---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Graham Cobb <openrights(a)cobb.uk.net>
Date: 2009/7/22
Subject: [ORG-discuss] Gallery photos petition now approved
To: Open Rights Group open discussion list
<org-discuss(a)lists.openrightsgroup.org>
My petition to the PM about galleries and museums making photos available
under CC has been approved. Feel free to sign up and/or to let other people
know!
Your petition has been approved by the Number 10 web team, and
is now available on the Number 10 website at the following
address:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/artphotos/
Your petition reads:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require all
museums and art galleries receiving public funds to release all
photographs they commision of their objects into the public
domain or under a Creative Commons licence.
The National Portrait Gallery has recently taken legal action
against the Wikimedia Foundation for hosting photographs of
their paintings even though the paintings are no longer under
copyright.
It is unreasonable that any publicly owned or funded museum
should restrict the public from having access to photographs of
their objects. These bodies receive public funding to promote
public understanding of and familiarity with art and history,
not to restrict it.
Any museum or gallery which takes public funds should be
required to release to the public all photographs it
commissions of all objects in its collection, whether still
under copyright or not. This would include photos taken for
curatorial reasons, publicity, web sites, as well as those
taken for creating souvenirs, postcards, calendars, etc. The
original photographs should be made available at full
resolution.
The photographs should either be released into the public
domain or under a Creative Commons licence allowing public use
of the material.
Thanks for submitting your petition.
-- the ePetitions team
----- End forwarded message -----
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Discussion on foundation-l...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Teofilo <teofilowiki(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:42 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Britain or Ukraine? What UK stands for in Wikimedia
jargon
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello everybody;
This is to say that I have written a piece on this topic at :
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#uk.wikimedia.org_is_Wikimedia_U…'t_it_
?
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I am putting together a fundraising website and need some help with
the text. Please leave comments (or just edit the wiki-versions) here:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising
Thanks!
Well, I did the presentation yesterday and it went fairly well - although I left unsure about the actual impact. Below are my notes from the day. I've uploaded the final presentation to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations/en.
There were about 100 people attending the conference - the largest group were free software developers followed by secondary school teachers and then local education authority staff. I was after lunch and the conference split into five sessions - the most popular one in the auditorium and the four others in smaller rooms. My session had about 15 people.
At the start of the conference the organisers said they wanted the "un"conference to be about interactive discussions rather than presentations. What this meant for my session - and a couple of others I went to - is that I started the presentation, got about a third of the way through and was then sidetracked into talking about issues that a couple of participants wanted to bring up. I then skipped through the last slides in the time given without being able to give them the proper attention.
We got as far as discussing the Schools Wikipedia - quite a few people were interested in this and took away copies of the DVDs I had brought along. We discussed how wikipedia is written so that adult generalists can understand it, and I was asked whether there should be a separate childrens wikipedia, aimed at a lower reading age. I repeated what SOS Childrens Villages had said at our AGM - that they were quite happy with the current level. After the session I thought I should have mentioned simple english Wikipedia, which I've done in a follow up comment to their forum.
One person was very interested in setting up a Wikipedia in his own school, that only his students could edit, to give them a sense of having created something. I mentioned how it would quickly become out of date; we then moved on to talking about adding lecture notes to Wikipedia, and I spoke about the Wikibooks and Wikiversity projects. We had a discussion on how universities can be quite hostile to Wikipedia on sourcing grounds, but schools don't seem to have the same concerns - possibly because they aren't generating their own expert reference works in the same way.
At that point I ran out of time, meaning I couldn't talk about active learning, blocked IPs or the role of Wikimedia UK. However, I think we covered plenty of ground in the 30 minutes available!
The rest of the conference was an interesting mix. The opening session was by an open source evangelist. It started with me thinking he was going to get on my nerves, but by the end I was very interested in his insightful observations about the nature of the education system and the challenges brought about by technological change. His idea that we have been undergoing since 1992 a revolution as radical as the industrial revolution, and the way that revolution reshaped our educational system was particularly interesting.
I also attended a session by Fiona Iglesias from the "The National Digital Resource Bank" - a great idea initiated by the North West England Learning Grid. This is creating a database of high quality reviewed and catlogued educational resources, much of which will be creative commons licensed. They want to get local education authorities signed up so that their schools can access the information. The Bank is planned to go live this autumn.
They're not thinking of making this available outside local authorities - I asked if a local authority could, for instance, decide to make it publically available through local libraries, and she thought she wouldn't want that for commercial reasons. The sign up fee - which she wouldn't disclose - sounded like it was be hefty, and also involved a commitment to helping with the meta data. I also spoke to Fiona after her session and we agreed to talk again on email. She may be interested in getting some of the Wikimedia information into the database, but only the bits that would pass their stringent quality standards. Wikipedia for Schools and featured Wikibooks material are the ones that sprang to mind for me.
Thinking afterwards, I might suggest we talk again in, say, 18 months time, when the UK market will be saturated. We could talk about releasing some "teaser" material into, say, Wikibooks, which could be used to advertise their presense to a global audience and solicit foreign subscribers. This would follow the pattern of the successful partnerships that, for instance, Wikimedai Germany, have had.
