I’m very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a USD 300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading. See the press release and the grant proposal as submitted (PDF).

This should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. Wikimedia Commons , the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

We want to begin to change that, and make sure that everyone who has useful educational media to share can do so easily. As part of our partnership with Kaltura, Michael Dale has already done some great work on external repository searches and transfers, and on integration of uploading into the editing interface, so we’re hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We’ve also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany’s investment in multilingual search (German link; see Google Translation) are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we’ll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course we’re enormously grateful to the Ford Foundation for funding it. Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Today we announced some fantastic news. The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community.  With the full approval of our Board of Trustees, this now means that the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system on all of our project’s content. The new dual license will begin to come into effect in June.

A Q&A about the announcement has been posted on the Foundation wiki.  You can also find considerably more information, discussion, and details about the license change and the work of the license update committee on their meta page.

A huge thanks to the committee, to the folks at Creative Commons (who have also blogged on the topic), to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to thousands of Wikimedia volunteers from around the world who both authored the content and voted to help make the proposal a reality.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

In February, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a survey with support from the Public Library of Science to explore the attitudes and beliefs of the open access scientific community with regard to Wikipedia. The open access movement is dedicated to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge. PLoS and other open access journals publish scientific papers under permissive Creative Commons licenses that allow anyone to download and re-use content. The Wikipedia article about open access, which itself could use some improvement, goes into more detail.

At Wikimedia, we’ve been thinking for a while about ways to directly work with scientists and open access journals. While scientists already contribute to Wikipedia in a self-organized manner (an example being the Gene Wiki effort), we have never made a systematic, large-scale effort to invite them to participate. Our exploratory survey indicates that such an invitation would be welcomed with open arms.

The survey was published on the PLoS website, blog, newsletter and Twitter feed, and the link to the survey was also more widely circulated, most notably in Peter Suber’s open access newsletter. 1,743 self-selected respondents completed the survey. Out of the respondents, 225 identified as PLoS authors. The subsample of authors did not differ remarkably from the general response. In general, respondents expressed a very favorable (58.98%) and somewhat favorable (32.19%) opinion of Wikipedia, and 87.73% indicated they used Wikipedia frequently or occasionally as part of their professional work.

71.03% of respondents supported some form of hyperlinks from open access publications to Wikipedia, and 91.51% supported links from Wikipedia to open access publications. 67.93% of respondents indicated support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, and 24.73% indicated support for limited experiments. 81.82% responded they would participate in such an effort to improve Wikipedia, with roughly half of the respondents indicating they would only do so as part of their professional work.

While the survey is by no means scientific (in spite of the subject of study, it wasn’t intended to be), it indicates that efforts to reach out to more scientists as potential contributors to Wikipedia would be met with enthusiasm and support, particularly in the open access scholarly community. We’ve had some initial conversations specifically with the Public Library of Science, and are looking forward to continuing them, specifically with an eye to scalable approaches to future collaboration.

More information:

• Overview report of survey results (PDF)
• Raw, anonynomous data from the survey (OpenDocument format)

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

One of the core principles under which Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects operate is that the knowledge contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers shouldn’t be locked into our servers. People should be able to re-use and re-purpose it in countless useful ways, commercial or non-commercial, to ensure that our work reaches the largest possible number of people. And from online mirrors to DVD editions to printed books to mobile versions, this basic principle has allowed knowledge to flow freely across all media.

When authors don’t make an explicit licensing choice, this isn’t possible: as an author, copyright law gives you maximal “protection”, unless you grant usage rights to others. Because the Wikimedia projects are an open collaboration, this grant of rights is requested from all contributors: When you make an edit to Wikipedia or most of our other projects, you’re asked to release it under a license that gives others, essentially, the right to use it for any purpose, as long as they provide credit to the authors and make any improvements freely available.

There are standard licensing documents that enumerate the rights and obligations of re-users. When Wikipedia started in January 2001, the project chose the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) developed for freely usable software documentation. The idea of giving information other than software freely away in this fashion was still relatively novel at the time,  and so it made sense to adopt a license that had been developed by the free software community, which at the time could already look back on a long tradition of sharing cultural works freely.

However, because it was developed specifically for (typically printed) documentation, the GFDL contains many passages that aren’t relevant to an online work like Wikipedia, and it also contains obligations that, when taken literally, are quite onerous. For example, it requires that the full text of the license accompany every copy of the work, and it also requires that the section entitled “history” be included with each copy. (For Wikipedia, a massively edited work, this history of changes is often much larger than the work itself.) While Wikipedia has developed a long practice of interpreting this language to facilitate easy re-use, the literal text of the license has baffled many re-users and confused them about what they can and cannot do.

