Fundraising Structure

Posted on September 14, 2009 by wittylama

Questions:

Should Wikimedia Chapters fundraise?
How should the money raised be distributed between and amongst the Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters?

Assuming that running this thing we call the Wikimedia Movement costs money, lots of money, the question follows – where does that money come from? The Wikimedia Foundation has three main streams of income (in increasing order of importance):

  1. business development;
  2. major gifts/grants;
  3. community giving a.k.a donations

Furthermore, community giving can be broken down into a) money donated to the Foundation directly and b) money donated to one of the Wikimedia Chapters around the world. This money does not stay only with the organisation that it was donated to but can (and should) be redistributed back and forth. How to do that equitably and for the greatest benefit to the mission is the key.

Should Wikimedia Chapters fundraise?
In my opinion it is part of the core business of Wikimedia Chapters to engage in fundraising. They exist to help grow and develop the Wikimedia movement in their country and collecting money is a key part of that. This does not mean every chapter will be able to raise funds, as it may be especially difficult when a chapter is very new or in a developing nation, but that if it is possible then it should be a priority. There should be other ways to identify with the movement (as Brianna is attempting to map out) and these other forms of “Wikimedia Interest Groups” need not be legal entities or engage in fundraising. That’s not what they’re for and that’s fair enough. But this only increases the importance of the administrative function of Chapters. Fundraising should be central to what Chapters are. Currently the overwhelming majority of money is donated by Americans to the Foundation directly. I would hope that one day donations from other nations constitute a more representative proportionate of the total (and that the total increases). Achieving this requires Chapter engagement in fundraising. I also hope that there will one day be a USA Chapter (with WM-NYC et al as branch organisations) to take care of the fundraising in America that is currently run by the Foundation directly.

How should the money raised be distributed between and amongst the Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters?

Section 1 – The donation website:

There are at least three ways of setting up the donation website to differentiate between Chapter and Foundation:

  • Language edition;
  • Location;
  • Globally.

Last year it was differentiated by language. For example, the French donation page gave the option to donate to Wikimedia France or Wikimedia Switzerland or the Foundation directly. It looked like this:

donate

This system meant that only if you were looking at the French edition would you be be able to see the French chapter. To my mind this approach is limiting as it assumes language and nation are tied and has the curious effect that some Chapters appear on multiple language links (the Swiss chapter appears four times) but only a very few Chapters would ever be linked from the English edition.

Another proposed option is to provide links to Chapters based on the location of the reader. This requires using the IP address of readers to give a rough estimate of their location and then displaying the donation of the nearest Chapter. Whilst this might seem more nuanced than the language approach it does imply that you would only donate to the Chapter to which you are physically closest. Wikimedia Israel points out that most of the donations to the Israeli Red Cross/Crescent/Crystal actually come from America, not Israel. Equally, most Chapters with large expatriate communities would expect a large proportion of donations from overseas. The Indian Chapter is another example. For this reason I don’t think the location-based system is equitable either.

The third main option is to simply show everyone! And I suggest this is best. In short, have an interactive version of the map that appears at the Wikimedia Foundation page listing all chapters. Perhaps add an alphabetical list of Chapters and some zoom functionality for Europe where there are a lot of chapters in a smaller area:

Section 2 – the money flow:

[caveat: this is just my thinking and a first draft proposal. If you don’t like parts of it, that’s fine, it’s not like this is set in stone. But please don’t bite my head off.]

So, how do we make the most utility out of the money that is given to the Wikimedia Movement and how do we make those donors as happy as possible? I suggest that the answer is a multi-stage process and each Chapter will need to find the stage that is most suited to its level of organisational maturity. The underlying principles of my proposal are:

  • Different Chapters have different levels of capacity and therefore they should be treated as such. Different rights and responsibilities should be accorded to Chapters as they grow;
  • The amount of money that is currently raised is barely scratching the surface of what can be achieved and should be achieved if we ever hope to fulfill our mission;
  • The Wikimedia movement will remain in flux for a long time to come and so there can be no set/fixed/universally-applied solution. Power relationships will change and so too will the makeup of the movement.
  • Irrespective of the stage that a Chapter is at, it should still appear at the donation website and on the map. The reason for this is that donors should not have to wade through all of the minutiae of Chapter/Foundation relations – they just want to donate. So, we should make a nice neat and consistent website and the Wikimedia community can work out all the fiddly bits behind the scenes (with appropriate disclosure and documentation if donors really want to know, of course).
  • These ‘stages’ only really apply to the central donation website as Chapters are still able to undertake their own independent fundraising on other websites (or shake a bucket at people in the street!) if they want to.

The three models I propose below would not be employed universally – each Chapter would need to choose the model that most suits it independently of what the others are doing. The diagrams below represent what would happen if every Chapter was the same. In practice, all three models would be in place simultaneously.

Stage 1: Centralised
[Appropriate for newly formed Chapters, Chapters in very small or developing nations]

The first step, the one that places the least onus on the Chapter, is for the donation system to be centralised into the Wikimedia Foundation and all donors’ money given via the main donation website would be given directly to the Foundation. Then, once the money is raised, distributed back to the Chapter via the grants system to undertake projects/events/local outreach/capacity building. This system would mean that a Chapter would not have to invest its limited time/resources in undertaking a fundraiser (and managing the bureaucracy that comes with that), donors would be assured of being treated professionally and the Chapter could then focus more of its time on being a “free culture service provider”.
fundraising-structure001
Stage 2: Hybrid
[Appropriate for middle-sized/established Chapters with a local presence and some capacity]

This is the stage that effectively mirrors what happened last year for all chapters – the proverbial “50/50 money”. Donors can now give money to the Chapter directly but a proportion of that money must be handed up to the Foundation. Equally, the Foundation grants program is still in place if the Chapter wishes to apply for it. Alongside the added power that comes with being able to take money directly from donors via the main donation website must also come added responsibilities – more stringent financial reporting and donor relationship being the key ones. Of course, it is up for debate what proportion of money is handed up to the Foundation and/or the process for agreeing to spend that money on a Chapter sponsored project.

fundraising-structure002
Stage 3: Distributed
[Appropriate for large, professionalised chapters]

In this final stage, the one that I would hope all chapters – at least in developed nations – should aspire to (especially the mythical USA chapter) is that all donations go directly to the chapter via the main donation website (the inverse of stage 1). Chapters are thereby the primary source of money into the Wikimedia movement and would therefore have commensurately high responsibilities to look after that money. Also, as the core funding would be coming in via the Chapters rather than directly to the Foundation, this would require that a larger proportion of that funding be handed up to the Foundation to maintain and grow its fundamental services. (This will not be a problem until the USA national Chapter starts to compete with the Foundation for donors). The Chapters grant process may be less prominent in this stage as by then the Chapters should be quite self-sustaining. On the other hand, the grants program might become larger as bigger projects are undertaken.

fundraising-structure0031

Posted in chapters, wikimedia foundation | 10 Comments

WIkipedia Journal

Posted on September 12, 2009 by wittylama

Questions:
How to encourage academics to contribute to Wikipedia?
How to increase the amount of good quality articles in Wikipedia?

Issues:
In order to demonstrate the work they have undertaken (to funding organisations, to their university, for promotion, for their professional reputation) academics require:
a) to be named as authors of their work,
b) that their work be their own rather than a mass collaboration,
c) that their work be in an academically reputable publication.

[Note! All of these issues were raised at GLAM-WIKI (i.e. I’m not just making them up) and all of them can be solved and still remain compliant with the requirements of a free-culture license (e.g. CC-by-SA). Also, I must mention that the original concept for this proposal grew out of working on The Sydney Journal, a side-project of the Dictionary of Sydney.]

Problem:
Wikipedia currently has no way of addressing any of these issues due to the very nature of it being an “anyone can edit” wiki. This alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty justifying it as legitimate work. Quite simply, academics in many countries/institutions must earn “points” each year to prove they’ve been working and thereby justify to government why their institution should continue to receive funding. The points system is an an effort to provide a fair comparison between qualitatively different fields of academic inquiry but in practice can turn academia into a numbers game. Some things that earn points are publishing a book, teaching courses and writing scholarly journal articles. One thing that certainly doesn’t earn points is helping to maintain the quality of the content on Wikipedia in the academic’s area of expertise – this is despite the fact that that is precisely where 90% of their students will turn to first to get some background information.

