Why Give to Wikimedia?

New Year’s Eve, a traditional time for celebration around the world, is fast approaching. Will your New Year’s look like this?

What was the point of this short pictorial excursion? It was a whirlwind tour of Wikimedia Commons, the media-supplying child in the Wikimedia family. Where Wikipedia’s trade is in encyclopedia articles and Wikibooks is in textbooks, Wikimedia Commons is devoted to free content photographs, diagrams, illustrations, animations, videos and audio. Multimedia resources are fast becoming the basic units of communication in our media-soaked world, where advertisements, entertainment and sheer data are beamed from every conceivable (and inconceivable) surface. I could have described the adventure above in a few paragraphs of text, but even then I’d be hard-pressed to compress the essence of the final photograph into the written word — don’t you think?

We understand that written literacy is important for allowing citizens to fully participate in society; allowing people to access and contribute to great written traditions is part of what is so valuable about Wikipedia’s success. Media literacy is becoming just as vital. A single image can have a devastating effect on the most carefully-prepared statement that skirts around the truth. Or the image can tell the lie as the text simultaneously disclaims. Think of the impact of a political cartoon that skewers an issue instantly; or for the latter, consider an advertisement that promises sex appeal and fun times while the small print warns, “Smoking may cause lung cancer”.

A written tradition is often about connecting people to their history, but increasingly our history is not being recorded in words on a page. Does the name Phan Thị Kim Phúc mean anything to you? Probably not. What if I showed you a black and white photograph of a little girl running down the road naked, screaming and crying? Probably you would recognise that photo, and instantly understand all of the issues it is short-hand for.

I can’t show you that photograph. It dates to 8 June, 1972, and is short-hand for the influence of the media’s reporting of the Vietnam War on the American public’s opinion of and support for that war. From this example it is clear that the media plays an active role in democracy. Free press, free people.

But not free content. That photograph won’t pass into the public domain until at least seventy years after the photographer’s death, and that’s only if the United States government doesn’t extend the term of copyright yet again (you can find the details on Wikisource, but Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a rather more readable introduction).

To see how quickly media is changing the landscape, compare the media available in Wikimedia Commons about the Vietnam War to that about 9/11. I’m certain that if I were to show a picture of a plane crashing into a building, everyone who reads this would understand what that stands for. I’m not going to include it because it doesn’t have a place in this article. But one difference between that image and the Vietnam War one, is that I would be able to. Free content images of that event exist, purely because it happened in the last five years.

Social movement cyclists Critical Mass are fond of the saying, “We’re not blocking traffic — we are the traffic”. There is a similar rallying cry behind citizen journalism — “We are the media”. And while the cyclists’ refrain seems more hopeful than accurate, it’s hard to deny the reality of participatory media today. YouTube videos can be front-page news. (Does the phrase “Don’t tase me, bro!” mean anything to you?) Wikipedia edits can be spookily ahead of the news. Blogs are said to influence political campaigns. People make careers out of this internet media biz.

Wikimedia Commons comes in here because it provides the basic building blocks for people who take part in media creation, commentary and criticism — that is, anyone who wants to. If you need images, video or sound that you want to be able to use without fear of being nabbed for infringing someone else’s copyright, then Wikimedia Commons is for you. And because it’s a wiki, you’re invited to give back, too.

Wikimedia Commons also takes existing free content or public domain collections and cannibalises the useful parts. By re-describing and re-cataloguing we essentially make these things that are already free, more accessible. After all, something that’s free but very hard to find is not all that useful, is it? (Did you know that all works created by US federal government employees are automatically placed in the public domain? You might not know it, but Wikimedia Commons editors certainly do!)

I wrote this post to ask for your help. You may guess from my tone that I’m not happy about the length of copyright being (seemingly) continually extended. You’re right; I’m not. I personally plan to fight it and argue against it whenever and wherever I can. That is a fight that I now understand the significance of; I now “get it” because I edit in Wikimedia Commons and see the gems that can be gleaned from the public domain, items whose copyright has expired and are now available for public use, a common good. But that’s not why I ask for your help, because Wikimedia Commons does not do this fighting.

