#WikiLeaks as a Wiki

Several people who I respect talked about WikiLeaks as a Wiki. One thing that they have right is that WikiLeaks has nothing to do with the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.

Where I disagree is that WikiLeaks does not qualify as a Wiki. The key characteristics of a Wiki are that it is quick and that everybody can participate. Everybody is invited to leak restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. WikiLeaks makes sure that no information is logged at any time that may lead to the identification of its sources.

Once a submission is made, the process is one where the material is assessed by a trusted and restricted group of people. The information is validated and there are processes in place that are intended to insure that people cannot be identified by the material that is to be published.

It should be quite obvious that running a project like WikiLeaks requires discretion and caution. It is obvious that they have made powerful enemies and their crocodile tears and posturing demonstrates a high degree of vindictiveness and / or bluster.

There are indications that much of the inner working of the banking kleptocracy will be exposed by WikiLeaks. This is something I am looking forward to. Keep in mind that the status quo is not necessarily in the people's interest. Just ask the people of Ireland or Iceland.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Portuguese ready for #Mifos Leila E

Beria finished the last messages for Mifos. She was told that the time was running out to include the localisations into the Leila E release. Beria went into high gear and localised 350 messages in two and a half hours.

Now that the localisations for the initial release of Leila E are in the bag, the need for localisations has not gone away. It is quite normal to have security or point releases and Mifos can follow the example of MediaWiki and include the new localisations.

When micro credits are important in your country, you will find the latest statistics of Mifos localisations for your language at translatewiki.net.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible VIII

With the #localisation of the two donation extensions in Farsi completed we hit an interesting situation. There are people in Iran who are willing and able to support the aims of the Wikimedia Foundation financially. Let's call them our friends.

Our friends want to help us with our ambition to bring the sum of all knowledge to all the people in the world. Our friends, their family, friends, neighbours live in a country that is not our friend according to some laws and consequently our friends cannot support our effort by donating money.

That is, they cannot donate money by transferring money out of their country. So the challenge is to allow our friends to donate to our cause and make these donations count towards achieving our goal.

The donations do not have to leave Iran. When Wikimedia activities in Iran are supported by these donations, we have a clear winner. The question is, can we arrange something while this fundraiser is still hot?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Copyright and #GLAMWiki

Pictures on #Commons have two purposes; the use as illustrations on Wikimedia projects and, the use as illustrations elsewhere. Most of these pictures place requirements on the user like attribution. Many people do not bother with such stuffiness. Many Wikipedians can get quite incensed about that particularly when the media is used for a commercial purpose.

Magnus Manske did a great job making it easy to use pictures from Commons. As you can see, nice icons that provide different ways of using the wealth that Commons has to offer.

When you use a picture "on the web" like I did recently in this blog post, you are provided with a neat attribution to the copyright holder and with a nice indication of the applicable license.

This is absolutely fabulous but still, there are a few things that would make it absolutely awesome..

• Show the license information on the Wikimedia projects as well
• Having these share options on the wikis of all Wikimedia projects
• Having the copyright message in the language of the Wiki, or a language that can be selected
• Including information about the GLAM that has it in its collection

For our GLAM partners the traffic numbers of their collection on our projects is important as is the number of articles their pictures are used in. References to the GLAM who has something in collection is important to us to us and vital to them.

We are adamant that citations are used to assert the validity of facts. It is how we provide a reason why our articles can be trusted. A similar assertion is needed for illustrations; Jimbogoesswimming.jpg is not the 1873 image by William-Adolphe Bouguereau that can be found in the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

This picture does not attribute the Clark and neither does the one on the article about nymphs on the Esperanto Wikipedia. It is relatively easy to recognise the GLAM that conserve a work like this. Such recognition makes a massive difference to our GLAM partners who struggle to maintain their collection and who need recognition to justify their partnership with us.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Intrigue: A Wiki Experience in Indonesia

My best friend Pipit once told me that my curiosity does not come cheap, indeed I found myself in many situations wondering "Oh my, how did I end up in here?".

My name is Siska Doviana, I'm an Indonesian in San Fransisco for two weeks, where the Wikimedia Foundation Office (WMF) is located. I was invited to come to tell WMF my story.

