Medical images have transformed many aspects of modern medicine. Over the past two decades the increasing sophistication of MRI, CT-scanning, and X-ray techniques has made these technologies the cornerstone of diagnosing a range of conditions, replacing what used to be largely guesswork by doctors. They can be the difference between life and death for a patient, and their importance is underlined by the tens of billions of dollars spent on them annually just in North America. For Wikimedia Foundation projects, advanced images are now a powerful tool for describing and explaining, and educating our worldwide readership of medical articles.
But somehow these images have fallen through the copyright crack because each image potentially involves a raft of stakeholders—both individuals and institutions ...
This legal fuzz was brought home with a thud on September 16 on Commons, when User:Eleassar nominated for deletion a featured image of the human brain, generated by a CT scanner. The image had been uploaded by a long-standing Wikipedian who is the subject of the image. Eleassar’s argument is that copyright for the scan belongs with the X-ray technician. If this position is upheld by Commons it may result in the deletion of the great majority of radiological imaging, which has been contributed by the patients or the physicians involved in their creation. To make matters worse, open-access publishers do not require release by the X-ray technologists, so we would likely lose those images as well.
This nomination for deletion has brought up a fundamental question: are diagnostic images copyrightable, and if so, who owns the copyright? Is it the patient, the technician, the radiologist (a medical specialist), the doctor who ordered the creation of the image, the hospital, the first person who publishes the image, or are such images by default in the public domain.
The law says very little on the question and a bunch of us have been playing amateur lawyer now since this case arose. A WMF legal intern provided an opinion which was more or less "the law has no idea": "The copyright office takes the position that X-rays are not copyrightable". Complicating matters further, some degree of creativity is required not just in the United States but in nearly all countries, yet "Anyone who has prepared a photographic picture has an exclusive right to make copies of that picture".
Wikimedians have put a number of arguments, including:
1) Diagnostic X-rays are the same as photos, and thus the person who presses the button owns the image. 2) Copyright requires "intellectual creativity". Radiological images are created on the basis of strict guidelines. No creativity is allowed. And thus they are not copyrightable. 3) Similar arguments used to support the deletion of X-rays can be made for ECGs—both types are created on the basis of electromagnetic waves at the press of a single button. Will we need to delete the thousands of ECGs on Commons? 4) What about the sculpture your plumber has created under your sink or your electrician within your walls? Are you allowed to take and upload a picture of that without his or her consent? Or do you need copyright release?
So what does the publishing world do? I have asked multiple publishers and academics from many countries. They all agree that copyright is not owned by the tech. Publishers state that they just assume that the author has "taken care of it". Authors state that they simply publish and do not feel they needed permission from either tech or hospital as long as the images were anonymized.
Is it country-dependent? Some are arguing that the laws pertaining to this in Sweden and Germany are different from those in the US and the UK; so while images might be allowed from some countries, they might not from others. The experts I asked from Sweden, however, viewed the laws the same as those from the US and UK. More opinions are being sought.
A number of radiological images have been deleted on the basis of the precautionary principle over the years.
With tens of thousands of images at stake, representing thousands of volunteer hours of time, the discussion has become heated, with a few insults beginning to fly. To solve the dilemma, I have started a request for comment on Commons to bring more voices to the table. Having asked at least a dozen lawyers and getting an even greater number of opinions, the question is: how do we resolve the unknown?
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This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 2 October 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
In what will be remembered as a game-changing week for Wikimedia grantmaking, the Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, published a forthright and in places highly critical statement, Reflections on the FDC process, and grantmaking staff revealed that the WMF will significantly strengthen its targeting of optimal impact in funding. These clear signs of the Foundation's intention to shift grantmaking strategies come just after 11 WMF entities placed on-wiki their applications for the October round of Funds Dissemination Committee allocations—the first of two rounds in the 2013–14 financial year in which the combined maximum budget will be US$8M. (The FDC is the volunteer committee, supported by a team of WMF specialist staff, that administers annual grants to chapters and other eligible entities.) The FDC also published the annual report for its first year of operation, 2012–13.
Sue Gardner's statement emphasised the successes of the new system, but went on to express significant concerns about how the WMF's affiliated entities are developing: "too large a proportion of the movement's money is being spent by the chapters [whereas] the value in the Wikimedia projects is primarily created by individual editors: individuals create the value for readers, which results in those readers donating money to the movement. ... I am not sure that the additional value created by movement entities such as chapters justifies the financial cost".
