WebProNews

Tag: Wikimedia

  • Mozilla Leads the Charge For Net Neutrality’s Reinstatement

    Mozilla Leads the Charge For Net Neutrality’s Reinstatement

    Mozilla, along with a coalition of companies, has sent a letter to the FCC asking for the reinstatement of net neutrality.

    Net neutrality rules were passed during the Obama administration and repealed during the Trump administration. Net neutrality prohibits companies from treating different services or types of internet traffic by different standards, or setting up internet “fast lanes” for companies that pay more.

    For example, AT&T customers were able to watch HBO Max — which AT&T owns — on their mobile devices without the streaming counting against their data plans. In contrast, competing streaming services did count. If this type of practice became widespread, it could cause users to gravitate toward or away from certain services, based solely on the whims of the carriers and internet providers with a financial motivation to push or punish a particular service.

    In the case of AT&T, they announced they are dropping their preferential treatment of HBO Max as a result of California’s net neutrality legislation. While net neutrality was killed on a national level, individual states are free to impose their own rules, setting up a potential legislative quagmire.

    Mozilla, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia have now sent a letter to the FCC asking the agency to reinstate federal-level net neutrality.

    We are writing to express our support for the reinstatement of net neutrality protections through Federal Communications Commission (FCC) action. As leading internet-based businesses and organizations, we believe that these fundamental safeguards are critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth. Net neutrality enjoys bipartisan support among the American public, and many may need to rely on protections enforced by the FCC as more offices and classrooms continue to shift to online settings during the pandemic. By using its authority to restore net neutrality at the federal level, the FCC can help protect families and businesses across the country that rely on high-speed broadband access and help spark our recovery.

    Net neutrality simply preserves the environment that has allowed the internet to become an engine for economic growth. The rules serve as protections that users have in their relationship with internet service providers, preventing ISPs from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing traffic for payment. And in an environment where users frequently lack meaningful choices between ISPs, net neutrality can ultimately encourage greater long-term investment across the network stack by promoting broadband buildout, faster service, and new applications.

    While the current administration has not commented on its intentions, some experts believe it is only a matter of time before net neutrality is reinstated. Given the digital transformation underway, such legislation would go a long way toward protecting all users and companies.

  • Wikipedia Is Bitching About Media Coverage

    English Wikipedia administrator Robert Fernandez just published a blog post on the official Wikimedia blog complaining about Wikipedia / Wikimedia’s media coverage – both quantity and quality.

    On which we are now reporting.

    According to Fernandez, the media doesn’t really understand Wikipedia, its parent organization Wikimedia, or the other projects under its umbrella.

    “Both qualitatively and quantitatively, news coverage is inadequate for a website and movement as large and influential as Wikipedia and Wikimedia. The news media has little understanding of the mechanics of Wikipedia, the role of the Foundation, non-Wikipedia Wikimedia projects, and other important issues involving the encyclopedia and the community. The coverage we usually see is neither in-depth, nor specialized, nor systematic,” he writes.

    “To the English-language news media, Wikipedia is a foreign country. They don’t speak the language, they don’t know how anything works.”

    According to Fernandez, news outlets need Wikipedians in residence.

    “There are plenty of stories here to be told, and a Wikipedian in residence could help tell them. In the process, they could help educate the media about how Wikipedia works and let them know that there are stories worth telling in the Wikimedian community too.”

    In order to bolster his claims that Wikipedia doesn’t get its fair share, he presents this chart of New York Times story subjects in 2015:

    Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 11.12.59 AM

    As you can see, the Times writes a lot about Twitter, Facebook, and Google – and not so much about Wikipedia.

    It might not be fair to say that the entirety of the Wikimedia organization feels this way. I mean, there is this disclaimer at the end of the post:

    The views expressed in this blog post are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia.

    Then again, this is the English Wikipedia administrator posting on the official Wikimedia blog, so …

    While you’re here, please take a look at our coverage of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ Chuck Norris humor.

  • Wikipedia Lists Ten Most Edited Pages Of 2014

    Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation released its first-ever annual video looking back at the year in Wikipedia edits.

    The video gave us a glance at some of the most edited pages, but now, the foundation has released an actual top ten list (in ranking order) of the most-edited pages in the English language, as well as how many times they were edited:

    1. Deaths in 2014 (19,789 edits)
    2. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (10,217)
    3. Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period (8,212)
    4. Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa (7,794)
    5. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (7,520)
    6. 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict (6,497)
    7. Shooting of Michael Brown (5,835)
    8. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (5,185)
    9. 2014 Pacific typhoon season (5,012)
    10. List of works by Eugène Guillaume (4,311)

    An interesting list to say the least.

    “In 2014, volunteer editors created more than three million pages and made more than 100 million edits on Wikipedias across all languages,” says the foundation’s Juliet Barbara. “During this time, Wikipedia content was viewed around 250 billion times by nearly half a billion visitors worldwide. With its vast community of readers and contributors, Wikipedia content is a reflection of what much of the world experiences and considers significant.”

    Harvard Business School computational social scientist and research associate Brian Keegan recently published a year in review of Wikipedia usage across 19 languages (English, Russian, Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Chinese, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Swedish, Indonesian, Korean, Czech, Farsi, and Ukrainian).

  • Wikipedia Banks $140,000 in Bitcoin Donations in First Week

    Wikipedia Banks $140,000 in Bitcoin Donations in First Week

    The Wikimedia Foundation lives on donations – that’s how you can read the Wikipedia entry on World of Warcraft and not be bombarded with ads for Mountain Dew Code Red. And garnering enough donations to keep afloat hasn’t always been easy for the non-profit – a fact that can be proven by Jimmy Wales pleading face appearing every once in a while as you browse the online encyclopedia.

    Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it would start accepting donations in bitcoin, with the help of wallet service Coinbase. With the help of Coinbase, any donations made in bitcoin can be immediately converted into US dollars.

    Ok, so it’s been a week. How’d they do?

    Pretty well, actually. The Wikimedia Foundation, which umbrellas Wikpedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and more, raised over $140,000 over the past week.

    “Wikipedia is run by a non-profit organization and has been able to operate ad-free because of the generosity of donors from across the world. For donors worldwide, bitcoin is a convenient donation method that ensures 100% of donated funds go to the cause. Donors can also enjoy significant tax benefits by donating bitcoin. As inspiring non-profits such as the Wikimedia Foundation continue to adopt bitcoin as a payment method, we look forward to seeing you and the community show strong support as well,” says Coinbase.

    Strong support indeed. Wikimedia did say that bitcoin donations have been a frequent demand of the community for a while now. Though it’s unlikely that Wikimedia can sustain such a robust donation flow, it does show that there are plenty of people out there willing to give up their bitcoin for the cause.

  • Wikipedia Donations Can Now Be Made in Bitcoin

    Wikipedia Donations Can Now Be Made in Bitcoin

    If you’ve been putting off donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, waiting to do so in a cryptocurrency, today’s the day.

    The Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for the internet’s largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia – as well as Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons (among others) – has just announced that it now accepts Bitcoin. This is the 13th method of donation now accepted by the foundation.

    Wikimedia’s Lisa Gruwell says that this option was a frequent demand of the community.

    They’ll get help from Bitcoin wallet Coinbase, who will make it so Bitcoin donations are immediately converted into US dollars.

    “During this review, we identified a new way to work around past technical challenges, as well as to minimize the legal risks of accepting Bitcoin. Using Coinbase, a Bitcoin exchange, we’re able to immediately convert Bitcoin to U.S. dollars, requiring minimal technical implementation on our end. Since we now also have guidance on how to account for Bitcoin, there is a clear understanding of how to legally manage it,” says Gruwell.

    Coinbase is also offering zero procession fees for non-profits.

    “The Internet has made it easier for non-profits to operate by enabling them to increase geographic reach and reduce the overhead required to fundraise. Adding bitcoin as a donation option is a natural next step for non-profits because it eliminates one of the most significant costs remaining —payment processing fees. In response, we’re proud to announce zero processing fees for all registered non-profits accepting bitcoin through our merchant tools. This means that any non-profit accepting bitcoin through Coinbase will be able to instantly cash out their bitcoin donations for U.S. dollars and receive a daily bank transfer, free of charge,” says Coinbase.

    You can hand those Bitcoins over to Jimmy Wales here.

  • Will Policy Changes Make Wikipedia More Trustworthy?

    The Wikimedia Foundation announced changes to its terms of service to address the problem of black hat paid editing of content such as Wikipedia articles. With half a billion people using Wikipedia every month, and the major search engines drawing from its information for quick answers to users’ queries, it’s pretty important that the content remains unbiased and factual, and not tainted by the influence of money in an undisclosed manner.

