Dear Wikimedia community,
Here are the latest news from Wikimedia France.
First of all, we are devastated by the passing of our estimate trustee Mrs.
Louise Merzeau on July 15th. Louise had been appointed by the Board in
February with the ambition to learn and profit from her deep knowledge of
and academic research on the commons. Sadly, the current problems of
Wikimedia France did not give her the opportunity to get seriously involved
with the movement before she passed away.
This sad news reached us a few days after the resignation of Mr. Guillaume
Goursat, treasurer, from the Board.
The Board has appointed a new treasurer, Mr. Florian Pépellin, who already
had a mandate from the Board for banking and financial matters. The
executive team (chair, vice-chair and secretary) remains otherwise
unchanged.
The Board has also acknowledged the demand for a general assembly expressed
by more than 25% of our members. This assembly will take place on September
9th and will be the opportunity for members to elect six new Board members
to fill the vacant seats, and discuss current issues. The regular General
Assembly where the certified and audited accounts are presented and voted
will be held in October as usual. Six Board seats will also be renewed then.
Wikimédia France will receive a site visit from the Wikimedia Foundation on
the 25th and 26th of July.
Best regards,
Édouard, on behalf of the board of Wikimédia France
Dear all,
I would like to draw your attention to our freshly published APG
Progress Report. It covers the first six months of 2017 and highlights
include:
* Learnings from our online campaigns to attract and retain new
editors for Wikipedia
* Experimenting with a new Wikipedia Hotline
* Developing features to increase data quality on Wikidata
* What you can do when Wiktionary data is integrated into Wikidata
* Making the German-speaking Community Technical Wishlist Survey more accessible
* How we are bursting the Brussels bubble
* Why WMDE dabbles in Open Science
As always, we wanted to share some of our most important learnings
with the movement. So, check it out:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2016-2017_round_1/Wiki…
Happy reading,
Nicole
--
Nicole Ebber
Adviser International Relations
Movement Strategy Track Lead: Organized Groups
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 27/029/42207.
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The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle has a number of objects on loan
from the British Museum,[3] and it appears that it is only those
objects that have any restrictions on photography. I took photographs
of two of these (without any flash), as the restrictions are
shockingly obvious cases of copyfraud, and not for any reason that
might protect the works from damage.[1][2] It seems incomprehensible
as to why the British Museum would ever want to make copyright claims
over ~2,000 year old works especially considering they are not a
money-making commercial enterprise, but a National institute and
charity, with a stated objective[4] that "the collection should be put
to public use and be freely accessible".
Does anyone have any ideas for action, or contacts in the Museum, that
might result in a change of how loans from the BM are controlled? I'm
wondering if the most effective way forward is to make some social
media fuss, to ensure the Trustees of the museum pay attention. The
reputational risk the apparent ignorance over copyright by the BM
loans management team seems something that would be easy to correct,
so changes to policy are overdue. My own experience of polite private
letters to a Museum's lawyer demonstrates that you may as well save
hours of volunteer time by filing these in the bin, compared to the
sometimes highly effective use of a few pointed tweets written in a
few minutes and shared publicly and widely across social media.
Those of us Wikimedians who work closely with GLAMs tend to shy away
from any controversy, wanting the organizations to move towards
sharing our open knowledge goals for positive reasons. I'm happy to
try those types of collegiate ways of partnering, however drawing a
few lines in the sand by highlighting embarrassing case studies, might
mean we make timely progress while activist dinosaurs like me are
still alive to see it happen.
Links
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_2nd_century_bronze_j…
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Fortuna_statue,_with…
3. Tullie House, Roman Frontier exhibition:
http://web.archive.org/web/20161030151228/www.tulliehouse.co.uk/galleries-c…
4. British Museum "about us":
http://web.archive.org/web/20170714042800/www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/ma…
5. Commons village pump discussion:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#British_Museum_and_…
Contacts
* https://twitter.com/britishmuseum
* https://twitter.com/TullieHouse
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Hey Folks,
We are very happy to announce the top 10 winning photos[1] of Wiki Loves Earth Bangladesh 2017. These 10 photos will compete in the international stage of the competition.
Bangladesh has taken part in the international Wiki Loves Earth competition for the first time this year. During the competition, a total of 191 Bangladeshi participants uploaded more than 2000 freely licensed photographs of 40 (of the 51 government listed protected sites of Bangladesh) different protected sites in Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to the volunteers and jurors who were involved in organizing the competition and reviewing the entries.
1. http://wikimedia.org.bd/blog/50-winners-wlebd2017
Cheers,
Nahid Sultan
User:NahidSultan<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NahidSultan> on all Wikimedia Foundation<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation>'s public wikis
Secretary, Wikimedia Bangladesh<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh>
Twitter: @nahidunlimited<https://twitter.com/nahidunlimited>
Hello All!
Daniel and I would like to share some good news:
After talking about it for years, and vetting the draft for months,
it's finally done: the Architecture Committee has adopted a proper charter
defining its purpose, operation, and authority.
You can find the charter here:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Charter <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Committee/Charter>>
The charter among other things defines from where the committee draws its
authority over technical development at the WMF: the committee acts as an
extension of the CTO. This gives the committee a clear role in the foundation's decision
making processes.
The charter also clarifies the scope of TechCom: it is to act as an authority on
technical decisions regarding any official software that serves Wikimedia users.
The committee should be involved in matters regarding such software that are
strategic, cross-cutting, or hard to undo.
The committee has also given itself a new name, to better fit the scope as
defined in the charter: we are now the Wikimedia Technical Committee (TechCom).
Looking forward to working with the technical community to fulfill the charter!
