In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

Erik Möller
Deputy Director

Happy Birthday to the GNU project, which turned 25 today and is celebrating with a video of English humorist Stephen Fry. In September 1983, Richard Stallman first announced the plan to develop a free software operating system called GNU. Today, in combination with the Linux kernel, GNU/Linux is a completely free operating system running on many millions of computers world-wide. You are using GNU/Linux every day when surfing the web, as it’s one of the most popular operating systems to power web servers, database servers, and the other infrastructure that makes the web work.

As a desktop operating system, GNU/Linux is also making inroads. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we use free software developed by the GNU projects and other communities for servers and clients. For example, we use the Apache web server, the MySQL database server, the Squid proxy server, the PHP scripting language, and the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution on our servers. But even our phone systems are built on top of free software, and we use important open standards like Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis on Wikipedia. For day-to-day office work, we use the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, OpenOffice.org for word processing and presentations, and so on. An increasing number of staff members are also using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as a desktop operating system (including Sue Gardner, the Executive Director).

And, of course, Wikipedia itself is given away under legal code developed by the GNU project: the GNU Free Documentation License. So, we owe an enormous debt to the GNU project and to the Free Software Foundation, as pioneers and leaders of a movement for sharing code freely, so that it cannot be used to coerce and restrict users, and so that it can be improved upon by others. That idea is one of the key inspirations for Wikipedia itself.

Happy birthday, GNU!

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

As many of you may know, Wikimedia is working with Kaltura, Inc. to explore collaborative video editing in the Wikimedia projects. I’m very happy to announce that Kaltura has decided to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki. To this end, Kaltura is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in early August.

Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia’s video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon.

Michael Dale is currently a Research Associate at the University of California Santa Cruz and the lead developer for the MetaVid project. MetaVid is a community archive project for public domain US legislative footage. The MetaVidWiki software (which runs the archive) is a free software extension to MediaWiki that enables community engagement with audio/visual media assets and associative temporal metadata. Michael has been involved free & open media adoption on the web in collaboration with the xiph.org and annodex organizations.

Please join me in welcoming Michael!

РErik M̦ller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimania is an annual conference put together by a team of local volunteers for Wikimedians around the globe.  The original conference, hosted in Frankfurt in August 2005, was put together as an opportunity for members of the growing communities to meet and talk with each other and those involved in wiki software development.

This year’s Wikimania is being held in Alexandria, Egypt, in the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The venue chosen was built both as a tribute to the Library of Alexandria of antiquity and as a center of knowledge and learning, which nicely compliments the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.   The event, featuring a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops from wide ranging topics of interest to Wikimedians, educators, the free-culture community at large, tech geeks, and the public at large, runs from Thursday, July 17 and continues to Saturday, July 19, 2008.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

Wikimedia Commons is the multimedia repository used by all Wikimedia Foundation projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and so on). With more than 2.8 million freely licensed photographs, sounds, and videos it is a treasure trove of rich media. The global Wikimedia community goes to great lengths to find high quality multimedia content and to release it freely: Wikimedians organize trips to foreign countries to take photos, they attend events to shoot celebrities, they spend hours restoring historical pictures. A new project, the “Valued Images” selection, seeks to identify the most valuable image contributions to the project. In doing so, it recognizes that taking a reasonable photo of an elusive celebrity can be just as much work as producing a fantastic panorama.

When browsing Wikipedia, we may often take for granted that so many articles include photographs and high quality illustrations. But just like the text, much of the multimedia in our projects is the result of the passionate dedication of our contributors. Identifying the most valued images in Wikimedia Commons is a good way to honor these contributions.

Erik Möller, Deputy Director

Greetings from Palo Alto, California!

Some folks from Wikimedia have joined the ranks of numerous wiki enthusiasts at this year’s Recent Changes Camp.  Big questions and conversations circulate…

Among dozens of great discussions and presentations, Ed Chi of PARC talked about some of their recent research on the users of Wikipedia, how they edit, and what that looks like - including the WikiDashboard.

Lots of photos on the Wikimedia Commons.

The camp continues tomorrow!  Still time to drop by. Thanks to Socialtext, Wikihow, Aboutus, WIkia, SolSeed.net, and Atlassian - and to all the volunteers who are making it happen.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

Many, many people know that the software the powers Wikipedia is called MediaWiki, and it is in fact an open-source software that anyone can use. What is not known however, is that the Wikimedia Foundation is now also using open-source software for our telephone system. This last weekend, we rolled out our Asterisk 1.4 installation. Asterisk is an open-source software managed by Digium. By utilizing open-source software to power our telephone system, the Foundation is taking another step in the direction of free and open software use.

Rob Halsell, IT Manager & Systems Administrator

An international team of volunteers has translated the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia into more than 100 languages. This is a critical precondition to enable participation in Wikimedia projects from all parts of the world. Today, the work of translating the wiki software is done through a wiki: BetaWiki , which is not operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free Culture Spotlight, a new blog feature that will focus on free culture and open source efforts external to the Wikimedia projects, takes a look at this extraordinary effort and the people behind it.

Wikipedias exist in more than 250 languages. From the very early beginnings of Wikipedia, the project was conceived to be multilingual. In March 2001, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the first non-English Wikipedias. In his announcement, Jimmy wrote:

One problem is going to be technical support of these languages, since if there
are “fancy letter” problems, I will not know much how to deal with them. Japanese
is pretty much all “fancy letters”, but I assume that Linux/Apache/Perl will just
magically support it? Or will they be forced to use non-fancy ASCII urls?

Indeed, supporting content in other languages well is a very hard problem. Fortunately, increased standardization and awareness of internationalization problems has made it a little easier to at least deliver content to the end user. Try loading the Hebrew, Russian, Japanese or Hindi Wikipedia: On most modern systems, you should see the correct character sets. Note that it’s not just the content of the encyclopedia that is in a different language: The entire user interface is localized, and in right-to-left languages like Hebrew, even the navigation is optimized.
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I received an email recently inviting me to RecentChangesCamp 2008, which is, from what I have seen a gathering of people into all things wiki.  After one of my wiki-sprites (thanks Alex) did some research, I was able to find information on a previous RCC at RecentChangesCamp 2007 — Portland, Oregon.

Its description is as follows:

It’s scheduled to take place in Palo Alto, California, on May 9-11, 2008. More information can be gathered from their site,
http://rcc2008.blueoxen.net/.

RecentChangesCamp is open to the public. Everyone can attend.

If you’d like us to post your wiki or free culture related event, by all means, send us an email or leave a comment on this post!

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator