Wikipedia practice with respect to claiming fair use for images became the subject of discussion again last week, this time focusing on publicity photos of celebrities. Jimbo Wales discouraged the use of such photos when they are not freely licensed and said the Wikipedia:Publicity photos page is "dangerous".
Although designated an "essay", rather than a policy or guideline, the page is linked from such places as the Wikipedia:Fair use guideline and the {{promophoto}} template, which is fairly heavily used. It purports to be limited to photos that are distributed in press kits, although it seems clear that not all photos given this tag were actually part of such kits. Jkelly called the category in which they are listed, Category:Promotional images, "one of the top five most problematic image categories by any measure I can think of."
For most celebrities, Wales said Wikipedia is better off having no photo at all than a fair use image. Not all those joining the discussion were fully prepared to agree, arguing that any image that improves an article helps Wikipedia's mission to spread knowledge, and should be used if not legally problematic. The point was also raised that freely licensed images tend to be of arguably poorer quality compared to the publicity shots of celebrities typically seen elsewhere.
Current practice on the English Wikipedia (but not for many other languages) allows images with a claim to fair use under United States copyright law. However, not all images covered by this are given equal leeway. Existing policy calls for the replacement of fair use images when a freely licensed alternative is provided.
Wales indicated his view that fair use should be even more limited, except for "a very narrow class of images that are of unique historical importance." He cited as examples album covers (when used to illustrate the article about the album) or movie screenshots, along with irreplaceable historic images such as that of Elián González being taken into the custody of federal agents. He admitted that formal Wikipedia policy does not yet require this conclusion in every case.
As part of the emphasis on freely licensed images, in May 2005 Wales prohibited images that were restricted to noncommercial use or Wikipedia-only permission (see archived story). Work to clean up the existing base of images has been ongoing for some time, with those participating in the effort occasionally voicing frustration at the pace of progress. Some have pointed to anecdotal accounts of freely licensed images being replaced with fair use images, saying this discourages photographers who go to the effort of providing free content.
The insertion of erroneous death dates in a number of articles about former baseball players received attention last week when a newspaper reported on one such player who is still alive.
The Beaver County Times revealed these changes on Tuesday, 2 August, in a story about local resident Tito Francona, a retired player and the father of current Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona. A claim that Francona had died in November 2004 was added on 6 July, and the information remained in the article until after the Times published its report.
This was one of several biographies on baseball players hit by similar vandalism, sometimes involving changing dates for people who have already died instead. Also affected were articles on Buddy Myer, Cecil Travis, Buddy Lewis, Sam West, and Tommie Aaron. The edits were sophisticated enough to remove the inclusion in Category:Living people from articles to which this applied, and add categories that matched the incorrect dates.
Besides Francona, the articles on Myer and Aaron had not been fixed, or the corrections had been incomplete, before the appearance of the Times report. In the case of Myer and Francona, the edits added other bogus biographical tidbits at the same time, in addition to the erroneous death dates.
Based on the timing of this vandalism, it appears that the inspiration came from another Wikipedia-related story in the news. The changes took place one day after the death of Kenneth Lay and a widely publicized report about inaccurate information that briefly appeared in the Wikipedia article on Lay (see archived story).
WHOIS information showed that the IP addresses involved came from Wyoming.com, an internet service provider based in Riverton, Wyoming. It seems likely that only one person was responsible but was assigned different IP addresses at different times. The initial batch of edits, which also targeted articles about actors and films, was largely reverted within a couple of hours by Jaranda, but some from a second IP address survived longer.
Francona was undisturbed by the erroneous report of his death—he said he had never even heard of Wikipedia. According to the Times story, he could not recall specifically what he was doing on the day he supposedly died.
In a keynote speech at Wikimania 2006 on Friday, Jimbo Wales announced that Wikiversity had been officially approved by the board, and would go into a three-language beta test "within a month".
Wikiversity was approved by 69.8% of voters in November 2005, reaching the two-thirds majority required to submit the proposal to the Wikimedia board. However, the measure stalled at the board level, as the board requested changes to the proposal in order for approval. The changes included the removal of credentials and online courses, and to clarify the concept of e-learning. Though work on the proposal continued, the proposal's approval had not been publicly announced until Wikimania.
The beta test would last six months, after which it would be reviewed. The test would start in three languages, with more possibly added as the project grows. Wales did not specify which three languages would be chosen, but as much of the Wikiversity proposal was based within the English and German communities, it seems likely that English and German would be two of the three beta languages.
Wikiversity would contain materials useful for learning that do not fit into Wikibooks' specific area (textbooks). Very little information is yet known about how Wikiversity will be launched, and exactly when the launch would occur, but many of the details are being worked on the meta-wiki.
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
MediaWiki developer Brion Vibber made a number of announcements at Wikimania; among the most notable were the announcement of plans to implement single-user login and stable versioning by the end of the year.
Single-user login, or the ability to use one single username and password for all Wikimedia sites, has been discussed for a long time, but due to developer concerns over how the plan would be implemented, and worries about username conflicts, has not been successful. Vibber noted that ideally, all wikis would have operated from the same database initially, but by the time developers got around to such support, hundreds of wikis already existed.
Vibber's short-term goals are to allow users to register once in order to log in to any Wikimedia site, and to reserve that username on all languages. During the transition, user accounts from all wikis will be added to a temporary database. In cases where only one account exists for a given username, that account would be named the global account, "winning" the right to use that username throughout Wikimedia projects. Where a conflict exists (either multiple users with the same username, or one user with accounts on multiple projects), the account with the most edits would in most cases be named the global account. Next, all accounts with the same confirmed e-mail address would be matched up. All accounts with no edits would be re-assigned to the global account. For accounts still unmatched, upon login, passwords would be stored and matched (due to the way Wikimedia salts passwords, password hashes from different projects cannot be compared).
Vibber acknowledged that conflicts will still occur, due to users with different e-mail addresses and passwords (some registered legitimately, others as impostors). The current plan is that if legitimate conflicts occur, minority account holders will have the option of renaming their account so that it does not conflict. After a period of time (likely a few weeks), the accounts would be forcibly renamed. Code to migrate accounts is being written, and is set to be tested later this month. However, due to the upcoming board elections, account migration may be put on hold so as not to "break" votes.
Stable versioning was also discussed at Wikimania. Vibber suggested different ways that stable versioning could be used, including a short delay before changes appear, or explicit approval, in order to reduce the impact of vandalism. Experiments will be conducted on the German Wikipedia, from which a formal stable versioning policy may be adopted. Possible uses for stable versioning include the marking of stable versions for semi-permanent display, marking reviewed versions to aid in publishing Wikipedia articles, and allowing editing on protected articles while publicly showing the stable or reviewed version. Previous proposals had suggested using ratings for articles, but Vibber worried about allowing automated review. Code is being worked on that would allow stable versions to work for not only pages, but also for templates included in those pages (currently, viewing an old revision of a page will show the current version of all templates on that page). Vibber indicated that the likely time of arrival for stable versioning would be in one to three months.
Finally, Vibber briefly mentioned authentication using OpenID. With OpenID, users could identify blog and wiki posts using their Wikimedia account. Conversely, users could identify their Wikimedia edits using a blog or wiki account, a move that Vibber called "a step up from IP addresses". The code is already live on Wikitravel, and would be implemented after single-user login is complete.
At Wikimania, this week, Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project has chosen to load a snapshot of select Wikipedia articles onto the laptops it is developing.
OLPC is an MIT-based project established to provide all children in the world access to knowledge and the opportunity to explore, experiment and express themselves. Wikipedia is among the first content to be featured in OLPC laptops. One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide all children in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection.
At Wikimania, Webaroo announced that they had added Wikipedia to over two dozen other web content packs. The Webaroo Wikipedia Pack lets users carry the Web-based, free-content encyclopedia on a smart phone with a compact flash card. Webaroo users can now search the information content of more than one million knowledgeable articles anytime they wish.
Web packs are a repository of free searchable Web pages on a specific topic, including things like New York City, Batman, Oprah Winfrey, soccer news or just regular old U.S. news. Webaroo says it "determines the content value based on the diversity, relevancy and quality of the pages so that they deliver terrific results for almost any query related to the topic being looked up."
If you would like to view Webaroo content on a handheld, a Pocket PC 2003 SE or Windows Mobile 5.0 OS is needed, as well as the Webaroo application for the PC and a USB cable with ActiveSync on the computer for connectivity. Finally, a minimum 256MB external storage card (SD, CF or mini-SD) is required. Webaroo is recommending at least 1GB of RAM and 10GB of free space on the system for the Wikipedia Web pack.
More details are available at the webaroo official site.