While stating her confidence in all FDC members, Gardner wrote: "I am troubled by the FDC being disproportionately chapters-centric, and my concern increased rather than decreasing following the 2013 FDC member elections, which resulted in the two open FDC seats being filled by chapters Board members. ... the FDC process, dominated by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices. I had hoped that this risk would be offset by the presence on the FDC of independent non-affiliated members".
"With such a high proportion of [resources] now funding [chapters' staff and offices], we need to ask if the benefits are turning out to be worth the cost. It's possible that a well-managed shift to some staff support can help a volunteer community stay energized and enthused, but the risks and costs of setting up bricks-and-mortar institutions also dramatically increase, alongside sometimes difficult dynamics between staff and community".
In Gardner's view, we lack evidence that this spending "is significantly helping us to achieve the Wikimedia mission. I believe we're spending a lot of money, more than is warranted by the results we've been seeing. I am concerned by the growth rates requested by the entities submitting funding requests to the FDC." She challenged Wikimedians to ask themselves "whether there are more imaginative and agile ways of organizing our movement that will support our work better".
Gardner's comments were, in part, reinforced and extended in presentations of unusual candour by FDC staff at the Foundation's regular Metrics Meeting last Thursday, streamed live and now available on YouTube (starting at about 37 minutes). WMF senior director of grantmaking, Anasuya Sengupta, said that analysing the impact of grants will be a priority in the coming year. One of her main points concerned the asymmetry in chapter allocations: "Last year, of the $5.65M we gave out, about $3M went to three chapters: Germany, France, and the UK. ... there are questions to be asked by all of us around where's the money going, for what, to whom, and how are our individual contributors being supported as best as we can".
Katy Love, the FDC's senior program officer, pointed out that the FDC guidelines generally allow a maximum annual increase of 20% in the funds allocated to any one chapter. Yet most of the 11 applicants are asking for considerably greater increases: Germany, the largest recipient—which already has access to generous levels of funding from German donors—is asking for 36% more ($2.43M). The UK's claim is up 32% from last year, Argentina's 34%, Switzerland's 38%, Austria's 41%, Serbia's 111%, Israel's 204%, and India's 401%. Only the bids from the Netherlands (up 20%) and Sweden (up 21%) were within the guidelines. This will present the FDC with "a very interesting process", Love commented.
Returning to the issue of asymmetry, the disparity between the allocations to the global south and north are more dramatic. Last year, Sengupta said, the global south received just 8% of WMF funding (from all sources, not just the FDC), with an average grant of $1554. The global north received 92% of the funds, and by the Signpost's calculation an average grant of $79,780. Despite this, reaching into the global south is a key priority for the Foundation. Asaf Bartov, head of WMF grants and global south partnerships, explained the rationale: "When our GS editorship is low, we are missing important voices, with different contexts, knowledge maps, hierarchies and categories." This leads to systemic bias from "the paucity of GS editors". More strikingly, Bartov pointed out that in terms of page visits "we are reaching 7% of the planet with our free knowledge – 7%! – so there's a way to go."
But the situation is complicated. In relation to grantmaking, he said, "it's actually hard to spend effectively in the global south. We are very eager to fund work in the global south, but it has actually been hard finding fundable projects that align with our global mission ... So that is a major component in the low number of funds that make it to the global south – it's not like we say 'no' a lot."
So just what has the Foundation learned about the criteria for funding successful activities? Bartov first talked about a fundamental prerequisite:
"Where that core doesn't exist, it's very hard to deploy any other type of program. If you want [a GLAM partnership] with the National Museum of Cameroon ... how are you going to deliver on what you promise the museum if you don't have local editors who will do the work – write the articles, show up to meet the curators. So this is the big, big challenge for which we don't have an answer: how do you grow such a core ... in a certain country? ... we're now cautious about active investment where there is not an active community—although it's still possible if you give us a really great idea."
The WMF's primary formula, Bartov said, is now that "growth happens when community and outside resources come together", although he pointed out that "we are in disagreement with some parts of the community, with some chapters, about this conclusion: some people think we should still do work where no community exists."
What has been learned more specifically, then? He listed six critical advances in the Foundation's understanding that will be of interest to all Wikimedians who are engaged in practical projects:
"WMF contractors operating "on the ground" are too complicated and not effective enough ("we now only partner with grantees").
"Sustained attention to local communities yields actionable plans (a major focus in India and Brazil at the moment, which "has yielded actionable plans in those countries").
"WP Zero is effective, but it's still a challenge to get people to use the resource you make available".
"Just making offline resources [like software] available in the GS is not enough; distribution is the key".
