After months of debate over whether the newest Creative Commons licenses could be considered "free licenses", the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses were accepted as acceptable licenses for media.
The debate centered mainly on a clause centering on "moral rights" related to a work. Moral rights, as defined by most legal systems, include the right to "the integrity of the work", barring the work from alteration, distortion or mutilation. Because such rights can prevent using works in ways that the author disagrees with, many believe that moral rights can make an image "unfree". Since some users believed that the clause applied moral rights to a work that may not have had moral rights applied otherwise, the license was not recommended at first while users discussed what the clause meant.
In a mailing list discussion in July, David Gerard said, "The problem with some variants of the CC licenses is that the wording of them appears to make moral rights apply in countries that don't have such laws. Thus, they're a blatant usage restriction, and the wording in question seems unduly onerous as well. But if this is not in fact the case I'm sure Joichi [Joi Ito, Creative Commons chair] will eventually come back to this thread and clarify how the licenses don't mean what they appear to mean."
Ito replied with an explanation from Catharina Maracke, the head of Creative Commons International:
Generally speaking, moral rights have to be addressed in the unported license to assure that this license would be enforceable by law in every jurisdiction, whether moral rights are exist or not. The criticism, that the wording of the moral rights section in the unported license could be read as if the licensee has the obligation "....to not distort, mutilate, modify or take any other derogatory action in relation to the work which would be prejudicial to the original authors honor or reputation" in every jurisdiction, even if moral rights are do not exist, is not legally correct.
...In a jurisdiction, where moral rights do exist, ... we have to respect moral rights (and in particular the moral right of integrity), meaning the licensee is not allowed to "distort, mutilate, modify or take any other derogatory action in relation to the work which would be prejudicial to the original authors honor or reputation" - whether we like it or not. ...In a jurisdiction, where moral rights do not exist, the latter part of the sentence will not be applicable: "except otherwise permitted by applicable law" means "except the respective copyright legislation permits every adaptation of the work", which is (only) the case, if moral rights are do not exist and not included in the respective law.
Ito also promised that in the next version of the unported license, and in this version of the national licenses, that the distinction would be made more clear, and easier for non-lawyers to understand.
Jimbo Wales weighed in as well, saying, "I am on the board of Creative Commons and thus privy to the discussions. I think there is a clumsy wording here that needs to be clarified for non lawyers, but all the lawyers say the same thing: no additional moral rights in countries where those laws do not apply."
Later that week, Erik Moeller forwarded a message from Wikimedia Foundation counsel Mike Godwin, who said,
In effect, CC 3.0 seems to me to be written NOT to *enforce* a restrictive vision of moral rights but INSTEAD to *dodge* or *avoid* the question of whether and how moral rights should be enforced under a particular nation's laws. The clear aim, it seems to me, is to allow the same CC 3.0 language to be used generally, whether in a nation like Japan that (apparently) has strong enforcement of moral-rights claims or in a nation like the United States, where moral rights claims are weakly enforced if at all, and where moral-rights claims are severely constrained by national legal norms. The preceding can be interpreted as restating what CC's counsel has said on the subject.
This weekend, a few weeks after discussion had died down on the subject, it was suggested that given the opinions of Ito, Wales and Godwin, and a lack of objection to the license, that the license should be accepted. On Monday, Commons officially began accepting CC 3.0 licenses, adding them to the license selector on the upload form.
The Creative Commons 3.0 licenses were introduced on February 23, 2007.
Some changes to the software are more requested than others; here's a review of the status of five feature requests and bugs affecting the English Wikipedia that I consider to be important, here given in chronological order by the time they were requested or reported.
The first request that was reported on the current bug-tracking system was for better documentation. New features are added to the code all the time; developers tend to be busy, and so the documentation often lags behind. You can help with the documentation; Help information for using most of MediaWiki's features is stored on MediaWiki.org, and as with all wikis it will benefit from constant improvement.
The most requested feature request ever, single user login would allow for usernames to be valid across all Wikimedia projects and languages, and not just valid on one project in one language. There was a test run in November 2006 which seems to imply that the project is feasible; the most recent update on its status was this message from June by User:Brion VIBBER, which lists the remaining work to be done as "Further work, testing, test rollout, separation of private from public wikis, live rollout." At the moment, separate accounts have to be registered on different projects; you can help simplify any future transition by using the same username and email address if you create an account on a different Wikimedia project or a different language as you do on the English Wikipedia.
Every section on a Wikipedia article has an [edit] link to allow editing of that section, except for the introduction ('section 0', the section before the first section heading on a page). The main problem with implementing such a link is disagreement about where it should be positioned; there have been suggestions to place such a link as a tab (like 'edit this page' is), on the same line as the title, and on the line just below the title. This feature apparently existed in some skins in the past, but was removed, due to interference with right-floating elements in the page's content. Several workarounds exist; there are five user scripts and two templates (see Help:Section#Editing before the first section) designed to fix this problem, and it's possible to manually enter a section of 0 to edit by editing a different section and changing the section number in the edit page's URL to 0.
At the moment, in a large category that contains both categories and non-category pages, sometimes the subcategories will end up in the second page or subsequent pages of results, which can be counterintuitive and inconvenient. This is the most requested bugfix ever; at least two alternative versions of the code that solve the problem have been written, but neither has yet been applied to the main code by developers, and as both versions are over a year old it's likely that some changes would be needed before they could be used with the current codebase. At present, one workaround (such as is used on CAT:AFD) is to use category sortkeys to sort subcategories to the start of the list, thus making sure that they are visible on the first page of results.
When a message is sent to an anonymous user's Talk page, sometimes the orange 'you have new messages' bar will not come up; sometimes when it does come up, the bar will not then disappear for the anonymous user (not even after a refresh, cache bypass or after deleting cookies), staying up permanently and annoying the user. The bug therefore means that it's impossible to send a message to an anonymous user in such a way that they will be guaranteed to see it. Further information on Wikipedia is collected at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism/Bug ID 9213; the bug has not yet been fixed because it's not certain what is causing it (although it is known to be a relatively recent bug), and as an intermittent bug it's hard to pin down.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "2000s". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
A meetup is being organized for this Friday in St. Petersburg, Florida; the meetup will be at the Panera Bread at 1908 4th Street North, at 5:00 p.m.
Wikimania 2007 wrapped up a week ago, and the annual, international Wikimedia conference generated some publicity in the Taiwan press and elsewhere. In a New York Times blog post, a conference attendee, Noam Cohen, outlined the purpose of the conference and the bidding process, and talked about a few highlights, including Florence Nibart-Devouard's speech, the location outside of the mainstay of Europe and the United States, and the One Laptop Per Child display. In a follow-up blog post, Cohen described the Joi's keynote address, where he distinguished transitory pleasure from happiness, conflicts in Arab topics, and the differences between the large and small projects. Titan Deng, the chairman of Wikimedia Taiwan, was interviewed by the Taipei Times about commercial re-use of Wikipedia content (see below for more).
Baidu is accused of violating the GFDL, on a scale that might make it the "biggest copyright violation we have", said Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. Baidu is China's largest search engine, and it runs Baidu Baike, a Chinese language editable encyclopedia. Wikipedia articles fall under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, which, among other requirements, demands attribution when copies are made. There have been instances of wholesale copying without attribution, and it is said that complaints have been falling on deaf ears, although this report suggests that Baidu denies fault, because the content is user-submitted. The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia is blocked in mainland China, and it is ironic that the only way that Wikipedia can be read in China is through this copying. Because the Foundation does not own the copyrights, legal action may not be possible, although Devouard hinted at the possibility of a class action suit.
Researchers have developed software that allows for Wikipedia articles to be colour-coded depending on how trustworthy a particular piece of text is. On the UCSC Wiki Lab home page, you can put the software to the test, with an online demo: text on a white background indicates trustworthy text, while orange indicates untrusted text. Editors' reputations are continually calculated by examining how long their edits remain untouched; if your contributions are quickly removed, you are seen as untrustworthy, and your contributions will be highlighted as such. However, the software is not a fact-checking tool, and "it won’t necessarily direct people to Wikipedia's best, most academically rigorous articles".
Is Wikipedia Corrupt? - follow-up comments are made about Durova's SEO optimisation article (see archived story). The mention of edits to Matthew Hill and David Davis also made mainstream news, with Timothy Hill, Davis's press secretary (also Hill's brother) admitting that he made the edits, saying, "I made a mistake". One article states that the editing has been reported to an internal committee of the United States House of Representatives, who may investigate the editing. The editing has also been covered on other local sites. [1] [2]
Other recent mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:
Five users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Brian New Zealand (nom), Eluchil404 (nom), MatthewUND (nom), Alex valavanis (nom) and Lyrl (nom)
Twelve bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: EddieBot (task request), GrooveBot (task request), CorenSearchBot (task request), Android Mouse Bot (task request), BoricuaBot (task request), SXT-404Bot (task request), Fluxbot (task request) and Maelgwnbot (task request), Chris G Bot (task request), ClueBot (task request), HermesBot (task request) and HermesBot (task request).
No articles were promoted to featured status last week.
Four articles were de-featured last week: Radar (nom), William the Silent (nom), Timpani (nom) and Ted Radcliffe (nom).
Seven lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of counties in Hawaii (nom), List of counties in Vermont (nom), List of works by Joseph Priestley (nom), List of Alpha Phi Alpha brothers (nom), Hart Memorial Trophy (nom), List of tallest buildings in Providence (nom) and List of wild mammal species in Florida (nom).
One list was de-featured last week: Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc (nom).
One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Energy (nom)
No topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: William Tecumseh Sherman, Encyclopædia Britannica, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Beagle, Backmasking, Toraja, and Maximus the Confessor.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Eastern Banjo Frog, GISP2 ice core, Senior American military officials of World War II, Mont Saint-Michel, Leafhopper, Apollo 11 bootprint, and Rosie the Riveter.
Eight pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.
The Arbitration Committee accepted one new case during the past week. No cases were closed this week.