There's nothing special about how I began my wiki experience really, naturally I was curious. My first long and multiple edits in the Indonesian language Wikipedia began with an idea that I didn't want my assignment paper for the university to end up as a recycled paper only. My first edit was about Playboy magazine and its impact in Indonesia, the year - 2006. In my search for references, I stumbled upon the English Wikipedia article, among other resources, and I checked the Indonesian language Wikipedia. It was poorly written, and I decided to contribute. Since I'm not a techie, soon enough I ended up inside an argument, partly about the content but mostly it's about the "how to". Although the subject of the article was controversial then, my edit and argument page attracted other (very active) wikipedians, not because of the article content, but because they found out that I'm a woman. It turned out I had ended up inside a "guys only" lair, I guess the situation just changed a bit. Back then (2006) the Indonesian language wikipedia only had 20 thousand articles and 20 very active users.

Looking back, I might not "last" as long if not for the series of meetings happening after ward. The first Indonesian language wiki meet happened after I started to edit heavily the U.S. Presidents in Indonesian Wikipedia (since the office I worked for published a book about U.S. Presidents). The first ever Indonesia wikimeet conflicted with me travelling to Bali for a holiday, I had signalled my  "regret", and thought "Uhm, what happens online, stays online" and I was convinced that there would not be other meetings. Yet life has its own plan and funny turns. I end up attending the meeting since I missed my plane to Bali (misread the departure time of my budget flight - and it left me with six days of nothing to do in Jakarta). So I decided to attend the meeting with "interesting" Wikipedians. One of them, Revo, happened to fly in (visiting Jakarta) from his home in Netherlands. He brought us a story about the German Chapter and suggested that Indonesia should have a chapter of its own. We weren't really excited at first, to me it is an idea located somewhere over the rainbow. However, that first meeting led to an unplanned series of meetings since our meeting picture was discovered by three independent movie makers from San Francisco: The Underdog Pictures, shooting "Truth in Numbers, The Wikipedia Stories". Since Indonesian Wikipedians are mostly male and not really "service oriented" - they forwarded me the email from Nic (the director) to be "taken care of".

After Underdog, the next thing we knew, we started to get invitations to talk in seminars, interview on radio, and then Nic wrote to me about Wikimania 2007 in Taipei. I told him to forget it, why would they wanted me to come? Pfft, nothing to tell here, don't know anyone there. Nic insisted, sending me all the links, and honoring his determination in offering it, I filled it.

In 2007 I found myself wandering around in Taipei with three other Indonesian Wikipedia volunteers and talking to Delphine Menard and the chapter's committee, about the possibility of an Indonesian chapter.

Wikimedia Indonesia was established in 2008, if I knew then what I knew now, I might not been so compelled to have an organization. For one thing, I realize later that the organization couldn't live if we were just doing what we're doing online. An organization needs a life of its own, and it turned out to be a huge responsibility. As part of the community I sense a strong need to step it up. However instead of increases, as life goes by, the volunteer activity decreases, one of the founding members and best friend that used to be single got married, had kids, and decided to establish his own company, with no more time for wikipedia, more over - no more time for offline meetings. The happening in life became a repetitive pattern for any other members too. Behind Wikimedia Indonesia, there are people with little time and an organization that has no money - both the people and the organization still hold a golden promise of what "could be great".

Since I don't rely on promises (life is too short), I decided to live it, golden promise - here we go. As a non-techie volunteer writer, I realize people might have been discouraged to write to Wikipedia since the technical bar is too high (it happened to me). I also noticed that Indonesian language Wikipedia should definitely have more articles, like "Come on, the fourth largest population and no one would write it for free? Seriously?". I would also grade existing volunteer in Indonesian language Wikipedia communication skills as "not so great", since if a problem showed up with a newbie - they, the Wikipedians, would rather focus on the problem (like putting a "warning signs") instead of taking the time to explain the solution. Dragging my "non-wikipedian and know nothing about wikipedia" best friend in college into the project, we designed an outreach project "Free Your Knowledge 2010", a project that my Netherlands Wiki friend, Gerard, referred to as "ambitious". Come to think of it, it was kind of ambitious, aside from all the obvious: cost, resources, goals - even the organization chart in Wikimedia Indonesia adjusted in order to support a project coming from "just a member" like me into a recognizable "on the board" organization-wise project. No money, no time, and no office, the project pressed on. During the project since resources were tight, I personally had to make hard decisions and use whatever I got - i.e. my best friend's personal resources, or an occasion where I saw my own financial resources and academic assignments fly out of the window, my window, not Bill Gates' - as much as I have fun - sacrificing is not easy, and I have to admit that the implementation was hard, unlike when you begin to plan it, no matter how prepared you are when life is about to hit you in the face.