On 31 July, and again on 2 August, Wikipedia was featured on the news satire The Colbert Report. The show's host, Stephen Colbert, poked fun at Wikipedia's nature, and encouraged viewers to insert falsehoods into existing articles. As a result, a number of articles were protected from editing, and some still remain semi-protected as of press time.
The Colbert Report has a regular feature known as "The WØRD", where a word or phrase, sometimes a portmanteau, is featured (in the show's debut episode, truthiness was coined). Last Monday's episode of The Colbert Report featured the word "Wikiality", a portmanteau of wiki and reality. Colbert said that "any website that has a longer entry on truthiness than Lutheranism has got its priorities straight." After "confusion" over his favorite pejorative term for Oregon, Colbert showed a screenshot of The Colbert Report, noting that he referred to the state as both "the Canada of California" and "Washington's Mexico" (a fact actually found in a separate article). Colbert decided instead that Oregon was "Idaho's Portugal", and purportedly edited the article to say so. He commented on the process, saying "Any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true." Colbert also stated that "George Washington never owned slaves", and "Africa has more elephants today than it did 10 years ago".
Near the end of the segment, Colbert says "Find the page on Elephants on Wikipedia, and create an entry that says the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months ... Together, we can create a reality that we can all agree on - the reality that we just agreed on." After the segment's airing, Elephant was immediately semi-protected by MarkSweep, then fully protected one minute later by Fire Star. However, clever viewers made similar edits to pages on numerous species of elephants (and other, unrelated articles such as Elefant (band)), prompting the semi-protection of most articles relating to elephants. Other articles mentioned in the segment such as Oregon, Portugal, and Colbert-related articles were subject to similar elephant-related additions.
Before the segment aired, the username Stephencolbert was registered, and made two edits: first, stating that Oregon was Idaho's Portugal ([1]), and second, saying "In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves ([2]). Though the edits were made around the time that The Colbert Report is taped, some question was raised over whether the edits were actually made by Colbert; while he pretended to edit Wikipedia on the show, it's possible that audience members could have edited via mobile phone. As such, the account was blocked indefinitely, under the username policy. Blocking administrator Tawker attempted to contact Comedy Central to confirm the account's identity, but no response has yet been received.
Colbert touched on the subject twice on Wednesday's episode. During one segment, he took "phone calls", purportedly from viewers. In the final call, "Maurice K." from "Beltsander, California" chastised Colbert and viewers for editing, saying that as a result, he was unable to add an "important fact" to an elephant article. Prompted by Colbert to share the fact on-air, the caller did so, saying "When fully erect, an adult elephant's penis is..." before being interrupted by Colbert. Later in the show, during a segment on latchkey kids, Colbert claimed that "Latchkey kids are more likely to be crazy, I read it on Wikipedia. Look it up." As a result, Latchkey kid was quickly protected within 15 seconds of the statement being said on air.
As a result of the incident, the article on The Colbert Report received significant revision. In a section titled "Influence on the English language", a sub-section on "Wikiality" was added, but after discussion, was removed. Another sub-section on "Gaysrael", a term for Massachusetts, a supposed place where American homosexuals could move to, preserving "traditional marriage" in other states, was removed. As a result, the section was replaced with one dealing exclusively with the term "Truthiness".
Little press attention was originally directed to the issue. MTV News published an article on Thursday. On the block of Stephencolbert, Jimmy Wales was quoted: "It's fine, we have a sense of humor, and if we wanted to, we could figure out if it was really him making the changes. But why bother? We banned the user because of his or her behavior, because they were messing around with some articles and encouraging other people to mess with several articles about elephants." A Sunday article in the Washington Post contained some inaccuracies, saying that "enough people obeyed Colbert to crash Wikipedia's servers", and that "Wikipedia took the smart step of posting the pre-Colbert entries alongside the many, many post-Colbert ones to show exactly what was changed and when it was changed by subsequent editors." The former claim is slightly untrue; the site was read-only for ten minutes due to an unrelated error. The latter refers to the diff function, which has been available on all articles since at least March 2002.
The prelude to Wikipedia and the history of its first year were the subject of a feature in the Atlantic Monthly that came out last week.
The article, by historian Marshall Poe, appeared in the magazine's September issue. Its online version included links throughout the text to Wikipedia articles about some of the concepts discussed. Accompanying the feature were an exploration of neutral point of view in the context of abortion, along with an interview with Poe himself.