Wikimedia Commons is a project that merely collects media files that are in the public domain or are free content. That project doesn’t have any position about what copyright laws should be, it only cares about what currently qualifies for inclusion. That project needs your help for very boring things: to pay for more servers, more bandwidth, and more software developers. Servers and bandwidth are obvious needs, I suppose. We have many 3MB images that are regularly used in dozens of Wikipedias, but there are not too many (if any!) Wikipedia text articles that are 3MB in size. We have to put a low cap of 20MB on uploaded files because we just aren’t confident that we could handle an explosion in larger content (video files, for example, could regularly pass that limit). Media is inherently bandwidth-greedy.

As for the software developers: If you have a browse around Wikimedia Commons you might notice the interface is not that great. It’s not shiny like…well…any Web 2.0 website. It may feel like the website is wearing hand-me-down shoes which don’t quite fit right. That’s true - the website uses the MediaWiki wiki engine designed for an encyclopedia. It still needs some more tinkering to adjust to the basic unit of Wikimedia Commons, which is a file (usually an image), not an article. And while MediaWiki is open source software which means anyone who has enough time and patience can contribute, it’s enough of a complex beast that few do.

So, servers, bandwidth and software developers — that’s why I want to ask you to please dip into your pocket and donate for Wikimedia Commons. But from me personally, I hope a New Year’s resolution may make its way into your mind, to resolve to fight against copyright expansion, enjoy the availability of the commons and give back to it, too. Happy New Year.

Image credits

1. “Godt Nytår 2004″ © Hansjorn, licensed under the GFDL.
2. “Charminar in all its glory at night” © Joe Zachs, licensed under CC-BY.
3. “Quelques euros en paiement” © Julien Jorge, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
4. “Pizza Landscape” © Peter Harrison, licensed under CC-BY.
5. “Dancing at a club”, dedicated to the public domain.
6. “Stiegl beer”, © Dan Karran, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
7. “Bratislava New Year 2005 FireWorks”, released into the public domain.
8. “Pints, ready for the ‘off’”, released into the public domain.
9. “Discoteque in Berlin”, released into the public domain.
10. “Shaoxing rice wine” © udono, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
11. “Sonnenaufgang im Forstbotanischen Garten Tharandt” © Henry Muehlpfordt, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
12. “Japanese Sleeping Style in Train”, released into the public domain.

Brianna Laugher lives in Melbourne, Australia and has been a Wikimedian since 2005. She writes on Wikimedia and free content-related topics in her blog at http://brianna.modernthings.org/ .

While communication technologies have created a world flush with knowledge, creativity, and communication, works of culture are more tightly controlled and restricted today than ever before. A rapidly expanding copyright regime makes the use, modification and distribution of almost all documented human expression the exclusive right of its creator. Copyright today is automatic, extensive, and lasts for more than a century. Our culture today, is owned.

To counter this trend, writers, scientists, musicians, artists, and others have joined together to call for access to knowledge and the creation of a social movement for free culture — culture that is free as in freedom, if not necessarily as in price. In the short lifetime of the free culture project, Wikipedia has taken up a position as the most successful and important free cultural work. Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, provide everyone working toward a free culture with an example of what success might look like, hints for how they might achieve it, and the inspiration to continue.

Your support of the Wikimedia Foundation during this year’s donation drive does more than fund the foundation and its projects. It helps support and pave the way for the global movement for free culture that is already much larger than Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and wikis. The free culture movement, as Wikipedia demonstrates, offers a compelling vision of how we might improve the way we produce and consume information throughout our lives.

Free Culture

Under contemporary copyright laws, one can not legally copy an article for a friend, create a mash-up of a video, or sing Happy Birthday at a restaurant without     asking for permission and, in most cases, paying for a license. Even more problematically, most cultural works are copyrighted by default at the moment of creation; only by explicitly disclaiming rights can works be used, copied, or modified. Through copyright, access to the most important cultural and scholarly resources are barred by tolls and restrictions. Legal access to most knowledge and culture is expensive — and prohibitively expensive for many. The creation of transformative or derivative works — like sampling and “mash-ups” — is frequently prohibited altogether.

Outraged by this situation, creators and consumers of culture have demanded increased freedom to distribute and modify creative goods as part of the free culture movement. While some leaders of the movement have resisted the statement of explicit goals, they have consistently positioned free culture in opposition to “high protectionist” approaches to copyright and intellectual property. Music, art, knowledge, and culture, free culture activists argue, should be widely accessible, flexible in the terms and restrictions placed on its use redistribution, and modification.

