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
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> _______________________________________________
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> wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
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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
Forwarding on the worryingly sensible discussion of this "copyfraud"
from the wikimediauk-l mailing list.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Deryck Chan <deryckchan(a)gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 4:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Copyfraud by the British Museum
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list <wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I agree with Lucy's approach here. We should try to raise this issue
directly and privately with the museum involved to let them know
they've made a mistake with the copyright of the object and ask them
to correct it.
My feeling is that Tullie House is a small museum with limited staff,
so they sloppily applied the "no photo because copyright" tag onto the
stands of any borrowed exhibit and simply forgot that this object is
>200 years old and therefore no longer copyrighted. Starting the
message with "copyfraud" catches Wikimedians' attention, but isn't
helpful towards achieving our outcome of actually getting things into
open copyright or making sure public domain things don't get
restricted.
--Deryck
On 28 July 2017 at 15:52, Richard Symonds <chasemewiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Trigger warning: sensible suggestions, I know those can be upsetting
>
> Might a friendly email to the museum have helped, just explaining the issue and suggesting a solution?
>
> On 28 Jul 2017 14:32, "Fæ" <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the feedback. Just to be clear, this absolutely is a
>> classic example of copyfraud. To say "I see no evidence of copyfraud
>> by the BM" is precisely correct, however this is still copyfraud. It's
>> an example that is very handy for Wikimedia Commons to use to
>> illustrate its own policies with regard to deletions and allowed
>> photographs where there are false claims of copyright being made.
>> Certainly I would be extremely concerned if the Wikimedia Foundation
>> were in any way funding events or projects in partnership with a GLAM
>> institution that continues to propagate copyfraud, rather than taking
>> positive action to stamp it out.
>>
>> We can see by simply looking at the photographs that copyfraud is
>> being committed by the Tullie House Museum, as they give members of
>> the public tickets for the exhibition, and are fully responsible for
>> the exhibition itself. I agree it is not clear yet whether the British
>> Museum have specifically required the Tullie House Museum to use this
>> particular sign and text. That would be a great question to get
>> answered.
>>
>> I find it highly unlikely that the THM have used a notice that was not
>> agreed with the BM, in just the same way as the text of the related
>> labels and posters would be agreed. Despite the same exhibition having
>> many other artefacts from different museums across Europe and several
>> objects on loan from personal collections, I could not see any other
>> signs of this type against anything other than objects on loan from
>> the BM.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Fae
>>
>> On 28 July 2017 at 14:14, Michael Maggs <michael(a)maggs.name> wrote:
>> > While the text on the labels is obviously wrong, I see no evidence of
>> > copyfraud by the BM.
>> >
>> > The labels are most likely placed by the Tullie House Museum in a (confused)
>> > effort to comply with a contractual term of the loan, under which the
>> > receiving museum must not allow photography.
>> >
>> > Such terms are pretty common where works are sent out on loan, sometimes to
>> > protect delicate artworks from flash. Here of course there is no need for
>> > such protection.
>> >
>> > A quiet word with
>> > Tullie House Museum would seem the best way forward, first to see whether
>> > they are indeed required by the BM to prohibit photography, and second to
>> > explain that any such restriction has nothing to do with copyright and
>> > should not be expressed as such. Enquiry and education, not shaming.
>> >
>> > Michael
>> >
>> > On 28 Jul 2017, at 13:11, Richard Nevell <richard.nevell(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > Attempting to embarrass the British Museum is misguided and certainly would
>> > not build bridges for future collaboration.
>> >
>> > On 28 Jul 2017 13:03, "Fæ" <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> 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
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> Wikimedia UK mailing list
>> >> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
>> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
>> >> WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Wikimedia UK mailing list
>> > wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
>> > WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Wikimedia UK mailing list
>> > wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
>> > WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia UK mailing list
>> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
>> WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
> WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
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WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the info. Perhaps the statistics have changed since 2010. Are
you aware of any more recent studies?
It's entirely possible that the conference that I attended was an anomaly,
but in any case it would be good to have a more recent study (preferably
with a larger sample size and information about how sampling was done) if
that kind of information is available.
"Mapping parties" seem to be common in OSM, and if they're successful in
narrowing the gender gap that information might be of interest to Leila
given the kind of research that she's planning to do with trying to engage
cohorts of users in Wikimedia. If you know of research about about the
success of mapping parties with regards to diversity, it would be nice if
you could share.
Thanks,
Pine
On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 7:55 AM, Andrew Hall <hall1467(a)umn.edu> wrote:
> Hi Pine,
>
> Thank you for sharing your experience at State of the Map USA. In the talk
> on Wednesday, I was referring to a survey of 426 OSM contributors by Haklay
> and Budhathoki [1] from 2010 where 96% of participants said they were male.
>
> References:
> 1. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/
> 16461/Horizon%20March%202010%20(Haklay%20and%20Budhahtoki).pdf
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
>
> > On Jul 26, 2017, at 5:06 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > For what it's worth, I noted that when I tended the State of the Map USA
> > conference last year, there seemed to be a *higher* representation of
> women
> > in the conference than there were at the WikiConference USA events that
> > I've attended. I was surprised to hear the presenter say that OSM has
> 95%+
> > male participation, and I'd like to know the origin of that number. I was
> > so impressed by the relatively high percentage of female participants at
> > State of the Map USA that I had a conversation with one of the organizers
> > about how OSM seemed to be much more successful than Wikimedia at
> engaging
> > female contributors. Perhaps there are at least some places in which OSM
> > has relatively good gender diversity.
> >
> > Pine
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 1:39 PM, Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On 25 July 2017 at 19:38, Sarah R <srodlund(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Freedom versus Standardization: Structured Data Generation in a Peer
> >>> Production CommunityBy *Andrew Hall*
> >>
> >> There's some discussion of the talk , on the UK OSM mailing list:
> >>
> >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2017-
> July/020401.html
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> >> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
