Picture of the Year 2010; data challenge; brief news

Commons Picture of the Year 2010 announced

Commons Picture of the Year 2010: "Laser towards Milky Way's Centre", taken last August by Yuri Beletsky, at the high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile. The laser "creates an artificial star at an altitude of 90 km high in the Earth's mesosphere", as a reference-point enabling the adaptive optics to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere, thus improving observations of phenomena such as the giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, the results of the fifth annual Picture of the Year competition were officially announced last week. 2,463 votes were cast, with all 783 pictures that were promoted to featured picture status in 2010 entered into the competition. The winning image is a photo by Yuri Beletsky, Photo Ambassador of the European Southern Observatory (ESO): File:Laser Towards Milky Ways Centre.jpg (above, Signpost readers might recognize it as "choice of the week" from the November 8 "Features and admins" section).

Reacting to the news via email, Beletsky said in thanks, "I am really honored and delighted with the results of the poll. I am happy ESO released the image under a free license." ESO (which had itself featured it as "Picture of the Week" in September) highlighted the result in an announcement on their website: "ESO Picture of the Paranal Observatory Voted Wikimedia Picture of the Year 2010".

Wikipedia data analysis challenge

Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced "the launch of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge, a data-modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia", hosted by Kaggle, a platform for crowd-sourcing predictive modeling. Based on data derived from Wikipedia's public XML dump, contestants are to "develop a model to predict the number of edits a given editor will make in six months' time", competing for $10,000 in prize money provided by an anonymous donor. The challenge was noted on various blogs, such as Revolution Analytics and New Scientist. User:Protonk noted that the dataset has been anonymized "to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness", and gave detailed advice to participants, especially those not familiar with Wikipedia editing processes. A blog posting by a former collaborator of the WMF's data scientist Diederik van Liere, titled "Mind. Prepare to be blown away. Big data, Wikipedia and government", compared the challenge to an earlier one on Kaggle that had significantly improved existing models from HIV research, and noted that "Within 36 hours of the wikipedia challenge being launched the leading submission has improved on internal Wikimedia Foundation models by 32.4%". By July 1st, the dataset had been downloaded more than 200 times. At the time of writing, 17 teams have submitted models.

In brief

An offensive image as it would look when hidden by the proposed personal image filter

Referendum on offensive image filter to take place in August: Last month, the Wikimedia Board passed its long-awaited resolution on controversial content (Signpost coverage), which included the recommendation to implement a "personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to view" (Signpost coverage of the design mockup for this feature: "'Personal image filter' to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media"). Last week, it was announced that a movement-wide referendum will be held from 12–27 August on servers hosted by a neutral third party. More details will be made available on Meta.
WikiHistories – Tagalog Wikipedia: One of the Foundation's WikiHistories summer fellows reported on her field trip to the Philippines to study the local Wikipedia/Wikimedia community, where she attended a meeting between Wikimedia Philippines and members of the official Commision for the Philippine Language, with the chapter "essentially asking for government approval of Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies. This signals a greater tendency [...] for that body to take cues from established entities such as the government [and] universities". She said another "key difference between the English and Tagaog Wikipedia movements is that there is significant overlap between Wikimedians and Wikipedians", in that the President and Vice-President of the local Wikimedia chapter are "two of Tagalog Wikipedia’s most active editors".
DMCA takedown despite OTRS permission: The Wikimedia Foundation complied with a DMCA takedown request for several photos from Canadian artist Gregory Colbert's "Ashes and Snow" collection recently, even though several of them carried an OTRS permission (Village pump discussion on Commons). In the takedown request, the law firm representing Colbert wrote "we have been advised by you that several years ago an administrative assistant at Ashes and Snow authorized (via the Internet) the publication and the use of certain photographs constituting Works and agreed to the terms of a Wikimedia Commons free license. Please be advised that [...] under no circumstances was the administrative assistant authorized to grant a license to Wikimedia Commons or anyone [... She] was not an authorized agent or Gregory Colbert, nor was she a manager, officer or director of any entity to which Mr. Colbert has licensed the Works, and did not have authority to grant such license."
Good article monthly round-up: In June the number of good articles rose to 12,237. This means that for the first time at least one in 300 of Wikipedia's articles has been quality assessed as passing the good article criteria. The proportion has been steadily rising since the good articles program was launched in 2005. An additional one in 1100 articles have attained the higher-quality featured article status, although this proportion has remained relatively steady for several years. This month's increase of 194 GAs was somewhat better than May's 181, but was still well below the project's average for the last 12 months. One controversial suggestion discussed this month, as a solution to the perennial nominations backlog, was encouraging nominators to review each other's articles. This received a mixed reception from experienced reviewers due to concerns about apparent conflicts of interest during quid pro quo reviews.
Wikimedia Mexico: A posting on the blog of the Mexican Wikimedia chapter reported in Spanish and English on some regional activities of Wikimedia Mèxico Occidente, the chapter's "regional ccordination" for the Western parts of the country.
NARA Wikipedian in Residence interviewed by Wikinews: User:Dominic has been interviewed for Wikinews about his position of Wikipedian in Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration. See "Wikinews interviews US National Archives Wikipedian in Residence". Dominic spoke of the importance of maintaining relationships between cultural institutions and Wikipedia, saying that Wikipedia "will not only make [NARA's] holdings findable, but it will add value to them". He also emphasized the importance of organizing and taking advantage of the Wikimedia community and its resources. Earlier mainstream media coverage of the residency (including an interview with the Washington Post) had highlighted similar aspects. Also last week, a posting by Dominic on the Foundation's blog described "Bringing Ansel Adams to Wikimedia Commons", referring to a donation of public domain photographs by NARA (see Signpost coverage: "Wikipedian residency at US National Archives begins with image donation").
The quarterly policy update is available at WP:Update. Contributors are welcome for this and future updates.

