On Tue, 24 May 2005, Angela wrote:
> ... since many people are not going to
> bother going through any complicated process of finding old
> certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
> whoever is suppose to validate that these are real.
Sounds like https:// to me. :-\
Cheers, Andy!
Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron at gmail.com wrote:
>Which means that English authors shall enjoy the US rights in the
>US... and that his work is protected for the normal delay even when
>it was published before 1954.
Crown copyright DOES exist outside of the UK, although in slightly
different forms. It exists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a
number of other countries. The UK version does exist in name outside
of the UK, although almost certainly the duration of the copyright
would be no different than ordinary authors under the Berne
Convention.
However, given what the OPSI have said in that email we are perfectly
safe in using published UK Crown copyright materials from 1954 or
earlier in the Wikipedia. Regardless of the exact term that the laws
of each country might provide, they are the people that administer UK
Crown copyright. That means they determine how long they will enforce
the copyright outside the UK. If they, as they have, say that
published UK Crown copyright works will be public domain 50 years
after publication worldwide, not just in the UK, then they are
perfectly able to do that.
I recently uploaded the two old Wikipedia logos to place them on the
History of Wikipedia article. However, I am unsure how to tag the
images, because of their unclear copyright status (one of them
definitely pre-dates the Wikimedia Foundation). Furthermore, I do not
know who created the initial one, all I know is it was created for
Nupedia and instead used on Wikipedia. The two images are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_logo_Nupedia.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki_logo_The_Cunctator.png
I don't want to tag the images because of their unclear copyright
status, but I don't want them to be deleted for not being tagged. Can
someone clarify if the Wikimedia Foundation owns the copyrights to
both of these images? If so, wouldn't it be appropriate to create a
new image copyright tag for *copyrighted* images of the Wikimedia
Foundation? Surely the free-images-only provision does not extend to
site logos etc.
~Mark Ryan
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I just checked in some changes to the above feature, mainly:
* Everyone can now see everyone's ratings
* Everyone's identified with full user name
* Anons can now rate too
Doesn't get much more open than this...
Technical note: This required a change in the database. I put it in the
table description, but don't know where to put it in the updater script
(not sure where...). Someone please do. Add
`val_ip` varchar(20) NOT NULL default ''
to the validate table.
Magnus
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Besides the 100K milestone, the project also received an honorary
mention at this year's Prix Ars Electronica. Please help with the
distribution and translation of the press release at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/100K
The online copy also includes various media examples.
NB: The Commons now has more than half as many files as the English
Wikipedia and more than any other project. Soon it will be the single
largest repository of files in the Wikimedia world.
See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps for
information on getting started to use the Commons.
All best,
Erik
100,000th file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository
Free images, sounds, and videos can be used by anyone for any purpose
St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
May 24, 2005
The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that the 100,000th file had
been uploaded to its online repository of free images, sounds, and
videos, the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/). These
files have been chosen or created by 5,259 registered users from more
than 12 different languages gathered in a single lively community. The
young project received additional encouragement and recognition on
Monday in the form of an honorary mention at the 2005 Prix Ars
Electronica awards.
The Wikimedia Commons, launched on September 7 2004, is a unique free
and open media archive (including images, sounds, and video), using the
same "wiki" technology that has made Wikipedia, a community-written
encyclopedia, the second most popular reference website on the web
(Hitwise.com report, April 2005). Wikis are websites that anyone can
edit, allowing for rapid growth and constant peer review of all
contributions. All files uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons are available
royalty-free for any purpose. Most files require attribution of the
creator, and some are under copyleft licenses, meaning that derivative
works also have to be made available for free re-use. Both Wikipedia and
the Wikimedia Commons are operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
The 100,000th file was an illustration drawn by a French Wikipedia user
named Stephane Tsacas. He manages the computer network of the Curie
Institute, a research center on biology and physics in Paris. "I
recently did some searches in the French Wikipedia and discovered some
incomplete information in a few articles in the field I know, computer
science. I then decided to register and do the modifications myself."