In 2002, a newly formed non-profit organization called Creative Commons released a set of standardized licensing agreements to flexibly grant rights to re-users (the right to make copies, the right to commercial use, the right to distribute modified versions of a document, etc.). These licensing agreements have found rapid adoption by a growing community of authors. For example, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr integrated the option to choose one of the Creative Commons licenses directly into its uploading interface, and thousands of users have granted more permissive rights to re-users than standard copyright would give. Last month, Flickr celebrated that more than 100 million photos had been uploaded under one of the CC licenses.

Importantly, some of the CC licenses are significantly more restrictive than what Wikimedia permits: unlike Wikimedia, they restrict commercial re-use, or limit the creation of derivatives. (In the case of a photo, that would include embedding the photo into a video sequence, for example.) One license, however, is very similar to the GNU Free Documentation License in its fundamental spirit and intent: the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

Unlike the GFDL, CC-BY-SA allows simply referencing the license text instead of including it with each copy, and it does not require copying an entire history of changes with each document. And, it’s not a license written for software documentation, but for any kind of work. Moreover, it’s been specifically adapted to many international jurisdictions, and there are official translations in many languages. A more detailed comparison is available.

Because many people consider it more suitable for works other than software documentation than the GFDL, it’s also been widely adopted. Projects like WikiEducator, Citizendium, the Encyclopedia of Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life, and many others use CC-BY-SA as a content license. While GFDL and CC-BY-SA are very similar, text under one license cannot be integrated into text under another. This incompatibility barrier has presented a growing problem: As other communities have started to share knowledge freely, Wikimedia has lacked interoperability to be able to take from them, and give to them.

As early as 2004, first discussions began about harmonizing the Wikimedia license. Last year, the Free Software Foundation released a new version of the GFDL, 1.3, which specifically allows massively collaborative websites like the Wikimedia projects to also license content under CC-BY-SA. This option was developed by the Free Software Foundation in answer to a request by the Wikimedia Foundation. The request included a commitment by the Wikimedia Foundation to consult its community of volunteers before actually implementing any change.

After months of open discussion and development of the specific licensing terms under which Wikimedia content will be available, the Wikimedia community is now encouraged to vote on a proposal for updating the Wikimedia Foundation licensing terms on projects which currently use the GFDL. Rather than eliminating the GFDL entirely, the proposal will retain it where possible, while also making content available under CC-BY-SA and allowing it to be imported. If the proposal is implemented, licensing terms on all projects in all languages will be standardized where the GFDL is currently use. This standardization will also create  clear and understandable terms and conditions for re-users who want to remix information from our projects.

In order to vote, users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project can visit a special page which will transfer them to a third party server (the page is linked from a notice on top of all pages for logged in users).  The server is administered by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) to guarantee the integrity of the vote.  The vote will be tallied by a licensing committee made of Wikimedia volunteers. It will be concluded by May 3, 2009. After the vote result is published, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will consult regarding the outcome of the vote and next steps.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has published a clear position statement: “The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.”

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Other coverage: Creative Commons weblog<

Yesterday, Wikimedia Germany announced an extraordinary collaboration with one of the largest libraries in Germany, the Land Library of Saxony – State and University Library Dresden (SLUB). The collaboration will see roughly 250,000 images from the library made available to Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons license.

A translation of the German chapter press release (with huge thanks to user:Weasel for the translation) can be found below.  The info can also be found posted in German and English on the Wikimedia Commons:

Berlin, March 31, 2009
Meeting Point Wikipedia

Cooperation deal with one of the largest libraries sealed.

As the first German library, the Land Library of Saxony – State and
University Library Dresden (SLUB) has concluded a cooperation agreement
with Wikimedia Germany e.V. In a first step, the German Photo Collection
of the SLUB makes available ca. 250,000 image files from its repository
for free use to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

The photos, the correspondent captions and further meta data will be
uploaded to Commons during the common months by voluntary helpers of
Wikimedia, then connected step-by-step with personal identification data
(? literally “personal norm data”, some kind of formalized assignment of
identification) and the relevant Wikipedia articles. Apart from that,
the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection can be enriched,
commented on and supplied with geographical detail by Wikipedia users.
All results of this work are flowing back to the database of the German
Photo Collection. In this way, the SLUB too directly profits from the
new collaboration.

No rights of third parties concerning the image material supplied are
standing in the way of using it under the free license “Creative Commons
BY-SA 3.0″. The cooperation will, in the words of Dr Jens Bove, the
director of the German Photo Collection, “enhance the publicity and
reach of the photographic treasures of the German Photo Collection”. At
the same time, the SLUB is a clear testament to the support of the
international Open Access Initiative, which seeks open access to
scientific information. “The collaboration with one of the largest
scientific libraries in Germany with Wikimedia and the free media
repository Commons is another important step towards the free
availability of knowledge.”, explains Sebastian Moleski, director of
Wikimedia Deutschland.

“This cooperation is therefore exemplary for the strategy of Wikimedia
to make the knowledge of humanity accessible to anyone worldwide,” Free
Access to information, is the motto that is on top, too, of the
political agenda of the International Federation of Library Associations
and Institutions (IFLA). President of the IFLA, Prof Dr Claudia Lux, who
at the same time serves as general director of the Central and State
Library of Berlin, is therefore very pleased about the cooperation
between SLUB and Wikimedia: “This cooperation enables many people
worldwide to use library resources and thereby expand their knowledge.
That is a benefit for everyone!”

This is a great victory for SLUB, Wikimedia Germany, the Commons, and perhaps most importantly for all the users of the web, for now and, well . . . forever.

We know Wikimedia German has been very active in this space, and we can only expect more incredible partnerships like this to unfold in the coming months.  A special thanks to Mathias Schindler who has been particularly active and vocal in pushing these kinds of partnerships forward.  Prost!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

The Wikimedia projects have been running on the same commodity hardware for many years now and every now and then we decide to decommission some of our older machines. This not only allows us to free up space for new servers but also lets us use more energy efficient hardware.

While searching around for a new home for our old but still very useful servers we came across two linked organizations: northxsouth & San Francisco Community Collocation Project (SFCCP). Both of these groups help out their local and regional communities by using open source software to better spread information within various media spaces.

The SFCCP is active within the San Francisco community while northxsouth works with various Latin American countries.

Our donation of servers was happily received and I’m excited to report that they will soon be humming along and serving the public for a long time to come.

Tomasz Finc, Software Developer

Wikimedia Commons’ four-millionth image ‘View of Masca at sunset,’ public domain from the Wikimedia Commons)

Last week the folks at Wikimedia Commons were very pleased to announce the milestone of four million images on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia site that hosts the vast majority of image, sound, and video data for the Wikimedia projects.

The four millionth file is a public domain image of the “view near Masca in sunset,” uploaded by user:Kallerna. Masca is a small mountain village in the Canary Islands.

The Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to act as a central repository for the thousands of images that were being uploaded to a very-quickly growing Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons is most certainly now one of the largest repositories of freely licensed media files on the web.

A huge congratulations to the dedicated volunteers at the Commons, and to the tens of thousands of contributors.

Check out the hundreds of other amazing featured images on the Commons.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Wikipedian Nadine Stark and master brewer Bernd Kirsch tapping the keg. (Photo: Martina Nolte, CCBYSA from the Wikimedia Commons)

Germany’s first Open-Source-Beer received its premiere last weekend in Hannover. During CeBIT, the world’s largest computer expo, around 30 Wikipedians from all parts of the country met at the “HBX” brewery and tasted the new composition, called “HannoverWikiRed” after its red color.

In the run-up to the event at the brewery, the Wikipedians went on a guided tour through Hannover and shot hundreds of photos to illustrate articles on Wikipedia’s German language version. “The meetup has been a big success,” Wikipedian Nadine Stark, the organizer of the event stated. “We not only had a lot of fun at the brewery, but also improved Wikipedia’s content.”

At Stark’s suggestion, the HBX brewery published HannoverWikiRed under the Creative-Commons-by-SA licence 3.0. This allows anyone to brew the dark malty beer on their own, provided that the original author is given credit and –if altered– the result is distributed under the same, similar or a compatible license. The recipe of HannoverWikiRed can be found on the brewery’s homepage.

Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach<

We’re excited to release ‘Inside Wikimedia‘ -  our first video showcasing the people, projects, and the environment of the Wikimedia Foundation.  It’s short, but you can get a sense of who is behind the Foundation and what exactly we do on a day to day basis.  All of this video was shot on-location in our San Francisco offices.

Of course it’s a CC-BY-SA 3.0 work (with free music from Jamendo!), so feel free to remix and distribute far and wide.  The video is available in the formats below, and is hosted on Wikimedia Commons and on the Internet Archive.  We’re working on localized versions with alternate language subtitles as well.  Appreciate any comments or feedback.

Via…

Internet Archive (Quicktime, highres, 1GB) (MPEG4, 9MB) (OGG, 9MB)
Wikimedia Commons (OGG, 9MB) (OGG, 106MB)
Vimeo, and YouTube

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Following up on the success of last Fall’s Wiki Takes Manhattan, the project goes National with Wikipedia Loves Art, taking place all month.  As you can find on its page on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.

The event opened up last Sunday at London’s  Victoria and Albert Museum, and is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the V & A, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art. There are totally 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.
Fred Benenson of  Creative Commons spoke with Jimmy Wales about the event, and produced this quick video where Jimmy explains how excited he is about the event.

For details, and to see if a museum near you is participating, see the Wikipedia page devoted to the event.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<