The next session I went to was from the BBC regarding their "Open Lab". I really struggled to understand where this fitted in with the overall purpose of the BBC - even the presenter admitted that if they were too successful they would be closed down! As someone put it to me afterwards, the BBC have a tendency to "chase pretty balloons" - i.e. go after the latest craze.
The closing keynote was also from the BBC - this time George Auckland, the Head of Innovation at BBC Learning. Very interesting and personable, he sounded keen on open source as a concept, but made the point that saying "Yes" to sharing is in some ways harder than saying "No" because of the can of worms it opens up. I asked him what the prospects were of releasing images, for instance, under free licenses - he replied that there were many problems with this - they were working on making more archive material available for streaming, but most of the licenses they hold - for documentaries, for instance - were for broadcast rights only.
I also had a great chat with him afterwards, over coffee. Interestingly he said they had looked at using Wikimedia Commons material and decided against it, because they couldn't be sure enough over the provenance. They'd rather pay a company for images, who they would have a contract with and could sue if anything went wrong, than take them for free. Started me thinking of a business idea, but that's for another time!
Well that's my reflections - let me know if you have any questions on anything here.
Regards,
Andrew
Before we start running ahead of ourselves on this, please remember that we need to get volunteers to help out first! Please spread the word and ask anyone who you think might be able to help.
I'm happy to lend a hand - I had the discussions with the V&A last time - but would prefer someone else led the initiative. It would be particularly good if someone from outside the board could lead this one, given that the other three initiatives are all going to be lead by board members.
Regards,
"Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Sent: Monday, 20 July, 2009 17:05:16 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] London Loves Wikipedia
>
> 2009/7/20 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > You're probably all aware of the London Loves WIkipedia initiative,
> > which has been funded (via the WMF) and will be running in the next
> > year (most likely the actual event will run in february 2010). The
> > page for this is at:
> > http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Loves_Wikipedia
> >
> > Who would be interested in lending a hand organizing this?
> >
> > The first task would be figuring out everything that's necessary -
> > but a broad-brush overview would be:
> > 1. Get museums involved, start discussions with them as to what can
> > be photographed, what rules are necessary, when special events should
> > happen etc.
>
> Someone should contact the London Mayor's office as well - if we can
> get their endorsement it would probably help a lot.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia UK mailing list
> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
> WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
>
Between now and the Summer of 2012 London is supposedly hosting the cultural Olympiad. But one might suspect that the Olympics committee is neglecting that and concentrating on the sporting side of the Olympics.
However it would tick a few boxes if this could be presented as a mass volunteer cultural event, part of the cultural Olympics with a permanent digital legacy.
WereSpeilChequers
--- On Mon, 20/7/09, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] London Loves Wikipedia
> To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Monday, 20 July, 2009, 5:05 PM
> 2009/7/20 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > You're probably all aware of the London Loves
> WIkipedia initiative,
> > which has been funded (via the WMF) and will be
> running in the next
> > year (most likely the actual event will run in
> february 2010). The
> > page for this is at:
> > http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Loves_Wikipedia
> >
> > Who would be interested in lending a hand organizing
> this?
> >
> > The first task would be figuring out everything that's
> necessary -
> > but a broad-brush overview would be:
> > 1. Get museums involved, start discussions with them
> as to what can
> > be photographed, what rules are necessary, when
> special events should
> > happen etc.
>
> Someone should contact the London Mayor's office as well -
> if we can
> get their endorsement it would probably help a lot.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia UK mailing list
> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
> WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
>
Hi all,
You're probably all aware of the London Loves WIkipedia initiative,
which has been funded (via the WMF) and will be running in the next
year (most likely the actual event will run in february 2010). The
page for this is at:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Loves_Wikipedia
Who would be interested in lending a hand organizing this?
The first task would be figuring out everything that's necessary -
but a broad-brush overview would be:
1. Get museums involved, start discussions with them as to what can
be photographed, what rules are necessary, when special events should
happen etc.
2. Get sponsors involved, gifting prizes
3. Develop the webpages and other documentation, get participants to
go to the museums during the appropriate month and upload their pictures
4. Be at the special events, making sure that they go smoothly etc.
5. After the event, help sort through the images, work out who wins
the prizes, and assist in moving the images to Wikimedia Commons (if
they're not there already).
Of course, not all of this has to be done by one person (a team of
3-4 would work best, I think), and the workload would be spread out
over the course of a year, so there's not that much to be done at any
one time.
Volunteers, comments and/or questions?
Thanks,
Mike
cheers Tango!
Comments in-line
----- "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Sent: Sunday, 19 July, 2009 22:30:11 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Presentation - Wikipedia in Schools
>
> 2009/7/19 Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>:
> > All comments gratefully received!
>
> I'll comment as I read - please excuse me not using a sandwich technique!
>
> Slide 2: Where does the 900,000 contributors come from?