What the WMF has been learning from its role in grantmaking appears to be leading to definite changes in its funding priorities and methodologies. While this is likely to be met with controversy in the movement, there will be inevitable implications for affiliated entities in terms of how they shape their own priorities and the way they achieve their goals. During the Metrics Meeting, Katy Love encouraged all interested members of the community to review and comment on the FDC applications.
Recent news concerning a related issue—the standards of governance required of FDC grant recipients—was first raised in the Signpost two weeks ago. In that edition we linked to an anonymous tip-off on the Wikimedia India mailing list on 15 September. The post claimed that two returning members of the chapter's executive committee, Pranav and Karthik Nadar, were in the paid employment of a third, Moksh Juneja, who joined them as a new member at the August election. This information did not appear to have been disclosed to voters, despite the obvious potential for conflict-of-interest in having a block of three members in mutual employment relationships out of a total of nine members.
The incident took a new turn yesterday when Moksh Juneja confirmed the employment relationships "have ended / [are] in the process of ending", and denied that this had any connection with the anonymous tip-off. Former president of Wikimedia India Arjuna Rao Chavala served on the chapter's election committee for the August election; his current membership of the FDC means that this information is likely to be discussed on the Committee during the current round, in which the Indian chapter has applied for US$178k for a predicted total budget of $217k .
An additional point of debate may involve another matter raised in the same edition of the Signpost: the allegation by one candidate, Santosh M. Shingare, that the chapter's election committee had failed to release the list of eligible voters 21 days before the election as required by the chapter's rules. In making the allegation that he would no longer participate in the election, Shingare declared he would no longer participate as a candidate.
Two weeks ago, we also reported on a conflict-of-interest issue in Wikimedia UK—that the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR—a professional body for public relations practitioners in the UK) has appointed current Wikimedia UK Secretary Alastair McCapra as its new chief executive. WMF general counsel Geoff Brigham has just published an opinion that "if a substantive issue arises at CIPR with respect to Wikimedia or its projects, I understand that Alastair intends to recuse himself from discussion and decision and appoint someone else at CIPR to act as the final decision maker on that issue within CIPR to avoid any appearance of a conflict of duty of loyalty. Alastair would also recuse himself on the WMUK board from a discussion and decision on any issue concerning CIPR. If an issue is particularly contentious and critical to the very fabric of either organization, Alastair may need to make a decision of resignation to address the potential conflict on that question, but such decisions can be handled on an issue-by-issue basis. The mere possibility of such a scenario does not necessitate resignation today."
Chris Keating, Chair of the WMUK board, has posted this message: "If there is a widespread view that, even with the steps we've outlined, it's not in the charity's best interests for Alastair to continue, then we will listen to that. However since Alastair posted the details of how he will handle this situation, only 5 people (myself included) have taken part in the resulting discussion. Some have posted at some length and in strident terms, but I don't yet see the picture I would need to see to be persuaded we are taking the wrong course of action here."
Discussion continues at the WMUK water cooler, beneath Brigham's statement.
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Six featured articles were promoted this week.
Two featured pictures were promoted this week.
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The war is over, declared one music editor preparing to return to editing classical music articles in the wake of ArbCom's Infobox decision. The editor had spent two years away from music topics, "I could see I would get involved in this long-running controversy on infoboxes and it would be an unproductive waste of time."
Another music editor, who had stopped editing in June, and who asked not to be identified, told the Signpost that even though the current guidelines say infoboxes are neither required nor prohibited, and the committee cannot decide a content issue, the arbitrators did well with the case, by calling a halt to the disruption, and calling for a community discussion for clarification of the guidelines.
"The decision to include an infobox in an article is a content decision," wrote arbitrator Worm That Turned. Worm further clarified the reasoning behind this, in a way that should put to rest any lingering questions about the role of WP:OWN in the debate:
| “ | The use of an infobox in an article is a content decision, not a maintenance decision. They should be added as part of content creation; they should not be added systematically to articles. | ” |
Worm delineated the difference between "content creation" edits and "maintenance" edits. Maintenance tasks should not change the meaning of the article for the casual reader, he explained. These tasks include categorisation, stub sorting, adding wikilinks, formatting and stylistic changes such as number and position of headers or placement of images, and simple copy-editing such as grammar and spelling fixes.
Content creation would include addition and removal of text, images, tables, references and so on—and infoboxes—and should be done by an editor who has some knowledge of the subject.
Starter templates are fine, and general recommendations by a WikiProject are fine, says Worm, but editors should not go through a group of articles, adding infoboxes to each systematically.
Before the case had even been closed, a new RFC was started on the talk page of WikiProject Quality Article Improvement by Chedzilla, an alternate account of Ched, who had initiated the original Infoboxes case request. The RFC drew immediate protests from music editors. The RFC should be in a neutral area, not on the pages of a project that was home to the two topic-banned editors, they said. The language of the proposal should be neutral. And the music editors were already exhausted by years of acrimony. Time was needed.
Arbitrator Carcharoth agreed: "My suggestion, for those who want to sort through their thoughts on this while they are still fresh, would be for people to make notes or mini-essays offline or in their userspace, and to leave articles and talk page discussions well alone for a bit. Don't rush into post-case discussions, but let things calm down, and find other things to do in the meantime. It's not like the issues are going to go away."
As a followup to this, the Arbitration report has compiled a partial listing of essays and previous discussion at the end of this report.
"I don't think the discussions should be hurried", agreed Quiddity. The RFC should run for many months to avoid fatigue, he told the Signpost, and needs a large amount of preliminary research, adding that Sphilbrick and Kleinzach have some of the best ideas . "I believe that all of the objective problems with infoboxes can be fixed", he said, "and all of the subjective problems can be minimized." He added, "I do think WikiData needs to be taken into account; there will soon be more facts and stats than could reasonably fit in an infobox."
"Structuring the discussion is important", music editor Kleinzach told the Signpost. Kleinzach calls for a drafting committee of three or five members to structure the questions. Interested parties would submit topics to the committee and all meaningful questions would be included.
In the past, community discussions have been muddled, and issues have been conflated. The problems need to be separated, said Kleinzach, and detoxified, one by one. The discussion should distinguish between publishing issues and technical issues.
| “ | What I call ‘publishing' (copy-editing) issues are all about consistence, clarity and coherence, relevance, appropriateness, balance, and presentation. The following would need to be included:
1. position of infoboxes within articles, 2. size/text length of infoboxes in absolute/relative terms, 3. box/lead content relationship, 4. box/article content relationship, 5. collapsed or non-appearing fields and field names, 6. appearing field name rules, 7. linking and referencing within boxes, 8. rules on avoiding anachronism, 9. material exclusive to the box (i.e. not in the article), 10. illustrations, 11. use of technical, scientific and foreign languages, abbreviations etc. What I call technical issues include template coding and design, data formatting, extraction and re-use outside Wikipedia (metadata), development of smart boxes etc. |
” |
"Any future discussion needs to be much broader than that defined by ArbCom", Kleinzach told the Signpost. "Looking just at how infoboxes are ‘used‘ (i.e. inclusion/exclusion disputes on article pages), but not at how the templates are created, means concentrating on effects rather than causes. Fundamental issues about template design and MOS guidance should be faced."
Infoboxes have been controversial, explained Kleinzach, because they have often been edited behind the scenes, without content contributing editors being involved. The idea that there are two ‘stances', "pro-box" and "anti-box", is not really correct. "There is a spectrum. Objections to infoboxes have been localized, and focused on particular topics and particular infoboxes.
One particularly controversial infobox is the 'bio-box' or biographical infobox. Another infobox that received a particularly negative reaction from serious music editors was Musical artist infobox with anachronistic, pop music derived fields such as 'birth name', 'genres', 'occupations', 'labels', 'associated acts', and 'past members' —misapplied to classical music articles.
An example of a positive response to an infobox was the Template:Infobox classical composer, which according to Quiddity was the result of a 2010 discussion which clarified problem areas in the documentation, and has been uncontentiously used in a few articles.
"Rather than trying to force them on the unwilling," recommends Brian Boulton, "improve them by returning to their original principles ('a few key facts'). I have recently added an experimental infobox to an opera article I have written." The sample infobox proposal was intentionally introduced in a relatively low-profile opera article, to minimize controversy.
English Wikipedia infobox for Angela Merkel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chancellor of Germany | |
| Assumed office 22 November 2005 | |
| President | Horst Köhler Christian Wulff Joachim Gauck |
| Deputy | Franz Müntefering Frank-Walter Steinmeier Guido Westerwelle Philipp Rösler |
| Preceded by | Gerhard Schröder |
| Minister of the Environment | |
| In office 17 November 1994 – 26 October 1998 | |
| Chancellor | Helmut Kohl |
| Preceded by | Klaus Töpfer |
| Succeeded by | Jürgen Trittin |
| Minister of Women and Youth | |
| In office 18 January 1991 – 17 November 1994 | |
| Chancellor | Helmut Kohl |
| Preceded by | Ursula Lehr |
| Succeeded by | Claudia Nolte |
| Member of the Bundestag for Stralsund-Nordvorpommern-Rügen | |
| Assumed office 2 December 1990 | |
| Preceded by | Constituency Created |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Angela Dorothea Kasner 17 July 1954 Hamburg, West Germany |
| Political party | Christian Democratic Union |
| Height | 1 m (3 ft 3 in) 65 / 1.65 m |
| Spouse(s) | Joachim Sauer (1998–present) Ulrich Merkel (1977–1982) |
| Alma mater | University of Leipzig |
| Signature |  |
While there are a few uncompromising ‘pro-box' editors who believe there should be a box on every article, no-one has taken up the opposite position: that there should be no infoboxes at all, says Kleinzach, a music editor who has added hundreds of infoboxes to articles. "Unfortunately many current boxes are not fit for purpose because of poor design."