In particular, Poe considered in depth the backgrounds of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Going back before Wikipedia and even Nupedia, the article discussed their business and academic experience, as well as their Internet activity on mailing lists and elsewhere.
The debate over whom to identify as the "founder" of Wikipedia was not explicitly covered, but did figure indirectly. Poe related Sanger's story about having dinner with a friend that inspired the Wikipedia proposal. Regarding their respective roles in the project, Poe wrote, "Wales's part in it was clear; he owned Wikipedia. Sanger's role was murkier."
The murkiness was partly due to Sanger's decision not to import his Nupedia title of editor-in-chief, but simply call himself "chief organizer". The authority issues manifested in the description of Sanger's disputes with The Cunctator and his eventual departure from the project.
In his separate interview, Poe explained his methods for reconstructing this history. As befits his field of expertise (early modern Russian history), Poe focused mostly on the documentary record, such as mailing lists and talk page discussion.
The interviewer noted that the article never quoted Sanger and Wales as primary sources (although it does quote their words). Poe said that he emphasized the documents, although he did interview both Wales and Sanger, because people's stories about events 5-10 years ago are often inaccurate. He commented that he was fortunate that Wikipedia has "a remarkably complete record of what had been done."
As of Tuesday, 1 August 2006, the French language Wikipedia contained about 337,357 articles. Of these, 290 articles (approximately 1 in 1200) are considered Articles de qualité (the French Wikipedia equivalent of featured articles). The French language Wikipedia has no equivalent of good articles page in the English or Lesenswerte Artikel in the German Wikipedia yet. In addition, 15 portals are considered Portails de qualité.
The latest three additions to the list of articles de qualité are: Battle of Adrianople (fr:Bataille d'Andrinople), Eiffel Tower (fr:Tour Eiffel) and Domestication (fr:espèce domestiquée).
As of 1 August 2006, 106 users of the French Wikipedia are administrators. This makes 0.08% of users out of a total number of 134,124 registered users.
A poll about internet traffic showed that Wikipedia was the 21st most visited website by French web surfers. 4,355,000 or 16% of the total have visited Wikipedia at least one time during June 2006. Wikipedia had the biggest growth of web traffic in 2005. At the beginning of year 2005 Wikipedia was in 137th position and by the end of the year Wikipedia landed in the 37th.
Since January 2006, there has been established a column about the French Wikipedia, called Wikifeuilleton in a weekly satirical newspaper called Le Tigre [3]. The columnist relates passionate debates which have occurred during 2006 in the Wikipedia, like the discussion about a dictator category or an incredible story of a sysop having about ten sock puppets.
The portal of the zoological and botanical history (Portail:Histoire de la zoologie et de la botanique) has launched a new feature. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that an interview is realised for Wikipedia. For the moment, one interview is available on the portal and three more are in the pipeline. The first of the series is an interview of Jean Lescure, an herpetologist working at the French national museum of natural history (first part and second part).
For the tercentenary of Buffon and Linnaeus, two well-known biologists, two projects have been set up (Projet:Buffon 2007 and Projet:Linné 2007). Valérie75, the Wikipedian behind these Wikiprojects, has two ambituous goals. First, make Wikipedia a reliable reference on this subject. Second, try to make some contacts with the scientific community. These two projects are progressing well. In a few days, Valérie75 is going to meet a French specialist of Buffon's work. We strongly encourage wikipedians to implement similar projects in their communities. Valérie75 would be happy to provide you with further details and advice.
The elections for the Board of Trustees continued this week with more Wikimedians declaring their candidacy. Potential candidates have until 28 August to sign-up. There are currently seven candidates: Arno Lagrange, Cerejota, Cimon Avaro, Improv, Kelly Martin, Linuxbeak, and Nicholas Turnbull. Several candidates, including Jeffrey Merkey (User:Gadugi), who is currently blocked on the English Wikipedia, also withdrew their candidacies this week.
The number of featured articles to lose FA status reached a milestone last week. Wikipedia was de-featured on 2 August, making it the 200th former featured article. Articles are de-featured if they no longer meet the featured article criteria. Despite the featured article criteria gradually becoming more stringent, the number of featured articles has been rising inexorably since the status was created in January 2004 from the previous "Brilliant prose" page. There are now over 1,000 featured articles (the Signpost reported on the 1000th FA in June).
Two projects were proposed this week: SpeedWiki, a place where advice on how to accomplish a certain task in a quick and efficient manner would be posted, and Wikibibliography. Wikibibliography aims to collect book and published information into one comprehensive reference and guide.