In part, the free culture movement is constituted by Utopians who imagine, describe, and espouse a world of what they feel is truly free culture. For these Utopians, free culture is a glimpse of ideal world where knowledge can be used, studied, modified, built upon, distributed, and shared without restriction. It is a world where creators are fairly and universally respected, attributed, and compensated. The major problem faced by free culture Utopians is that, in many cases, they do not know to move from contemporary cultural-economies based on copyright, ownership, control, and permission-asking to their ideal world.

Feeling that Utopianism is impractical, free culture’s pragmatists argue that it’s better to settle for the best that we can get by reforming the current copyright system and making incremental improvements. In particular, pragmatists argue that Utopian idealism eliminates the exclusivity on commercialization that helps support the production of many creative works. Better, they say, to settle for non-commercial use or verbatim copying than copyright’s default of “all rights reserved.”

The free culture movement, in this sense, is torn between the desire to create a world of truly free knowledge and the sense that in, for that knowledge, they have eliminated all viable financial and social systems to sustain creation of these works. The pragmatists compromise on a Utopian vision of a free world while the Utopians espouse what appears to many to be unrealistic.

Wikimedia

Wikimedia is a Utopian free culture project. Its goal is not only to collect knowledge; its goal is to do so freely. Wikipedia was created before it was clear that a free encyclopedia could or would succeed or that it would be better than the existing proprietary alternatives. Its goal was to be free, open, and unrestricted. Ironically, this idealistic commitment drove the creation of alternatives and redefined what was possible and realistic. In the free culture space, nothing demonstrates this better than Wikipedia. Nothing gives free culture’s Utopians as much hope.

Wikimedia is important simply in that it exists and in that is existing freely. As one of the most visited websites in existence, Wikipedia is an inevitable destination for any web searcher or surfer. It is a frequent response to the questions and curiosity of millions. But it is not just ubiquitous; it is better. It is no longer particularly controversial to suggest that Wikipedia is the single most impressive reference work ever compiled. It is one of the most important extant culture works in the world. And it is also free.

Early this year, the Wikimedia Foundation Board made an explicit commitment to a strong articulation of free culture goals. Through their resolution, the Wikimedia Foundation board made clear what was obvious to those involved in the project: Wikipedia has succeeded not in spite of the fact that the encyclopedia is free but because the encyclopedia is free. Wikimedia projects are valuable precisely because they have torn down barriers to contribution, use, and reuse.

Equally important for the free culture movement, Wikimedia has set an example and painted a picture of how a free culture might be achieved. In large part because of Wikimedia, wikis — once a marginal tool used by a small group of geeks — are a core technology in the production of free culture on thousands of wikis on myriad subjects. The technologies, social models, communication structures, and decision-making policies, procedures, and systems each provide inspiration and instructions for others in the broader free culture community. In each of these areas, Wikimedia projects provides a set of innovative models and practices that are compelling, successful and well documented.

Donating to the Wikimedia Foundation

While Wikipedia is free to use and is written without direct compensation to the vast majority of contributors, running Wikipedia is not without costs. Wikipedia is free as in speech, but not free as in beer — at least not for the Wikimedia Foundation. Financial support is necessary to power servers, sustain essential technological development, fend off legal threats, and ensure a healthy and productive community. This essential work is paid for by donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

And yet, while these donations are targeted toward the support of Wikimedia and its member projects, their impact in the free culture movement is much larger and more important. As the visible symbol of free culture to the vast multitude of people who have never heard the term, Wikimedia is intimately tied up in free culture’s success. Wikipedia provides not only an example of how free culture is possible, it demonstrates how it can be done. It also shows that free culture — truly free culture — is better than the proprietary alternatives. Wikipedia has already paved the way for the success of hundreds of free culture projects. Its success in its struggles, including this fundraising drive, will help or hurt the immediate prospects of the entire movement for free culture.

Please, join me in donating to the Wikimedia Foundation this year. The fate of a much more than Wikipedia is riding on our generosity.

Benjamin Mako Hill is an free software and free culture activist. He is an editor on English Wikipedia and Wikiversity and sits on the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board. He is an initiator of the Definition of Free Cultural Works and a director of the Free Software Foundation. By day, he works as a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management and as a Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.