Open Wiki Blog Planet

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Siebot is the bot operated by Siebrand.. This one bot alone did at the last count 9071569 edits and the counter for the total number of edits is at 952027924 edits. Siebot is used for many functions, it is used heavily for Commons maintenance and for interwiki linking.


The thing with statistics is that you have to be wary of what it is a number represents. One billion edits is enormous and, they are indeed all generated by our community, some do an awesome job and automate much of the drudgery.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Right now everywhere in political circles the recently-deceased John Murtha is being toasted by friend and former foe alike.  He was a man’s man and a politician’s politician.  It was hard not to like the character he cut.

That said, I don’t miss the King of Pork Congressman Murtha, who felt no shame in the game that earned him his moniker; the white elephant of waste that is the $200 million John Murtha airport his true legacy.

Liberals sort of fell for Murtha when he became anti-war because he was continually trumpeted in the media as a real “hawk”.  He’s still loved for that.

However, Murtha’s ‘grasp at the swill for my constituents because it’s my Constitutional duty’ style of politics were foolish before and ruinous now that the country’s economic outlook is so dire.  If we don’t start capping people like Richard Shelby at the knees, as we should have done to Murtha, our entire standard of living is threatened.  We simply can’t afford to spend this way anymore, nor allow our government to be run so ineffectually.  The war, tax-cut and high spending policies of the last ten years have hurt this country’s finances greatly, and we haven’t woken up to the economic reality yet.  Our leaders won’t tell us how bad it is because they are all too much like Congressman Murtha, or Senator Shelby, and because the cold hard truth of it all does not get them re-elected.

But a toast to John Murtha the man, may he rest in peace.

New York Times obituary.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

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• Richard Shelby stops Senate in the name of pork (0)
• 2010 the Year of Anger Management? (0)
• Kids who kill – are children murdering more? (2)
• Who died? Death by Scuba, pet dog and mobile home this November 5, 2009 (0)

News and notes: Commons at 6 million, BLP taskforce, milestones and more
In the news: Robson Revisions, Rumble in the Knesset, and more
Dispatches: Fewer reviewers in 2009
WikiProject report: WikiProject Olympics
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Here is how the pork cuts across party lines and the Senate gets nothing done in the process. It wasn’t just porkstar Democrats like John Murtha.  Alabama Senator Dick Shelby, a Republican who dabbled in birtherism, showed everyone that he will hold up Senate business in the name of pork for his state.

How’s that for tea in your eye?

[continued]

With all the talk of tea parties, it’s easy to forget that fiscally reckless Bush Republicanism is still with us, and that if Scott Brown is anything he is an untested moderate who won an anomalous election.  Ron Elving’s column was spot-on about Shelby:

Shelby has placed a blanket “hold” on 70 nominations pending before the Senate, nominations for federal agency jobs and seats on the federal bench. Does he have a case against each and every one of the 70? No, he isn’t really talking about any of them.

His problem has to do with a couple of government contracts he wants to see benefit his home state of Alabama. To date, these Shelby “earmarks” have not come to pass, and the senator wants to change that. He is tired of being stiffed. He wants to force the Senate and the Obama administration to cede to his preferences for the granting of these contracts.

That they allow this chicanery in the Senate procedural rules is without doubt evidence that both parties fail at doing the people’s business.  Shelby released some holds Monday night amid a growing public uproar, but he still has retained others and continues to threaten to do so.

These are bad times!  Don’t hold up the business of the people because you aren’t getting your earmarks:

What is this mysterious power to place a hold on appointments and bills? How is it that one senator can delay or even cancel the filling of these jobs? The hold is simply a senator’s way of notifying the majority leader that he or she intends to use the right to extended debate against that name or bill. It is an implicit threat to filibuster, in a time when such threats are as effective as filibusters themselves ever were.

In this case, Shelby’s communications director tells us, the issue is the coddling of terrorists. The Obama administration has not yet granted a certain contract for the building of tanker planes to refuel U.S. warplanes in midflight. And the Obama administration has not let a contract for a lab that will analyze forensic evidence from bomb-making materials found in Iraq and Afghanistan. The communication from the senator’s office suggests this shows a lack of commitment to anti-terrorism.

It neglects to mention that both these contracts involve, or might involve, large business interests in the state of Alabama.

Let him filibuster.  Let them filibuster.  Let the filibusters begin should be the new mantra of the Democrats as people watch Dick Shelby stop government to filibuster his pork.

Read Ron Elving’s Washington Watch post at NPR, Why All Americans Should Thank Senator Shelby, and the New York Daily News op-ed about this abuse of process.

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• Tom Coburn, wing-nut senator from a wing-nut state (1)

Michael Bierut of Pentagram gives “a brand new talk on the subject of Clients.” On Tina Roth Eisenberg’s swissmiss website, commenter Stratton Cherouny says:

Perhaps the most valuable “exit video” any matriculating design student could ask for. Should be required viewing before even thinking about picking up the diploma.

There was recently a Nieman Journalism Lab article comparing news coverage between Wikipedia and its smaller sister project Wikinews. It's an interesting topic, and certainly relevant to Wikimedia strategy in the long run: is Wikinews tenable? Would it be better to discontinue it, fold it into Wikipedia, keep it as is, or some other path?

Andrew Lih, who was interviewed for the article, attributed the differerence (and, apparently, a preference for Wikipedia) to a few factors. First, a formulaic structure in Wikipedia articles: an "inverted pyramid" going from general description to finer details. Second, a redundance in Wikinews articles: new events in a series require an entirely new story, with a new narrative and a new summary of contextual information—one that increases the workload and lessens the motivation of a Wikinewsie. Finally, he argues that the wiki process does not lend itself well to narrative processes like Wikinews, giving as an example the (essentially failed) A Million Penguins project by Penguin Publishing.

While Andrew Lih's commentary is good, I think there's an interesting generalization that can be made that I'm not sure is evident in what he says. My generalization is as follows:

Aggregative content production is easier than collaborative content production, but lacks the same quality.

This generalization is intended to highlight one of the biggest failings, in my opinion, of the "Web 2.0" shift: a lack of real collaboration. Take any of a number of Web 2.0 sites, and they can be roughly categorized as either primarily aggregative or primarily collaborative. For example, Flickr and Wikimedia Commons are primarily aggregative: add a decent image and you've improved the collection. There might be some collaborative elements, particularly in managing the metadata on Commons, but the broad thrust of these sites is aggregative. Content could in theory be added automatically.

I feel that most sites will tend towards aggregation over collaboration: aggregation is far simpler and easier. You don't worry about whether your funny cat videos really add to YouTube: you simply trust that enough people will upload enough videos of sufficient quality to keep you amused. People don't go around deleting bad YouTube videos, or solely improving other peoples' work. Aggregation doesn't require high-quality reviews, or any sort of endorsement of content, but instead generally takes more general statistics and perhaps-ignorant numerical approximations that can be made automatically. Search engines like Google are good examples of aggregative content: people create websites on the Internet, then Google aggregates most of those websites and applies an automatic process to rank their relevance to any given keyword.

I think that in the Wikinews vs. Wikipedia debate, we're missing a key component of the difference: which project is more collaborative, and which is more aggregative? I see that even if only one author writes a set of Wikinews articles, dozens of articles may be required to get the same information that will be present in a single paragraph of a decent Wikipedia entry, each written by a person or team. A Wikipedia article can be updated by simply adding a sentence with the update and perhaps a citation confirming it. Wikipedia is, in this sense, more aggregative than Wikinews. As ironic as that may seem (since Wikipedia is generally more collaborative than many "Web 2.0" sites) Wikipedia can more easily compile small contributions that might be worthless on their own into a high-quality aggregate article. Wikipedia is more formulaic, more automatic than Wikinews in some senses, especially given the lack of narrative. (That being said, we should not ignore the fact that Wikipedia's model is, in fact, essentially collaborative, but my argument is that Wikipedia has more of the low-input aggregative mode in this respect than Wikinews does.)

Now, automation and aggregation are not necessarily good or bad things: Google is leader in the search market precisely because it does an aggregative task well. But aggregation has severe limitations. There is a certain lack of human oversight in many aggregative processes, and they can easily be gamed: for example, Google bombing or search engine optimization or even simple sock puppets on sites without close moderation.

Collaboration is highly desirable. Good collaboration produces much better-quality content than aggregation, in general, since there are few forces to cause aggregated content to be improved. Standards can be built; corrections can be made. Google Knol is a good example of this problem. Individual "knols" are essentially controlled by their original author(s) and those designated by them, and there can be any number of knols on the same subject. Edits are often only allowed when manually approved by the original author. It is thus usually much, much easier to create a new, mediocre knol than to attempt to improve on someone else's knol. On average, I would bet on the Wikipedia process more than the Knol process.

The primary problem with collaboration is apathy. It's very, very hard to get good collaboration going, and when it does manage to make those few steps you'll still see only a tiny fraction of users contribute meaningfully to the end result. Apathy is a powerful enemy of collaboration, and without any interest in collaboration, a collaborative project will die a ghost town or be filled with irrelevant material or perhaps simply be taken over as a soapbox for a vocal minority. Aggregation solves the apathy problem by taking a route around it: make the apathy irrelevant by bringing in as much content as possible. Some users will still contribute high-quality material, and if they are numerous enough, the service will ultimately be useful. One does not have to care very much in an aggregative environment, and that helps overcome apathy to collect the end goal: the product; the content.

There can—and probably should—be a balance between collaborative and aggregative processes. Wikipedia, for example, harnesses aggregative forces in small edits and new articles, which fuels a platform for collaborative production. The difference in ease-of-growth between aggregation and collaboration, I think, is best illustrated by Wikipedia's own content statistics. A tiny fraction of the English Wikipedia's articles get significant collaborative influence and see recognition and promotion to grades like "Good" or "Featured", while a sad majority of articles remain short (but still hopefully useful) "stubs" and "Start-class" articles that have not seen significant editing by people other than their creator (or bots, which tend to break statistics looking at human patterns). Now, I think that the balance that ought to be sought is one that continues to accept the powerful aggregative influence, but that greatly promotes collaboration where possible, since collaboration most reliably produces good results.

The long-term goal needs to be to foster collaboration. Whether this will, or should, occur, at the expense of, or fueled by, an aggregative process, remains an interesting question.

On the Toolserver there is this counter that shows how many edits are left before we hit a cool billion.
Thanks,
GerardM

An employee's first day is one of the few she will always remember about her job with your company. The first day provides a number of opportunities that, if squandered, can be difficult to recoup.

On the New York Times Dot Earth Blog, Andrew Revkin writes about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and whether they are a burden on government agencies who must handle compliance. Revkin references my article quoting Stewart Brand’s full thought at the 1984 Hackers’ Conference – that information wants to be free and expensive.

In the article, Revkin includes a response from Chris Horner, a lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who has filed numerous FOIA requests. Horner explains to Revkin why he believes FOIA compliance should not be viewed as a burden to agencies:

Keep that journalist hat on and the telescope won’t so easily get turned backward, as to who has a burden when the public seeks access to that for which it entirely pays.

His point: information that is expensive to develop, and paid for by tax dollars, should be freely accessible to those who have paid for its creation – the public. That’s one example of how information can be expensive – true to Brand’s thought – and free in the sense that it should be freely available to those who have helped cover that expense.

#Crisiswiki.org is a MediaWiki wiki building a "yellow pages" with everything that is relevant for the Haiti disaster response. This project is organised by Crisis Commons, an organisation that not only aims to provide relief when needed, but also stimulate people all over the world to prepare for an un-hoped for disaster. There is a wiki for that as well.