Votes closed on proposed logos for both the Incubator Wiki and the Test Wiki. The vote for the Test Wiki logo resulted in a Wikipedia logo with inverted colors and "Test Wiki" underneath in red font. The Incubator vote, meanwhile, was for the variant of the "meddie egg" logo chosen in the previous vote. The horizontal variant of the logo was chosen.
Last week's issue erroneously reported that the Swahili Wikipedia was the first African-language Wikipedia to reach 1,000 articles. The Afrikaans Wikipedia has already reached over 1,000 articles. Afrikaans, while of Indo-European descent and considered a Low Franconian language, is a language spoken primarily in Africa. The Afrikaans Wikipedia currently has about 5,500 articles.
Wikimania continued to prompt advance coverage from the media. The Detroit Free Press characterized the goal of the conference as "A more consistent—but still cool—site". Interviewed for the article were two local contributors, Michael Karazim and Larry Kestenbaum, who discussed using Wikipedia as a reference and dealing with vandalism. The paper also pulled factoids from various Wikipedia entries related to Michigan. Observing that relying on paid editors could not have kept up with the pace of change under the Wikipedia model, Kestenbaum commented, "It's still impossible. But it's less impossible."
In New Hampshire, the Nashua Telegraph ran a column on Wednesday by reporter David Brooks (who is also a Wikipedia editor, one of the first in the state). Starting with a discussion of the paradoxical Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, he covered the debate over Wikipedia quality, balancing its growth and success against various points of failure.
Many reports (here PCWorld, here allheadlinenews.com) covered the announcement by Jimmy Wales at Wikimania that the English Wikipedia would focus on quality of articles over the next year rather than quantity, as the English Wikipedia is nearing 1.3 million articles. He also said he would be building a more formal advisory board, to help control Wikipedia's article quality issues.
Wales also said that he is keen to upgrade Wikipedia's humanities coverage, which will be upgraded by good quality art editors.
The United States House of Representatives IP was temporarily banned from editing Wikipedia after it was determined that some edits to the article on U.S. Representative Christopher Shays had been subjected to vandalism.
According to Wikinews report on 2 February, "all mention" of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act by Shays and Rep. Marty Meehan and a paragraph about Shays raising $70,000 with House Speaker Dennis Hastert at a country club event had been removed. Consequently, the House IP address was blocked from the site for eight hours on 1 February.
A spokeswoman said the information was put back on Wikipedia later, and Shays told staff not to alter his biography. Wikipedia spokesman Wayne Saewyc said that editors are currently watching the articles for any more cases of vandalism.
Four users were granted admin status last week: Wickethewok (nom), Phaedriel (nom), Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington (nom) and Crazycomputers (nom). Phaedriel's nomination received a record 271 support votes, breaking CSCWEM's record of 246 support votes. Phaedriel and CSCWEM are the only two RfAs that are in WP:200.
Also of note was Ambuj.Saxena's failed RfA, which garnered over 100 support votes, but eventually failed due to the lack of consensus. Ambuj.Saxena is the third user to have an RfA supported by over 100 users, yet fail to be promoted to admin status, joining CSCWEM's first nomination, and Rob Church's fourth nomination.
Fifteen articles were featured last week: Fifteen articles were featured last week: Emu (nom), Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (nom), Battle of Bicocca (nom), John Brooke-Little (nom), Battle of Rennell Island (nom), Llywelyn the Great (nom), Final Fantasy VIII (nom), The Philadelphia Inquirer (nom), AK-47 (nom), Final Fantasy VI (nom), Gregorian chant (nom), Countdown (game show) (nom), Rudolf Vrba (nom), Selena (nom) and Caroline Island (nom).
Three articles were de-featured last week: Wikipedia, Lord Chancellor and Cyclone Tracy.
The latest portals to reach featured status are Portal:Numismatics and Portal:United States.
Four lists reached featured list status last week: List of vegetable oils, List of Testudines families, 2005 NCAA Division I-A football rankings and List of South America tropical cyclones.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Thrasybulus, Knights of Columbus, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Damon Hill, Music of the United States, Ubuntu and Azerbaijani people.
These were the pictures of the day last week: Mount Hood, Machu Picchu, Digital art, London Eye, Great Dividing Range, Graz and Cyclone Gafilo.
Nine pictures reached featured picture status last week:
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One picture was de-featured last week: Tarawet.
The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week.
