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

On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the licensing change that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the GNU Free Documentation License as the primary content license to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig tweeted that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “free culture win” in the Creative Commons blog.

A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all our projects in all languages reflect the new terms (see this message for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use MediaWiki, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Earlier in May Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the newest appointment to our Board.  Arne Klempert is the very first chapter-appointed member of our board.  The Wikipedia Signpost also covered the announcement. Welcome Arne!

The Board also announced that our current chair, Michael Snow, has been re-appointed to his post.  Both posts run until July 2010. More details from Jan-Bart’s note to the Foundation-l mailing list below.

In April 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation gave the chapters a role in the board member selection process, by asking them to select candidates to fill two of the Trustees seats.

The Wikimedia chapters have selected Arne Klempert as a new candidate. In agreement with the board, they have decided to propose Michael Snow as their second candidate, with the intent of confirming his position on the Board of Trustees as occupying one of the chapters selected Board seats. The chapters are glad that both candidates have accepted their selection and hope that the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will be able to formalize this as soon as possible. The selection of those candidates comes after many heated but fruitful discussions and represents the chapters’ will to introduce novelty and ensure continuity in the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Arne Klempert is Head of Digital Communications at IFOK, a German consulting firm. He is one of the founders of the German chapter. He was involved in the development of Wikimedia Deutschland first as vice-chair and then as Executive Director, until September 2008.

Michael Snow has served on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, and was chosen in July 2008 to be its chair. Michael is a lawyer and has been involved in Wikimedia for many years as Head of the Wikimedia Communications Committee and creator of the Wikipedia Signpost, amongst other roles.

The chapters are confident that this selection brings quality, diversity and stability to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, and that both candidates will capably handle the responsibilities of being Trustees. Both candidates are selected to fill a term that ends in July 2010.

Please join me in welcoming Arne to the board and congratulating Michael on his re-appointment. On behalf of the board I would like to thank all those involved in facilitating the process and making these appointments possible.

Jan-Bart de Vreede
Vice Chair Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Congratulations to both Arne and Michael, and to the chapters for putting forth their first Board appointments.

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

The start of Volunteer Appreciation Week in the US (April 19 to 25, 2009) seemed an auspicious time for me to introduce myself to the amazing community of Wikimedia volunteers! I started last week in the new position of Chief Program Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation and have received such a wonderful warm welcome. Thank you!

Every minute of every day so far I have been awed by the people behind all the great and nearly innumerable activities going on! My background is in management of volunteer-driven programs. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Central and West Africa, I became passionate about volunteer programs being the answer for long-term sustainable change that is most needed and most appropriate for the beneficiaries they serve.

I also had the chance to see first-hand how access to information, or lack of access could profoundly affect individuals, communities and whole societies. My work at the Wikimedia Foundation will be to help support the volunteer community in achieving their mission. I aim to help strengthen the volunteer support structure, to help provide materials and skill building opportunities for current and potential Wikipedians, and to facilitate the exploration of new projects and strategies to increase participation as well as the quality and reach of our content. I look forward to getting to know more individuals as I advance along this adventure!

Jennifer Riggs, Chief Program Officer

From late October to early November 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit conducted the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors in 20 languages. In total, more than 130,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors completed the extensive survey questionnaire (out of more than 300,000 people total who took at least part of the questionnaire).* This level of response far exceeded our expectations, and the data that was collected provides a wealth of information about the Wikipedia community. English, German and Spanish were the most responsive Wikipedia editions and together make up two thirds of the responses.

The UNU-Merit team has spent the previous months cleaning and preparing the data, and is now making available first results for some of our priority questions. Key outcomes of this first analysis include:

• 65% of respondents self-described as readers, and 35% as (mostly occasional) contributors. Former contributors are analysed separately.
• Respondents came from over 200 countries, ranging from 10 to 85 years completed the survey; their average age is 26 years, and 25% of the respondents are younger than 18 years. Female respondents are a bit younger than the average (24 years)
• Among these, readers and contributors are on average in their mid-twenties, and predominantly male (75%)
• Women, with a share of 25% in all respondents, are more strongly represented among readers (32%) and less strongly represented among contributors (13%).
• Both educational levels and age are slightly higher among contributors than among readers.
• Regarding their motivations to contribute, respondents mentioned as their top two reasons that (1) they liked the idea of sharing knowledge, and (2) that they had come across an error and wanted to fix it.
• The concern that they might not have enough information to contribute is the main reason holding back potential contributors, mentioned by 51% of this group. Fourty-eight percent mentioned they were happy readers of Wikipedia, and saw no reason to get involved as contributors.
• The most common reason why respondents have not donated money to the Wikimedia Foundation, mentioned by more than 42% of respondents, is that they don’t know how. (If you happen to be one of them, we suggest you go to donate.wikipedia.org ;-) )

Ruediger Glott and Philipp Schmidt from UNU-Merit have made available additional data in the online workbook of their analysis (PDF file), and we’re planning to give you regular updates with new data every couple of weeks from now on. The survey team also maintains its own website at wikipediastudy.org.

This is a landmark moment in the history of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. These and future findings that will result from this data will help to shape our efforts to reach new contributors and new readers.  The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank everyone who has made this survey possible, especially the UNU-Merit Team and the community of translators.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

* In addition to the 130,000 responses overall, we’ve received 40,000 responses from the Russian Wikipedia, which very significantly overrepresents this group in the total response set. The survey team has excluded this group from the data until the possible causes for this overrepresentation can be fully understood.

[UPDATE 4/16] Naoko Komura, who project-managed the survey translation and launch on the Wikimedia Foundation side, sent a list of translators who helped us to run this survey in 20 languages. They are: Jeandré du Toit, Mohamed Magdy, Meno25, Toni Pulido, Jordi Roqué Figuls, Xavier SMP, Zirland, MF-Warburg, Tim Landscheidt, Michael Bimmler, Arno Lagrange, Ariel T. Glenn, Ziko van Dijk, Verónica Rivero, Salvador Espada, Sébastien Beyou, Plyd, Delphine Ménard, Philippe Verdy, Daniel U. Thibault, Maximilian Hasler, Rex Alberto, Morris Mastini, Federico Leva, Hatukanezumi, Henrdrik Maryns, Robin P., Wojciech Pędzich, McMonster, Jennifer Hobbs, Thomas Buckup, Aleksandr Sigachov, Ilya Haykinson, Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai, BalaSundaraRaman, C.R. Selvakumar, Manop Kaewmoracharoen, Nguyễn Thanh Quang, Trần Vĩnh Tân, Ting Chen, Andrew Leung. Thanks to all of them for their help — it’s wonderful to have so much volunteer support in a project like this. Thanks also to Naoko herself, who helped to create the Japanese translation, and to the UNU-Merit webmasters, Herman Pijpers and Mourik Jan Heupink. :-)<

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<

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

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<

Earlier today we posted a job description for a Communications intern at the Wikimedia Foundation.  This is a great opportunity for someone studying in a communications related field (marketing, communications, public relations, journalism – or others) to get extraordinary hands-on experience.  We have an enormous amount of work on our plate.  Handling the communications needs of a global organization with hundreds of millions of users around the world is no simple task.

If you’re interested and up for the hard work, send along your resume and some recent samples of your writing work.  The internship could last anywhere from 3 to 6 months, with some flexibility. We can also support school credit if it fits within your program.  For now we’re primarily looking for someone to work with us in our San Francisco offices, but as this is a rotating opportunity we may look at other options in the future.

Join the team that supports Wikipedia and its huge sister projects.  Help us help our volunteers make the internet a better place!

Jay Walsh, Communications<