Great to see this :-) The community tech team is an amazing initiative. And
agree all items listed have the potential to have significant impact.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
As of July 2015 I am a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation
My emails; however, do not represent the official position of the WMF
Please refer to this link,
http://www.communia-association.org/2015/12/04/1761/ .
Sounds like a more restricted condition for copyright holder. I am
wondering is there any feedback from WMF or the UK chapter?
Liang
Dear Wikimedians,
In view of the upcoming holidays, we would like to inform you that the
Wikimedia Conference 2016 organizing team will be out of the office
from December 23, 2015 until January 11, 2016.
If you need assistance or have any questions, we recommend you to
contact us until December 21, 2015. Otherwise we will respond to your
emails as soon as possible upon our return.
We will do our best to send the documents which are needed for the
visa application process to everyone who registers until Thursday,
December 17, 2015 11:59 p.m. (Central European Time). Should you
register after this deadline, we will prepare and send the documents
to you as soon as possible after our return in January (~January 15,
2016).
If your affiliation is eligible to attend the conference and you have
been selected to be your affiliate’s delegate, then please be kindly
reminded to register until Friday, January 15, 2016. Please be aware
that only registered participants are allowed to attend the Wikimedia
Conference. You can register via the following link:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2016/Registration#Regi…
All the best,
Wenke & Daniela
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
Hello,
Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program
would like to share with you the newsletter below for the month of November
2015. We look forward to hear any feedback or input you might have.
Wikimedia communities of four (Kannada, Marathi, Odia and Telugu) out of
the five Focus Language Areas joined for the IRC-based meetings on 29
November 2015 to discuss about the next set of activities for the newly
recruited Programme Associates.
Marathi:
(https://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/विकिपीडिया:आय.आर.सी._चॅनेल/२९-११-२०१५)
Four Marathi Wikipedians Santosh Dahiwal (User:संतोष दहिवळ),
User:Suyogaerospace and Santosh Shingare (User:Cherishsantosh) along with
Wikimedian and CIS-A2K member Abhinav Garule (User:Abhinavgarule) joined
for the IRC. The discussions were focused on CIS-A2K's work from July 2015
and Marathi Wikipedia work plan (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Work_plan_July_2015_-_June_2016/Mar…).
Wikimedians joined in the discussion proposed for diversifying the outreach
and take it to many other cities and towns apart from the usual places like
Mumbai or Pune. Santosh Dahiwal, administrator of Marathi Wikipedia
appreciated encouraged to keep posting about every Marathi Wikipedia
community activity and invite for various activities organized in different
places.
Kannada:
(https://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ:ಸಮ್ಮಿಲನ/೨೦)
Thanks to the seven Kannada Wikimedians User:Omshivaprakash, Deepu, Yogesh
(User:Yogesh), Vishwa, User:M G Harish along with CIS-A2K team members
Anant (User:Ananth subray), Pavanaja (User:Pavanaja) who participated in
this meeting to discuss about priorities for the community and how to take
the programmatic works forward with the help of the new Programme
Associate. The community members suggested for more work related
documentation for the community to know about programmatic work by CIS-A2K
e.g. books relicensed and digitized.
Odia:
(https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ:IRC/29-11-2015)
Four Odia Wikimedians User:Akala Kushmanda and User:Swagatika91 along with
Sailesh (User:Saileshpat) and Subhashish Panigrahi (User:Psubhashish) who
are part of CIS-A2K program joined in the IRC suggested for creating
monthly offline meetups and online campaigns where the latter could help
recruit new editors from Twitter , Facebook and other social media. They
also emphasized on featuring Wikimedians in local newspapers and websites
so the Wikimedians and other potential Wikimedians would be encouraged to
contribute. There is a potential for the Odia Wikiquote (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikiquote_Oriya)
which is in Incubator at this moment and there was a request to make it
live. The Wikimedians also suggested for creating more projects for quality
improvement of article. One of the participants of the IRC also showed
interest in supporting outreach in the southern and western part of Odisha.
