The preliminary program has been released for Wikimania 2009, the annual international conference for users and contributors to the Wikimedia projects. Wikimania this year will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from August 26 to 28. This is the fifth Wikimania conference, and the first in South America. The conference is organized by Wikimedia Argentina as well as Wikimedia volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation.
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The program features academic, community, and technology sessions in several tracks. The keynote speakers are Richard Stallman and Jimmy Wales. The conference will be bilingual, with sessions in both Spanish and English. The conference will feature lightning talks and community panels, including a Wikimania Foundation Board panel. Parties and tango lessons have also been promised, along with an introductory barbeque before the conference gets underway.
The conference will be held at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, a cultural center in downtown Buenos Aires.
Registration is now open. Before July 30, it will cost US$45; after July 30 it will cost $60. The fee includes all three days of the conference, including lunch. Accommodation is available at the Bauen Hotel, near the conference venue, at a special rate of $25/night (if booked before July 30) or $30 a night (after July 30).
To keep up with Wikimania news, subscribe to the wikimania-l mailing list or watch for updates on the Wikimania site.
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Last week news broke of the legal threat sent to Wikimedian Derrick Coetzee (see Signpost and Wikinews coverage). The National Portrait Gallery in London alleges that Coetzee infringed on the gallery's copyrights by uploading to Wikimedia Commons over 3000 relatively high-resolution images of public domain portraits; the NPG, like many UK cultural institutions, claims copyright on photographic reproductions of public domain works.
Since the initial Signpost coverage, the Wikimedia Foundation has responded with a post on the Wikimedia blog, Coetzee has announced that he is being represented by a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the story has seen a wide variety of discussion in the mainstream media and among bloggers and others.
Although an individual Wikimedian, rather than the Wikimedia Foundation itself, is the target of the National Portrait Gallery's threat, the legal dispute is widely understood as pitting the gallery against Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. In the letter to Coetzee, the NPG stated:
Our client remains willing to enter into a dialogue with the Wikimedia Foundation to discuss terms upon which low-resolution images of paintings in its collection can be made available on the Wikipedia website and our client will continue to write to the Wikimedia Foundation with requests for discussion. However, to date, the Wikimedia Foundation has ignored our client’s attempts to negotiate this issue, preferring instead to take a more harsh approach that one would expect of a corporate entity.
On 16 July, Erik Möller posted a response on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, titled "Protecting the public domain and sharing our cultural heritage". The post describes some of the ways in which other organizations are working in cooperation with Wikimedia projects and highlights the open letter on "Working with, not against, cultural institutions" that was published in the previous Signpost, but it also re-iterates the Foundation's position against efforts to restrict the distribution and use of cultural works that are in the public domain. In support of Coetzee, the post notes that:
The Wikimedia Foundation has no reason to believe that the user in question has violated any applicable law, and we are exploring ways to support the user in the event that NPG follows up on its original threat. We are open to a compromise around the specific images, but our position on the legal status of these images is unlikely to change. Our position is shared by legal scholars and by many in the community of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
On 17 July, Möller said that "we’ve just entered good faith discussions with the NPG to determine whether a compromise is possible". According to reporting by The Guardian, the NPG "said they were not considering suing Wikipedia."
The letter to Coetzee demands that all the NPG images uploaded by Coetzee be deleted from Wikimedia servers by 20 July; there is no indication that this is being considered. Coetzee's administrator privileges on Wikimedia Commons were revoked last week because of the potential conflict of interest, although even deletion by an administrator would not meet the gallery's demand, since "deletion" on Wikimedia projects is merely the reversible suppression of content to prevent access by non-administrators. According to Coetzee, he is being represented pro bono by Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes in intellectual property issues.
Wikimedians and others have begun filing freedom of information (FOI) requests to discover such details as how much web traffic comes to the NPG website from Wikimedia projects and how much of the gallery's income comes specifically from licensing public domain works (as opposed to the many still-copyrighted works the gallery also owns).
