This week I'm pleased to announce two new ways of keeping up with the Signpost and breaking Wikipedia news. Thanks to Ral315, the Signpost has a WordPress blog to provide a convenient RSS feed that will post the contents of the new issue each week: wikipediasignpost.com/blog. Thanks to Steven Walling, you can also follow the Signpost through Twitter. The wikisignpost Twitter feed will announce new Signpost issues and also link to significant Wikipedia-related news and commentary throughout the week.
As always, the Signpost relies on the efforts of volunteer contributors. In addition to the review desk announced last week, the weekly "In the news" feature could use more help.
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License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009
Licensing vote results announced, resolution passed
25 May 2009
Licensing vote begins
13 April 2009
Community weighs license update
30 March 2009
License update, Commons cartoons, films milestone, and more
16 March 2009
News and notes: Elections, licensing update, and more
8 February 2009
GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
17 November 2008
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License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing |
As the Signpost has previously reported, the Wikimedia Foundation is currently considering re-licensing Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Currently, all of the Wikimedia projects (with the exception of Wikinews) are only licensed under the GFDL. In the coming weeks, community members will be asked to vote on the re-licensing proposal. In this article, we cover the background of the proposal and arguments regarding it, in our ongoing coverage of this issue.
This shift in licensing was not possible before the introduction of the GFDL version 1.3 in autumn 2008 by the Free Software Foundation. This new GFDL release provides a specific clause for any "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site", specifically any public wiki, that is currently licensed under the GFDL to relicense their content under the CC-BY-SA license if they desire, provided that the content was added to the wiki before November 1, 2008.[1] This clause has an expiration date; sites can only choose to switch until August 2009. The FAQ for the new license notes specifically that Wikipedia is eligible.[2]
Wikipedia chose the GFDL license in 2001, before Creative Commons released their first licenses in late 2002.[3] Subsequently, there has been much discussion over whether the GFDL is the best free content license for Wikipedia to use, and whether the site should switch. In the past few years, CC licenses have become the most widely used free content licenses. The new clause in the GFDL came about after extensive discussion between the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Free Software Foundation.
The two licenses, though they are generally similar in intent, do have a number of differences. Perhaps the most striking difference is in how information about the license itself must be included when distributing a work. The GFDL—originally designed for software documentation—requires inclusion of a complete copy of the license whenever content is distributed. This requirement has been a cause for complaint in recent years among Wikipedians and others who wish to reuse and reprint Wikipedia articles and other content, although some users take advantage of that requirement by licensing photographs solely under the GFDL (effectively preventing use without permission by traditional print media while still enabling online uses). For the CC family of licenses, it suffices to "make clear to others the license terms of [the] work".
Another difference between the two licenses is how authors must be attributed; the GFDL requires a section entitled "history" and attribution to the authors of a work, while CC-BY-SA, although by default it requires that authors can be credited, allows the copyright holder to specify the manner in which a work must be attributed.
The Wikimedia community debate on the subject, which has been held primarily on the mailing list Foundation-L,[4] has mainly centered over the attribution clause. The CC-BY-SA 3.0 license requires re-users of content to provide attribution in a manner "reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing" but also spells out the types of attribution information that may be required—including "the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied". The debate has centered on whether providing a link to wiki content (where individual authors can be found through the history function) is an appropriate method of attribution, as opposed to publishing a list of all article authors whenever an article is reused. Some mailing list discussants would rather that any re-use of content (whether online or offline) include a list of all contributors, an attribution model that others fear would introduce unnecessary obstacles to re-use.
Influenced by this discussion and the results of the small-scale survey that was published, proposed attribution language has been drawn up by the Foundation. Consistent with the way GFDL attribution requirements have been handled for Wikimedia projects, projects' terms of use would be updated. According to the licensing update page,[5] if implemented, the new specified attribution terms would allow re-used content (such as a reprinted article) to be attributed simply by including a hyperlink to the original article, a link to a compatible copy of the article on a non-Wikimedia site, or a list of all the article authors.
According to the license update timeline, in the next few days the update committee will finalize the translations of the update proposal and the voting interface, and prepare the voting software and authentication software. The community-wide vote on whether to switch licenses will then take place from 2 April to 23 April. All users with at least 25 edits to any project prior to March 15, 2009 will be eligible to vote. The results of the vote will not be the final word on the license update, but if the switch receives less than 50% support, "further Board-level and community consultation will follow" before a final decision is made. If the vote gathers more than 50% support, the matter will be referred to the Board of Trustees for the final decision. The Board has stated [6] that they support the proposal.
Microsoft Encarta, the second most popular English-language Internet encyclopedia, is being discontinued and taken offline on 31 October 2009. According to the updated FAQ, "the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past." Although it never had as high a reputation as Encyclopædia Britannica for its articles, Encarta rose to prominence in the 1990s on the strength of its multimedia content, including tens of thousands of illustrations and hundreds of videos. However, in recent years Wikipedia has left Encarta a distant second among online encyclopedias; according to a recent Hitwise analysis, Wikipedia attracts 96.7% of encyclopedia web traffic, compared with 1.3% for Encarta.
On March 23, Brion Vibber announced that Frédéric Vassard had been hired for the Wikimedia Foundation technical staff. Vassard will be working with "operations, monitoring, and documentation of our servers."
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
The ongoing poll on the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal is set to end on April 1. The compromise proposal currently has around 82% support—and has been falling gradually from an early level about 88%—with over 300 votes so far. In addition to those who oppose any form of flagged revisions, the proposal has been opposed by some who argue that it is essentially toothless with regard to biographies of living people. It is yet to be seen whether Jimmy Wales will present his own compromise proposal to apply some form of flagged revisions to such biographies, as he indicated he would before the current proposal gained momentum.
Mathias Schindler reports the imminent "release of some 250,000 images from the Deutsche Fotothek under Creative Commons cc-by-sa 3.0 and its subsequent uploading to Wikimedia Commons." A joint press conference with Wikimedia Germany is expected soon. This follows Wikimedia Germany's late 2008 success in securing almost 100,000 images from the Bundesarchiv.
As of April 1, a new system will be used to create nomination pages for featured article candidates. Under the new system, modeled after articles for deletion, all nominations will be automatically created in standard subpages with the following form:
This will avoid problems associated with the old system of moving pages and updating links. Further information is available here.
Earlier this month, Wikipedia was drawn into a dispute over Australian Internet censorship. In an experiment to test the nature and extent of enforcement of the website blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), activists added a link to a censored site to the ACMA's Wikipedia article, among other legitimate sites. Wikinews covered this in more detail in a March 20 story, "Portions of Wikileaks, Wikipedia blocked in Australia". Wikileaks published an editorial on March 29, "Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?", in response to reactions to the publication of blacklists.
In England, "Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up", The Guardian reports. Draft plans for a revision of primary school curriculum would lessen the requirements for history education and give teacher more flexibility in deciding what to emphasize. The plans also call for children to learn about "blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication".
Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution (ISBN 1401303714) is drawing a considerable amount of media attention. It has been reviewed in several high-profile venues, and this week Lih was interviewed for an article at Salon.com, "Are we dangerously dependent on Wikipedia?".
The book is also the starting point for a "Week in Review" essay in the New York Times by journalist Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City". Cohen explores the metaphor, discussed in Lih's book, of Wikipedia as a city, where well-trafficked areas are relatively safe and there are always surprises and new developments for visitors to find. Technology writer and social critic Nicholas Carr responded to Cohen's essay with a blog post called "Potemkinpedia". Carr argues that Cohen is too optimistic, and that "Wikipedia has, to play with Cohen's metaphor, erected a lot of police barricades, cordoning off large areas of the site and requiring would-be editors to show their government-issued ID cards before passing through."
The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see our previous edition.
Five editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Smith609 (nom), LinguistAtLarge (nom), Mentifisto (nom), Someguy1221 (nom) and Al Ameer son (nom).
Five bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: AnomieBOT (task request), RockfangBot (task request), SoxBot VII (task request), Sambot (task request) and HersfoldBot (task request).
Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (nom), Harriet Bosse (nom), Noel Park (nom), Noël Coward (nom), Agrippina (opera) (nom), John Brownlee sex scandal (nom), Nevado del Ruiz (nom), Norman Birkett, 1st Baron Birkett (nom), Frank Hubert McNamara (nom), Hillsboro, Oregon (nom), Edmontosaurus (nom), U.S. Route 50 in Nevada (nom), Phil Hartman (nom), Laurence of Canterbury (nom) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (nom).
Seven lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Megadeth band members (nom), Silver Slugger Award (nom), Veronica Mars (season 1) (nom), List of National Monuments of the United States (nom), List of Mexican National Heavyweight Champions (nom), List of Houston Rockets statistics and records (nom) and List of members of the Gregorian mission (nom).
Three topics were promoted to featured status this week: Triple Gold Club (nom), Second Persian invasion of Greece (nom) and U-43 class submarine (Austria-Hungary) (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Operation Varsity, Hellingly Hospital Railway, Nathu La, Peter Jones, Germanium, Barthélemy Boganda and Red River Trails.
Five articles were delisted this week: Black pepper (nom), Yoweri Museveni (nom), Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee (nom), Llywelyn the Great (nom) and Washington gubernatorial election, 2004 (nom).
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Oswego Harbor West Pierhead Light, Stunt performer, Role preformed en travesti, Cone nebula, American Green Frog, Hotel Coronado and U.S. WWI poster.
No media files were featured this week.
One featured picture was demoted this week: Walt Disney Concert Hall (nom).
Eleven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. This past week, developers updated the live code on Wikimedia sites to 1.15alpha r48811 (see change log), which means that a number of bug fixes and new features previously mentioned are now live.
Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The Committee announced their new mail-handling policy. They also announced a new procedure and committee for reviewing ban appeals.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, and closed none, leaving seven cases open.
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