Telugu:
(
https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/వెబ్_ఛాట్/సమావేశం_16/సంభాష…
)
Five Telugu Wikimedians JVRK Prasad, Arjuna Rao.C, Sujatha.T., Pranay Raj
Vangari and Viswanadh.B.K. along with CIS-A2K program members Pavan and
Rahim joined in this IRC. Arjuna emphasized on conducting a reader survey
to assess various interest areas for the Telugu Wikipedia. Wikipedians also
shared how important it is to develop a tool that could ease in extracting
text from scanned books using Google OCR so that could be useful for Telugu
Wikisource. Improving quality of Telugu author Sayeed Naseer Ahmad's books
that exist on Wikisource was also discussed. Most of the participants
expressed interest in collaborating for celebrating Telugu Wikipedia Day
and Telugu Wikipedia 12th anniversary. The community members asked to share
the statistics on success of the "how-to" video tutorials that the CIS-A2K
program created for Hindi (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Learn_to_edit_Hindi_Wikipedia)
and Kannada (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/category:Learn_to_edit_Kannada_Wikipedia)
so that the Telugu community could assess if the similar tutorial could be
made for Telugu Wikipedia.
== Events ==
⬤ Community discussion for making Tulu Wikipedia live (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/making-tulu-wikipedia-live): CIS-A2K
Programme Officer Rahmanuddin Shaik visited Mangalore on October 28 and 29
and again on November 5 and 6, 2015. During his visit he interacted with
Wikipedians for making the Tulu Wikipedia live. There were discussions on
translations of system messages that appear on Wikipedia interface,
creating templates pages and adding images. Around 79 strings were
translated on Translatewiki.net, the community project for MediaWiki
localization, and about 500 strings were approved. This event was organised
at Tulu Bhavana, Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Akademy. The director of the
institution was part of the meeting who agreed for relicensing lower
resolution cover pages of their published books and metadata of 157 volumes
of books under Creative Commons licenses, and share detailed information of
Tulu Sahitya Akademy award winners which would add close to 100 biography
articles on Tulu Wikipedia.
⬤ Open Source India 2015 (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-india-2015): On 19 and 20
November, the twelfth Open Source India event was held at NIMHANS
Convention Centre in Bangalore. On 19 November Subhashish Panigrahi
attended the event behalf of CIS-A2K.
⬤ FUEL GILT Conferences 2015: (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2015): FUEL GILT
Conference 2015 was held at Tamil Virtual Academy, Anna University Campus,
Gandhi Mandapam Road, Kottur in Chennai between 20-22 November 2015.
CIS-A2K Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi participated the conference
as a speaker and discussed about "Consensus in localization in a
multi-stakeholder community: Wikimedia as a case study" (
http://slides.com/psubhashish/consensus/fullscreen).
== Blog posts ==
⬤ Shaik, Rahmanuddin and Hasan, Tanveer. Konkani-language books from
Konkani-language culture center Mannd Sobhaann to enrich Konkani Wikipedia (
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/konkani-language-books-from-konkani-l…),
1 November 2015
== Media coverage ==
1. शंभर वर्षांपूर्वीच्या पुस्तकांचे होणार डिजिटायझेशन (
http://epaper.lokmat.com/newsview.aspx?eddate=11/11/2015&pageno=2&edition=4…),
Lokmat, 11 November 2015;
2. Dr. Pavanaja featured in Vijayavani, Vijayavani (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/dr-pavanaja-featured-in-vijayavani), 16
November 2015;
3. तेसर फ्यूल कॉन्फरेंस आओर मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न (
http://www.esamaad.com/regular/2015/11/13714-third-fuel-conference-complete…),
esamaad, 19 November 2015;
4. ଅନ୍ଲାଇନରେ ପଢ଼ିହେବ ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ ପ୍ରସାଦ ଦାସଙ୍କ ୩୦ଟି ବହି (
http://sambadepaper.com/Details.aspx?id=209489&boxid=2111679), Sambad, 19
November 2015;
5. तीसरा फ्यूल कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न (
http://surkhiyan.com/fuel-gilt-conference/), 23 November 2015;
6. तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन चेन्नई में संपन्न (
http://aajtak.intoday.in/story/third-fuel-conference-completed-in-chennai-1…),
Aaj Tak, 24 November 2015
7. भाषाई कंप्यूटिंग के मानक बनाने के लिए चेन्नई में हुआ तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट (
http://www.outlookhindi.com/media/social-media/third-fuel-jilt-in-chennai-t…),
Outlook, 26 November 2015
== Team updates ==
After several rounds of the selection committees formed for Kannada, Odia
and Telugu, the CIS-A2K team finally got on-board Anant Subray (User:Ananth
subray), Sailesh Patnaik (User:Saileshpat) and Pavan Santosh (User:Pavan