So what's next? My goal is to design a system that allows anyone who is willing and able to contribute to Wikimedia Indonesia as a means to realize their goal and (preferably) to use the Wikimedia projects as their tool. I would also love to see a global competition happening.  What would be awesome is having people from different parts of the worlds, the non native speaker like me, competing to write in the English Wikipedia, while the native speaker could only serve as coach - it's like a world Idols version but for writing! Ha...

--
Siska Doviana | Pendiri (Co-Founder) | Wikimedia Indonesia
Ph. +62 816 484 5052
~~~~
Dukung upaya kami membebaskan pengetahuan

The #MantisBT bug tracker

MantisBT is one of the applications that are localised at translatewiki.net. For software like Mantis there is a limited group of people who benefit. It is therefore very much a "scratch your own itch" that makes people localise Mantis.

This week people started to localise in the Turkish and Vietnamese language. They are making a product their own and as it is open source, every other compatriot can benefit from their effort. Some work needs to be done before these languages feature among the 23 languages that have been fully localised.

The MantisBT website informs about in many ways about its progress; there is a blog and there is twitter. When you are considering your need for a bug tracker, consider Mantis and, you may be in luck with a user interface available in your language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible VII

The fundraiser is doing well, with over 5,6 million dollar donated we are likely to achieve the goal that exists that was set. There have been several nice spoofs of Jimmy Wales, la Giacondo is well known for all kinds of alterations and, having a beard as well is more then what Marcel Duchamp added.

The localisation of the two MediaWiki extensions, the "Donate Interface" and the "Payflow Pro Gateway" extension, is doing well. There are now 33 languages with great localisations.

There has been an argument if size matters when you should consider localising for a specific language. It is obvious that a Wikipedia with little traffic is unlikely to generate large amounts of money for the Wikimedia Foundation. Then again, it does not cost much either and, in this way a project, a language pays its own way.

Helping make the fundraiser a success in your language is one way of showing commitment to our shared goal. This is also a great signal to the WMF to consider helping with specific needs for your community.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The bits and bytes of our #GLAM partners

Our big GLAM partners do not only provide us with their images, they provide us with annotations, with references to their own resources and consequently each image has an added value. The information includes the date of its creation, the creator, info to the license and often a little story to its background.

Such information is extremely valuable because it is often the difference between just an image and a usable illustration. Maintaining such information is expensive; it takes manpower, technology to manage what is often an overwhelming amount of data.

Not all GLAMs have the facilities to provide the information that we need. Copyright and license for instance are subjects that became relevant only recently and most GLAMs find that many of their collections provides at best ambiguous information. Many of the GLAMs do not have the infrastructure to store uncompressed digitised images or have a system to manage all this data.

It does happen that when you approach a GLAM for cooperation, you will find that this is an issue. This does not necessarily mean that cooperation is impossible, it will be more complicated and possibly more involved.

On a meta level our Wikimedia movement could help localise an application like CDS/ISIS, this software as well as its source is available from UNESCO. One sticking point is that it is not available under a license..

On a micro level, a Wikimedian in residence can help a GLAM as a volunteer. What needs doing will differ from GLAM to GLAM. It is however the beauty of a movement that all such activities help to achieve the aim of making high quality information available to a world wide audience.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Thanks to Peter Weis for his contributions writing this blogpost

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible VI

With Thanksgiving celebrations in the USA tomorrow, it is a good time to consider the plight of the turkey. Today is probably the best time to be still alive for a turkey while tomorrow is probably the day when the most turkeys will be eaten.

A whole turkey cost something like $20,- depending on quality and size and stuffing and stuff will certainly be another $10,-. Having such a grand bird well prepared and enjoying it with great company is certainly a feast.

The Wikimedia Foundation has had a great year, many things were accomplished, the usability has improved, GLAM partnerships are becoming more mature. Wikipedia is getting more traffic, there are more Wikipedias then ever with an increasing number of articles that are of interest to an increasing percentage of the world population.

We hope that you have your reasons to be thankful for what we have offered in all the Wikimedia projects. Maybe you can express it by giving us a turkey.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Opportunities, equal for all

When we write our #Wikipedia articles, we are all volunteers. We are given the same opportunity to write in our own language and all our efforts are needed to realise the aim of the Wikimedia Foundation i.e.: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment".

