the quality of work. - I am following approach taken by http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html<http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/%7Ettsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html>, but with some difference, i am using python to convert wiki-text to html and django for server. - As of now, with XML dumps provided by media-wiki, last year's October dump was 4.1G, i have csv files to locate articles inside those dumps of size ~300M, and small django configuration to access and convert the articles to html, and all this fits into a DVD. Issues at hand: - My python parser to create html out of wiki-text if not perfect, i can replace it with something which is better and existing, but am yet to find that. - To access articles faster i am breaking single bz2 using bz2recover, and it gives me 20k odd files for English content, i am trying to avoid those many files and not compromising with the speed of browsing the articles. - We can replace django server with something more light and simple given they don't have dependency cycles and making it hard to access/use/install. - March 09 English content is 4.6G making things more tight - It is only text content excluding multimedia, pictures(which are improtant part and cant be neglected). Target: - Make it updatebale. - To make it editable. - To manage different categories of articles, and segregation based on that to make refined and better education/learning tool. There are other issues too, i know of other attempts like wiki-taxi, wikipedia-dumpreader, and am trying to patch things to get better results. But don't know why those present parser/attempts never made to that DVD distribution list. I am working to improve it, in the meanwhile any suggestion, feedback, contribution are most welcome. -- Regards Shantanu Choudhary

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[Foundation-l] Fundraising Data Dump
by Rand Montoya 20 Mar '09

20 Mar '09

Hey All-- Just announcing the data dumps for our fundraiser data for the 2008 Annual Fundraiser. As always, we like to provide our anonymitized data to the community...both to show our openness and transparency, but also to ask for the communities help in doing analysis and data crunching to aid our future fundraising efforts. The dumps are located here: http://download.wikipedia.org/fundraising/2008/ The main gift data files are 2008_Fundraiser.csv.gz. The fields are date stamp, USD donation amount, original currency amount, original currency, country of donation, & payment type (paypal/check/cash/dexia/etc.). The main data on the site notices and their effectiveness is 2008_Fundraiser_Tracking.csv.gz. The fields here are template (the name of the site notice we used), tracking source (from where the click came from, campaign (an internal tag), USD converted amount, original currency, and country of donation. If any in the community could help analyze the site notice data for effectiveness, it would be greatly appreciated. Also, I would like to thank the Wikimedia tech team for helping make this possible. If you have any questions, please send them my way. -Rand -- Rand Montoya Head of Community Giving Wikimedia Foundation www.wikimedia.org Email: rand(a)wikimedia.org Phone: 415.839.6885 x615 Fax: 415.882.0495 Cell: 510.685.7030 “At some future time, I hope to have something witty, intelligent, or funny in this space.”

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
by Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 17 Mar '09

17 Mar '09

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: > Michael Snow wrote: >> Anthony wrote: >> >>> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)verizon.net> wrote: >>> >>> >>>> Anthony wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>>> a) a link (URL) to the history page of the article >>>>>> or other page that contains the authorship >>>>>> information of the articles you are re-using. >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> For offline copies, that would likewise be no attribution at all. >>>>> >>>>> >>>> Can we please drop the nonsense that a URL is "no attribution at all" in >>>> an offline context? I've made this point before, but URLs do not >>>> suddenly become devoid of meaning just because you're using a medium >>>> where you can't follow a hyperlink. I could just as soon say that print >>>> media aren't acceptable sources for Wikipedia articles because you can't >>>> check them by following a hyperlink, it's the same logic. >>>> >>>> >>> It's not the same logic at all. A reference, by the very definition of the >>> term, refers to something outside the work itself. >>> >>> >> In its own way, attribution by definition refers to something outside >> the work itself. Even if you reduce me to the contents of my user page >> on Wikipedia, that page is not an actual part of the Wikipedia articles >> I've helped write, and that holds true regardless of what you think is >> the "right" way to be doing attribution. That's even the case online, >> with hyperlinks and all. I suppose it's "not the same logic at all" in >> the same way that a URL is "no attribution at all" then? >> >> --Michael Snow >> >> >> Let me just clarify that as the first person in this thread to use the words "no attribution at all" (as phrased and put within scare quotes), I did *not* argue that it was valid to apply to all forms of attributing by URL. I have specifically argued that linking to history is in my view the only valid form for such an attribution, but it is *both* necessary *and* sufficient. I have pointedly stayed out of the argument on the more metaphysical side of what actually linking by URL entails, as that is best left for those with a strong stomach for nonsense of the non-Carrollian kind. But in the interests of somewhat reducing the ambient tensions in this thread and some others about the same subject, let me offer a recommendation of a wonderful dramatic work, written by Alan Bennett and directed through commission by John Schlesinger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Question_of_Attribution Prunella Scales' depiction of the Queen is wonderfully piercing, with every line delivered allusive on multiple levels. And Edward Fox as the Surveyor of the Queens pictures (Anthony Blunt), comes accross most human, caught in the web of human intrigue, though not without complicity. Yours, semper fi; Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

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[Foundation-l] Anthony subthread (was Proposed revised attribution language)
by Anthony 16 Mar '09

16 Mar '09

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Anthony, > > If you don't mind, let's be specific. I have no problem with being specific, but it probably isn't in my best interest to answer some of your questions. Sorry. Which edits are yours? (Were you User:Anthony?) > Unless something changed recently, I believe I still am [[User:Anthony]]. I've also contributed under many other accounts (mostly single-purpose accounts, though I have a few longstanding sockpuppets, none of which I've used after the release of GFDL 1.3). Your other questions seem to be in the form of a negotiation. I'm willing to negotiate, but only with people who can speak on behalf of the party I'm negotiating with, and not on a public mailing list. I'm perfectly willing to answer questions about which of my rights I feel are being violated, but I'd rather not get into publicly ordering these rights and measuring their importance to me (just as I wouldn't want a used car dealer to know how bad I really want that particular car).

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[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
by Erik Moeller 15 Mar '09

15 Mar '09

Hello all, as some of you may have seen, I've run a small survey over the weekend, scattered via a 5% site-notice on the English Wikipedia for signed in users. The result is a self-selected sample of authors. I'll publish the full anonymous raw data later this week, and I also intend to run it on the German Wikipedia to get some comparative data. Please note that I'll probably turn off the English version before doing so, so if you feel you still want to take the survey yourself, you can do so at: http://survey.wikimedia.org/index.php?sid=69514 We have 570 complete responses so far, of which only 1.23% have stated that they do not edit. On a 5 point scale where 5 represents multiple hours of editing per week 45.79% have answered 5, 18.60% have answered 4, 19.12% have answered 3, and 13.33% have answered 2. The key piece of data is that 80.89% of respondents have answered as their first option that either no credit is needed (12.11%), credit can be given to the community (27.37%), credit can be given by linking to the article (30.18%), or by linking to the version history (11.23%). Most frequently ranked last is no credit (45.79%) and a full list of authors (33.51%). Many people also left choice comments regarding the notion of a full list of authors. Most frequently ranked second-to-last is "link online, full list of authors offline". Only 4.38% ranked "link to the article" last or second-to-last. IMO these results demonstrate a fairly strong and shared understanding in the community of the tension between freedom to re-use and author credit, while also showing that a simple solution, such as credit by linking in all cases, would probably be acceptable to the largest number of contributors. However, I'll leave further interpretation of the results for later. Part of the reason that I want to run the survey in the German Wikipedia is that I anticipate we might see significantly different opinions there, due to a historically stronger emphasis on author credit. But we'll see. :-) More soon, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Licensing update committee open for membership applications
by Erik Moeller 15 Mar '09

15 Mar '09

The licensing update committee is a group of Wikimedia community members appointed by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and facilitate the process of making and potentially implementing a community decision on Wikimedia's licensing terms. If you would like to be involved, please see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Committee I will be processing applications over the weekend to move things forward :-) Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Hungary picture competiton
by Bence Damokos 14 Mar '09

14 Mar '09

Dear All, Pray, allow me to announce the first ever international picture competition of Wikimedia Hungary. [1] The competition officially launching tomorrow, commemorating a Hungarian national holiday[2], is aimed at gathering visual representations - photographs, videos, maps, drawings, SVG graphics, etc. - that have a 'Hungarian aspect'. We are awaiting submissions in the next three months from all over the world. Apart from the endless possibilities of works created in Hungary - e.g. on a summer visit -, we hope to engage the international community of photographers, and graphic artists of Wikimedia Commons. Please take a look at our prepared list of possible works to be created all over the world (including geographical places, museums, events and suggestions for non-photographic contributions). [3] The submissions will be evaluated by the community in a way similar to the Picture of the Year competition, the authors of the best pictures will be awarded a Wikimedia gift package. For more information, please visit the competition's homepage on Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimedia_Hungary_picture_competi… Thank you, Bence Damokos Wikimédia Magyarország http://wiki.media.hu/wiki/Home P.s. I would like to ask you to forward this announcement to all whom it may concern, your local village pumps, chapters' communities, and photographers and people who might be interested in participating. [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimedia_Hungary_picture_competi… [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1848_Hungarian_Revolution [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wikimedia_Hungary_picture_competi…

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[Foundation-l] status of the licensing update
by Ryan Kaldari 14 Mar '09

14 Mar '09

As far as anyone not subscribed to this listserv can tell, the proposal to migrate Wikipedia to Creative Commons is dead in the water. Despite requests for an update on-wiki, no updates have come from the Foundation since January. Looking at the archives here, it looks like the last update was from Erik Möller on February 3rd in which he said that he was hoping to "get some survey data this week, and move quickly after that." Was the survey conducted? Is there a new target date for the proposal? I'll be happy to post an update on-wiki if someone will provide some information as to what the hold-up is. I hope this email doesn't come across as critical or confrontational. I'm simply trying to bridge the communication gap between the Foundation and the community on this important issue. Thanks for your attention. Ryan Kaldari

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Wikimedia-l March 2009