On their website, you find many geek organisations that have involved themselves in the relief effort. Translatewiki is not that geeky, then again I am biased, but we have already identified two applications that are used for the Haiti relief effort, MediaWiki and OpenStreetMap. Both can do with a massive effort to localise these applications in Haitian Creole

We welcome Open Source applications that are used for disaster management and disaster relief.. When many applications are supported at translatewiki, our community will be strengthened by the people that come specifically to lcoalise this software but equally important, it gives us something real to do, something other then giving money and hoping for the best.
Thanks,
     GerardM

• In case you ever wondered: the complete matrix of all Wikimedia wikis.
• Place your entries in the billion edit pool!
• “Is it something like Wikipedia?”
• I am locking the Wikipedia article on our sex life.
• The Wikiman.
• I’ve shifted my fake news writing to NewsTechnica. Enjoy!

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Actor Justin Mentell, known for his role in US television drama Boston Legal, died February 1st in a road accident in rural Wisconsin.  He was aged 27.

Iowa County Sheriff’s Department, who confirmed the death, stated that Mentell was driving without wearing a seatbelt when he crashed his 4 X 4 vehicle into two trees placed on an embankment. He was killed in the collision at 0300 local time.

One of the roles that Justin Mentell played was Garrett Wells in Boston Legal in 2005 and in 2006. William Shatner, who also appeared in the programme, paid tribute to the actor on his Twitter page on Wednesday. He wrote: “I’m deeply saddened to hear about Justin Mentell. There’s no telling how far up the ladder he may have climbed. My sympathies to his family.”

Source: Wikinews

Photo of Justin taken by me for the Creative Commons at the premiere of Palo Alto in April 2007.

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Everyone reading this is probably reasonably smart — Wikipedia is a nerd magnet, after all.

So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share.

Can you explain the obvious to people it isn’t obvious to? With references?

Sydney is Australia’s oldest and largest city, and state capital of New South Wales. The city is built around Port Jackson, where the Parramatta River meets the Tasman Sea, and Sydney Harbour is graced by two of Australia’s most iconic structures, the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Sydney is a major cultural, retail, fashion, art, and education center, produces more than 25% of the country’s economic activity, and is home to approximately one-in-five Australians.

Sydney CBD (Central Business District), seen from the air. The Royal Botanic Gardens can be seen at center right, with the Opera House on the water at the northern tip of the Gardens, and Sydney Harbour Bridge to the left of the Opera House.

Sydney Harbour and Parramatta River

Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon and opened in 1973, Sydney Opera House was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

Circular Quay Railway Station

From left to right: Sydney Opera House, The Rocks (one of Sydney’s oldest neighborhoods), and the southern approach to Sydney Harbour Bridge

Panorama, Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. The bridge is a steel through-arch designed by John Bradfield, an Australian engineer who also designed the Story Bridge in Brisbane (photos of the bridge under construction between 1923 and 1932).

The Harbour Bridge opened in 1932 and is famous for the Bridge Climb, an adventure tour that allows people to climb to the top of the bridge’s arch, 134 meters above Sydney Harbour.

Front steps, Sydney Opera House, seen from the Royal Botanic Gardens

Sulphur-crested Cockatoos in the Royal Botanic Gardens

From left to right: Deutsche Bank Place (partially obscured by trees at left), Chifley Tower, Aurora Place, and Governor Philip Tower, seen from the Royal Botanic Gardens

Coat of Arms of Australia. The shield is surrounded by a Red Kangaroo and an Emu, two native species of Australia, and the unofficial animal symbols of the country.

University of Sydney

Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney, Camperdown and Darlington Campuses

Looking down University Avenue from Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) tower is in the upper left.

Central Sydney at night, looking north. The illuminated red “W” on the building in the center is the logo of Westpac, a major Australian bank

Darling Harbour

Glick’s Cakes & Bagels and a Kosher Supermarket next door in Bondi, New South Wales. Bondi and other towns in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney are historically home to a large portion of the city’s Jewish population.

Control Tower, Sydney Airport

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Kwiat Dalii.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Lestath

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Lachmöwen.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by 4028mdk09

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There are “artists in residence” at many art galleries and universities, the city of Adelaide has a “thinker in residence” program and Alain de Botton was even “writer in residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport! So, one of the ideas that I suggested in my closing speech at GLAM-WIKI (and I recall that someone in the audience scoffed at the time) was my hope that one day there would be a Wikipedian in Residence in museums.

What would such a project be?

A Wikipedian in residence could undertake any number of tasks, some which are more public-facing or others which are directed internally. For example, they might prepare a report of the applicability of the GLAM-WIKI recommendations to that institution or they might coordinate backstage pass tours. However both of these require a level of trust to have already been built up.

Perhaps the most immediately useful for the museum, least politically divisive for both communities and most empowering for Wikipedian would be for them to write articles about the notable items in the collection.

The advantages of this would not be limited to bringing awareness of items in the museum’s collection to a new audience (and potentially increased visitation as a result), but also a positive strengthening of the existing relationship between the museum and Wikipedia. Just like on other social media platforms, Wikipedians are already having a conversation about virtually every museum - so the museum might as well be a part of it

Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that there is an appropriately qualified local Wikipedian who would be willing to volunteer their time each week in exchange for access to curatorial expertise and all the usual benefits official museum volunteers receive (exhibition discounts, coffee, thank you events…). Museums already have lots of experience with volunteers, so why are there no museums with officially supported “digital volunteers”?

To alleviate concerns from the Wikipedia community about Conflict of Interest, the Wikipedian-in-residence would need to be open about their affiliation and would not be allowed to edit the article about the museum itself. Furthermore, the museum would need to make assurances that they, like everyone else in the wiki-verse, do not wish to assert editorial control over articles.

There are at least two things that I feel might be necessary prerequisites for such a project - one is specific notability criteria, the other is staff training.

1) Notability criteria

It must noted that the term “Notability” when used by Wikipedia is not synonymous with “significance”. My (possibly simplistic) understanding of a museum’s “statement of significance” is that it is a description of why an item is deserving of being acquired and preserved. This is not the same as Wikipedian notability which determines whether a topic merits its own article in the ‘pedia.

Therefore, every object acquired by a museum has significance, but not every object has notability. One of Winston Churchill’s half-smoked cigars might have recently sold for $7000 so it clearly has significance but that doesn’t mean that that specific cigar deserves its own article. Ancient roman coins might be worthy of preservation, but that doesn’t mean that every individual coin should have its own article.

Currently there are no Wikipedia criteria for museum objects - be they artworks, archaeological findings, pieces of technology or anything that fits a museum’s acquisition policy. There are a range of subject specific notability guidelines which determine the notability of books, movies, companies, websites and even “criminal acts”! However, there’s nothing that comes even close to outlining under what circumstances a museum object deserves its own article, despite the fact that some objects definitely do. For example, Wikipedia already has “Category: Collections of the Science Museum (London)” with eight object-articles in it, and there are all the other museums under the broad listing of “Category: Museum collections by country“.

The good folks at “Wikipedia saves public art” (led by Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art) have started discussing this and they’ve also raised the issue of what makes an artist notable.

I would suggest that a very good place for a Wikipedian-in-residence to start, in the absence of such criteria,  is the shortlists that many museums have already created - the “highlights of the collection” glossy book for mass-appeal. For example, here are the books for sale in museums’ online shops listing the key items in the collections of the: British Museum, Louvre, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, V & A, Hermitage, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Canada, UK National Portrait Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Museo del Prado etc. etc.

I suggest that the majority of the items listed in these books are walk-up-starts to become Wikipedia articles in their own right precisely because they had to undergo a vigorous curation to make it into a glossy coffee-table book. Obviously, being in the museum’s own “best of” catalogue doesn’t qualify as an independent reliable source - but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb!

Taking account of the types of criteria that are used in the other specific guidelines, what do you think should be used as criteria for Notability of museum objects? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

2) Staff Training

It is not surprising that many institutions are reticent about working with Wikipedia. As I said in my thesis, the approach of knowledge professionals to Wikipedia has been one of “vacillation between ambivalence and disdain”. Equally, Wikipedians are frustrated by the way some museums use dubious copyright claims to control the downstream use of their collection. So, before any Wikipedian-in-residence project could begin, it is probably worthwhile arranging for a local Wikipedian(s) to come in to the museum and deliver a half-day training session for senior staff on the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia. This would be less a practical training session and more of an exercise in building trust by demonstrating the mechanisms that Wikipedia has built for monitoring/controlling/improving the project.

For example, surprisingly few people actually know just how assiduously the Wikipedia community deletes articles which are copyright violations of other websites. Equally, not many people know that all revisions of every article are kept and can be compared and returned to at any point. Demonstrating these kinds of things to museum management would be important builders of trust before any in-residence project were to begin.

Are you from a museum that would like to receive such a staff-training session? If so, please contact me, your local Chapter, or the Wikiproject responsible for your area and I’m sure something can be arranged for you.

#OpenStreetMap is used extensively in Haiti, more then the other geo locations. There is a great article in the Guardian that extols the virtues of OpenStreetMap in Haiti. What makes this article so interesting is that it talks about the many relief support applications that are currently in use.

Software like Sahana that helps people find people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps and liase among the many people and organisations involved. It is the kind of software that should be ready for wherever it is needed.

There is more software that is used, read the article for that.. My point is, that when disaster strikes, you want to be ready. Disaster can and will strike anywhere. When you are prepared, when your software is ready for deployment in the whole world, when it is localised for the people that are there, they can actually use it.

I am happy to learn that we may get people localising OSM at translatewiki.net. I would love it when all the software mentioned is ready to be used when disaster strikes in my backyard,
Thanks,
GerardM

One factor to consider when cropping a portrait is lead room.  When a subject looks to one side viewers become curious where the person is looking.  Lead room adds a sense of meaning to facial expressions and gives compositions a satisfactory emotional balance.  This 1935 portrait has a beautiful use of lead room: it was taken by photographer Ben Shahn in Jackson Square, New Orleans.  A wide space to the left enhances the wistful expression in the subject's eyes.

To see what a difference the lead room makes, let's try cropping out part of the photograph so he looks centered.  The effect isn't nearly so pleasing.

Today's example of Sigmund Freud isn't so much an example as a contemplation of copyright law.  The portrait was taken in 1914, which makes it public domain under United States law.  If the portrait had been taken ten years later then Wikimedia Commons wouldn't be able to host it.  Although all of Freud's writings entered public domain in the European Union at the start of 2010, United States law doesn't recognize all of his work as public domain.  It's a really weird quirk that causes big obstacles.

Copyright terms in the European Union run for the life of the author plus seventy years.  Freud died in 1939.  So on January 1 2010 all of his copyrights expired in Austria and the United Kingdom.  Most countries reflect that lapse in their own law by a provision known as the rule of the shorter term, but the United States doesn't follow the rule of the shorter term.

So I could republish all of Freud's writings from Vienna where they're public domain, but not from the US where they remain under copyright.  The Wikimedia Foundation servers are located in the United States.  So because the servers fall under United States law, Austrian Wikimedians can't bring Freud's later writings onto the German language Wikisource (which hosts free licensed texts).

United States copyright law is complex, but one rule that holds true nearly all of the time in the States is that material which was published before 1923 is public domain (no matter when the author died).  So this 1914 portrait is fine to reuse but a 1924 portrait wouldn't necessarily be free.  That copyright gap is going to widen: Anne Frank's autobiography will lapse into public domain in The Netherlands in 2015 but will remain under copyright in the United States.  Broadly speaking, United States copyrights are in a holding pattern until 2020.  So 1923 works won't lapse public domain for at least another ten years.

For the last thirty years U.S. copyright law has been getting a series of extensions.  Those extensions have something to do with lobbying by the Walt Disney Corporation: Mickey Mouse was created in 1925.  It doesn't actually protect the value of Mickey Mouse to keep Sigmund Freud under copyright in the United States, though.  The United States could adopt the rule of the shorter term without harming Disney's profits.
Other culturally valuable material is getting tied up because of this legal hitch: William Butler Yeats's works entered public domain in his native country of Ireland this year.  I can republish this 1911 portrait of him freely, but I can't republish his late poems.

And one thing worth wondering is this: with a normal copyrighted work it could be possible to contact the copyright owner and request a release under copyleft license.  How does one seek access to material that remains under a copyright which no one seems to own?

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Joseph Martin Kronheim - Foxe's Book of Martyrs Plate VIII - Prest's Wife and the Stonemason.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Adam Cuerden

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Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to Berlin for a Developer Meet-Up on April 14.-16. Last year’s meet-up in Berlin was a great success, and we hope to make it even better this time! This year we want to focus on structured (meta) data, search, and community building. The future of the Toolserver will also be a subject.

The dates are set, but it’s not clear yet if we start full throttle on Wednesday the 14th or if we have just an arrival event on that date and a full day on Friday the 16th instead – this depends on venue arrangements that are not sorted out yet. Note that registration in advance will be required – a website will be set up for this soon, we will announce it on blogs and mailing lists.

On that Friday, April 16., the Wikimedia Chapters and Board start their convention in Berlin. This will be a great opportunity to meet, to discuss interesting topics, to network and to exchange ideas and thoughts! Wikimedia Germany will host the event, so we will organize the venue, the hotel(s), some fun things to do in Berlin, food & drinks and lots of other things – and there might even be a party at the c-base again…

See you in Berlin!

Mike Monteiro illustrates the shift in computer use from domination by geeks to domination by a much greater number of people who do not consider themselves geeks, and are more inclined to buy a product they can understand than one they can tinker with:

As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.

Commenter Koen van Hees noted the high degree of civility in the comments on Mike’s article:

What the? A blog that writes about the most hyped product of all times, an Apple product at that, and all the comments are intelligent and nicely worded.

It’s good to see civilized discourse in the comments. Vitriolic commenting has gotten out of hand, especially in technology-related discussions. Earlier this week, tech website Engadget disabled comments to stem a rising tide of overly negative, attacking, and off-topic comments.

The Toolserver now has a paid admin: Wikimedia Deutschland contracted River Tarnell to look after the Toolserver, starting February 1. As you probably know, River has been an integral part of the Toolserver team from the very beginning, and has done a great job as a volunteer. However, when doing system administration in your spare time, the more annoying jobs tend to be left – which may lead to unpleasantness or even downtime every now and then. A fixed number of hours dedicated to the toolserver and a protocol for emergency situations will now help us to get the Toolserver’s availability to at least 99%.

Contracting a payed admin should also benefit the other Toolserver administrators, as they can now rely on River to look after the every day operations and to coordinate further administration work. Volunteer work will of course remain an essential component in the operation of the Toolserver, as is the case with all Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Deutschland wants to thank everyone who works on the toolserver, all admins and users, for their great contributions. We look forward to a future of even greater success of the Tooserver project!

The localisation of the Wikia extensions is doing well; a start has been made for many languages. Thirteen languages are now supported for more then 50% of the messages.

The Wikia extensions can now all be localised at translatewiki.net and the software at Wikia has been updated with both improvements to the internationalisation and with the many localisations.

The people at Wikia and translatewiki.net worked hard to get everything working properly. The next step for Wikia will be to implement the LocalisationUpdate extension. They will hopefully do this in their next development cycle.. This will not only make the Wikia extension messages available but also the MediaWiki core messages.

Lately the localisation for languages like Singalese, Urdu, Hausa and Igbo have started or improved considerably and it will be great when people can start their Wikis in these languages at Wikia.
Thanks,
    GerardM

وادي الذئاب فلسطين:

commons.wikimedia.org:

Garden of Eden ArchesNP MC.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Chmehl

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Former Microsoft executive Dick Brass offers his perspective on how unchecked internal politics and competition can damage an organization’s ability to get good ideas to market:

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.

He offers two examples where this dysfunction stifled or delayed new products.

ClearType:

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.

Tablet PC:

When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet.

So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

(Via David Travis)

Samantha is a guest contributor who writes an often hilarious featured blog at MyMedifast.com about losing thirty pounds and counting.

Dear Right Boob:

You remember last year or so when you started growing? I mean, growing even more than your sister over there? Yeah. We both know that you do. Well, I figured after I took you to see that breast surgeon, you’d feel sufficiently cared for (if not at least scared straight) that you could stop your shenanigans. I even had you squeezed over and over in that big plate glass machine. You were flat as a pancake! I can’t believe that didn’t reduce your size! And after all that torture for the both of us, the verdict was in. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. Well, medically, anyway.

Anyhow, that surgeon said you were out of control because I got fat. God you are so sensitive. Can’t a girl inhale a bag of Doritos or two hundred without her right breast acting like it was in some radioactive scientific accident? So selfish. It’s all “me me me me” with you. So, I’ve done what’s necessary, and started to slim down. All for you. I’m 30 pounds down now, and I KNOW that you have gotten smaller. You know it too. But WHY oh WHY do you insist on losing slower than your former twin sister over there on the left? Are you mocking me? Poor Leftie is beginning to get a complex, too. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

You do realize I can’t buy a single bra that fits both you and Leftie over there at the same time, right? And that your stubbornness is a source of great discomfort and consternation for me? Not to mention a source of deep embarrassment for your sister.

Could you at least point in the same direction as Leftie? Is that so much to ask? You look like some googley eyed freak, with Leftie pointing front and center in the cold weather, and you all misdirected and pointing down and to the left.

Down and to the left. Down and to the left. Enough of this! Maybe you have Attention Deficit Disorder, hmm?

I’ve been eating well. I’m getting thin. For god’s sakes, I just made chocolate bread out of peach oatmeal! For you! All for you. Shrink dammit.

I beg of you. And do it faster than Leftie, would ya? So help me god you will not see the inside of a bathing suit this summer if you don’t get your stuff together here, girl. You are headed for a major time out.

Sincerely,

Samantha
Shrinkinglawchick

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The Photo Gallery module has been updated to version 1.2. A new (and much prettier) image viewer component replaces the older one to fix many cross-browser formatting issues. The new viewer also uses more of the available screen space to view larger images. You can install this version right over your existing version to update. Enjoy!

During his sit-down last night with Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart said something profound about the differing presence of opinion in newspapers and television:

Newspapers are a passive piece of paper that you go to and you know where the opinion thing is. Television doesn’t function that way.

There are cases where opinion is subtly woven into the hard news reporting in newspapers, but the fact is, the op-ed page is clearly labeled so that people can draw a distinction between facts and opinions. The line is nowhere near as clear on television news – particularly on cable.

Australian copyright law has a new landmark decision as of this morning, with Justice Cowdroy of the Federal Court of Australia handing down his decision in the Roadshow Films v iiNet Limited case, in which the misleadingly-named Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) sued iiNet, Australia's third-largest ISP, alleging copyright infringement. The case is significant in several ways both for ISPs and for operators of Internet services in Australia.

AFACT is a consortium of Hollywood movie studios who alleged that iiNet customers infringed copyrights owned by them in certain films by distributing copies via the BitTorrent file sharing protocol, and that iiNet itself had infringed by authorising its customers' infringements. AFACT had engaged an anti-piracy software firm to track the transmission of films over BitTorrent by IP addresses allocated to iiNet, and had then sent notices to iiNet warning them of the infringements and requesting that the ISP take action against the customers concerned. iiNet argued that it had not authorised any infringements. It also argued that privacy provisions in telecommunications legislation prevented it from acting upon any notices sent to it, and alternatively that it was protected from litigation by safe harbour provisions in copyright legislation.

Cowdroy J today held that while iiNet customers had infringed copyrights owned by AFACT members, iiNet had not authorised these infringements, for three reasons:

1. that one can distinguish "the provision of the 'means' of infringement compared to the provision of a precondition to infringement";
   
2. that any scheme for acting on AFACT notices would not constitute a relevant power or a reasonable step available to prevent infringement (within the meaning of s 101(1A) of the Copyright Act, which sets out factors that must be considered in assessing authorisation); and
   
3. that iiNet did not sanction or approve of copyright infringement by its customers.
   

Cowdroy J held that the means of infringement in this situation was the BitTorrent system (the protocol, trackers and clients) and not iiNet's network, thus distinguishing classic authorisation cases such as University of New South Wales v Moorhouse (involving a university library that provided photocopiers for the use of library patrons) as well as more recent Internet-centric cases such as Universal Music v Sharman Licence Holdings (in which Sharman was found to have authorised infringements via its Kazaa file-sharing software, with which Sharman both refrained from preventing infringement and actively encouraged infringement).

Distinguishing in this way the ultimate means from mere preconditions injects some clarity into the test for authorisation, which has largely revolved around degrees of control and of encouragement (Cowdroy J's second and third reasons mentioned above go to this classic test). This approach was obviously advantageous for iiNet. However, for operators of services such as wikis and social-networking sites, this approach would seem to render it more likely that they would be found to be authorising any copyright infringements by users, by providing the means of infringement such as a file upload facility or the ability to edit pages.

Without authorisation AFACT's case thus failed, however Cowdroy J went on to consider iiNet's other arguments in its defence anyway, in the event of an appeal (which would seem highly likely). He held that iiNet would not have been protected by s 112E of the Copyright Act, which protects telecommunications providers from being held to authorise infringement merely through providing the telecommunications service used to carry out the infringement. However, he found that iiNet would have been protected by the safe harbour provisions in the Copyright Act (s 116AA ff) because it had a "reasonably implemented" policy for dealing with repeat infringers.

These safe harbour provisions were based on the United States' OCILLA safe harbour provisions, although while the American provisions extend to "online service providers" (including website operators) the Australian ones are limited to "carriage service providers", that is, ISPs themselves. To my knowledge this is the first case to seriously address these provisions, and Cowdroy J notably utilised American OCILLA jurisprudence in doing so. Thus it seems that the safe harbour provisions will provide reasonably strong protections for ISPs, although with the current form of the legislation, this is of little comfort to online service providers.

The decision is significant in the context of Australian copyright law, and will be a boon for ISPs operating in Australia. However, for online service providers (such as operators of wikis), the substance of the decision will only serve to underline their precarious legal position in Australia, as opposed to their American counterparts, when it comes to copyright infringement by users of their services. They are not protected by safe harbours, and a "means"-based test for authorisation may well be worse than the more traditional control/encouragement test, if indeed it replaces it (it may merely augment it).

The silver lining however may be in Cowdroy J's rhetoric. His discussions of AFACT's nature and objectives, of its arguments and trial conduct, and of its attempt essentially to foist upon iiNet a positive obligation to protect its members' copyright interests, are enlightening. Robert Corr extracts some choice quotes here. Following last year's even more significant landmark decision by the High Court of Australia in the epic IceTV case, there would seem to be a healthy desire, in certain quarters of the legal community, to reevaluate some of the more extremist trajectories in Australian copyright law.

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Basilica of the Sacred Heart.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Dilaudid

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Phylidonyris novaehollandiae Bruny Island.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Noodle snacks

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Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.

- Barack Obama, State of the Union, January 27, 2010

Photo credit: The White House is pictured in the morning after a night of snow February 3, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the recession has prompted businesses to shift away from strategic plans to more flexible strategy reviews and quick decision-making:

Office Depot

Office Depot Inc., for example, began updating its annual budget every month, starting in early 2009. “This downturn has changed the way we will think about our business for many years to come,” says Steve Odland, Office Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

J.C. Penney

Amid the slowing economy in early 2008, [Chief Executive Myron E. "Mike"] Ullman realized that “there’s no way you can have all gun barrels blazing.” So he devised a tentative “bridge” plan that lasted through 2009. “We hit the pause button on a lot of things,” he explains, while speeding up efforts to woo customers in fresh ways such as through social-networking sites. Mr. Ullman says the bridge plan succeeded, and he cites Penney’s improved margins and lack of layoffs.

Spartan Motors

[Chief Executive John] Sztykiel inaugurated a three-year strategic plan that he and his lieutenants update every month. The Spartan CEO has started to see a payoff. In November, the company agreed to buy Utilimaster Corp., a maker of delivery vans and custom chassis, for $45 million. Mr. Sztykiel is sure the deal wouldn’t have crossed his radar in time if he had stuck with quarterly strategy reviews.

