Hoi, It is the explicit goal of the Wikimedia Foundation to make information available for as long as it exist. In addition to this, there are several copies at the Internet Archive. If there is no statement that satisfies your need, it will not be hard for the WMF board to come up with one. Having such a statement by tomorrow is a bit much to ask for. Thanks,      GerardM On 2 June 2011 13:29, Fae <faenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I'm taking part in an images discussion workshop with a number of academics tomorrow and could do with a statement about the WMF's long term commitment to supporting Wikimedia Commons (and other projects) in terms of the public availability of media. Is there an official published policy I can point to that includes, say, a 10 year or 100 commitment?

Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far: Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no long term operational archive plan. "Self evident" is insufficient in order to budget and plan in a credible way. If as the planned outcome of a research project I had a large image donation to make and such a commitment was absent, I would prefer to mass donate images of public interest to an organization that had one, and assume that at some point e-volunteers at Wikimedia Commons would take the initiative and port in what they fancied. The people I'm workshopping with tomorrow have research roles within a number of leading universities along with a number of research organizations under the umbrella of the Wellcome Trust (the largest charity in the UK) and a variety of semi-associated organizations such as Cancer Research UK, Open Research Computation, Bioinformatics Training Network and FlyBase. All these folks have large image assets to discuss and are keen to move forward with an open solution to recommend on their personal networks for the long, long term public good. I appreciate the image deletion issue, what we are talking about here are planned batch uploads of high quality donations. Part of that planning would be to discuss the relevance to the public of large number of research images and compliance with existing Commons guidelines. There may well be cases, for example many thousands of similar images of mutant drosophila, where Wikimedia Commons is not the right place for a full donation and a more specialized database host is needed. Cheers, Fae -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags

On 2 June 2011 13:24, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)googlemail.com> wrote: There's also the matter that no particular image can be promised to be safe from local deletion processes. (except, e.g., WMF logos etc. But even then there's a perennial policy suggestion to move those to a non-free repo not on Commons instead.)

There are two caveats: nobody can tell the future of human cultural history or any individual legal organization, and while the repository and wikis as a whole, and virtually all legally hostable media of genuine value, are preserved indefinitely, obviously no guarantee can be given concerning any specific individual image or article. Beyond that, the best guarantee is the license it's under. The Foundation licenses all its data and content (with the sole exception of non-free images used to illustrate articles on local wikis) under a license that allows anyone to use, copy, amend, or distribute them. The explicit purpose of doing so is so that anyone wishing to can not only redistribute it, but if they are unhappy with its prospects in WMF's custodianship, they can take all of it and archive it or fork from it - that is, start their own version based on all content, descriptions, data and articles they wish to take and use. That right is enshrined on Wikipedia in policy and license - it's known as the "*right to fork*" [ie, to create derivatives and copies]. Our forking FAQ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Forking> expands on this giving details of where data can be downloaded, as well as Wikipedia holding a list of websites that mirror its content<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_which_use_Wikiped… anyone's use. As the financial market crash proved, promises made by one organization are only useful insofar as that organization can promise to endure and meet them. Our approach is to spread our content and make sure others know we actively support re-archiving and reuse of it, ensuring that copies and archives will always exist. At worst I cannot be sure if all data is routinely provided - a staff member can comment on this - but the policy, rights, traditions, choice of license, and endorsement of other sites doing so in practice, is our way of ensuring a practical commitment is made. FT2 On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Fae &lt;faenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far: Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no long term operational archive plan.

Sure Tom, here's a SciFi user story: In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of work.

On 2 June 2011 14:21, Fae &lt;faenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Why would we have an archive plan? Archives are for things that aren't expected to needed on a regular basis any more but may need to be referred to in the future. We're not going to archive things on Commons, they'll just stay on Commons indefinitely.

Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far: Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no long term operational archive plan. "Self evident" is insufficient in order to budget and plan in a credible way. If as the planned outcome of a research project I had a large image donation to make and such a commitment was absent, I would prefer to mass donate images of public interest to an organization that had one, and assume that at some point e-volunteers at Wikimedia Commons would take the initiative and port in what they fancied.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Fae &lt;faenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Fae, There is no explicit, official operational archive plan of the type you are referring to. I am familiar with the type of plan you mean -- archives and libraries in particular often have explicit retention plans that specify a date range. This kind of plan would likely be developed by the board as part of our long-range operational planning. There are difficulties, as others have pointed out, because unlike an archive we cannot guarantee retention of any particular item -- individual curation and editorial decisions are done by the community. However, long-term preservation and dissemination of knowledge is an inherent and explicit part of our mission. You could point to: * Our mission statement, which says we will retain useful information from our projects on the Internet, free of charge, in perpetuity (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement) * the fact that a free license enables redistribution and longer-term preservation support than copyright does, because others have the ability to preserve our collections even if the WMF itself fails (dumps are noted as a value, in our values statement: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values). As you note, the key part of this is free licensing under a compatible license. We are interested in supporting the ecosystem of free knowledge, so that if an organization wanted their primary archive to be someplace else (but accessible to Commons technically and through licensing) that's fine; we can upload. However, as an organization, we are absolutely committed to preserving free knowledge for the long term. For this presentation, your preparation turn-around time is pretty short here, and I personally don't have time to pull together other community documents on this subject right now (maybe others do), but you can certainly tell the organizations our about our long-term commitment. Whether Commons is appropriate for them, however, depends on what they are looking for. The biggest argument for uploading collections to Wikimedia is not our function as an archival service (since we don't fulfill all of the requirements of a traditional archive), but rather the immense distribution and visibility our projects can give such collections, far exceeding any other online service, because of our global reach. best, Phoebe (speaking as a member of the Board) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I've floated this to Erik a couple of times, but if the Foundation would like an IT disaster response / business continuity audit, I can do those.

Tape is -- still -- your friend here. Flip the write-protect after writing, have two sets of off-site tapes, one copy of each in each of two secure and widely separated off-site locations run by two different organizations, and you're sorted.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 16:11, Neil Harris&lt;neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt; wrote: The mechanics of the backup are largely irrelevant. What matters are the *policies*: what data do you back up, when do you back it up, how often do you test your backups, and so on. Once you've got that sorted out, it doesn't really matter whether you're storing the backups on tape, remote servers, or magic pixie dust.

Hello Fae, There should be no explicit statement because the WMF holds it self-evident to preserve.

Hi, I'm taking part in an images discussion workshop with a number of academics tomorrow and could do with a statement about the WMF's long term commitment to supporting Wikimedia Commons (and other projects) in terms of the public availability of media. Is there an official published policy I can point to that includes, say, a 10 year or 100 commitment? If it exists, this would be a key factor for researchers choosing where to share their images with the public. Thanks, Fae -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l