And Wikisource ?
Yann
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Wikis Go Printable: Wikimedia/PediaPress/COL/OSI partnership
FYI - please forward :-)
WIKIS GO PRINTABLE
New open source technology will bring content from Wikipedia,
WikiEducator, and other wikis to the world of paper.
DECEMBER 13, 2007 - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA: The Wikimedia Foundation
today announced a partnership that will make it possible to obtain
high quality print and word processor copies of articles from
Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the
underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society
Institute (www.soros.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning
(www.col.org), and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in
Germany.
"This technology is of key strategic importance to the cause of free
education world-wide," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the
Wikimedia Foundation. "It will make it possible to use and remix wiki
content for a variety of purposes, both in the developing and the
developed world, in areas with connectivity and without."
Deployment of the technology will happen in three stages. The first
stage, launched today, is a public beta test running on
WikiEducator.org of functionality for remixing collections of wiki
pages and downloading them in the PDF format. WikiEducator is a
project hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning and uses the same wiki
technology as Wikipedia.
"These tools have the potential to transform and improve the way we
author and share distance education materials, textbooks and other
learning resources -- I'm thrilled that the WikiEducator will be the
first online community to implement them," said Wayne Mackintosh,
Ph.D., an education specialist for the Commonwealth of Learning and
founder of the WikiEducator project.
The second stage, planned for early 2008, will be the deployment of
the technology on the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation,
including Wikipedia. At this point, users will also be given the
option to order printed copies of wiki content directly from
PediaPress.com. "The integration into Wikipedia will be a milestone
for print-on-demand technology. Users will literally be empowered to
print their own encyclopedias", according to Heiko Hees, product
manager at PediaPress.com.
The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the
OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats.
"Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom.
By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for
educators to customize and remix content before printing and
distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.
This work is funded through a US$40,000 grant by the Open Society
Institute.
The technology developed through this cooperation will be available
under an open source license, free for anyone to use for any purpose.
It ties into the MediaWiki platform, the open source technology that
runs Wikipedia. As a result, thousands of wiki platforms around the
world will have the option of providing the same services to their
users.
CONTACTS
For more information, please contact Sandra Ordonez at (727) 231-0101,
or email her at: sordonez AT wikimedia DOT org
ABOUT THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION
The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of
free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these
wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of
the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world,
including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. The
Foundation was created in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, the founder of
Wikipedia.
ABOUT THE COMMONWEALTH OF LEARNING
COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads
of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open
learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.
ABOUT THE OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE
The Open Society Institute (OSI), a private operating and grantmaking
foundation, aims to shape public policy to promote democratic
governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. On a
local level, OSI implements a range of initiatives to support the rule
of law, education, public health, and independent media. At the same
time, OSI works to build alliances across borders and continents on
issues such as combating corruption and rights abuses.
ABOUT PEDIAPRESS
PediaPress is a startup creating technology and services that make it
easy to derive printed books from wiki content. The company is located
in Mainz, Germany and has entered a long term partnership with the
Wikimedia Foundation.
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
>From [Wikimediafr-l].
In short, Emmanuel would like to develop a free software for images
post-scan processing.
Yann
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Wikimediafr-l] [WIKISOURCE] Scan. de livres
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:29:46 +0100
From: Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel.engelhart (at) wikimedia (dot) fr>
Salut
Je cherche une solution libre pour traiter des pages d'écritures
scannées de livres à la chaîne
Je cherche un logiciel permettant de :
* Enlever les bordures noires et de manière générale les ombres (effet
de transparence)
* Re-équilibrer le texte par rotation simple.
* Re-découper automatiquement la page (par exemple 50px de marges
autour du bloc de texte)
Je ne trouve malheureusement rien et j'envisage donc de m'occuper
moi-même du problème.
Sachant que je suis tout nouveau face à ce problème, tout remarque,
tout conseil est le bienvenu.
Techniquement, j'envisage de faire un truc en script-fu (langage
scheme pour TheGimp). Cela en fera un outil libre, facile à modifier
et multi-plateforme ; en plus je n'aurai pas à m'occuper de la partie
algo. de traitement d'image.
Si vous avez aussi des échantillons de pages scannées en 300 dpi (voir
150), je suis aussi preneur (m'envoyer directement en privé). Cela me
permettrait d'évaluer une solution sur un panel large d'exemples.
Emmanuel
PS : Je viens de faire l'achat d'un AVISION FB6080E
(http://www.avision.de/?content=FB6080E). Ce scanner offre l'avantage
de scanner directement depuis la bordure de sa dalle. Sans être la
panacée, il permet de scanner des livres en réduisant beaucoup les
efforts au niveau de la reliure et au passage l'ombre (sur l'image) à
son niveau :
ce qui permet de scanner des livres (assez gros) inscannables autrement
(avec un scanner plat typique). Le tout fonctionne sous linux
parfaitement... avec quelques efforts ;)
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
All -
we've set up a blog to accompany our annual fundraiser. The headlines
from the blog will be featured in the sitenotice:
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/
I'd like to invite you to submit posts to the blog. These posts can be
provocative, and should give compelling reasons to support the
Wikimedia Foundation. You can draft posts here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Why_Give_blog
Posts will be selected by a number of people: Cary Bass (our Volunteer
Coordinator), Sandy Ordonez (our Communications Manager), Sue Gardner
(Special Advisor to the Board), and myself. We'll probably try to have
a new post every 2-3 days at least.
Once again, the point of these posts is first and foremost to invite
the general public to donate. :-) Please submit stories in this
general spirit.
If you are willing to act as a moderator for comments to vet out spam
& trolling, please contact Cary Bass at <cbass AT wikimedia DOT org>.
For now, this is an experiment and as such, only in English. We will
set up blogs in other languages if this one has a measurable impact on
our fundraising.
Thanks for any and all help!
Erik Möller
Member of the Board
Hello,
Not surprisingly, this wish list would also be very useful for
Wikisource (from Wikibooks list).
Yann
Florence Devouard wrote:
> Hello
>
> Does Wikibooks have a wishlist in terms of technical developments that
> might be useful for the project ?
> I am currently hacking down a quick grant request with another
> organization, and, if I do it well, we'll be concerned. So, if there are
> specific development which might be super useful, please say so, I
> might get it added somewhere.
>
> Thanks
>
> Ant
I got a wishlist for Wikibooks of technical developments that would be a
boon for Wikibooks I think.
1. Extend Special:Random to be able to return a random book rather then
a random module from a random or specific namespace. Right now we do
this in JavaScript, so anyone not using a JavaScript-enabled browser
can't benefit from this.
2. Extend Special:Search to be able to search in only a specific book.
Right now we use JavaScript and make use of Google to return search
results for only a specific book. Which like the previous one can't be
used by anyone not using a JavaSript-enabled browser. Would also be nice
to remove the dependency on an external search engine.
3. Extend Special:AllPages so that it can optionally list books instead
of all pages.
4. {{NUMBEROFBOOKS}} to return the total number of books Wikibooks has,
as opposed to {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} which returns the total number of pages.
Would be useful to be able to display on the front page how many books
Wikibooks has rather then listing the total number of pages we have.
5. Add a book organization meta page, which defines the book layout and
how each page in a book relates to another page in the book. This would
be the bases of many features:
a) adding navigation buttons to the previous and next page in a book
for online reading in a consistent way
b) generating a book's table of contents
c) generating headers and footers that should appear on every page
d) generating printable versions of an entire book and for saving an
entire book in different formats like PDF for easy redistribution.
e) listing all required licenses for inclusion in redistributed
form and attributing the authors in order to comply with licenses.
This would make the job much easier and create a consistent way
to do so.
f) adding css stylesheet elements that are used on every page of a
book to encourage consistency and uniformity for a book, both
for online viewing and in printed form. This would make it much
more practical to have style guidelines work for each book and for
everyone to see the same thing.
The basic idea is that by knowing how each page relates to one another
and how elements on a page should look it becomes much easier to create
consistency between all the pages, to read a book, and reuse and
redistribute our books.
6. Add a <includeonce></includeonce> tag so that something can be
included once. Example: Template:A has "<includeonce>Hello<includeonce>"
Template:B includes {{A}}, and Template:C includes {{B}}. "Hello" would
appear on Template:A and Template:B, but not on Template:C, because
Template:A was indirectly included in Template:C. This would be useful
for inclusion of content directly within another template, but in which
should go no further then that.
7. Add {{CURRENTPAGENAME}} or similar for getting the name of PageA
within PageB when PageA is included in PageB.
8. Add an extension for being able to display musical symbols,
programming symbols and other symbols found in other fields of study not
covered by the <math></math> tag.
9. Caching needs to be improved to be more intuitive for pages that are
included a lot or include a lot of inclusions, because when they are
updated, the updates are not reflected and creates a lot of strange
results.
10. On the same bases as #9, Fix template inclusion limitations. I can
understand having a limit to including a template within itself and
templates that include each other, in order to prevent infinity loops.
However limiting how many times a template can be included on a
different page that isn't included in the template being used directly
or indirectly has caused some problems, which shouldn't be at risk of
causing infinity loops if such limitations are removed and is needed.
If caching is part of the reason for having this limitation, then a
possible solution might be to make use of IFRAME's, so that the server
only has to process and/or retrieve once and caching can happen on the
client side for each repeated appearance of a template.
Thats all I can think of for now. I'm sure I'll think of others and
I'm sure other people have ideas as well that they will want to mention
as well. Someone has already informed those on English Wikibooks about
this wish list message.
-- darklama
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
(sorry for my English and for the crossposting)
I known that the FlaggedRevs extension is under a review stage and their
development is devoted basically to the needs from the most known Wikimedia
project. This is ok to me, no worries on it. But since more Wikimedia
projects have users watching the development of this feature, I think that
only two future official wikis for the public beta testing is insufficient.
Wikisource, for example, have LabeledSectionTransclusion and ProofreadPage
enabled on all of yours wikis. These extensions may have issues to work
appropriately with FlaggedRevs. Enabling these two extensions at the same
wiki devoted to the English Wikipedia beta-testing may generate some
troubles with the en.wp users that don't known how and why Wikisource have
these extensions, to exemplify with only one of the possible reactions. Not
enabling these two extensions + FlaggedRevs at someplace may create false
hopes. And I think that knowing that issues and waiting for someone with the
required skills to fix them when get time to work on it is more proper
instead of a community (a Wikisource wiki) gaining consensus to request
FlaggedRevs getting enabled and finding that a new nice feature brokes another
one.
[[:m:User:555]]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Klaus Graf <klausgraf(a)googlemail.com>
Date: Oct 21, 2007 2:06 PM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Implications of IMSLP case
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Franz Liszt writes in his Myspace weblog:
"A great blow has been dealt against the world of music and of our
common cultural heritage.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) was a wonderful
site for sharing public domain music scores. They had an encyclopaedic
collection of scores which anyone could download as a .pdf file. The
site was entirely free and run by people dedicated to the art of
music.
Unfortunately the music publishers Universal Edition has threatened
the site's creator with legal action if he does not "cease and desist"
the site's activities. This has now happened. UE's threats appear to
be based on rather spurious copyright grounds. The intention is not to
protect artists' rights, but to stop people from accessing public
domain materials.
Most artists have struggled terribly in life and die broke and young.
Having ignored the artists during their lifetimes, publishers are then
able to exploit their genius posthumously. Take poor old Franz
Schubert, for instance.
UE's legal threat is a direct attack on our common musical heritage as
well as on culture in general. I believe that these public domain
works should be freely available to the public. For the most part,
IMSLP made available sores by all the greats (including my humble
self), most of whom have been long dead and are out of copyright.
There is a current trend for all our common cultural heritage to be
"privatized" and exploited by private corporations for the sole
purpose of making money. The idea that the works of Shakespeare,
Beethoven and Leonardo da Vinci (et al) should "belong" to anyone
except the people of this planet (and beyond) is outrageous.
Sadly, this trend is not restricted only to great works of art.
Ancient buildings, national parks, libraries, museums, images of works
art, and many aspects of our cultural heritage are all being devoured
by private corporations in order to fuel the interests of a small
minority of greedy individuals.
Be that as it may, I do urge you to go to the IMSLP forum, register.
learn the facts and offer support (if only by adding your voice). This
is important because this is about freedom, our common cutural
heritage - and about music! [...]
The address is http://imslpforums.org "
Source:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=113684180&b…
The cease and desist letter mentions EU-protected composers but also
composers like Gustav Mahler who is dead since 1911.
There are two questions:
First: Can WMF help to re-activate IMSLP by hosting e.g. Wikiscore (or so)?
It is already possible to uload PD scores on Wikimedia Commons. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sheet_music
Second: Are there implications for WMF copyright policies?
The CaD-letter mentions the fact that "that under Canadian law a
judgement rendered in Europe is enforceable in Canada". If a Canadian
user uploads works on Commons from an US server like Internet Archive
(pre-1923-rule) which are PD in Canada (50 y pma) then this is allowed
by the (inappropriate) rule of Commons.
I have to quote the rule:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Interaction_of_United_S…
"If material that has been saved from a third-party website is
uploaded to Commons, the copyright laws of the US, the country of
residence of the uploader, and the country of location of the
webservers of the website apply."
It clearly lacks the COUNTRY OF ORIGIN in this (inappropriate) rule.
If this country is a EU country the 70 year pma rule is in effect.
Take a Bela Bartok score published before 1923 (or 1909). Bartok died
in 1945, his works are protected in all EU countries until December
31, 2015. The score is PD in the US and Canada but the Canadian
uploader can be sued by a Canadian lawyer because the work is not free
in Europe.
WMF cannot be sued for an US court in this case because the work is PD
in the US.
But should'nt we protect the uploader when he is uploading according our
rules?
Klaus Graf
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Regarding the discussion of the Flagged Reviews extension, in my opinion it will be of huge benefit to Wikisource. Both blatant vandalism and more insidious damage to texts will largely irrelevant for any text that has a stable version, even *before* those edits are reviewed. There will no longer be a strong need to protect texts or sections of texts.
This extension is a tool to make the efforts of expert editors more worthwhile (by letting them waste less of their time and efforts dealing with vandalism and ill-considered edits). It does not replace human expertise, but rather uses it more efficiently.
As to whether it will interfere with other extensions that are live at Wikisource wikis, there has been no evidence that this is so, though of course it would be prudent to test things first. I have put a query in what seems to be the most appropriate place for a question of this sort, namely here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:FlaggedRevs#Compatibility_with…
Dovi
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com