A Solution:

“The Wikipedia Journal”

Proposal:
The creation of peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal. Academics would be encouraged to write encyclopedic articles on their area of expertise in accordance with our editorial principles (including Neutral POV, Verifiability and No Original Research) and the Wikipedia manual of style. Their article would be submitted to blind peer-review, as per the best-practices of any academically-rigorous journal, by both relevant academics and also a Wikipedian who had been a major contributor to a Featured Article on a similar topic. The final articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal” ready and available to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic.

[Note: this proposal is not the same as “WikiJournal” on Meta (the purpose of which is to encourage Original Research scholarship) or “Wiki Journal” on WikiVersity/Wikia (the purpose of which is to publish articles about Wiki-related scholarship).]

The subjects particularly sought would be intentionally diverse and come in two main forms:
1) in part from Wikipedians’ demand for expert input on a topic (e.g. articles high on the importance scale but currently low on the quality scale) and,
2) in part from academics’ interest in participating (e.g. to be able to legitimately integrate their previously-published research into Wikipedia).
If there were enough content to warrant it the Journal could have themed editions (e.g. January edition = Psychology, March edition = Astronomy) or each edition could be broken up into sections based roughly along the academic faculty structure (Commerce, Law, Medicine, Humanities, Engineering…).

The Journal itself would, of course, be Gold Access, under the CC-by-SA license and be registered with an ISSN.  Furthermore, it is probable that the Journal would gain academic prestige (or at least notoriety!) due to three factors:
a) the number of reputable scholars who have indicated their support for Wikipedia (and might conceivably be willing to write for the Journal) giving it credibility by association;
b) the likely very high citation impact of the Journal (a corollary of the popularity of Wikipedia itself) and our ability to give precise statistics on hits, clickthroughs and utility (via the currently-being-tested “reader feedback” extension);
c) the virtually unlimited scope of Wikipedia would mean that any academic in any discipline could potentially write an article for the Journal.

Articles, once published, could then be merged into the existing Wikipedia article (or a new article created if one did not exist before) and appropriate attribution placed in the external links section of the Wikipedia article to the Author and journal edition. Also, it might be nice to have a talkpage template indicating that an academic had made substantial contributions to the article. *Hopefully* the newly refurbished Wikipedia article could then be taken to Featured Article candidacy relatively quickly. But, the Journal articles would not get any special rights to overwrite the existing article. It would be up to the Wikipedians who look after the relevant article to decide whether to incorporate the text. The academic would be encouraged to use make use of the information and references in the existing article (and read the talkpage debates) so as not to lose the good work that has already gone before.

Other benefits “The Wikipedia Journal” would provide:
– a different media format for people to be able to access the free-culture content of the Wikimedia movement;
– increased credibility to the Wikimedia movement;
– an increased awareness in academia about free-culture generally and about Wikipedia’s editorial standards/requirements specifically;
– an entry-point for recruiting academics to improve Wikipedia. After all, authors would have an incentive to monitor the progress of their article once it was merged into Wikipedia and might continue editing more broadly;
– a product scalable to multiple languages/areas of expertise/countries at minimal cost to Wikimedia funds.

Set Up:
In order to be given up-front academic legitimacy the Journal would need to be sponsored by an academic research funding body (e.g. the Australian Research Council) and perhaps also a reputable research-based University. The research funding would be used to employ an editor (see below) and the university required in order to provide a workspace and employment administration (insurance, superannuation, etc. – assuming a Chapter or the Foundation couldn’t/wouldn’t/doesn’t supply these things). The Journal could be set up as a project of a Wikimedia Chapter, of the Wikimedia Foundation or independently of any existing structure – after all, anyone can write Wikipedia articles! It would nevertheless, require trademark approval from the Wikimedia Foundation. The academic legitimacy is much more important here than the funds themselves but the funds would be useful if for no other reason than it avoids having to use money donated by individuals to the Wikimedia movement to pay for it.

It is possible that the research funding organisation would require that the journal be of specific benefit to the research community of that nation, in which case it would be a matter of publishing subjects that were demonstrably of national relevance and/or only accepting authors of that nation’s universities. For example, if the Australian Research Council funded/sponsored the Journal then it may require that the articles be in some way related to the Wikipedia [[category:Australia]] (or one of its many many sub-categories) and or be written by an academic employed at one of the Universities in Australia. If this restriction was placed upon the Journal then would simply give greater impetus for many of the Wikimedia Chapters to organise for funding in their own countries resulting in a whole series of Journals!

The Journal could be administered using the Open Journal System (which is, of course, F/LOSS) and published on an instance of Media-Wiki (perhaps at journal.wikimedia.org or at a sub-domain of the sponsoring Wikimedia Chapter or of the sponsoring university). Articles, editions and volumes could be downloaded in PDF/ODF etc. Articles would have a named author and author biography and they would have flagged revisions enabled in such a way that people would always see a version approved by the author (of course, the article would be available for editing at the equivalent Wikipedia article to which it would be linked). The official editions would be archived in journal databases such as google.scholar, and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Role of the Editor:
I suspect that this project would require one person whose responsibilities would be to:
– work with potential authors and find peer-reviewers;
– manage the editorial workflow;
– copyedit and wikify the text;
– manage copyright permissions;
– publish and distribute the editions through various forms (blog, email, notification at relevant wiki-projects/academic newsletters);
– ‘hand-hold’ academics/reviewers to explain Wikipedia’s editorial style, especially WP:NOR (although referencing their own previously published original research would be encouraged);
– encourage the conversion of Journal articles to Wikipedia articles and (hopefully) have them listed for Featured Article status;
– report to the Wikimedian and academic communities about the project’s progress at conferences, media etc.
– answer the phone… Having a contactable person you can talk to might be a more comfortable way for some to approach wikipedia rather than through OTRS, mailing lists or talkpages.

Future Potential/Alternative Models:
If demand/funding warranted it the journal could be a series of separate journals for specific topics (e.g. Molecular Biology, Paleontology, Constitutional Law…) and/or in different languages. The former could be achieved through partnership with specific research institutes that would be willing to provide the academic credibility/sponsorship to the publication whilst the latter could be achieved through the support of the Wikimedia Chapters and various nations’ research funding organisations. Indeed, it is quite possible that a whole network of peer-reviewed Wikipedia Journals might be established to cater for different languages and different areas of expertise all categorised at journal.wikimedia.org. It could even become a project that each Wikimedia Chapter sponsors in its own country/language.

[Edit 1: Since publishing, I’ve been made aware of the fact that by and large you can have a “commissioned journal” or a “peer reviewed journal” but not both at the same time. This is on the basis that if someone’s been commissioned to write then they can’t be rejected later on by a reviewer. Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw in my proposal or perhaps this is something that doesn’t apply in this case because the subject matter is encyclopedic articles rather than Original Research. I’ve since decided to remove the word “commissioned” from the proposal completely. Of course, in practice you can always encourage people to write, it just means they won’t necessarily pass the peer-review.]

[Edit 2: After talking with a lot of people it looks like the idea is coming clearer. The Journal would be peer-reviewed not commissioned. The Journal would be broad ranging in subject areas. However, the Journal would be restricted in scope to one country in order to make it managable – therefore it would be called “the [insert country name] Wikipedia Journal”. It would not necessarily need research funding, merely the funding and academic legitimacy provided by a university. It would need a strong and well respected editorial board – this will be the trickiest thing to put in place.]

Posted in academia | 24 Comments

silly little vision things

Posted on September 8, 2009 by wittylama

Whilst I try to pull my thoughts together post-wikimania here are a couple of silly little things I picked up.

1) I was trying to work out what the minimum standard is of what everyone in the Wikimedia world agrees on. That is, we keep arguing over so many things that you’d think we would have split apart long ago, so what is it that keeps us all together.

In summary the answer appears to be:

“Wikimedia: Free(free) stuff ‘n’ stuff. “

…perhaps that should be our updated vision statement? Which brings me to,

2) Our current vision statement says:

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

Grammatically, does that make sense? Breaking it down to just the verbs and you get:

” imagine a world…that’s our commitment. “

So does that mean I’m committing to imagining something? Phew! I was worried that I might actually have to do something 🙂

Posted in wikimedia foundation | 1 Comment

GLAM-WIKI recommendations

Posted on August 21, 2009 by wittylama

This blog post is actually my thoughts I’m pulling together for my presentation to be given on the third day at Wikimania in Buenos Aires next week which will be entitled: “Wikimedia and museums – why we need each other what we can do about it“.