santhosh.s) as Programme Associates (PAs) for the three fore-mentioned
languages out of the five Focus Language Areas. The three PAs will be
working closely with their respective language communities based on several
community priorities and implement the work plans. Anant is a Kannada
Wikipedian who joined the community during the WikiProject Christ
University (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/WikiProject_Christ_University)
outreach and later became a Campus Ambassador mentoring his junior batch
students for contributing to Kannada Wikipedia and Wikisource. Active since
2012, Sailesh is a long time Odia Wikimedian and is active in Odia
Wikipedia outreach. He has also participated actively in various national
projects like Wiki Loves Food (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Food) and is part of the
organizing team of WikiConference India 2016 (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016) and various
other global initiatives. Pavan is the first Telugu Individual Engagement
Grant (IEG) recipient for his IEG "Making Telugu content accessible" (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IEG/Making_telugu_content_acces…)
which was aimed at creating a catalog of Telugu books available in the
Digital Library of India (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Library_of_India). Pavan has been one
of the keen organizers of the monthly Telugu Wikimedia community meetups in
Hyderabad, Telengana apart from participating in various community
initiatives. All the PAs went through an orientation by the core team at
CIS-A2K for five days. Kannada Wikimedians Pavithra H, Yogesh and
Omshivaprakash along with Tamil Wikimedian and Wikimedia India's (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India) Program Director
Ravishankar A. joined in an evening during the orientation to share their
advise to the PAs. Kannada Wikimedian Kiran Ravikumar also joined in
another day and spent time with the PAs advising on various aspects of
their work.
== Resources created ==
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tulu_Wikipedia_Tutorial_01.webm
⬤
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikipediaTutorial01-With-Audio.…
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial02.webm
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial03.webm
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial04.webm
Tulu Wikipedia tutorial (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/tulu-wikipedia-tutorial): A series of
"how-to" tutorials were created by Pavanaja for new editors of the Tulu
Wikipedia (https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/tcy/ಮುಖ್ಯ_ಪುಟ). The
tutorials explain in details about various aspects of Wikipedia editing
like creating account/logging in, Wikipedia basics and wiki mark-up,
editing Wikipedia and adding citations. The Tulu Wikipedia is in incubation
at this moment and CIS-A2K is helping build a community in Mangalore and
places around Mangalore where a significant Tulu speaking community
live.
This newsletter is also available on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/November_2015
Thank you
Tito Dutta
CIS-A2K Programme Associate
See 2015 in four minutes! Our year-in-review video, #Edit2015 is now live.
A collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation's Victor Grigas and
several volunteer editors, #Edit2015 celebrates the individuals all over
the world who've invested thousands, if not millions, of hours in curating
Wikimedia sites.
Please watch it and share on social media! You can simply paste the YouTube
link into a tweet or Facebook post and share with your friends.
Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Edit_2015.webm
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rm1LKcHD1VE
Blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/15/edit2015
Enjoy!
--
Ed Erhart
Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation
Dear Colleagues,
I’m writing to seek your feedback on a consultation to improve Wikimania,
open until 18 January 2016. The goals are to (1) build a shared
understanding of the value of Wikimania to help guide conference planning
and evaluation, and (2) gather broad community input on what new form(s)
Wikimania could take (starting in 2018).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Towards_a_New_Wikimania
Feedback on both of these goals is welcome on a survey provided on the
project page, and can also be given on the project discussion page. In
addition, I also invite you to share any personal experiences you have had
at at a Wikimedia movement conference, including Wikimania. We plan to
compile and share back outcomes from this consultation in February.
I look forward to working with you to develop a Wikimania that better
serves the needs of your communities.