The file Stephane Tsacas uploaded is a diagram of the experimental
dataflow computer architecture. It is used in the detailed French
article http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Dataflow. As soon as a
file is uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, it is instantly available for
use on all Wikimedia projects without needing to be uploaded to the
local project. This feature is encouraging the Wikimedia projects to
move towards a multimedia approach rather than the simple text-based
approach they relied on in the past.
"Wikimedia Commons is of critical importance for all the Wikimedia
projects, and beyond that, it is critically important for the entire
free culture movement," said Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia
Foundation. Since the inception of the project in September 2004,
thousands of Wikimedia contributors have joined to make their multimedia
available to the larger community. As such, the Commons is one of the
most diverse collections of files imaginable. It includes many
independent collections of free content:
* 7,733 pronunciation files in various languages, notably Dutch
(5,926), German (499), Farsi (464), and Italian (249). These voice
recordings made by editors of the project are mostly used in Wiktionary,
a wiki-based dictionary and thesaurus.
* Reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings from ancient to
modern times, donated by Directmedia Publishing, a German publishing
company. This includes the works of artists like Leonardo da Vinci,
Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Hieronymus Bosch, and many
others. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Yorck_Project.
* Hundreds of public domain recordings of classical music by
composers like Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Classical_music.
* A growing collection of videos of historical speeches, excerpts
from public domain films such as Charlie Chaplin's "The Bond", and
scientific videos such as bacterial broths being deposited into a Petri
dish or the Space Shuttle Columbia going through the sound barrier. See
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video.
Besides these collections, it is the work of individuals which defines
the Wikimedia Commons -- like Wikinews user "Belizian", who took photos
during civil unrest in the small Central American nation of Belize in
January 2005 for the Wikinews article on the subject
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Unrest_in_Belize), or Wikibooks author
Robert Engelhardt, who has added photos of various beekeeping tools to
his growing reference work on the topic
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beekeeping). From lovingly drawn subway
maps to print quality photos of insects, from physics diagrams to photos
of exotic locations, the members of the Wikimedia Commons cover
virtually all areas of human interest with great attention to detail.
Like Wikimedia's other projects, the Wikimedia Commons is open for
everyone to edit, to enrich it with new content, to help in the
categorization of existing media, and to remove problematic materials.
Given the proven successes of the wiki model, it may soon become the
largest repository of free media on the web.
Additional information
For questions and interviews, please contact:
In English only:
Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: (+1)-727-644-3565
Email: jwales(a)wikimedia.org (mailto:jwales@wikimedia.org)
Angela Beesley, Executive Secretary, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
Phone: (+44)-208-816-7308
Email: angela(a)wikimedia.org (mailto:angela@wikimedia.org)
In English or French:
Florence Devouard, Vice President, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation:
Email: anthere(a)wikimedia.org (mailto:anthere@wikimedia.org)
Prix Ars Electronica
The Prix Ars Electronica is a yearly prize in the field of electronic
and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It
has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), one of
the world's major centers for art and technology.
The 2005 honorary mentions can be viewed at:
http://www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2005.asp
David Gerard (fun at thingy.apana.org.au) wrote:
>What counts as publication for this purpose? OS or HMSO themselves
>publishing them? OS licensing them to someone else who published them?
>Something else?
The Ordnance Survey have delegated authority from HMSO to deal with
Crown copyright since they are a trading fund. However, for the
purposes of Crown copyright, any authorised publication would count.
The Ordnance Survey tend to publish things themselves, but if they
licence someone else (like the AA for example) to publish a map based
on their data, then it also counts as a publication. However, bear in
mind that any non-Ordnance Survey publication will likely have a
separate copyright for the publisher of the map as well.
So, any OS maps that you can buy in the maps that date from 1954 or
earlier are public domain. However, copyright is not the only
intellectual property to worry about here. There are trademarks to
worry about. Here is a link to a PDF file on the OS website which
lists their trademarks. I strongly suspect that their symbols on maps
may well be trademarked as well, even if they are not registered
trademarks.
So, if you can find old published OS maps from 1954 or earlier, and
you're careful about trademark information, then I think you would be
in the clear.
David Gerard (fun at thingy.apana.org.au) wrote:
>Are Ordnance Survey maps from 1854 or before Crown Copyright? Because if
>they are now public domain, Open Streetmap (http://openstreetmap.org/)
>would probably love to know.