In Breaking More Than Just News, Richard Ingram says it’s more important than ever to check and recheck your content before publishing it – especially when you’re under deadline:

As Google begins to apply further weight and prominent positioning to live search results the pressure for some to publish useful, usable, and shareable content fast will no doubt increase. Those editorial workflows, style guides and quality control checklists – considered mere obstacles during moments of high publishing intensity – have never been more vital to ensure the web content you publish is accurate, consistent, relevant, and supports your overall web content strategy objectives.

(Via Kristina Halvorson)

Here's a great example of a customer who jumped in and did some nice customization of their EditMe design to match an existing site in need of EditMe's content management convenience.

Every year, Wikipedia usage goes upward, and every year the technical folks working and volunteering with Wikimedia have to plan, purchase, and implement new servers to keep up to the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  With the advances in computing, running 9 new application servers this year took the load of 36 application servers from 3 years ago.

So when we upgrade, what happens to the old equipment that is too slow for Wikipedia, but not too slow for MANY other non-profits?  We donate them!  These systems were 1U rackmount servers, dual cpu 2.5-3, single core, 2-4GB of RAM, and 2-4 HDD Bays with 1-2 80-250GB HDDs. This year, we have  three non-profits who received our older systems (in alphabetical order): Drupal.org, OpenStreetMap Foundation, and Sugar Labs.

Drupal.org

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international non-profit organisation supporting but not controlling the project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.

OpenStreetMap is an open initiative to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.

Sugar Labs

The mission of Sugar Labs^® is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform.

We hope the recipients of our servers will be able to put them to good use!

Below are some common questions involving Wikimedia and the server donation process:

Q. How can I get some of the decommissioned donation servers?

A. The best place to follow the goings on of our technical team is here, on the Wikimedia Technical Blog.  When we have a batch of servers up for decommissioning and donation, we will announce it on the tech blog, and instructions on how to apply to receive some servers.

Q. Who is eligible to apply for servers?

A. We try to only donate servers to other non-profits whose core values are similar or in support of our own.  This means we do not donate them for individual use.   Since these servers were purchased with donations to support Wikimedia, we feel we need to further donate them to other like-minded organizations, since that is how the money for the servers was meant to be spent.

Q. How often does this happen?

A. Most servers are kept in use by Wikimedia beyond three years.  Many of our servers that we have turned off in this batch are anywhere from 3 to 5 years old.  We only replace them when it makes sense from the technical standpoint to do so.  This means we cannot just say ‘we will do this every X months.’  We try to get the most use out of every server, as they were donated or purchased with donations.  So there is no set date, just keep checking the Wikimedia Technical Blog, when we have more to donate, we will say so there!

Q. I am a student/person/so and so, and I want to learn to develop and do such and such.  Can you send me a server?

A. Sorry, unfortunately it is just not realistic or fair of us to try to sort out which personal use requests for servers are legitimate and which are folks wanting computers for any other reason.  We choose to limit our donations to other like minded non-profit organizations.

Rob Halsell
Systems Administrator

There are things Britannica can do that Wikipedia will never manage.

This blog seems to have developed in spurts of activity followed by long lulls. What does it take to encourage more sustained activity?*

I’m currently teaching a course called ‘Teaching and Learning with Emerging Technologies’. This course encompasses a broad range of such technologies - wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc. - but also technologically-mediated initiatives such as Open Educational Resources. My main focus for the past five years (yikes!) has been on wikis, the ‘wiki way’, and their implications for education and society. This course now offers me a chance to explore my perspectives through teaching - as well as to learn from other course participants. I will also be engaging with technologies that I know relatively little about - my only actual experience with Second Life so far is of the comedic walking into the wall variety!

So, this post is both to prompt me to renew my commitment to use this space, and to show the course participants that we’re truly in this together! (And, for the curious, there’s more info than you’ll ever want to know about me on this page.)

But I’m also excited to teach and learn in this emerging field. My thesis has made me kinda fatigued about wikis (!), but preparing for this course has given me fresh perspective. Part of the course is to get out of our comfort zones, to explore and to experiment - and I’ve been doing that already! I’d love to hear other people’s experiences on using emerging technologies for education - in the widest sense of the word.

C

* This brings to mind Stephen Downes’s article on Educational Blogging. In it, he quotes Will Richardson:

“By its very nature, assigned blogging in schools cannot be blogging. It’s contrived. No matter how much we want to spout off about the wonders of audience and readership, students who are asked to blog are blogging for an audience of one, the teacher. [When the semester ends] students drop blogging like wet cement.”

As part of the course, I am asking participants to set up their own blogs. What can I/they do to sustain momentum? Personally, I have to say it’s much more motivating when people leave comments - when I feel I am engaging with someone else, as opposed to ’shouting into the wind’. As part of a course, I’ll be leaving comments on other participants’ blogs, and I hope they will do likewise. But after the course - what happens?

In their “World in 2010″ annual almanac of predictions, the Economist looks at whether this will be a year of social unrest, and included is the map below as a helpful guide to countries at the greatest risk:

I highly recommend you purchase this almanac for a good overview of where the world is more-or-less heading.  In the accompanying article on this particular topic, Laza Kekic of the Economist Intelligence Unit writes the following:

[A] congruence of calamities could prove politically tempestuous: a sharp rise in unemployment, increased poverty and inequality, weakened middle classes and high food prices in many countries. Austerity is also on the agenda in 2010 following the extreme fiscal relaxation of 2009.

Historically, political reactions to economic distress have tended to come with a lag. The same is true of labour-market developments: even once the recession ends, unemployment continues to rise. According to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) estimates, in 2010 there will be 60m more unemployed worldwide than in 2008. The International Labour Organisation reckons some 200m workers are at risk of joining the ranks of people living on less than $2 a day.

Declines in incomes are not always followed by political instability. Vulnerability to unrest depends on a host of factors. These include the degree of income inequality, the state of governance, levels of social provision, ethnic tensions, public trust in institutions, the history of unrest and the type of political system (“intermediate” regimes that are neither consolidated democracies nor autocracies seem the most vulnerable).

Something to watch.

Brazil’s position in the low combustibility category mirrors the magazine’s recent profile of the continuing boom of the country:

Latin America’s largest economy is enjoying its best moment for a long time. One of the last countries to enter the global downturn started by the financial sector in 2007, Brazil was also one of the first to come out of it. For the first time in its history it has found a combination of economic growth, low inflation and full democracy—and the good fortune looks set to continue.

The story reminded me of a 2007 article I read in the New York Times about Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. who were emigrating back to Brazil:

That decision — to give up on life in the United States — is being made by more and more Brazilians across the country, according to consular officials, travel agencies swamped by one-way ticket bookings, and community leaders in the neighborhoods that Brazilian immigrants have transformed, from Boston to Pompano Beach, Fla.

No one can say how many are leaving. But in the last half year, the reverse migration has become unmistakable among Brazilians in the United States, a population estimated at 1.1 million by Brazil’s government — four to five times the official census figures.

To explain an often wrenching decision to pull up stakes, homeward-bound Brazilians point to a rising fear of deportation and a slumping American economy. Many cite the expiration of driver’s licenses that can no longer be renewed under tougher rules, coupled with the steep drop in the value of the dollar against the currency of Brazil, where the economy has improved.

Brazil’s ascendency is nothing but good news for the Western Hemisphere.

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Last month I posted about restoration work on a portrait of opera singer Jenny Lind.  Today I came across another graphic artist's approach to restoring her portrait.  It's an interesting peek at how different two approaches can be.  Robert C. McLaughlin's restoration is a composite of two different photographs including the one from the Library of Congress that I've been using.

He specifically avoids using the healing brush and works toward a much more artistic effect.  The result looks more like a pencil sketch than a photograph.

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Plinian Eruption-numbers.svg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Sémhur

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Rob Foster shares three stories about iPad-excitement from people he least expected to even know about it:

The Grandma:

My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”

The Technophobe:

I told him about the new iPad and his eyes grew wide. He blurted out “Wait, are you talking about an iPhone but with a bigger screen? A regular sized computer THIS easy to use? $15 a month for internet anywhere? When can I buy one?”

The Luddite:

“Dude, I think I want to get one of those Apple tablets for my business.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, I went and looked at them and they seem really easy to use. I think it would work great for showing potential customers my work and for doing bids on.”

If these three people are any indication of a wider trend, this could be really big. Although some geeks are complaining about what the new device doesn’t do, there are many more luddites, technophobes, and grandmas who are excited by what it can do – more easily than a traditional computer – for them. Dan Moren of Macworld calls this a third revolution in computing:

For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.

Technology is like politics, in that you have to go outside your traditional base to make big things happen. I think Apple is reaching out, perhaps farther beyond their base than ever before, with the iPad.

Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

enwiki-20100130-pages-articles.xml.bz2

I took this early in my photography, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, two months before I bought my Olympus.  It’s the stage that is shared by both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.  I had a cheap Panasonic, but a guy who I had fallen in love with once offered to show me around because he had access to what was then the New York State Theater.  I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, so I used what I had, but it still came out decent enough.  I believe this is my one and only panoramic shot.

Man, I had to go to the ballet a lot when we dated, because he had been a ballet dancer and I thought I should give it a try but after two I was burned out.  Nobody can tell me I don’t have a right not to like Balanchine, as it was his anniversary season so every show was Balanchine.  I’m sure he’s great, but I learned ballet is not my thing.  Particularly as I associated it with this guy.

Two years before on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was one of the most miserable moments of my life, and he had a good bit to do with it; that and MacroCat prematurely dying on that day as law school exams loomed.

I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year after he left to work in Europe, and in that time I had finally forgiven him for the lies and betrayals, forgiven him enough that I pined for that in-love feeling I had felt.  We tried to make a go of it again for about a month, but whatever we had was lost.  Worse, discovering new indiscretions and trying to remember what I had even seen in him cheapened what had been a proud bittersweet memory.

The photo I took that day of a ballerina working with her coach in the empty theater is used on 143 pages on 31 Wikimedia projects around the world.

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Sarah Palin June 2009:

She opens the introduction praising Reagan’s son, a talk radio guy, for his willingness “to screw the political correctness that some would expect him to try to adhere to.”

She blasts “self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the smug lobbyists who dominate Washington, and the liberal media.”

Sarah Palin February 2010:

Sarah Palin took out after White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel today for referring to a group of liberal activists as “retarded.”

“Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page.

I find this kind of shameless, in the way values-crusaders like David Vitter and Mark Sanford are shameless.

It’s very difficult to converse in a country when there is no consistency in the arguments that our leaders make.  Which is it: are we going to be politically correct, or not?  If you decide to take a stand against political correctness as Palin did–to Republican cheers–then to back-track for cheap political points is…shameless.

It’s also confusing to those of us who care to try to figure out what our leaders believe and how they think.

Regardless, the N-word has a long history of use for oppression of blacks; whereas the word “Retarded” has simply fallen into disfavor and is akin to calling someone “Insane” instead of “Pathological”.

Additionally, there are many uses of the word “Retarded” that could apply to, in the words of Rahm Emmanuel, “fucking retarded” liberal activists:

• retard – cause to move more slowly or operate at a slower rate; “This drug will retard your heart rate”
• retard – be delayed
• retard – check: slow the growth or development of; “The brain damage will retard the child’s language development”
• retard – decelerate: lose velocity; move more slowly; “The car decelerated”
• retard – idiot: a person of subnormal intelligence

Source: Princeton Wordnet

Of course, he probably meant the last, but I’m just sayin’.  Don’t forget all the hot water people have found themselves in over the word “niggardly“.

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Not long ago the On Language column of The New York Times published a piece against CamelCase, something we use widely on AboutUs.org.

The piece does provide a useful history of intercaps, as they’re sometimes called. However, it turns out that the Times’ reason for being against CamelCase also explains why we prefer it:

…though camel case may have been spurred by recent technology, its effect is regressive — in fact, medieval. It harks back to an era when reading was effortful, public and loud — like a visit to a contemporary shopping mall.