    “This new change will empower Wikipedia’s editor community to address the issue of paid editing in an informed way by helping identify edits that should receive additional scrutiny,” a spokesperson for the foundation tells WebProNews. “In addition, the change will help educate good-faith editors as to how they can continue editing in the spirit of the Foundation’s mission and provide additional tools in enforcing existing rules about conflicts of interest and paid editing.”

    Do you trust information on Wikipedia to be unbiased and factual? Do you think the new changes will help? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    The issue has been around for a long time, but really gained a lot of attention last year when Wikimedia announced that it shut down hundreds of accounts for undisclosed paid edits. Prior to that, a Wikipedia editor had uncovered “the largest sockpuppet network in Wikipedia history,” and a service called WikiPR was actively promoting services to manage clients’ Wikipedia, employing admins, which have special rights over content and edits that others don’t.

    “Editing-for-pay has been a divisive topic inside Wikipedia for many years, particularly when the edits to articles are promotional in nature,” said Sue Gardner, the foundation’s former executive director at the time. “Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic. We consider it a ‘black hat’ practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people.”

    Gardner recently stepped down from the executive director role, which was officially taken over by Lila Tretikov this month.

    Earlier this year, the foundation had to let go a respected employee after it became known that she was involved in paid editing.

    That was in January. In February and March, the Wikimedia community discussed the issue of undisclosed paid editing, and the changes that the foundation just announced gained “overwhelming” support from the community.

    Wikimedia’s Geoff Brigham writes in a blog post:

    As explained in October of 2013, we believe that undisclosed paid advocacy editing is a black hat practice that can threaten the trust of Wikimedia’s volunteers and readers. We have serious concerns about the way that such editing affects the neutrality and reliability of Wikipedia.

    The change to the Terms of Use will address these concerns in a variety of ways. First, it will help educate and explain to good-faith editors how they may continue to edit in the spirit of the movement and mission, through simple disclosure of their affiliation. Second, it will empower the community to address the issue of paid editing in an informed way by helping identify edits that should receive additional scrutiny. Finally, it will provide an additional tool to the community and Foundation to enforce existing rules about conflicts of interest and paid editing.

    Those who are being paid to edit will need to disclose the paid editing to comply with the new ToS, and add their affiliation to their edit summary, user page, or talk page, and “fairly disclose” their perspective. There’s an FAQ about this here.

    Those who edit Wikipedia as volunteers and “for fun” don’t have to worry about anything changing with the new terms. Those employed by galleries, libraries, museums, etc. that pay employees to make “good faith” contributions are considered “welcome to edit” as long as the contributions aren’t about the actual institutions themselves.

    There’s a letter from Wikimedia’s board about paid contributions without disclosure here. Here’s a sample:

    Several editors raised concerns about the impact of this amendment on good-faith editors, such as first-time editors who aren’t familiar with our rules, or editors who work on projects with GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) or with universities. We ask everyone to be respectful of others and to help enforce existing community practices and policies about privacy and harassment, even in cases of suspected paid advocacy editing. The amendment is not intended to impact participants in GLAM projects, or professors, when they are writing about topics of general interest on their own, rather than writing about their own institutions while being compensated directly quid pro quo, for example.

    Given the complexity of the issue, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to monitor the effectiveness of the amendment, and remain open to changes as necessary to improve it. We thank everyone who participated in the community consultation.

    Those who are paid to edit are also subject to laws such as those prohibiting fraudulent advertising.

    Do you think the foundation’s ToS changes will make a significant impact on the legitimacy of information presented in Wikipedia articles? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image via Twitter

  • Wikipedia Shuts Down Hundreds Of Accounts For Paid Edits

    Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced today that over 250 Wikipedia accounts have been blocked or banned as editors investigate accusations of people being paid to edit and manage pages.

    “The Wikimedia Foundation takes this issue seriously and has been following it closely,” writes Gardner. “With a half a billion readers, Wikipedia is an important informational resource for people all over the world. Our readers know Wikipedia’s not perfect, but they also know that it has their best interests at heart, and is never trying to sell them a product or propagandize them in any way. Our goal is to provide neutral, reliable information for our readers, and anything that threatens that is a serious problem. We are actively examining this situation and exploring our options.”

    Gardner said that she and the editors who are investigating have expressed “shock and dismay.”

    Not many would be “shocked” that people are trying to game the system. Wikipedia is one of the biggest and most visible sites on the Internet, and is the primary gateway to information about companies for many people. It’s also tightly integrated into Google’s Knowledge Graph and Apple’s Siri. It should be no surprise that people would try their best to make themselves look better.

    But what is more shocking is that there could be some in the Wikipedia universe with a great deal of power over content that are part of this.

    Gardner references an article from the Daily Dot from earlier this month about a Wikipedia editor uncovering what the publication called ” the largest sockpuppet network in Wikipedia history”. This was kicked off when the editor noticed something fishy about citations on the page for a company called CyberSafe and the appeals that came in during the deletion process, which seemed to be coming from the same person through different accounts.

    The article discusses a service called WikPR, which promises to manage its clients’ Wikipedia presences. WikiPR says on its Services page:

    “Trying to get on Wikipedia for the first time? Or has Wikipedia created a page that you want edited? We can help. Our staff of 45 Wikipedia editors and admins helps you build a page that stands up to the scrutiny of Wikipedia’s community rules and guidelines. We respect the community and its rules against promoting and advertising. Don’t leave your Wikipedia page up to chance. Don’t get caught in a PR debacle by editing your own page. Ensure your Wikipedia page is 100% accurate with our Page Creation & Editing service.”

    “Let’s face it: You can’t monitor every edit made to your Wikipedia page. That’s why we created Page Management service. We’ve built technology to manage your page 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Plus, you’ll have a dedicated Wikipedia project manager that understands your brand as well as you do. That means you need not worry about anyone tarnishing your image – be it personal, political, or corporate.”

    WikiPR also tells prospective clients, “Let the largest Wikipedia research firm help you claim your top spot in Google search results.”

    As The Daily Dot’s Simon Owens wrote, “Perhaps the most shocking claim on the Wiki-PR is that the firm employs admins. Wikipedia’s privileged few, admins possess special rights and powers they use to keep other editors in line. They can restrict editing access to a page (often when a page is being vandalized or is extremely controversial), ban users, and delete pages. Wikipedia admins (who, like almost other Wikipedia user, are volunteers) are often thought of as the site’s sacred guardians, committed to neutrality and fairness, able to wade into the most controversial and divisive entries and deliver impartial judgement.”

    “If Wiki-PR’s claims are true, that means there may be ‘sleeper agents’ among Wikipedia’s most powerful users, a revelation that would likely send chills down the spine of any devoted Wikipedian,” Owens added.

    Apparently this is indeed the case in Gardner’s case.

    “Editing-for-pay has been a divisive topic inside Wikipedia for many years, particularly when the edits to articles are promotional in nature,” she writes. “Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic. We consider it a ‘black hat’ practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people.”

    “What is clear to everyone is that all material on Wikipedia needs to adhere to Wikipedia’s editorial policies, including those on neutrality and verifiability,” Gardner adds. “It is also clear that companies that engage in unethical practices on Wikipedia risk seriously damaging their own reputations. In general, companies engaging in self-promotional activities on Wikipedia have come under heavy criticism from the press and the general public, with their actions widely viewed as inconsistent with Wikipedia’s educational mission.”

    She says the foundation is continuing the investigation, assessing its options, and will have more to say about the situation in the coming weeks.

    Earlier this year, Gardner announced that she would depart the Wikimedia Foundation. At the time, she said she was “uncomfortable” with where the Internet is heading. I’m guessing these events have done little to change her mind about that.

    Image: Sue Gardner (Victoria Will for the Wikimedia Foundation)

  • Wikimedia Plans To Beef Up Security Across Projects With HTTPS

    The Wikimedia Foundation is working on making its projects more secure to protect users’ privacy.

    As one can imagine, there are plenty of technological obstacles that the foundation must overcome, so it’s going through the process a little at a time. The foundation has outlined its current roadmap in a blog post.

    “The Wikimedia Foundation believes strongly in protecting the privacy of its readers and editors,” writes Wikimedia Foundation operations engineer Ryan Lane. “Recent leaks of the NSA’s XKeyscore program have prompted our community members to push for the use of HTTPS by default for the Wikimedia projects. Thankfully, this is already a project that was being considered for this year’s official roadmap and it has been on our unofficial roadmap since native HTTPS was enabled.”

    “Our current architecture cannot handle HTTPS by default, but we’ve been incrementally making changes to make it possible. Since we appear to be specifically targeted by XKeyscore, we’ll be speeding up these efforts,” adds Lane.

    First on the agenda is redirecting to HTTPS for log-in, and keeping logged-in users on HTTPS. The foundation intends to deploy this on August 21st.

    Next, the foundation intends to expand the HTTPS infrastructure, moving the SSL terminators directly onto the frontend varnish caches and expanding the frontend caching clusters. Then, it will look to “more properly” distribute its SS load across the frontend caches.

    Wikimedia will then slowly soft-enable HTTPS for anonymous users by default, starting with its smaller projects. It will do so by changing its rel=canonical links to point to the HTTPS version of pages, rather than the HTTP versions, which will cause search engines to return HTTPS results.

    After that, the foundation will then consider enabling “perfect forward secrecy,” hard-enabling HTTPS (force redirecting users to HTTPS versions), and enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security to protect against SSL-stripping attacks.

    Wikimedia doesn’t have eexact time frames associated with any of the changes other than the aforementioned August date for redirecting logged-in users.

  • Wikipedia Finally Gets Mobile Editing

    The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that it has finally added the ability to edit Wikipedia from mobile devices. Historically, you’ve only been able to do so from the desktop.

    This is an increasingly important feature, as over 15% of Wikipedia’s users are already accessing the site on mobile devices. This number will obviously continue to trend upwards.

    The feature is starting out in trial mode, available only to those with Wikimedia accounts. If this applies to you, you can look for the pencil icon to access the edit feature. If not, you can easily sign up for an account.

    Mobile editing on wikipedia

    Wikimedia’s Juliusz Gonera writes in a blog post, “For our first release, our primary goal was to create a fast, intuitive editing experience for new users and experienced editors alike, while still sticking with markup editing for now. We started simple so we could observe our users’ needs and expectations.”

    “We’ve already seen an encouraging number of users try out editing on our experimental beta site, where we first built the feature,” Gonera adds. “Now that it’s available for all users, we hope to learn more about the kinds of edits people make on mobile and build more advanced features, including possible Visual Editor integration, in future releases.”

    The foundation says it has been trying to make mobile editing work on as many devices as possible, but reiterates that this is just the first release, so some may have be patient when it comes to that.

    Wikipedia has been getting a lot more useful on mobile devices lately. In addition to getting new Siri integration on iOS 7, it recently got a new “Nearby” feature to surface location-relevant content, a mobile app for Wikimedia Commons, and the ability to upload photos from mobile.

  • Wikipedia and Other Wikimedia Sites See 500M+ Uniques a Month

    Wikimedia sites, which include Wikipedia, Wikionary, Wikibooks, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, and nearly a dozen more, now see over 500 million unique visitors a month.

    The previous high was set in May of 2012, when Wikimedia Foundation sites saw 492 million uniques. In March, the family of sites saw an astounding 517 million unique vistors. The data comes courtesy of the latest comScore Media Matrix.

    “In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavor: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment,” says Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner.

    “The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever – but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.”

    The increase in uniques has also had an impact on how long readers stay and how much content they consume. Gardner says that people are staying longer and reading more.

    “Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views. We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.”

    Speaking of Sue Gardner – she’s not long for the position of Wikimedia director. A couple of weeks ago, she announced that she would be stepping down from the job – not right away, as she expects to take 6 months or so to find a replacement.

  • Asteroid Named “Wikipedia” Officially Documented

    Considering just how many asteroids there are in the asteroid belt, it can be difficult to come up with acceptable names for all of them. So, they are given obscure provisional names until a naming organization can bestow names on select celestial bodies. Most named asteroids are named after astronomers themselves, or the relatives of astronomers.

    This week, Wikimedia announced that an asteroid has officially been named “274301 Wikipedia” after the open-source internet encyclopedia. The object is estimated to be 1 to 2 km (1 mile) wide and orbits the sun as part of the main asteroid belt.

    The name was proposed by Andriy Makukha, a Wikimedia Ukraine board member. It was then submitted to the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature by Yuri Ivashchenko, the head astronomer at the Andrushivka Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. The official naming was published last week in the the journal Minor Planet Circular, coincidentally the ninth anniversary of the first Ukrainian language Wikipedia article.

    The asteroid itself was discovered on August 25, 2008 at the Andrushivka observatory. The object orbits the Sun once every 3.68 Earth days at 2.4 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

  • Wikipedia Moves To Ashburn, Virginia

    Wikipedia Moves To Ashburn, Virginia

    The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that it is transitioning its main technical operations from a data center in Tampa to one in Ashburn, Virginia, in move it says will improve the technical performance and reliability for all its sites, including Wikipedia.