The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the MediaWiki platform. MediaWiki provides support to many languages; the group statistics at translatewiki have currently 337 entries. Most languages are in the Latin script and these are reasonably well supported. Many other languages have a problem; their script can have debilitating issues that prevent Wikipedians writing their articles with the same ease that is considered normal for the English language.

The native languages of the Indian subcontinent all have a problem. The effect of the script issues can be best appreciated by comparing the Indonesian Wikipedia and the Malayalam Wikipedia. Their number of contributors is roughly the same but the output of new articles in Malayalam is quite different and consequently the traffic it generates is much less.

BBC support for Hindi
for mobiles

When India and with it explicitly the Indic languages are part of a new strategy, the direction is decided. What is not decided is how you get there, the new roads you will have to travel and the companions you will meet on the way. The BBC supports Hindi on mobile telephones by showing texts as images and while this may suffice for readers of Wikipedia for editors this is just not good enough.

When the WMF is serious about an India strategy, it will  take ownership of the issues and tackle them. It can partner with other organisations but it cannot abandon its requirement for a solution. As the WMF is the 500 pound gorilla of the Free Content world it can partner with governments, with standard organisations and the developers of operating systems for mobiles and computers to make the difference that is needed to realise a working strategy for the Indic Wikipedias and for India.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Photoshopping Jimmy Wales

With Jimmy on every #Wikipedia article, it was to be expected that people would poke fun at him. Using Photoshop to make a cuddly wombat was to be expected. Jimmy in all kinds of kinky positions is also rather too obvious.

The ones that I have seen did not have the quality to include them in my blog. So I will not. The best Jimmy fix is still this remarkable work by Durova. My challenge to all those who are photoshopping Jimmy is to do something this good. If it is, I will be happy to share it on my blog.

Thanks,
     GerardM

Ambitions for the #Myanmar #Wikipedia

A Myanmar times article informs us that the Myanmar Wikipedia community has the ambition to grow its number of articles to 15,000. It is ambitious not because there are too few people on the Internet but because of the technical issues they are facing.

This instructional screen shot shows that the localisation has improved a lot lately. It would have been fun to have Jimmy's message shown with all the nice boxy indicators that the Unicode font is missing but getting the core functionality localised is still more important.

When you read the article you will start to understand why achieving 15,000 articles is ambitious. Getting everyone to use Unicode fonts will be hard; some 90% of the Myanmar population use an incompatible writing system and, it will take some convincing that Wikipedia is worthy of the effort needed.

There are several scenarios that will make it possible to fulfil the 15K ambition. With out of the box thinking and some carefully targeted investments, this ambition is in reach.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#DYK, cloggs are safety equipment

Klompen, clogs, wooden shoes are what tourists buy as a souvenir. When they do not buy them as a souvenir, they buy pictures with them.

When it was decreed that safety equipment was to be worn, it was understood that clogs were out. This created a backlash and the Dutch safety institute could only test clogs to provide a compelling argument why this wearing safety equipment was so important.  The result was surprising to them because it turned out that clogs did comply with all their requirements and then some.

The people who actually wear clogs were not surprised. They provide isolation against cold and the wet. When a cow puts his feet down, they prefer clogs and not steel capped boots.

The protest ensured not only that clogs are now accepted safety gear, this ensured that Dutch wearing clogs is not only a myth; it is a reality.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The Mozilla foundation is largely responsible for making the Internet what it is. Thanks to their effort Open Standards and honest implementations are now the rule. Firefox captured the hearts of many people and broke the monopoly and the lack of invention that characterised Internet technology.

Now that this key achievement is becoming evident in more and better quality browsers, Mozilla is looking forwards because it must remain competitive in the browser arena and should broaden its scope into mobile and apps and maintain its sustainability.

This graphic presentation shows the importance of the 500 localisers for the Mozilla projects. They are positioned right in between the Mozilla employees and the volunteers who donate code. Their effort to internationalise and localise has been key to stimulate the use of the Internet worldwide.

Localisation for MediaWiki and several other projects is done at translatewiki.net. Over 2,700 people receive the TWN-newsletter. Their contributions make a difference to some of the most relevant projects. With a localised browser and with projects in people's own language, the Internet gains relevance for an increasing number of people.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The Dutch November 2010 mini conference

Yesterday was a small Wiki conference in Utrecht. Sadly the day before a building that controls the train traffic into Utrecht burned out and consequently it was announced that there was no train traffic possible. Now, on Sunday I received a mail that the trains are running again.

First prize at the "Wiki loves Monuments" competition

Some forty people made it to the conference and they had a really pleasant event. Part of the event was the announcement of the winner of the "Wiki loves Monuments" photo competition. There were presentations and there was the usual after party.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Sad news about the #Bundesarchiv