The paper’s linguist might shudder at the thought of language harkening back to a time when it was a more populist activity, when there were no professional linguists, but it’s that public flavor that draws us to it. A language convention that anyone in a mall could use and understand is one that works for an editable guide to all websites.

The column is correct that technology has driven much of the resurgence of CamelCase. In addition to the edit and history tabs you’re familiar with, we’ve added a tool for fixing the capitalization of domain pages on AboutUs. Using CamelCase may cause certain problems, but technology can certainly solve those too if we apply it in the right places.

Image courtesy The New York Times

From the editor: Writers wanted to cover strategy, public policy
Strategic planning: The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community
News and notes: New CTO, Britain Loves Wikipedia, Telefónica partnership, Multimedia and more
In the news: Wikipedia on CDs, BBC uses Wikipedia content, and more
WikiProject report: WikiProject Dinosaurs
Sister projects: Sister project roundup
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Over the weekend I helped teach a continuing-studies course at Stanford with Diana Scearce and Heather Mcleod-Grant. It was a real joy — the experience of sharing what we’ve learned with a diverse audience of highly-engaged listeners made it entirely worthwhile to get up early on a sunny Saturday. We were glad to be able to share our current thinking with people from across the spectrum in the social sector and it helped us a great deal to see that they appreciated the content that we’ve created with primarily foundation and nonprofit management in mind. To all who came: thank you, I hope you found it valuable, and please come by this blog and our Twitter-stream to continue the conversation into the future. We would love to hear your stories of how you’ve tried to apply these ideas in your own efforts. This is a very fast-moving area of practice and only through your eyes and ears that we can keep a handle on what works and what doesn’t.

As promised, all of the materials are up on SlideShare. We’ve released them under Creative Commons, so please feel free to download them for your own re-use and re-mixing, just so long as you give us credit. I’ve embedded the documents below so that you can flip through them quickly. To download a copy to keep just click the “download” button above each one.

Here are the slides:

Here is the healthy networks diagnostic:

And here’s the network mapping exercise, which is only a slight modification of June Holley’s original design:

If you’ve spent any length of time at the AboutUs Portland office, such as for WikiWednesday, WaveWednesday, Lunch 2.0, or PDXScala (our most recent addition to the events queue), you know about the trains.

We love our Portland office, with its open floor plan and view of the city. But sometimes the trains next to our building are loud enough to hinder conversation for a few seconds. To use what would be lost time for something productive, we decided that train breaks were unofficial stretch breaks at AboutUs.

The Wiki Way often leaches into the rest of our professional lives. Our moveable desks and lack of cubicles were inspired by wiki.

Wikis take what would be a bug in other software — the ability of anyone to edit — and turn it into a solution. Making the problem of a little sound interference into a solution for our health was just another application of that kind of thinking.

Last week the Web was abuzz with the news of the iPad. But among all the comments about the features of the device, Josh Bernoff (coauthor of Groundswell and a Forrester analyst) wrote a deep-thinking post about Apple’s Tablet and the New Splintered Web.

What exactly did Bernoff mean by “the Splintered Web”? As he explained in the post:

The whole framework of the web (and web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing.

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the web, that’s not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes Flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android.

He also goes to talk about the prevalence of walled gardens like Facebook and the upcoming New York Times paywall. You can listen to his appearance on Marketplace later in the week for more explanation.

Whether or not you agree with Bernoff’s conclusion about what this splintering means, there’s really no counter-argument to his premise that the universally-accessible read/write web of old is fracturing.

Even if you’re talking about standards-based websites, things seem to be increasingly complex. You only need to spend a little time in the AboutUs help chat to know that people are confused by the Web today.

So how do we fix it?

We view AboutUs.org as one way to help people navigate the splintered Web. Domain pages give you information about individual websites, and lists organize those pages around topics important to you. Both these tools are open and editable like any wiki. Using domain pages and lists, our community can offer you a better grasp on a fragmented digital experience.

A lot of people have shown interest in the Multimedia usability project and it turns out that many questions are similar. I would like to answer as many questions as possible, but on the other hand I also have to optimize the time devoted to such activities. A good venue for this kind of Q/A is the Wikimedia “IRC office hours”, a weekly event during which a Wikimedia staff member answers questions on IRC.

As a consequence, I will be available on IRC to answer questions related to the Multimedia usability project this Thursday, February 4, 2010 @ 1700 UTC. You can use the fixed time world clock to check the time in your timezone. Please join us in #wikimedia-office on Freenode using your favorite IRC client; you may also use web-based clients (check out the IRC office hours page on meta-wiki for more information on how to do that).

Looking forward to your questions.

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.

Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.

We found this article by Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org, as reposted on SSIR’s blog, very interesting. It captures highlights of the past decade with respect to the rise of Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation – two topics we at the Monitor Institute care very much about. Of particular note are several of these key tipping points which relate to networks, new technologies, or movement building within the SE field. In particular, we note:

• The advent of the Stanford Social Innovation Review as a journal, and now website and online community providing connective tissue for knowledge sharing across the field (Katherine Fulton and I both serve on their advisory board).
• The launch of the Social Innovation Fund, which creates a new networked model for government, working as a partner with nonprofits, foundations and borrowing best practices from the private sector.
• Social Capital Markets conference, where we’ve spoken and shared our research on the rise of impact investing
• The iPhone, which is facilitating mobile connectivity, and furthering both network mindset and action among social activists. It signifies many of the new technologies driving the creation of networks that we’ve written about here.
• The importance of the Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy in creating new models of giving for the field, influenced by their experience at eBay and a more network-centric approach to grant-making

For the complete list and commentary, here’s the original post.

A guy that the Huffington Post claims is part of the famed Rothschild family is actually an impostor.

Apparently, all it takes to blog there is to claim a pedigree and build a bunch of fake websites with Moonfruit: check out HuffPo’s “Stefan de Rothschild“.

All of the websites used to bolster his credibility were created by the same guy, and all are hosted by the do-it-yourself Moonfruit:

rothschildarts.org=146.101.249.107
rothschild-estates.com=146.101.249.107
rothschildglobalfoundation.org=146.101.249.107
www.moonfruit.com=146.101.249.107

None of those organizations actually exist (try Googling them with quotes).

Who is the guy who created them?  He used to go by Stefan Roberts, who has a website at stefanroberts.com.  If you look at the photo and layout, it’s the same as stefanderothschild.com

The Huffington Post was contacted by members of the Wikipedia Review, who caught on when Wikipedia was continually deleting the fake biographies of both Stefan Roberts and Stefan de Rothschild, and also Stefan’s fake father “Andrew de Rothschild” (here’s that discussion – worth a read).  However, HuffPo still has him up.

So much for the future of journalism – HuffPo is helping this scam artist, who appears to be soliciting donations through them:

Here is their (still live as of publication) biography of “Baron Stefan de Rothschild”:

Pretty comical; even by his own admission Stefan was born in 1992, which makes the claim he is a “leading voice” about anything pretty ridiculous.  Anyone who has only read a magazine article about the Rothschilds knows 1) they wouldn’t put a teenager in charge of so many businesses; and 2) they are far more private than this kid, who practically begs people to e-mail him.  Here’s the other HuffPo profile of Stefan Roberts, who has written a non-existent book:

I can’t wait to read his book on how to be liberal on some issues, and conservative on others.  Even though that describes the majority of voters, we’d all like to learn how to do it properly.

Pretty much everything about this guy is fake – but hey, now you have Huffington Post helping it (even Wikipedia didn’t fall for this).

Check out Stefan Roberts fake biography when he wanted to be known as His Excellency Lord Stefan Roberts of Jersey.

If you go to StefandeRothschild.com, you come across this opening shot:

Now here’s Stefan Roberts, same outfit, just slightly different pose:

It’s my understanding that the Rothschilds (the real ones) have been alerted.

So to those victims in Haiti that “Rothschild Estates” claims it is giving $2.5M and that the Washington Post reported about?  Don’t expect to see it.  Here’s Stefan lecturing Huffington Post readers from his column “Since When Was There a Minimum Donation Amount?” (with 130 comments):

The Huffington Post’s coverage of the corporate world’s reaction to the terrible earthquake in Haiti last week has prompted a ludicrous and frankly reprehensible reaction from HuffPost readers – many of whom seem to think that businesses should have some kind of minimum donation amount.

I am on the board of a company which donated $2.5 million to the relief effort, and I am very pleased that we have made such a commitment. We donate over $50 million to charitable causes around the world every year. But these are planned and executed after months of extensive research and assessment to ensure that the money will get into the right hands.

Arianna is not going to like this one bit (now will somebody please tell her).

Update 2/1-A:  The editors of Wikipedia contacted the Rothschild Foundation, which responded:

The Rothschild Foundation replied “Thanks for your message – it has been passed it [sic] on to the relevant authorities.” It will be interesting now to see if Stefan’s fake sites suddenly disappear. JohnCD (talk) 10:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

But he’s still up at Huffington Post!

Update 2/1-B:  Baron de Scamchild is being revealed, and everyone wonders how HuffPo *still* has his blogs up:

• Felix Salmon @Reuters
• Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish
• Gawker/Valleywag: How a Layabout Used the Huffington Post to Become a Rothschild

Update 2/1-C:  Around 5:30 pm EST Huffington Post *finally* removes the “Stefan de Rothschild” and Stefan Roberts blogs; it only took all the blogging above to get them to do it.  Let’s face it: their brand is hurt.  Here’s the message on the now deleted blogs:

Editor’s Note: On February 1st, it came to our attention that this blogger had misrepresented himself and was blogging under a false identity, part of an elaborate online hoax. As a result, his work will no longer be published on HuffPost, and his previous pieces have been removed.

Update 2/1-D: Stefan took down his fake websites sometime around 7:30 p.m EST, but since he has been doing this since 2005 and his StefanRoberts.com website is still up, I imagine this ethically-challenged young man will scam again.  Seek help, Stefan.  Maybe it runs in the family: apparently dad Andrew Roberts  (“Andrew de Rotshchild”) had a fake investment group called Roberts Investments Group (see that whole mess here).

Possibly related posts

• Aaron Klein fabricates his own Obama scandal, WorldNetDaily and Fox News report it (0)
• An open letter to my right boob (0)
• David H. Koch Theater photo on Wikipedia (1)
• Sarah Palin and Retarded (1)
• Kids who kill – are children murdering more? (2)

I’m an avid reader of The Economist, and in this week’s edition the article that jumped out at me was “A needier era“, which details how some–including me–think the new global economic realities are going to re-shape our politics:

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.

One of the biggest problems America faces is that many of its citizens, both liberal and conservative, are stuck on culture wars that feed their anger, instead of focusing on the reality that our current economic system is unsustainable.  Our focus on voting for people for their views about abortion, gun rights and gay marriage has given us a crop of leaders who are ill-prepared to take on the real challenges that we face.

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure.

One of the challenges America faces as a country is how we choose to inform ourselves, which is mostly by the cable news channels.  Fox News and MSNBC (as well as the rest of them) are corrosive influences on all of us.  For those like myself, who don’t watch them, we still have to deal with the foolish liberals and conservatives who do and form their opinions based upon cable news demagoguery.

[Authors of a report at the Center on International Cooperation] claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux. Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon, “stove-piped”.  As a UN panel said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes.”

The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

What’s the first thing that you, as an individual, can do to start preparing for this new world?  Stop watching the cable news channels.  Stop listening to the Olbermanns and Hannitys, who do little else but incite your rage (and I have it too, but it has to be tempered).  Right now, we don’t need an angry populace.  We need a calm citizenry that takes time to learn about the economic issues that we face, rolls up its sleeves and gets to work fixing them.  You might not like abortion, and you may think gay marriage is all about equal rights, but if there is widespread economic collapse, these issues are going to be irrelevant to the world we face.

Do yourself and the rest of us a favor:  Stop watching cable news.