Through previous FOI requests and the NPG's official statements, it is known that the gallery invested £1 million in its ongoing digitization project, that it spent £39,000 putting images online, that licensing images for web use brought in between £10,021 and £18,812 in each of the past five years, and that the total income from licensing in all media (including for copyrighted works) and reproduction fees ranged from £433,000 in fiscal year 2006-2007 to a projection of over £339,000 for 2008-2009. Licensing income appears to represent only a few percent of the gallery's budget, which exceeded £16 million in the 2007-2008 fiscal year.
Over the last week, Coetzee and others have cataloged the steady stream of press coverage, including Slashdot, the BBC, The Independent, the Evening Standard, The New York Times, and a host of blogs and specialist publications. Overall the coverage highlights well the essentials of the copyright dispute, although with such a wide variety of reporting, these stories report a wide variety of sometimes contradictory facts about the dispute.
UK publications in particular have often stated categorically that UK law extends copyright protection to photographs of public domain works; in contrast, legal analysts—such as technology law bloggers Simon Bradshaw and Andres Guadamuz—have consistently come to the conclusion that UK law is unsettled in several respects relevant to this dispute.
While the images uploaded by Coetzee are widely referred to as "high resolution", they are too small for many types of print usage. It is standard practice in galleries and museums to create much higher resolution digital files—for insurance and repair purposes, in addition to reproductions—and the NPG is assumed to keep such files.
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Erik Zachte has posted new statistics about the English Wikipedia, bringing them up to date for the first time since fall 2006. While the statistics for other Wikipedias are regularly run, the English Wikipedia has proved problematic for many years because of incomplete dumps. Zachte's blog post notes that these statistics were made possible because of a new custom version of the dump of en:wp.
The statistics show a decrease then leveling off of new user accounts and active (have edited at least five times this month) Wikipedians since a peak in early 2007, but a gradual increase in the overall number of editors who have edited at least ten times since they arrived, and a large increase in the number of bots. The statistics also show a gradual increase in the article count and average size of articles, but a monthly variation and decrease from 2006 to 2007 in the number of articles created per day.
The publication of the statistics has also enabled the publication of totals for all Wikipedias combined. As of May 2009, there are 928,022 editors across all Wikipedias who have edited at least ten times since they arrived, and 13.3 million articles across all Wikipedias.
The deadline for submitting a candidacy to the 2009 Board of Trustees elections has been extended a week, to July 27. According to a message sent to Foundation-l by Philippe Beaudette, the change was made in response to concerns that site-wide sitenotices advertising the elections have not been working since July 11, because of problems with the image server.
As of press time, there are 16 candidates running for three open positions. The elections are to elect community representatives to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, which provides guidance and oversight to the Wikimedia Foundation. Voting begins July 28, and will extend to August 10. Questions for the candidates are also now open; any voter may ask a question.
Eugene Eric Kim, a wiki developer and consultant about how people collaborate, was announced as the project manager for the Foundation-wide Strategic planning process that will take place over the next year. Philippe Beaudette, a long-time editor on en:wp and member of the elections committee was announced as the project's community facilitator. Both positions are one-year positions.
Wikimedia volunteers and staff collaborated with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to produce the first-ever United States Wikipedia Academy on July 16. According to the press release, "NIH and the Wikimedia Foundation want to increase the availability of accurate medical and health information available to the public." The workshop was all-day and covered editing techniques, policies, and suggestions for how to get started; a list of the many volunteers who helped with the Academy can be found on the Academy page. News of the workshop was also picked up by many media outlets, including the Washington Times. Three Wikimedians gave talks at the event: Tim Vickers on "Wikipedia as a Source of Scientific Information", Bill Wedemeyer on "The Art of the Article", and John Broughton on "Wikipedia's Quality". Vickers and Michael Laurent recently published an article about health information in Wikipedia, finding that "Wikipedia ranked among the first ten results in 71–85% of search engines and keywords tested" for online health information searches.
Section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion ("An article about a real person, individual animal(s), an organization (e.g. band, club, company, etc., except schools), or web content that does not indicate why its subject is important or significant") has been expanded to include articles about non-notable "individual animal(s)", such as people's pets. According to the proponents of the change in the discussion, such articles occur frequently enough to make the change useful to new page patrollers.