When a partner like the Bundesarchiv announces that they will not make any more material available to us, it is sad news. The Bundesarchiv was the first big GLAM who provided us with a large collection of scanned pictures and, it is good to appreciate the value of what they have given to us.

This has been a true partnership; many of our Wikipedians have used material as an illustration. At this moment, 20.97% of the 82553 pictures on Commons are used on one of the Wikimedia projects. They have been seen 76 490 874 in March, 90 034 115 in September and 90 839 613 in October. Wikimedians in turn have identified many people in the pictures and, many of the annotations have been evaluated and updated.

Does this picture have proper attribution

One picture is used a staggering 210 times but more interesting is the number two picture. Interesting because who would have thought that in order to illustrate a French president we have to turn 135 times to a picture of a German archive. It is equally amazing that the number 3 is used 133 time and is one of a Sovjet president.

The reason why the Bundesarchiv stops making material available to us is because so many people have ignored the provisions of the CC-by-sa license when they use their images outside of the WMF projects.

A big improvement is that on Commons HTML code is available for the embedding of pictures on the web. This makes it easy to use pictures and comply with license requirements.

Abiding by license requirements is important for our GLAM partners and, it is important to us as well. The Bundesarchiv does not want to be a "litigation bastard" but at the same time it is vitally important to them that the license requirements are abided by.

We are happy to continue doing our part of the partnership; we will continue to work on the annotations of the pictures and we hope to identify even more people.

We will be there when the Bundesarchiv reconsiders its moratorium on providing us with new material and we hope that together we can find a way to that will make the German cultural heritage that the Bundesarchiv is the custodian of available to the world wide audience that Wikipedia offers.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible V

While the Jimmy appeal is almost universal, I am really happy that there is someone else out there as well. Kartika Sari Henry is not just any Wikipedia volunteer, she is the winner of the hard fought Bebaskan Pengetahuan 2010 competition.

It is really pleasing to find one of our unsung heroes appealing to the better nature of our readers. Her appeal is well worth a read:

A message from Wikipedia editor Kartika

If you have knowledge, you must share it.

It's a simple idea that's at the heart of Wikipedia.

I started editing and adding articles to Wikipedia because I saw how many important topics weren't yet covered in my language. The more I searched, the more I realized how much was missing – and how much I could add.

So I started editing articles and helping Wikipedia grow. And I discovered that I wasn't alone – there was this whole community of people, here in Indonesia and around the world, who were doing the same. These were people who were completely dedicated to this project of sharing, just for the joy of it. We have knowledge. We have to share it.

I am proud to be part of the Wikipedia community. And because you are here, on this page, you are part of it too. You are part of the largest source of information in human history, and we're building it together.

I want Wikipedia to keep growing. I want it to be free to use for everyone, and I never want to see a single ad here. Wikipedia is and always will be what we make it – and we need to protect our Wikipedia.

If you can read this, then you can help. I hope you will.

Kartika

Jakarta, Indonesia

 Thanks,
      GerardM

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible IV

This years fundraiser is effective. A lot of time and effort has gone into getting it right and it shows. Geolocation is used to identify where people are from so that the appropriate message gets out. This is a good thing; it helps our chapters to get our message out.

Still... there is one obvious thing that can be done to optimise our fundraising operation: When in Rome ask donations in the currency of the Romans. This means that you ask in India for rupees and in Indonesia for rupiahs.

My bet is that asking for donations in the local currency will more then double the number of donations. Getting it right this year will have an effect in the next year as well.

When you use Chrome as your browser, you may want to consider installing this extension.. it is fun, but I doubt that it will gain us more donations
Thanks,
      GerardM

Let's have the best #Wikimedia fundraiser possible III

The part I enjoy most of the Wikimedia Fundraiser are the ways people poke fun at it. Sometimes, they get it completely wrong; the hammer and sickle for someone who made his fortune in playing the stock market

When you consider the source of the donations, it is ordinary people who help us out of the kindness of their heart. It is not one big business that makes our day, it is not "resistance is futile", it is the common people who earn their daily bread and share from what they have.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The #Wikimedia France #GLAM conference

The organisers of the French GLAM conference asked to promote their conference so that there will be as many people attending as fit in the premises. I have been anxious about being able to understand the proceedings but I need not worry because it will all be translated from French into English and vice versa.

I am also really happy that all the talks will be captured on video so even when you cannot make it to be in Paris, these will help you with your loss.

I hope to meet you in Paris so that we can do some serious networking.
Thanks,
      GerardM