Possibly related posts

• 2010 the Year of Anger Management? (0)
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• Michigan tries to re-brand itself (2)

Today I'm going to do the unspeakable: praise the Photoshop auto levels function.  This is something like a fine chef admitting to liking fast food.  Auto levels is notorious as the one click tool that gives mediocre results.  It's reliable, quick, easy, and not very good for you.  Sort of like a hamburger.  And yes, I have a use for it.  Not the usual use, though.

NativeForeigner is working on another Crimean War lithograph.  He asked me to check his progress, which was very good  except for something he hadn't noticed yet.  A problem loomed in the upper left corner.

One of the #geograph pictures became the 6 millionth file on Commons.

Geograph is a British organisation that aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland. They do a splendid job and they make their material available under the CC-by-sa licentie.


The picture is called Sailing on Ullswater and was created by James Hearton.

The Geograph contains really nice pictures and, it is a great concept. It would be a great concept for the WMF chapters to adopt. Adopting it on a global scale would be a great way of stimulating local interest for our projects.
Thanks,
GerardM

Those of us who live other than under rocks will no doubt be aware of the latest controversy over Wikipedia's approach to biographies of living persons articles (BLPs), concerning the deletion last week of a large number of BLPs that had been tagged as being unsourced, and had not been edited for more than six months. The deletions sparked a giant administrators' noticeboard discussion, a request for arbitration and now a request for comments on how to proceed from here.

At the crux of the dispute is how seriously the project is to take the modified standards that it has adopted with respect to biographies of living persons.

Debates of this sort are usually run along inclusionist/deletionist lines, but really the more important philosophical dichotomy when it comes to BLPs is between eventualists and immediatists. Wikipedia on the whole favours an eventualist perspective - facilitated by the almost immeasurably large potential pool of labour out there - but the BLP policy is essentially a localised switch to immediatism: unsourced material needs to be sourced post-haste, or else removed.

Conceptually it's an elegant and attractive approach. But a major flaw with it is our attraction to eventualism. We just can't shake it off.

This category, and its many subcategories, tracks BLP articles that have been tagged as not having any sources. At the time of writing there are over 47,000 of them, some having been tagged as long ago as December 2006. Evidently any sense of urgency has passed those by. The backlogs mount until they approach the point where individual editors have difficulty comprehending the problem, let along working to address it. Frustration builds at the inevitable inertia, until something radical happens, like these mass deletions.

Is this view accurate? Is the problem of unsourced BLPs really out of hand? We can try to answer these questions by looking at the way the backlog has been managed.

Unfortunately, the data available for this purpose is somewhat limited. Database dumps older than the 20 September 2009 dump are currently not available due to maintenance. However that September dump, along with dumps from 28 November 2009 and 16 January this year (shortly before the deletions started), do offer three data points with which to commence.

The monthly subcategories from October 2006 to August 2009 inclusive were common to all three dumps. The total number of articles in these categories declined from 50,715 in September to 43,655 earlier this month, a 13.9% fall. However, over the same period, the total in all subcategories through December 2009 rose from 50,715 to 51,301, a 1.2% increase. At least over this period, new additions outweighed articles being removed from these categories.

It should be noted that some of these additions are due to articles that had been tagged, but were unsorted, being added into the monthly subcategories. In fact, ten of the thirty-five subcategories common to all three dumps saw increases in numbers since September. The following graph shows the change in the monthly category totals over the roughly four months between the September and January dumps:


Without analysing the actual changes in the lists of articles in these subcategories it won't be possible to tell whether the sorting process is merely outweighing the normal reductions through articles being referenced or deleted, or, as I suspect, if there are genuinely fewer reductions in these subcategories that are no longer recent, but not yet the oldest. This can be the subject of further inquiry.

What we can say now is that the total number of unreferenced BLPs is now showing real decline for at least the first time in four months, possibly longer. It seems to have been the shock of mass deletions that has spurred people into action either to fix or delete these articles. Hopefully the shock will last long enough for a significant reduction to be achieved.

The following are links of interest to customers from EditMe's Twitter feed that flew out during November. Follow @EditMe and/or become a fan of EditMe's Facebook page to stay in the loop.

Considering how much of the historic media at Wikipedia comes from the Library of Congress, it may surprise you that the Wikimedia Foundation has no formal partnership with the Library of Congress. 

Yesterday Slashdot picked up on a Library of Congress initiative to do more of their work with open source software.  It would make a lot of sense if the Library of Congress interfaced directly with the world's most successful open source nonprofit: Wikimedia.  The Library of Congress has been absolutely wonderful about making its material available to the public at high resolution.  Today's post expresses appreciation for that openness in the hope that this valuable synergy will be appreciated and built upon.

Eight of the images that ran on the main page of the English Wikipedia this month came from the Library of Congress collection.  The image above is a landscape of Havana, Cuba painted in 1639 by Johannes Vingboons, which I restored.  Wikipedia's main page received 4.0 million page views while it ran at the Picture of the Day feature on January 1, 2010.  The image itself received 11,900 direct page views that day and a total of 13,382 direct views this month.  All of the page view statistics for Wikipedia's main page are confirmed here.

Matt Yglesias saw Lawrence Lessig speak about the problem of money in politics concluded his concern on the influence of money in politics was “too narrow”. I tend to agree that Lessig’s focus is a bit too narrow — that’s why I started the PCCC — but I was shocked by Yglesias’ “broader” solution: fewer elected officials.

Matt’s focus on institutional reforms is definitely a well-needed antidote to most political journalists’ tendency to focus on personalities and other small-picture details, but in this instance it’s just crazy. In what sense is the number of elected officials broader than the influences that come to bear on them?

Matt seems to be arguing that countries with fewer elected officials are better run because voters can monitor the performance of those officials better. I don’t see how this argument can possibly survive engagement with the details of our political system.

Let’s take health care, since that’s in the news lately. Health care has basically been talked about nonstop by every news outlet, yet even voters who follow these things in detail have no clue what’s really in it. (This is true even of my friends who are political junkies; they know a public option isn’t in the bill, but they basically have no idea what the exchanges are or how they would work.) When election season rolls around, campaigns will begin running lots of ads about the health care bill. None of these ads will help inform them what’s in it. And the press will continue not to inform them about what’s in it.

I don’t see how having fewer elected officials will change any of this. The problem is not that voters try to monitor their elected officials but are simply overwhelmed; the problem is that voters have no tools for actually monitoring their elected officials in any meaningful sense. Yes, one can point to a Chris Hayes flowchart here or an Alec MacGillis guide there, but there’s no way any significant number of voters know how to find those things. And even if you tell them about those, there’s no system for finding similar documents about issues in the future.

And that’s the biggest issue Congress is considering this session! And that’s just its broadest outlines! The health care bill has thousands of pages of detailed provisions and it’s just one of thousands of bills Congress is trying to pass. There’s nobody who’s even reading all of those provisions, let alone trying to figure out which ones are good ideas and which representatives are fighting for the good ideas.

Instead, there’s a vast industry of lobbyists, each of which care really deeply about a handful of those tiny issues and are willing to spend vast amounts of money and effort persuading members of Congress to take their side. On most issues, they face no opposition. So naturally, the members take their side.

What’s needed is not fewer representatives, but better monitoring systems and institutional incentives to make monitoring less necessary. Better monitoring systems is what I’m working on and better institutional incentives is what Lessig is fighting for. If Matt thinks that fewer representatives is a better or “broader” solution, I’d like to hear him explain how it’s going to help.

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Lessig’s group, Change Congress.

It’s ironic (or maybe just sad) that in this, the week when we remember the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau, today’s Washington Post included a story about how the Culpeper County, Virginia public schools decided to stop assigning the full version of The Diary of Anne Frank because “a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.” Children in the Culpeper schools will still be able to read an older, and presumably less-offensive-to-one-parent version of the book, but the full text of the book is now out of their history curriculum.

We could spend all day wringing our hands at the very idea that we’ve reached the stage where a public school district will change its curriculum because one parent objects to one assignment. But that’s a debate for other blogs.

Instead, I have to ask why it is that our children must be protected from the reality of the past?

Anne Frank’s story is well-known to almost everyone who grew up in the United States in the past several decades, because her Diary has been a standard assignment for students in the late middle or early high school years since at least the early 1970s. Hers is a story that is sad, glorious, poignant, raw, difficult, and in the end, tragic. But it’s not like the Holocaust was a happy story. And yet, in the midst of the mayhem of the period from 1933-1945, a young girl’s voice has spoken to generation after generation of school children because hers is an authentic voice, not one made up by writers in Hollywood or anywhere else. It is the reality of Anne Frank as a person–a teenager much like them except for the fact that she’s trapped in an attic and dies in a concentration camp–that speaks to young people.

And I’ve got news for the concerned parents of Culpeper County–your children are already having sex, so it’s not like the fact that Anne Frank mentions her vagina is going to result in a general moral decline among youth in the county. I make this statement not just based on the common sense assumption that teenagers are having sex in America, but based on data. According to the Virginia Division of Health Statistics, the number of teenage pregnancies in Culpeper County rose 20% from 2002 to 2008. Because the unedited version of Anne Frank’s Diary only recently made it into the curriculum–and then only for a short time–we can hardly blame Ms. Frank for the rapidly rising teen pregnancy rate in the county.

As I write this post my children are 10 and 13 and so of the age when they are confronting the bad side of humanity and the bad side of our past. My oldest has a close friend who can’t play outside because his neighborhood is too dangerous. My youngest has had to work his way through the sudden and unexplained death of a teammate’s mother last spring. They know life is hard and they know that humans can be cruel and capricious one day and loving and predictable the next.

Editing historical sources to sanitize them in ways that won’t offend one person or another does our children a grave disservice. As much as we’d like to keep them safe from the realities of life, they see through our attempts much more easily than we’d like to admit. Instead of hiding the reality of Anne Frank from them, we should teach them the reality, even the parts that might make us uncomfortable. How else are they going to learn?

Yesterday's post talks about how many people are using the Internet to find local products and services vs. traditional methods like phone books. I knew I'd read a statistic on this somewhere and asked my friend Matthew Mamet if he knew where I might have seen it. Though it's a different source, this video pretty much sums it up. You probably already know this, but seeing it this way hits home.

Starting 31 January and during the entire month of February 2010, participating museums in Great Britain are joining with people from all ages, backgrounds and communities to celebrate Britain Loves Wikipedia.  The public is encouraged to photograph the multitude of national treasures contained in Britain’s collections, releasing them under a free license to be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles and much more.

The initiative is being spearheaded by the volunteer chapter based in the United Kingdom, Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia’s volunteer chapters (which now number at 27 and continue to grow) support the movement by carrying out fundraising, public outreach, and relationship building in their respective territories.

You can read more about Britain Loves Wikipedia on the Wikimedia UK blog here. If you’re in the UK through the coming month, join up and help grow Wikimedia’s collection of freely reusable images and media!

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

A lightbulb went on in my head while I was listening to the PdF webinar last week that laid bare the machinery that made it possible for 350.org to achieve the most widespread day of political action in history back on October 24^th. We’re still in the midst of examining the various threats that traditional “membership organizations” are facing and the story of 350’s success is one of the best illustrations I’ve seen yet of the new model. In the words of 350 organizer Phil Aroneanu, “It’s about concerned citizens who are looking for a meaningful way to engage. It doesn’t make sense to ask them to click once and that’s it. That’s not a believable theory of change. Building those [local] leaders is the secret to the way that we organize.”

The roots of 350.org are in the campaign that Bill McKibben and six students ran to convince their Vermont college to become carbon-neutral by 2015. When that was successful the organizers decided to try out a similar message on the state level and then on a national level. The national campaign was called Step It Up, in which the goal was for people in each location to teach each other about climate change and visually depict the concept of 80% carbon reductions by 2050. The idea resonated: three months of organizing netted 1400 local events throughout the country. Following up on that success the organizers decided to, in Aroneanu’s words, “make it even more ridiculous” by tackling a global campaign with the same seven staff.