Victoria & Daniel
Barbara Page, a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar and Wikipedian in Residence at
the University of Pittsburgh, has written a blog post[1] for Wikipediocracy
about how the Amazon Echo's Alexa assistant reads out Wikipedia articles in
response to queries. This includes queries that do not specifically ask for
Wikipedia information.
What's the deal with the CC licence here?
To quote from the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Licence identified at the bottom of each English Wikipedia page,
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or
Collections, *You must,* unless a request has been made pursuant to Section
4(a), *keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide,
reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the
Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the
Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a
sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution
("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or
by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the
title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable,
the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work,
unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing
information for the Work*; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the
case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the
Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or
"Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").
Some similar services preface their Wikipedia readings with "According to
Wikipedia, ..." This is at least a minimum amount of attribution. While I
am not a legal expert, I guess it could be construed as an attempt to
comply with the "reasonable to the medium or means" passage above. It also
tells the user where the information comes from, which is useful from the
standpoint of transparency.
But the Amazon Echo appears to include no attribution whatsoever when
providing Wikipedia-based answers. On the face of it, this would seem to
violate the terms of the Creative Commons licence (as well as obscuring the
origin of the information provided). Am I missing something?
Has this ever been the subject of discussions, agreements or understandings
between Amazon and WMF?
Best,
Andreas
[1] http://wikipediocracy.com/2017/07/24/alexa/
Hi,
during long flights, I have often been wondering why there is no
Wikimedia option in in-flight entertainment systems. As I am normally
offline during flights and I normally don't think about in-flight
stuff while on the ground, I never actually asked around, so after a
long flight yesterday, here we go:
Do any of you know of attempts to explore the option(s) to get
Wikimedia content onto in-flight entertainment and similar systems?
Many of them already have educational content, but I am not aware of
anything openly licensed amidst those offerings. Have any of the Kiwix
team looked into this?
Also, many airlines/ ships/ trains and others offer WiFi for a fee -
has the Wikipedia Zero team ever looked into engaging with such
"providers"?
Thanks and cheers,
Daniel
Why stop at read-only content? Why not take advantage of people trapped in
a can for their flight time? You could solicit contributions from people,
most of whom probably have never contributed to Wikipedia before. You could
even gamify it based on competition between those on the same flight, one
flight against another, etc.
The technical difficulty here would be to support a system allowing
revisions from multiple sources with local clones of Wikipedia,
asynchronously, into the "source" Wikipedia. But it would be worth it.
Daren
On Jul 30, 2017 19:01, "James Heilman" <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Amazing idea. I guess one could email them and offer this. Would not add
weight on their end as it is simple digital. The entertainment system would
be completely separate from the flight systems so would not have
significant certification issues.
James
On Sun, Jul 30, 2017 at 4:50 PM, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
wrote:
> I know that KLM included some cuts from Wikipedia articles in their
> onflight system to explain sights from at least San Francisco. Not sure
> whether they made it scale, probably not.
>
> Lodewijk
>
> On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 12:13 AM, Pierre-Selim <pierre-selim(a)huard.info>
> wrote:
>
> > Certification process for the hardware of kiwix might be a tremendous
> pain
> > in the ass.
> >
> > And second point the airline will need a business case to cary more
> weight
> > (count about 3.5% of the weight as extra fuel burn per hour).
> >
> > That said I'd love to use Wikipedia on an IFE.
> >
> > Le 31 juil. 2017 00:02, "Daniel Mietchen" <daniel.mietchen@googlemail.
> com>
> > a écrit :
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > during long flights, I have often been wondering why there is no
> > > Wikimedia option in in-flight entertainment systems. As I am normally
> > > offline during flights and I normally don't think about in-flight
> > > stuff while on the ground, I never actually asked around, so after a
> > > long flight yesterday, here we go:
> > > Do any of you know of attempts to explore the option(s) to get
> > > Wikimedia content onto in-flight entertainment and similar systems?
> > >
> > > Many of them already have educational content, but I am not aware of
> > > anything openly licensed amidst those offerings. Have any of the Kiwix
> > > team looked into this?
> > >
> > > Also, many airlines/ ships/ trains and others offer WiFi for a fee -
> > > has the Wikipedia Zero team ever looked into engaging with such
> > > "providers"?
> > >
> > > Thanks and cheers,
> > >
> > > Daniel
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
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Hi all,
As we have stated in our annual plan [1], “currently, community members
must search many pages and places to stay informed about Foundation
activities and resources.” We have worked in the past two quarters to
create a single point of entry. We call it the Wikimedia Resource Center,
and its alpha version is now live on Meta Wikimedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Resource_Center
As the movement expands to include more affiliates and more programmatic
activities every year, newer Wikimedians are faced with lack of experience
in the movement and its various channels for requesting support. In order
to expand Wikimedia communities’ efforts, we want to provide easy access to
resources that support their very important work. The [[m:Wikimedia
Resource Center]] is a hub designed in response to this issue: it is
intended to evolve into a single point of entry for Wikimedians all over
the world to the variety of resources and types of staff support they may
need to develop new initiatives or also expand existing ones.
This version of the Resource Center is only the beginning. For phase two of
the project, we will enable volunteer Wikimedians to add resources
developed by other individuals or organizations to the Wikimedia Resource
Center, and in phase three, the Wikimedia Resource Center will include
features to better connect Wikimedians to other Wikimedians that can
support them.
We want to hear what you think about this prototype and our plans for it!
If you have comments about the Wikimedia Resource Center, you can submit
your feedback publicly, on the Talk Page, or privately, via a survey hosted
by a third party, that shouldn’t take you more than 4 minutes to complete.
A feedback button is on the top right corner on every page of the hub.
Looking forward to more collaborations!
Best,
María
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2016-2017/…
--
María Cruz
Communications and Outreach Project Manager, Community Engagement