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansContributors.htm. Note this is all languages - 928,022 is exact figure
I think I'll change it to 95,000 - the figure for "Active Wikipedians"
> Not all use
> pseudonyms, "registered users" would be better.
"Registered users" is a good phrase to use when talking to wikipedians but I'm not sure someone outside will know what this means. I came across "pseudonym" as a description for usernames when reading a few external articles - more accurate than "anonymous".
Of course some people use their real names, but the norm seems to be pseudonyms - like "Tango" for instance - and I think thats all thats needed fotr a general introduction like this,
> The WMF prefers not to
> be thought of as a publisher for legal reasons - I would go for
> "hosted".
I agree. "Hosted" sounds a bit to little - I'll go with "operated" which is how the Foundation terms it here, for instance:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e5/WP_Key_Facts_jun_2009…
> Slide 4: I think statements are better than questions for this kind of
> thing. As far as I know, you aren't leading a discussion session. The
> slides should summarise what you are saying.
Changed. Although I've put it as a presentation, they've asked for it to be as interactive as possible, but I agree these shouldn't be in as questions.
> Slide 5: There is some non-free content in Wikipedia. While fair use
> images should be reusable as part of the articles in which they
> appear, they may not be reusable in their own right.
Good point - i've amended.
> Slide 6: An example with references would be better. (It looks like
> you've removed the references because there were too many - find an
> example with a more reasonable number so you can include them.)
Not clear from the slide notes, but the purpose of this slide is to show how one third party attributes text copied from Wikipedia - I'll circle the "the source of this article is Wikipedia, the free enclyclopedia. The text of ..." and add this to the notes.
> Slide 7: I'd rather WMUK didn't draw conclusions about how
> child-friendly Wikipedia is. Present the facts and let people make up
> their own minds. Personally, I think it is perfectly child-friendly,
> since I don't see any harm coming from exposure to sex and violence.
I'm talking to primary school teachers here as well as secondary school teachers. From the schools Wikipedia website:
"Wikipedia is not necessarily a childsafe environment and has "adult" content."
I'll change it to use their wordings.
> Slide 9: Bear in mind that the Nature study is several years old now.
> Wikipedia has changed a lot since then.
True, and the study was very limited anyway. However, I'm not aware of any other studies that have been done.
> Slide 10: Typo: an->a.
Good spot!
> I wouldn't recommend COIs - drop the school bit.
Changed.
> Slide 12: WikiSpecies is hardly one of our major projects. I would
> replace it with Wiktionary (I would also spell "Wiktionary"
> correction! ;)).
It isn't, but it contains lots of educational material, which I could imagine teachers using. I've added Wiktionary though, spelt correctly!
> Ok, those are my negative comments. Positive comment (half a sandwich,
> at least!): I think you've chosen the correct material. You are
> prioritising the right stuff. Just make sure you time yourself going
> through it (out loud) to make sure you can fit it all in. Good luck!
Cheers! I've got 20 minutes to do 10 slides (well, 10 with material on it) which seems about right.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Andrew
I would suggest replacing:
Wikipedia contains sexually explicit, violent
language and is subject to vandalism
Therefore – not child friendly
With something more reassuring, remember most of your audience will have already looked at Wikipedia, some will even have edited it; but they may not have done so for some time. If so they may have perceptions of vandalism and article quality that are ancient in Wiki time, and this is your opportunity to persuade them to go back and see how much its changed.
I would suggest that early on you ask your audience how many have read Wikipedia articles, did they spot errors? Did they fix those errors? Then say "We have hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who've made the changes that make wikipedia what it is today.
Similarly with vandalism - there we do have an amazing story in terms of how quickly vandalism now gets fixed.
Also worth asking how many have tried Wiktionary and commons.
And talk up the advantages of Wikipedia over offline encyclopaedias - if something fits into several categories it can be given several categories unlike paper classification systems where each library book has to be fitted in one classification. Talk about hyperlinks, ask your audience if they've clicked on a link in a Wikipedia article, and give them an example - point out that when you read about Steel you can click on [[Bessemer Process] and from there you can go to [[Limestone]] without the hassle of looking at three different volumes in a dead tree pedia.
WereSpielChequers
--- On Sun, 19/7/09, Joe Anderson <computerjoe(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Joe Anderson <computerjoe(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Presentation - Wikipedia in Schools
> To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Sunday, 19 July, 2009, 10:39 PM
> On 2009-07-19 18:33:41 +0100, Andrew
> Turvey
> <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>
> said:
>
> >
> >
> > All comments gratefully received!
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> >
> > <html><head><style type='text/css'>p
> { margin: 0;
> > }</style></head><body><div
> style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;
> > color: #000000'>All comments gratefully
> >
> received!<br><br>Regards,<br><br>Andrew<br></div></body></html>
> >
> >
> > This message has one or more attachments. Select "Save
> Attachments"
> > from the File menu to save.
>
> I show a list of sources at the bottom of an article and
> the inline
> citations to demonstrate its transparency.
>
> I would also talk much more about Commons. Free images are
> not only
> useful for pupils, but can be used in school documents as
> stock images
> etc.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia UK mailing list
> wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
> WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
>