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4 July 2011 (all comments)

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Re the DMCA take-down issue, whatever happened to the doctrine of ostensible authority? – ukexpat (talk) 13:09, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On the same issue, why haven't the pictures be uploaded as fair use to en Wikipedia? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 15:48, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Although there was apparent authority at the time, the copyright owner has directly refused permission. As such we have no right to use the images. As for using on enwiki, they'd be hosted on US servers, so we'd just get a new take down notice, surely? If the original permission-giver had been the copyright owner themselves rather than a representative, it'd be harder for a take-down notice to be enforced, as he would have directly given a release under a suitable license. Although it's a shame to lose the images, they presumably aren't so essential as to make any articles they were used in useless - or can we expect some article deletions as a result of the illustrative pictures no longer being available? -- PhantomSteve.alt/talk\^{[alternative account of Phantomsteve]} 18:07, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone wishes to restore one or more of these images as NFC compliant images on En, mail me and I will send them to you. The firm should also be informed of these uses. If another take-down request is issued, you then have the option under the DMCA of issuing a counter claim claiming it as fair use. See How to File a DMCA Counter Claim. Dcoetzee 19:25, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A far more insidious problem occurs with TI calculator encryption keys. These were uploaded by an anonymous source, taken down as a result of DMCA as an "office action". Because it is an office action no-one can reverse it, the "office action" won't be withdrawn unless a DMCA counter-claim is made, and only the anonymous editor is allowed to make a counter claim. Therefore the "office action" rules, as they stand, allow anyone to effectively protect the unprotectable, by uploading it to WP via a puppet, then issuing a DMCA takedown. Rich Farmbrough, 15:15, 16 July 2011 (UTC).[reply]

I dislike the offensive image filter idea. First of all, as a certain cretin has demonstrated repeatedly, any attempt at controlling the use of offensive images can be easily circumnavigated (per BEANS I won't say how, except that it isn't a hack or exploit). This means that if someone wants to shock or offend people, we can't stop them from doing so, we can only strive to get better and better at catching and removing the offending images. As for the permanent images, who becomes the arbiter of values for Wikipedia. Do we allow anyone to set up their own personal filters? If so that does not prevent first time exposure. Do we just do it to items on the bad image list? Do we establish a working group of experts/parents/concerned bystanders? How do we decide what's inappropriate to whom? Does it become censorship? I would most certainly fear a few prudes going haywire and deeming large swaths of images as needing filtering, leading to an all out brawl when those changes are reverted. The offensive image filter will cause nothing but trouble. Sven Manguard Wha? 20:49, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]