They launched the global campaign with a simple message: returning to 350ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, the level that most climate scientists believe to be safe. The seven organizers split up the world into seven parts and each went to work finding activists who were interested in volunteering to build the campaign. As they found volunteers they organized a series of six training courses—in Turkey, Johannesburg, Bankok, and the U.S.—where they followed in the footsteps of the Obama campaign in drawing on the “Public Narrative” community organizing principles of Marshall Ganz. The focus in those sessions was to build the organizers’ core organizing capacity: how to build trust, how to build collaborative commitment, and how to think strategically about a campaign. When the final date of October 24^th rolled around the organization had a wide pyramid in place: seven core organizers, 28 field staff, over 200 volunteer organizers, and 5200 grassroots leaders in 181 countries. Over 25,000 photos showing the number 350 streamed into the website, showing groups as small as one all the way up to a parade of 20,000 people.

Step back for a moment and contrast that model with the Sierra Club and MoveOn. In simplified terms, the Sierra Club is structured as a traditional membership organization: they ask for a regular yearly contribution to support professional advocacy work and email petitions to show support for certain issues. The organization’s mission is broad enough to encompassing a wide range of environmental issues. MoveOn runs a leaner model, leaving off the professional advocacy to focus on email petitions but still maintaining a permanent staff and an even broader focus that includes the full spectrum of progressive issues. 350.org focused on a single issue and went deep, investing the majority of its resources in the ability of its grassroots organizers to run highly effective local campaigns. In Aroneanu’s words, “The tangible piece that you’re looking for is that commitment to taking action.”

350.org doesn’t have a plan yet for how to use that commitment in the future. Aroneanu said: “We don’t think of ourselves as an organization but as a campaign. This was entirely towards the goal of building a movement, and movements aren’t typically led by organizations…. If the movement can move forward without the 350 team driving it, we’ve done our job… We’re about to go on a retreat with our core staff to talk about strategy. But at the local level there is now infrastructure that can be used for things like a city plan to go carbon neutral, build a city garden, or affect the politics of that city or region.”

This is what it looks like to give up control. Contrast the comments above with the approach of Organizing for America, which amassed powerful grassroots networks in the course of the Obama campaign but then started asking local organizers to simply rally support for the new administration’s projects. 350.org treats its grassroots leaders not as foot soldiers in an army but as fellow organizers. They have no reason to think otherwise. They may have offices now but it wasn’t long ago that they were just seven people with laptops.

What does this mean for people who are running campaigns from within today’s organizations? Certainly it means there’s new competition in town. But it also means that there are new collaborators and new proven models for augmenting offline networks with online connectivity, a tough nut that few have managed to crack. We’ll return to this point later as our research continues.

How do you think the traditional membership model needs to change?

Since very early on in our history, AboutUs has had a public help chat using a tool called IRC. Now it seems that other companies with a flair for collaboration are catching on to the idea of public IRC channels.

In particular, this week we noticed Atlassian, a software company that makes software for developers, including a pretty superb wiki, has started up their own IRC channel as well.

If you’re not familiar with IRC, don’t feel out of the loop. It’s an old school tool for creating a live chat room. Most non-technical users these days prefer IM from popular networks such as Yahoo and Facebook.

What IRC lacks in popularity, it makes up for in reliability and flexibility. IRC is always there when you need it. In addition to using a desktop application, you can even reach the AboutUs channel via this blog.

Both AboutUs staff and community members hang out in IRC regularly during the work day. Anyone with a question concerning AboutUs should feel welcome connecting to our help channel.

Read about more ways to connect with us at our Community page.

A renewed focus on usability was one of the top ten things we celebrated at the end of 2009. We’ve continued that focus in 2010, and the latest result of that focus is the new look for our search experience.

The new search on AboutUs.org is unique because it was inspired by unsolicited feedback. Specifically, we caught wind of a tweet from user experience designer Derek Keevil (@hatsharpener) that offered some honest criticism of how our search result pages looked.

Derek clearly felt frustrated, so we continued the dialog on Twitter and later over email to get a sense of how we might make it better.

He gave us several very detailed suggestions; the general thrust of the feedback was that the search results were too un-styled to properly find and identify the information our visitors needed. And we agreed.

The new look for our search includes not only a restyled search bar, but a complete revamping of how results are organized.

The most striking change is that we used colored headers to divide the results into the two basic types of page on our site: Lists and Web Sites. Another change was the use of subtle background color to more clearly mark the small band of AdSense ads above results. We hope this and the rest of the new AboutUs search improves findability on the site.

AboutUs, as a company and a community, has always been open to constructive criticism. Being able to improve AboutUs.org based directly on what people have asked for is one of the pleasures of being a business that interacts on the social Web.

Please feel free to reach out to us, with your questions and comments about the new search or anything else, in the comments of this weblog post, or any number of ways including: Twitter, Facebook, or GetSatisfaction.

Join Wikipedia in photographing and celebrating Britain’s cultural heritage in museums, galleries and archives nationwide

29 January 2010, UK: ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ is a month-long competition and series of events to be held in participating museums nationwide from 31 January 2010. People from all ages, backgrounds and communities can take part in the competition, which encourages the public to photograph the treasures of our nation’s museums and galleries, actively involving them in digitally recording the collections. All of the photos entered into the ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ competition will be made available under a free license on Wikimedia Commons, and can then be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles.

Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Chief Executive Roy Clare said, “‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’ provides a stimulating opportunity for museums and Wikipedia to work more closely together for the benefit of the public. This new collaboration enables museums to bring their collections, scholarship and expertise even closer to audiences in digital environments. Wikipedia provides a vivid forum for engaging public interest in the stories within collections held in museums across the country. MLA is very pleased to support this initiative and welcomes the development of partnerships between museums and Wikimedia.”

Chair of Wikimedia UK, Michael Peel, said, “Museum collections hold a vast range of objects that have great cultural significance and enhance our knowledge of our origins but are not as well covered on Wikipedia as they deserve to be. With ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’, we hope to increase the number of photographs on Wikipedia for the world to share, enjoy and learn from.”

The celebration begins at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Sunday 31st January from 11.00 am to 4.00 pm in the Sackler Centre; everyone is welcome to come along and take part. Short talks from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Wikimedia UK and the Collections Trust will take place at 11.30 am, accompanied by free tea, coffee, and refreshments, with plenty of time in the afternoon to explore the museum and photograph its collections!

Gail Durbin, Head of Online Museum at the Victoria and Albert Museum, said, “Britain Loves Wikipedia is an innovative way for amateur (or professional) photographers to make things in museums accessible to more people. We are delighted to be hosting Britain’s photography community at the kickoff event and look forward to seeing creative new images of our objects.”

Britain Loves Wikipedia then continues with:

• On the 6th/7th February, the Museum of Army Flying in Hampshire will be offering free entry to photographers as well as free tea or coffee, and will be allowing flash and tripod photography.
• Nottingham Natural History Museum is hosting a “Britain Loves Wikipedia Day” on 11 February, where they will be bringing out a selection of biological and geological objects from their stores and making them available for photography in the museum’s Great Hall (situated in the main Wollaton Hall building.) Objects will include examples of taxidermy (reptiles, birds, mammals) skeletal material, and invertebrates from the biology collections, and various rocks, minerals and fossils from the geology collections. Booking is essential.
• The Manchester Museum is running “Darwin’s 201st Birthday Bash Big Saturday” on 13 February (book ahead or on the day); as part of this they will be making objects from their zoology, palaeontology, entomology, botany and geology collections available for photography in the Museum’s Resource Centre on the 3rd floor gallery.
• John Muir’s Birthplace and Preston Grange Museum will strike a romantic note for Valentines Day, hosting “East Lothian Photographers LOVE Wikipedia!” These host museums are opening up specially for photographers, and are providing a warm Scottish welcome with free tea and coffee to all participants, as well as tours and guides around the museums.
• Mill Green Museum will be running “Mill Green Loves Wikipedia” on the afternoon of 16 February – come along to explore the range of, and changes in, the working days of local people.
• Bedford Museum will be giving photographers the opportunity to see behind the scenes at thir stores on the 18 February, including a sneak preview their upcoming exhibition ‘Clocking-In’, an exhibition of the working day. Places are limited; booking is essential.
• On the 20th February, The British Postal Museum & Archive will open the doors of its Museum Store in Debden, Essex to photographers. The British Postal Museum Store houses a variety of objects including letterboxes, telephone kiosks, postal vehicles, sorting machinery and the desk of Sir Rowland Hill (founder of the penny post). Refreshments will be available to participants and flash photography and tripods are welcome.

Throughout February, you can visit the following museums to take part in the Britain Loves Wikipedia competition:

• Astley Hall, Chorley
• Caithness Horizons, Thurso, Scotland
• Ceredigion Museum, Wales
• Horniman Museum, London
• Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland
• Museum of Army Flying, Stockbridge, Hampshire
• National Football Museum, Preston
• Old Operating Theatre, London
• Royal Air Force Museum, London and Cosford.
• Segedunum Roman Fort, Baths and Museum
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Working Class Movement Library, Salford

Prizes include a WikiReader – a copy of the entire English Wikipedia in your pocket. The best photograph from each RAF Museum site will receive £100 worth of goods from the Museum’s shop. The best photograph taken at The British Postal Museum & Archive’s Museum Store will receive a trio of DVD box sets celebrating the work of the acclaimed GPO Film Unit, valued at £75. More prizes will be announced at the launch event on the 31st January.

Britain Loves Wikipedia is organized by Wikimedia UK in collaboration with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Collections Trust, Culture 24 and Museums Galleries Scotland. Full information is available at http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/. An initial event in February 2009 at the Victoria and Albert created over 300 photographs now available on Wikipedia. In June 2009, Wiki Loves Art in The Netherlands created over 10,000 photographs taken at 46 Dutch museums.

EDITORS’ NOTES

About Wikimedia UK:

Wikimedia UK is an independent organisation that supports free and open knowledge throughout the United Kingdom, including promoting and supporting the projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

About Wikimedia Commons:

Wikimedia Commons is a free image and media file repository, and is a sister project to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was started on 7 September 2004, and is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It currently contains over 5.5 million freely licensed images and media files.

About the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the US-based non-profit organisation that operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world. These include Wikipedia, one of the world’s 10 most-visited websites, and Wikimedia Commons.

Further information:

• Britain Loves Wikipedia: http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/
• Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
• East Lothian Photographers LOVE Wikipedia: http://www.eastlothianmuseums.org/content/pages/events-and-activities/el-loves-wikipedia.php
• Britain Loves Wikipedia at The British Postal Museum & Archive’s Museum Store: http://postalheritage.org.uk/events_archive/blw

Contact details:

Michael Peel, Chair, Wikimedia UK

• Email: michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk
• Phone: +44 (0)7988 013 646

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I’m delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new Chief Technical Officer, Danese Cooper. Danese is an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010.  You can read more about this great news in the Foundation press release that went out today.

Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun’s OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel’s Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years.

Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla.

As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting and developing Wikimedia’s open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to support increases in Wikimedia projects’ reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia’s ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages.

We’d also like to thank the Walker Talent Group for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

This post is an overview of a talk I'll be giving for a small business forum at Enterprise Bank in Acton, MA on February 9th. Check back here soon for information on how to register for this event. The following is an outline - I'll post the full presentation and expand this post with additional detail after the event.

The #Tropenmuseum currently has an exhibition on traditional clothing, modern designs, video portraits and even a catwalk.

Today’s iPad introduction has to be about the most depressing Apple product launch I’ve ever watched. As has been noted, Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field only works when he believes in what he’s selling and he didn’t seem to really believe in this. The audience must have further added to the disappointment, expecting a revolutionary product and only getting an oversized iPhone (iPod touch, actually).

That’s not to say the iPad won’t sell, or that I don’t want one. The scariest thing is that I think it probably will. It’s clear that Apple plans for the iPhone OS to be the future of its product line. And that’s scary because the iPhone OS is designed for Apple’s total control.