The key thing to come from the recent “GLAM-WIKI: Finding the common ground” event in Canberra was the list of recommendations from both the cultural sector (the galleries, libraries, archives and museums – GLAM) and the Wikimedia community to each other and to government – and were divided into the four themes of the conference: law, tech, education and business.

These are available to be read online (or PDF) here at MetaWiki.

[me giving the welcome speech, with WikipediaVision playing onscreen]

The purpose of these recommendations was to allow both communities to give ideas to each other about what would make GLAM-Wiki collaboration easier and more productive.

Here are a couple of interesting things that were pointed out which aren’t recommendation (and therefore don’t appear on the list) but are interesting nevertheless:

1) In the last few years in Australia there has been a 720% increase in licensing fees paid by the education department (i.e. government funded) to the museum sector (i.e. government funded) because of the increased amount of digital educational material being used in classrooms. This is based on a crazy interpretation of the copyright law that says that schools have to pay fees to use the website of taxpayer funded organisations – the same websites that you or I would view for free anywhere in the world (e.g. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC) and the Copyright Agency Limited (the collection agency) takes a nice cut off the top of this in administration fees.
2) What’s the point of the government investing a ton of cash in a fast “National Broadband Network” (NBN) if there’s no local content to put on it. It’s rather like buying Cable TV if all you get is 57 more channels showing repeats of American sit-coms from the 80’s…
3) If Wikimedia and the cultural sector don’t make public content *public* then any private organisation that creates an information monopoly <cough>google</cough> would have every incentive to lock it up and allow access only to the chosen few – those who can pay for it.

And so, here are some of the points raised in the recommendations list that I’d like to go into greater depth with. I’ll focus on recommendations “to Wikimedia”, rather than the ones that we Wikimedians made “to GLAM” (a.k.a. the cultural sector).

1)

“Education section: Highlight the importance of real-world interaction with cultural heritage, not just online.”

This idea, or variations on it, was raised regularly – the fact that nothing beats the real thing. This seems to stem from a fear/perception that the Wikimedia community and project, because they are web-based, undermine or do not value the importance of “the original object”. It’s one thing to see an image online or in a book, but it’s quite another to actually see something in real life. Reproductions are just that, reproductions. Furthermore, anyone who has watched an archaeology documentary will know that a huge proportion of the information about an object will be learnt from its specific location and that learning about culture in-situ is of fundamental importance. This is the principal concern of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) whose job it is to highlight the importance of “place” in the GLAM sector. Archivists and librarians are equally concerned that, with all this focus on digitising, that we forget that books and documents are *real things* not just texts.

Now, I doubt anyone in the Wikimedia community is actively against real-world interaction with cultural heritage, but let’s face it, we don’t exactly promote it either… For example, when the Featured Article about Théodore Géricault’s magnificent painting “The Raft of the Medusa” went onto the front page of the English Wikipedia on April 10 this year, neither the article nor the metatadata in Wikimedia Commons included a link back to the catalogue record of the painting in the Musée du Louvre, Paris – where the painting is hung.

The best argument I could muster at the time in defence of Wikimedia projects’ promoting “place” was to point to our geo-coding efforts – which are indeed fantastic. This will be doubly so when we have the Open Street Map integration and I hold great hopes for some cool augmented reality applications on smartphones to increase the link between Wikipedia and “place”. E.g. Wikitude:

Nevertheless I think it bears keeping in mind how much our emhasis on web-based interaction with cultural heritage is not the norm for most people (especially those in countries with less technological infrastructure) even if we can’t do much about it right away.

2)

“Law section: If content which was once published under a Creative Commons license is revoked by the publisher, delete it on Wikimedia too.” and “Tech section: Investigate hotlinking content from GLAM institution websites directly into Wikimedia projects to avoid duplicating effort/databases.”

This was an interesting pair that I knew would be controversial when I wrote them down… Hey, I’m just the messenger. But, even if the suggestions themselves are not feasible/acceptable, what is the reason for these suggestions and can we find a way to alleviate any concerns through another mechanism?