There are two possible answers to that question.
1) If the maps are published then they have been public domain since
1912 when the Copyright Act 1911 came in, and possibly since 1904 when
50 years since publication expired (although Crown copyright did not
exist in its present form back then).
2) If the maps are unpublished then they are still in copyright and
will remain so until the start of 2040 when the transitional
provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 come to an
end.
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I have just updated the validation feature in CVS (soon on the leuksman
site, I hope...)
The main news is that you can now see the ratings and comments for a
specific version of an article. These are shown as a table (topics in
columns, users in rows).
I have treated the "user anonymity problem" by showing the user IDs
rather than their names. So, in its current state, it *is* possible to
find the user who did the rating, but it requires actual work :-)
Would a page of all ratings from a specific *user* be of general
interest? I think someone suggested it, but...
In other news, it now tells you when it has stored your ratings, similar
to saving your user options.
Magnus
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http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_possible_problems
Lots of people hear about the feature and immediately ask, "what if someone
does xxx bad thing?" 1.5 is just to gather data, so we probably want as
wide an input range as possible, without trying to second-guess problems we
can't measure. But this list will help tell us what to look out for later.
- d.
Hello everybody,
the German IT news service "Heise" (www.heise.de) has a short article
on an interview with a German Professor of linguistics talking about
the advantages of Wikipedia.
The German text can be found under:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59754
I try a short translation here (sorry for the bad English - but I
hope its better than babelfish :-) :
"Following Wolf-Andreas Liebert, linguist at Koblenz, Germany, free
internet encyclopedias like Wikipedia can complement the reporting on
scientific subjects in the media. "Scientific journalism has to
follow commercial restrictions. Wikipedia is still free of that", the
professor said in an interview with the german press agency Deutsche
Presse-Agentur (dpa). [unfortunately no link to the interview itself
- Bernd] Wikipedia could cover subjects that in normal journalism
cannot be sold or said anymore.
"In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the
discussional [?] character of science more strongly." Liebert
declares. Science does not appear to be a uniform system producing
truth, as it often appears in science journalism." In Wikipedia there
are experts and normal people working on texts, that can be up-to-
date and cover different positions. From this point of view it can be
said that Wikipedia can fill up a special gap.
The big disadbantage would be that there is no coherent system of
quality management. "We find articles of a very high level of quality
besides bad articles." The reader has to decide, which articles he
finds trustworthy and good. "In Wikipedia there are different
strategies to deal with the problem", the professor said. He assumes
that the operators of the database would have to take parts out of
the self-organizing process and work with professional authors."
From my point of view, the last passage shows that the professor did
not fully understand what is one of the most important strengths of
Wikipedia. It's the old discussion:
Who guaranties the higher quality of an article by a person named
"dr." or "prof." in other encyclodias? Why should these persons be
more trustable? In fact, the problem of the "inner circle filtering
information" always comes up in these systems.
And: If someone finds articles that do not fullfill scientific
standards - why not correct them immediately? Still people (like
prof. Liebert) think of Wikipedia as any other top-down information
system: "You have to give me information; it has to be correct - and
that is YOUR responsibility!" - "No, it's yours too!" I would like to
answer.
Anyway - I wanted to bring this to your attention because it shows
that Wikipedia is not only subject to scientific analyses already,
but also that - even in the eyes of scientists - it reaches the
levels of "real" scientific encyclopedias and ist not considered only
a "hobby alternative" to "popular" encyclopedias like ... the ones we
know :-)
In fact, I believe, that Wikipedia can soon (2-5 years?) reach higher
quality in the scientific in-depth treatment of subjects than any
other encyclopedia - no one could hinter to publish articles of the
quality of specialised encyclopedias in Wikipedia that may be
interesting only for a small community of scientists dealing with any
subject they like ... And that opens up the way to get more and more
"experts" interested and convince them (hopefully) to co-operate in
Wikipedia: Especially the young students from today will be able to
see and rank the advantages of Wikipedia higher than the traditional
system of "earning fame" in scientific publications. In fact, if
someone does science because s/he is _interested_ in something and
not because of the fame - s/he should see Wikipedia as _the_ tool of
choice to contribute.
greetings
Bernd