A lot of people have argued that requiring Apple to approve every application for the iPhone OS is some kind of “mistake”, something they’ll remedy as soon as they realize how bad things have gotten. But recent events — Phil Schiller’s personal interventions, comments on their call to analysts, etc. — have made it clear it’s not a mistake at all. It’s their plan.

The iPad is their attempt to extend this total control to what’s traditionally been thought of as the computer space. This is just the first step, but it’s not hard to imagine Apple doing their best to phase out the Macintosh in the next decade, just as they phased out OS 9. In their ideal world, all computing will be done on the iPhone OS.

And the iPhone OS will only run software that they specifically approve. No Flash or other alternate runtimes, no one-off apps or open source customizations. Just total control by Apple. It’s a frightening future.

I don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s hard to see how it makes them more money. (Curating all those apps must be expensive, not to mention the lost sales from the unapproved ones.) I can only presume it’s a result of Jobs’ megalomaniacal need for control — not only does the hardware have to be flawless, the software must be too. And the only way to ensure that is to have Apple approve every inch of it.

I love Apple products. I’m a huge Apple fan. I’d buy an iPad right now if I could. But, for the first time, I’ve got a real sinking feeling in my stomach.

I spent a lot less time than I should have speaking Spanish in Bolivia, but I did learn some new words. Some are regional or have regional meanings. Here is a sampling:

• chamarra - a jacket
  
• chompa - a pullover sweater. The word is derived from the English word "jumper".
  
• llajwa or llajhua - a very spicy salsa
  
• polainas - leg warmers
  
• wawa - a baby. This is a Quechua word that has entered the regional Spanish.
  

I also learned two expressions. I knew the words before, but I didn't have the full context for the phrases.

• gracias / provecho - This is the greeting and reply at the end of a meal, said before leaving the table. Although it amounts to saying "thank you", it is not directed towards the cook, at least not anymore. It is said to anyone and everyone dining with you. A couple of people asked me what the English equivalent would be, and I don't think there really is one, at least nothing quite the same.
  
• cuando floresca el chuño - There is a song by this title, which I had heard before my visit. Literally, it means "when the chuño blooms". What I had missed was that the chuño is a dried potato and does not grow or bloom. (I got a chance to taste some, finally. They taste much better than they look.) Thus, this expression means "never", something akin to "when pigs fly".
  

Sharing in the sum of all human knowledge requires us to go to the sources. Beyond citations to books, journals, and websites, knowledge comes alive through images, video, and audio footage. We can travel to the beginnings of human history and admire the beauty of the Venus of Brassempouy carved from mammoth ivory 25,000 years ago. We can marvel at 2000-year-old mummy portraits that capture the dead in vivid colors. We can immerse ourselves in an Easter procession of the 19th century painted in incredible realism by Ilya Repin. We can listen to the earliest sound recording of a human voice, which could only successfully be played back two years ago for the first time.

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (a collective we refer to as “GLAM”) document, showcase, preserve and protect our cultural treasures. The Internet gives us the opportunity to share digital entry points to the fuller experience that cultural institutions can offer. With more than 340 million unique visitors every month, Wikipedia is the central entry point for research in the Internet-connected world.

The international Wikimedia volunteer movement is therefore naturally aligned with the public service mission of cultural institutions. Over the last year, we have seen an acceleration of partnerships to bring content online. This is also a result of the emergence of Wikimedia’s world-wide presence through chapter organizations founded by volunteers, which exist in 27 countries.

For the first time, we now have compelling data that shows the success of these partnerships, and the virtuous circle they can inspire. We also can use the same metrics to track the success of Wikimedia’s other content outreach initiatives.

Measuring success

Developing improved content usage metrics was one of the key priorities identified at the Multimedia Usability Meeting in Paris (see previous report). Thanks to the work done by Bryan Tong Minh, who attended the meeting, the usage of every media file in our media repository is now fully tracked across different Wikimedia projects and languages. Based on this, Magnus Manske, another volunteer and Paris attendee, developed two useful scripts that help us track the usage of entire collections of content:

• “Glamorous“, which enumerates where media from a collection are used (e.g. which Wikipedia languages);
• “Amalglamate“, which tracks comparative collection usage data over time (starting January 12).

Using these scripts, we can analyze the impact of our content partnerships in real-time. For example:

In December 2008, Wikimedia Germany developed a partnership with the German Federal Archives resulting in the donation of 80,000 images, most of which relate to German history. As required by Wikimedia policy, these images were donated under a free content license which allows anyone to re-use them, provided proper credit is given.

Of the 82,458 images uploaded, 18.3%, or 15,109 images, are in active use in Wikimedia’s projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks).

The most frequently used [1] photograph from the collection is the photograph of Willy Brandt, German Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. It is used in 60 language editions of Wikipedia, with a total of 83 uses.

Effectively, this photograph of Willy Brandt becomes an iconic image that web users from around the world will see when researching the politician, in any of these languages: Aragonese, Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Breton, Bosnian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Fiji Hindi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Ido, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin (!), Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Lower Sorbian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. And it’s just one of more than 15,000 images from the collection that are already in active use, about a year after first being made available.

These tools do not yet show the number of pageviews of the articles in question, although that data is available. For example, the German Wikipedia article about Willy Brandt was viewed 38,449 times in December 2009. Considering the combined language usage of Wikipedia, the use of images in many articles creates a large aggregate impact.

Like all media files in Wikimedia Commons, the image is available under a free content license, the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This means that it is usable by third parties as well, provided that proper credit is given. Tracking third party usage is, of course, more difficult. The MediaWiki software powering Wikimedia projects has built-in support for Wikimedia Commons (called “InstantCommons“), meaning that any wiki, anywhere, can immediately use files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons if this feature is enabled. For example, you can view the Willy Brandt image on WikiEducator (not a Wikimedia project), with all the same metadata, even though it has never been uploaded there. In the future, we may be able to track image usage across third party MediaWiki installations as well.

The Virtuous Circle

Not only do these images enrich articles in many languages, they also make it easier for people in languages that don’t have an article to get started. And, importantly, they drive awareness of the cultural institutions that provided them — as each and every image carries a visible seal when clicked:

Note how even the seal itself has been translated into 23 languages already. The images carry the original metadata provided by the Bundesarchiv:

This links back to a copy hosted on the archive’s servers. Because the descriptions and other data in the records of the German Federal Archives sometimes contain errors, there’s a dedicated page that lets volunteers submit corrections. This page is regularly reviewed by the archive’s employees, and corrections are incorporated into its records.

The usage of the images therefore drives interest in the content, awareness of the institutions, improvements of the metadata — and hopefully incentivizes other institutions to follow. Since the German Federal Archives, several large content partnerships have been established:

• The donation of 250,000 historic images by the German “Fotothek” (more info)
• The donation of 39,000 images about Suriname and Indonesia by the Dutch Tropenmuseum (more info), with more to follow

• “Wiki Loves Art Netherlands“, a large-scale competition to take photos of artistic objects, with more than 40 participating cultural institutions, resulting in more than 4,000 image uploads to Wikimedia Commons
• The upload of 140 videos from the Dutch newsreel Polygoon-journal
• The upload of more than 30,000 images of ants from the open AntWeb archive by its maintainers

Beyond partnering with cultural institutions, Wikimedia chapters have also taken a leadership role in documenting the world around us through picture competitions, expeditions, and workshops. The aforementioned metrics can be used to track which models produce content that ends up being widely used in Wikimedia’s projects. Examples include:

• a project by Wikimedia Česká republika to document Czech municipalities (funded through WMF’s chapters grants program), which so far has resulted in more than 2,000 uploaded photographs;
• the Israeli “Pikiwiki” project, a dedicated platform for donating photographs from Israeli history and society, which has resulted in more than 5,000 uploaded photos;
• financial support by chapters for travel, event attendance, etc., such as Wikimedia France’s funding program, which has resulted in nearly 5,000 uploaded photographs.

The usage of images from these and other initiatives will now be tracked over time. Of course, having such metrics is only the beginning, and WMF will invest in global program support capacity to ensure that we learn from, document, and incentivize best practices.

Managing growth

Altogether, Wikimedia Commons has achieved extraordinary growth over the past year. Launched in September 2004, it took two years for the multimedia repository to reach the milestone of one million files. We’re now at almost six million files, two million of which were added in the last 12 months.  More content partnerships, new video functionality, and improved usability (see earlier post) will further accelerate this growth.

Thanks to Wikimedia’s large network of supporters, we can keep up with this growth. It’s been a much closer call this time than we would like, as the chart below showing our recently shrinking media storage capacity illustrates (out of a total of 8 terabytes):

But yesterday, we put into service a new media storage server which more than triples our total storage capacity (it will be redundantly mirrored to a second server with the same capacity). This, too, is likely only the beginning. Wikimedia Commons is not comparable to websites like Flickr or Picasa: it does not aim to document vacations, parties, and precious life moments. It is a repository of educational media. But there’s a world full of riches waiting to still be brought closer to the minds of millions.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

[1] excluding the use of images for purposes of navigation and topical representation on a large number of articles

Contact a local Wikimedia chapter

Further reading:

• In August 2009, Wikimedia Australia organized the “GLAM-Wiki” conference, bringing together 170 representatives of the Australian and New Zealand cultural sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums – GLAMs). One of the work products of the conference was a series of recommendations to Wikimedia, to cultural institutions, and to policymakers. These recommendations show that our work is far from complete. They are also an example of transparent and honest dialogue.
• The Wikimedia Outreach team is developing resources and documentation to help Wikimedians in their work with cultural institutions:
  • Case study of the Tropenmuseum partnership
  • Case study of the German Federal Archives partnership
  • In a nutshell: How to build a content partnership

Upcoming events:

• On April 13, 2010, Wikimedia volunteers and Wikimedia Foundation representatives will participate in a one-day workshop as part of the “Museums and the Web 2010” conference (“Wikimedia@MW2010“) to further explore and promote the active engagement between the communities.
• On January 31, 2010, Wikimedia UK will kick off Britain Loves Wikipedia, a month-long photo competition that invites the general public to take photos of cultural treasures in participating institutions, for the primary purpose of illustrating Wikipedia articles

Ever since the dot com bubble a decade a go, Internet software companies have been referred to rather glamorously as "startups" without much regard for what that means.

The fourth largest city in Germany actually is quite beautiful.  The photograph here was taken by a German Wikimedian named Thomas Wolf and it is featured in three languages.  The thing that stinks is that the city's archive building collapsed last year; Cologne's archive had been one of the very few that had survived World War II completely intact.  Last March the city was constructing a subway on the same street.  Then suddenly the archive tumbled.

Two people died.  Thousands of documents going back nearly 1100 years were in rubble.  Half a million photographs were housed there.  Disasters such as the Cologne archive collapse demonstrate why it is important to digitize cultural records. Digital versions help protect and preserve a heritage.

So with thoughts of Cologne, here's a photochrom print circa 1910 of the Eisenbahn Bridge at Cologne from the Library of Congress collection.  I haven't restored it yet; maybe someday.

The #Tropenmuseum new object of the month is this statue of the God Ganesha.

In a break with the past, the object of the month is about objects that have an interesting story to tell. This month, Ganesha is sitting on a money box with a mobile at its ear.

The associated text is in translation:

Ganesha, contemporary appearance of Ganesha as a businessman, sitting on a money box having a conversation on his mobile. The God with the head of an elephant, Ganesha, is the son of Shiva and Parvate, two important deities of the Hindu pantheon. He is the leader of the ganas (earth spirits and kobolds). Ganesha is the God of wisdom and the remover of obstacles of material and psychic nature. As a consequence he is venerated before important business is undertaken. The popular Ganesha can be found in tempels on house shrines, in niches in shops, on dashboards, near a door as a statue, print or as sticker. In many places Ganesha is venerated in the form of a stone painted orange with the contours of en elephant. He is depicted either sitting, standing , crawling or dancing.

Thanks,
GerardM