The membership of the Foundation's 2009-2010 Audit Committee, which "represents the Board in oversight of financial and accounting issues, including planning, reporting, audits, and internal controls"[1] has been announced. It includes four community members with financial backgrounds (Matt Bisanz, Ad Huikeshoven, Renata Stasaityte, and Anders Wennersten); two San Francisco-area business people (Alan Bauer and Sandy Gallanter); Board member Stu West; and Director Sue Gardner and Board chair Michael Snow as observers.
Most of Wikipedia's news coverage this week was dominated by the copyright dispute with the National Portrait Gallery in London. See "Further developments in copyright dispute" for more.
Encyclopedia Britannica was recently ranked number 10 on a list of top British consumer brands, jumping up 19 spots from last year's rankings. BBC News discussed this increase in popularity. When asked how Britannica is able to survive with competition from Wikipedia, Britannica marketing director Ian Grant said, "They're a chisel, we're a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job."
The New York Times writer Noam Cohen criticized Wikipedia for its poor images—specifically its lack of high-quality photos of celebrities. Some of the articles whose images were criticized include Halle Berry, Hank Aaron, and Natalie Dessay. Cohen described images as being "a glaring flaw in the Wikipedia model," in that articles gradually improve over time while images do not.
He also wondered "considering the money that stars spend to maintain their image, it is surprising that more have not invested in high-quality, freely licensed photographs for Wikipedia and other sites" (as Plácido Domingo has done). As briefly mentioned in the Signpost's January 2, 2008 edition, a streamlined mechanism for providing such photos exists at Wikipedia:Contact us/Photo submission. However, according to the NYT article Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said that many representatives or publicists trying to provide a photo are not aware that they need permission by the photographer to release it under a free content license.
One photographer, Jerry Avenaim, who has contributed a number of celebrity photos to Wikipedia, was nevertheless skeptical about the free licensing requirement, stating "the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use... [Wikipedia] should allow photographers to maintain the copyright."
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Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Skomorokh (nom) and Kateshortforbob (nom).
Six articles were promoted to featured status this week: Diocletianic Persecution (nom), Ruff (nom), Cloud Gate (nom), Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (nom), Battle of Corydon (nom) and Cycling at the 2008 Summer Olympics – Women's road race (nom).
Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Hot 100 number-one singles of 2008 (Canada) (nom), List of Big Brother (U.S.) HouseGuests (nom), Mayor of San Francisco (nom), List of listed buildings in Runcorn (rural area) (nom), Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame (nom), List of Wario video games (nom), List of CMLL World Middleweight Champions (nom), List of Gold Glove Award winners at outfield (nom), Templeton Prize (nom), Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps (nom), Crafoord Prize (nom) and List of lemur species (nom).
Two topics were promoted to featured status this week: Jupiter (nom) and State highways in Essex County, New York (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: Strapping Young Lad, Domitian, Port Chicago disaster, The Age of Reason, Nevado del Ruiz, Rampart Dam and Blair Anderson Wark.
Two articles were delisted this week: Pan American World Airways (nom) and Kerala (nom).
Four lists were delisted this week: List of Anuran families (nom), List of number-one Billboard Top Latin Albums of 1993, 1994 and 1995 (nom), List of number-one Billboard Top Latin Albums of 1996, 1997 and 1998 (nom) and List of awards and nominations received by Fiona Apple (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Storming the Bastille, West Point Lighthouse, Apollo 11 launch, Eriophora heroine, Richmond Bridge, Inflorescence and Mazda RX-8.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Fourteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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Pursuant to a remedy requiring it, consensus has been reached on naming guidelines for the West Bank.
The Arbitration Committee closed and opened one case this week, leaving one open.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. 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.4 (a8dd895), 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.
Developers have been working on various behind-the-scenes developments this week to ease, combat, and in the long term prevent, the problems of last week. Many of the problems have been related to a fault with the server software (and has been reported) when servers neared full capacity. Instead of filling up one server, then moving onto the next (as had been originally planned), some of the files have already been transferred from one to the other, which should solve the intermittent problems of late. (Wikimedia Techblog.)
5 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These included:
population field of {{Infobox UK place}}.nocat parameter from {{Surname}}.Also approved were XeBot and EarwigBot I 4.
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