In particular, some 'monsterboxes' have been created with far too many fields, unfamiliar abbreviations etc. that are actually longer, bigger, more prominent and more difficult to read than the articles they are supposed to summarise."
German Wikipedia in particular is known for its minimalist approach to infoboxes. They are particularly unpopular on biographies. Even the article for Angela Merkel has no infobox, only a photo and signature (see above). In contrast, the infobox for Merkel's English Wikipedia page (right) would extend well past the fold in most browsers.
One of the major criticisms of infoboxes is the loss of nuance, when complex information about a subject is forced into an abbreviated infobox format.
"I feel strongly that it is poor form to use an infobox entry, which almost by definition is extremely short, to summarize situations which might be too complicated for a one word or short phrase, says SPhilbrick. "That is exactly what well-written prose is for—to explain nuance, in as many words as it takes to explain the issue."
The articles best suited to infoboxes, says Smerus, in an essay provided to the Signpost, may be in scientific and geographical topics. "The arguments over infoboxes seem to have occurred in articles relating to history, biography and music." Infoboxes may be particularly unsuited to liberal arts fields when they repeat information already available in the lead section of the article, are misleading or oversimplify the topic for the reader, or include a vast amount of irrelevant or inappropriate information from the article.
The metadata question may well be obsolete. If you Google La traviata , Giuseppe Verdi, and Johann Sebastian Bach, you will find that it now creates its own small infobox on the subject, even though none of the corresponding Wikipedia articles have infoboxes. [screenshot] Quipped one user, "The Google box is better than the WP ones!" Perhaps Google has spent time and money identifying what their customers want.
Anyone who attempts to read any of the infobox discussions will quickly come up against some specialized terms.
What exactly is an infobox? A navbox? A template? A header or a footer? And where can new users turn to for assistance? Is there a place to "shop" for infoboxes, where you can see what is available and how it will look in a new article? The answer to the last question is no; apparently new users who are creating articles outside of a WikiProject have little to go on.
According to Kleinzach and Smerus, an infobox offers a quick summary of the article, sometimes with an illustration. It is normally in the right hand corner position. A navbox (navigation box) offers links to related articles, and is often found at the bottom of the page. All infoboxes are templates, but not all templates are infoboxes.
Quiddity provides a crash course in all things infobox and navbox, along with examples and links to the help files:
| “ | "Where can new users find out about infoboxes?"
"What is the difference between an infobox, a header, a navbox, a footer?"
Sidebar navboxes are complicated, and figure into my concerns about "collapsible sections". Back in the misty early days, they were intended to be very brief and focused (and were called an "WP:Article series") with usually 5–12 entries, e.g. {{History of Uganda}}, but since then, many have grown obese. E.g. {{Politics of the United Kingdom}} I suspect the large sidebars are generally unused by readers; partially because they're overwhelmingly large/dense, and partially because of the default-collapsed content (again, due to size). The sidebars (and footer navboxes) make sense to the people who build them [who are familiar with the entire topic's scope and breadth], and it's often difficult to convince them that a problem exists. There is never going to be a perfect answer to "how big" a navbox/category/Seealso section should be, hence they grow and split and grow again. |
” |
Note: The natural place to look is [[Wikipedia:Infoboxes]], but that is a redirect to [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Infoboxes]] which is of more interest to someone interested in designing a new infobox. There are also various options at Category:Infobox templates.
All infoboxes are templates, but not all templates are infoboxes. People create new ones unnecessarily all the time, hence many editors bring them to TFD to get them merged.
This week, we revisited the enthusiastic editors at WikiProject U2. Started in June 2007, the project has grown in spurts, resulting in a collection of 8 Featured Articles and 24 Good Articles. The project maintains a to do list, portal, and a list of references. We interviewed Melicans, Pjoef, and Miss Bono.
Next week, we'll head off on a road trip in the outback. Until then, take a pit stop in the archive.
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