    “Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida, since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center to host Wikimedia sites,” says Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier. “A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the site. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started to look for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes.”

    “The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data center in Summer 2010,” Paumier adds. “The actual build-out and racking of servers at the colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long period of hardware, system and software configuration.”

    Some traffic has been served to users from the Ashburn data center since November 2011.

    Along with the transition will come a disruption in service, though the foundation says its engineering teams have been working on trying to minimize inconvenience for users. Sites will be in read-only mode for part of the time, and may be “intermittently inaccessible”. The target windows for migration are: January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC.

    Last week, the foundation unveiled WikiVoyage, which transitioned to a Wikimedia Foundation project after seven of existence under the Wikivoyage Association.

  • There Are Now Over 15 Million Media Files In Wikimedia Commons

    The WIkimedia Foundation announced that on December 4, Wikimedia Commons, the organization’s free media repository, hit a 15 million media file milestone. There are now over 15 million pictures, videos and audio files, and the 15 millionth one shows Tropical Depression Seventeen-W, described as a “tropical cyclone that developed during the 1996 Pacific typhoon season.” It comes from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    Tropical Depression

    The last such milestone the foundation announced was 10 million media files, back in April of 2011.

    “Credit is due to the Wikimedia Commons community, who is largely involved in a variety of projects, processes and negotiations that are intended to improve the availability of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to the public,” says Peter Weis on the Wikimedia blog.

    “The last two years have seen an increasing number of cultural institutions (GLAM) and other organisations providing content that would have otherwise not been freely accessible,” he adds. “Two Wiki Loves Monuments contests have also been responsible for more than 500,000 uploaded images. Moreover, constant technical improvements, such as the UploadWizard introduced in May 2011, and the new HTML5 video player, facilitate the contributions of current and future participants and encourage them to expand niches like audio and video.”

    Wikimedia projects attract 480 million unique visitors per month, according to the foundation.

  • Wikimedia & Orange To Provide Free Wikipedia Access In Africa, Middle East

    Jimmy Wales isn’t messing around when it comes to stressing the point that, yes, everybody should have free and available access to information.

    In a press release this afternoon, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, announced that they will be partnering with Orange, of France Telecom, in order to make Wikipedia more easily available to Orange mobile customers throughout Africa and the Middle East. Hailed as the “first partnership of its kind” – that being the world’s first mobile and Internet partnership – the two companies will provide more than 70 million Orange customers with mobile access to Wikipedia without incurring any data usage charges.

    This new partnership will be gradually launched throughout 2012 across 20 African and Middle Eastern countries where Orange operates, with the first markets launching early in the year. The initiative is part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile strategy that aims to reach the billions of people around the world who access the internet solely through mobile devices.

    Any customer with an Orange SIM and mobile internet enabled phone will be able to access the Wikipedia site either through their browser or an Orange widget. They can access the Wikipedia encyclopedia services for as many times as they like at no extra charge as long as they stay within Wikipedia’s pages.

    Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said, “”Wikipedia is an important service, a public good – and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using.” She continued, “This partnership with Orange will enable millions of people to read Wikipedia, who previously couldn’t. We’re thrilled to be Orange’s partner in this important endeavor.”

    Orange posted a video on their website extolling the value of a freely accessibly Wikipedia to their customers that is now viewable on their website.

    Marc Rennard, Group Executive Vice President, Africa, Middle-East and Asia at Orange, commented, “In countries where access to information is not always readily available, we are making it simple and easy for our customers to use the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia. It is the first partnership of this kind in the world where we are enabling customers to access Wikipedia without incurring any data charges; and shows Orange’s ability, once again, to innovate in Africa and the Middle East, and bring more value to our customers.”

    The timing to announce the merger one day ahead of the the one-year anniversary of Egypt’s January 25th Revolution (although it continues to go on even today), which could be considered the first domino to fall in the Arab Spring’s chain of protests throughout the past year, is peculiar. It may be unintentional, but I’d like to think that this reaffirms Wikimedia and Wales’ commitment to providing a worldwide network of free information whenever someone needs it.

  • Wikimedia Foundation Breaks Record With Fundraising Campaign

    The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has wrapped up its annual fund raising campaign, breaking a record with $20 million raised from over a million donors in “nearly every country in the world”.