With thanks,
Ellie Young
WMF Events Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
There are at long last indications that UK copyright law is moving in
the direction of the WMF and Commons policy [1] that "faithful copies of
public domain works are themselves in the public domain" - in other
words that faithful photographic reproductions of old, out of copyright
artworks such as paintings do not create an enforceable new copyright
for the photographer. The UK Intellectual Property Office has recently
updated its copyright advice notice [2] to include the following:
Are digitised copies of older images protected by copyright?
''Simply creating a copy of an image won't result in a new copyright in
the new item. However, there is a degree of uncertainty regarding
whether copyright can exist in digitised copies of older images for
which copyright has expired. Some people argue that a new copyright may
arise in such copies if specialist skills have been used to optimise
detail, and/or the original image has been touched up to remove
blemishes, stains or creases.''
''However, according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which
has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that
is original in the sense that it is the author's own 'intellectual
creation'. Given this criteria, it seems unlikely that what is merely a
retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as
'original'. This is because there will generally be minimal scope for a
creator to exercise free and creative choices if their aim is simply to
make a faithful reproduction of an existing work.''
This official advice from a UK Government agency is useful as it
recommends a strikingly different approach from the one that has been
taken over many years by the UK courts, namely that a new copyright can
very easily be created merely by the 'skill and labour' involved in
taking any sort of photograph (the copyright practitioner's text,
Copinger & Skone James, says that "in terms of what is original for the
purpose of determining whether copyright subsists in a photograph, the
requirement of originality is low and may be satisfied by little more
than the opportunistic pointing of the camera and the pressing of the
shutter button.")
Although the IPO advice is not binding on the UK courts, it will be of
useful persuasive value. It's interesting that the official view being
taken is that the European Court of Justice has effectively replaced the
very low bar of "Was sufficient skill and labour applied?" with the
higher one of "Is it the author's own intellectual creation?''. The
2009 CJEU decision in Infopaq [3] is gaining traction.
Communia have published a blog post [4] that is worth reading.
Michael Maggs
Chair, Wikimedia UK
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-Art_tag
[2]
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4…
[3] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:62008CJ0005
[4] http://www.communia-association.org/2015/12/04/1761/
The NPG may be *less than delighted*:
news: http://www.communia-association.org/2015/12/04/1761/
PDF: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4…
Are digitised copies of older images protected by copyright?
Simply creating a copy of an image won’t result in a new
copyright in the new item. However, there is a degree
of uncertainty regarding whether copyright can exist in
digitised copies of older images for which copyright has
expired. Some people argue that a new copyright may
arise in such copies if specialist skills have been used
to optimise detail, and/or the original image has been
touched up to remove blemishes, stains or creases.
However, according to the Court of Justice of the
European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright
can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the
sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’.
Given this criteria, it seems unlikely that what is merely
a retouched, digitised image of an older work can
be considered as ‘original’. This is because there will
generally be minimal scope for a creator to exercise
free and creative choices if their aim is simply to make a
faithful reproduction of an existing work.
- d.
As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the
developer summit, I am hosting two IRC office hours back to back [2] on
December 21st from 20:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC.
The previous office hour [3] focused on ways to reconnect to the shared
hosting community. This time two very different topics will be discussed.
*The open questions in the descriptions below are by no means meant to be
exhaustive, nor are they expected to be fully answered by the end of those
office hours. They are just examples to clarify the context of the titles.*
*Shared hosting technical alternatives*
During the last office hour on the topic of non-technical mediawiki
installs, people seemed very eager to discuss new technical solutions that
could offer a viable alternative to shared hosting.
Could new technologies like containers allow for performance/cost ratios
comparable to shared hosting? If not, how big would the penalty be? How
much maintenance would we have to do to keep deployment on such platforms
up to date?
Shared hosting has always suffered from the fact that it's not used at the
WMF and therefore only maintained on a volunteer basis. How would things be
different with new tech?
*Shared hosting support definition*
Shared hosting usage is already a reality and we should do a better job
accounting for it. Currently mediawiki contributors have no visibility in
what should be supported and to what degree. Our browser support is graded
and very clear, meanwhile our server-side support is not:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility
Should we model our server-side compatibility guidelines on the graded
system we have for browsers? If so, what would that look like? How could we
break down "shared hosting support" into more discreet server-side
capabilities?
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.20…