    It appears those big banners at the top of Wikipedia, which have been ridiculed a few times, have been a success.

    The ridicule was mostly over the layout, where a user could look at a page for something like “bitch” or “rapist” and see the word appear right under a big photo of co-founder Jimmy Wales or various volunteers. It became something of a meme, though some were much more light-hearted.

    “Our model is working fantastically well,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service. I am so grateful to our donors for making that possible. I promise them we will use their money carefully and well.”

    The campaign has indeed been Wikimedia’s most successful ever. On top of that, it’s part of a streak that has seen donations rise every year since campaigns began in 2003. Since 2008, the number of donors has increased ten-fold, and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million.

    Wikimedia’s sites attract over 470 million people each month, and is the only major site supported by donations rather than ads, the foundation says.

    The money from this campaign will go to servers and other hardware, development of new site functionality, expansion of mobile services, legal defense, and support for volunteers (there aree over 100,000 of them).

    The foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is $28.3 million.

    Wikipedia itself has over 20 million articles in 282 languages. It will celebrate its 11th anniversary on January 15.

  • Wikimedia Expands On Wikipedia’s Thoughts Concerning SOPA

    While the position of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales concerning SOPA is now well known, his “Put SOPA on Blast” essay essentially spoke for himself, although, one would be inclined to believe Wales shares the thoughts of his co-workers. Now, however, thanks to an extended post over at the Wikimedia blog, there can be no mistaking as to where Wikipedia as a whole stands in relation to SOPA.

    The post in questions, titled, “How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia” goes way beyond the reactive, blanking of Wikipedia measures discussed by Wales. Like a good law firm, the media arm of Wikipedia laid down their position in detailed fashion, explaining why the idea of SOPA goes against the open principles on which the Internet was founded. An example:

    We cannot battle, however, one wrong while inflicting another. SOPA represents the flawed proposition that censorship is an acceptable tool to protect rights owners’ private interests in particular media. That is, SOPA would block entire foreign websites in the United States as a response to remove from sight select infringing material. This is so even when other programs like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have found better balances without the use of such a bludgeon. For this reason, we applaud the excellent work of a number of like-minded organizations that are leading the charge against this legislation…

    It continues on for some length, comprehensively laying out their ideas opposing SOPA. There’s also a section that deals with the legal ramifications of such a bill passing, and these, too, are addressed in the post. In fact, Lamar Smith’s amendments are also addressed, showing just how up to date Wikimedia’s reaction is.

    I’ve been asked for a legal opinion. And, I will tell you, in my view, the new version of SOPA remains a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet.

    • The new version continues to undermine the DMCA and federal jurisprudence that have promoted the Internet as well as cooperation between copyright holders and service providers. In doing so, SOPA creates a regime where the first step is federal litigation to block an entire site wholesale: it is a far cry from a less costly legal notice under the DMCA protocol to selectively take down specified infringing material. The crime is the link, not the copyright violation. The cost is litigation, not a simple notice.
    • The expenses of such litigation could well force non-profit or low-budget sites, such as those in our free knowledge movement, to simply give up on contesting orders to remove their links. (Secs. 102(c)(3); 103(c)(2)) The international sites under attack may not have the resources to challenge extra-territorial judicial proceedings in the United States, even if the charges are false.
      The new version of SOPA reflects a regime where rights owners may seek to terminate advertising and payment services, such as PayPal, for an alleged “Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” (Sec. 103(c)(2)) A rights owner must seek a court order (unlike the previous version) (Sec. 103(b)(5)). Most rights owners are well intentioned, but many are not.[2] We cannot assume that litigious actions to block small sites abroad will always be motivated in good faith, especially when the ability to defend is difficult.

    Read more at Wikimedia’s post. As for the inclusion of Smith’s amendments, the feeling is, while an improvement, they don’t adequately fix what SOPA potentially breaks:

    In short, though there have been some improvements with the new version, SOPA remains far from acceptable. Its definitions remain too loose, and its structural approach is flawed to the core. It hurts the Internet, taking a wholesale approach to block entire international sites, and this is most troubling for sites in the open knowledge movement who probably have the least ability to defend themselves overseas.

    Aside from the Protect Innovation consortium, there aren’t many publications that so thoroughly discuss the implications of SOPA with such a level head. Not only is the discussion an important one, there’s also emotion involved. Thankfully, the Wikimedia post purposely eschews emotion for a factual, level-headed approach.

    Lead image courtesy.