In my opinion, this request for revocability comes straight from the “I’m interested in learning how to skydive, but I want a spare parachute to be safe” department. Moving to a free-culture license is scary and people who represent major, publicly funded, organisations obviously don’t want to make judgment calls which they cannot undo later on. I mean, this is one of Creative Commons FAQ’s so, please, don’t think badly of institutions for suggesting it.

[Twisted  lines, as seen at [[Malfunction (parachuting)]]. Something no one wants to see – especially without a backup plan.]

It was pointed out to me, quite insightfully I thought, that the very fact that the first of these recommendations could even be suggested (for revocability) is the reason why the second would never happen. That is, if institutions are thinking about publishing under a CC-By or CC-By-SA license but with a mind to revoking that license later on, then Wikimedia projects need to keep a copy of that content, rather than hotlinking it, so that free-culture remains free forever (and not just so long as the institution that owns the object can’t think of a way to make oodles of money out of it). This is a perfectly reasonable point from the Wikimedia perspective.

But the hotlinking issue was raised at a completely different part of discussions. Not because institutions were thinking about revoking access to content but because they were thinking about duplication of effort. The cultural institutions have just spent the last decade putting together digital catalogues of their content which has necessitated huge amounts of labour in transcribing card catalogues and sometimes building bespoke systems to keep all of their information and data in nice neat order. Considering that maintaining the integrity of the information they look after is of critical importance to these institutions – Wikimedians coming along, right-click-n-save and manually transferring their metadata across (often incompletely) looks like a grand waste of effort. So, if hotlinking in Wikimedia projects is not an option for very good legal, cultural and technical reasons, then the Wikimedia community should look at other ways of reducing the duplication of effort. To me this suggests that we might want to develop bots that can periodically (and with permission) scan through the catalogue of an institution and neatly, efficiently and correctly import all of the appropriate data. Tricky to implement, but it would alleviate both communities’ concerns.

3)

“Education section: Create a best-practice for appropriate sharing/publication of indigenous knowledge”, “Law section: Take pro-active care of the moral rights of content creators as these are not waived even with free-licensing” and “Law section: Do not publish content regarding indigenous peoples’ culture without approval/consultation – indigenous cultural rights stand independent of copyright.”

As you can see, there is quite a set of recommendations that deal directly and indirectly with the idea of cultural rights – especially of Indigenous peoples and “Indigenous Intellectual Property rights”. This is an increasingly politically sensitive issue in Australia (and rightly so) as well as worldwide wherever there is an indigenous culture. See section 6 of the International Council of Museums’ code of ethics for example:

“Museum collections reflect the cultural and natural heritage of the communities from which they have been derived. As such they have a character beyond that of ordinary property which may include strong affinities with national, regional, local, ethnic, religious or political identity. It is important therefore that museum policy is responsive to this possibility.”

This is not just a matter of copyright, nor is it just a matter of “Wikipedia should have an article about everything”. No, Wikipedia shouldn’t. Wikipedia should have articles about things that are a) public and b) have verifiable sources. Much of indigenous culture (at least in Australia) is private and has a structured system of access based on gender well as things for elders-only or family-only or clan-only etc. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the interrelationship between indigenous culture and western copyright but I do know that a system such as I described is neither a) public nor b) produces verifiable sources – both of which Wikipedia needs in order to discuss anything.

This is good in that the question is not contentious, but it is clear by the number of recommendations that refer to indigenous issues and moral rights that the Wikimedia community needs to take some kind of proactive approach to being aware of cultural sensitivities around this topic. It is simply not good enough for us to say “we want to know everything about your culture and we’ll put it online where anyone can edit it.” Wikimedia needs a more nuanced approach when it comes to indigenous cultures and how we represent them. I have a feeling that the project with the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands – to do with the the Maroon people of Suriname – will also come across these issues and I look forward to hearing what they have learnt from it.

That’s it for Round 1 of GLAM-WIKI recommendation deconstruction. I hope to get around to doing some more soon but for the foreseeable future I’ll be doing lots of coverage of Wikimania in Buenos Aires. Keep your ears out for lots of content at the Wikipedia Weekly podcast!

Posted in museums | 4 Comments

Wikimedia Manifesto?

Posted on August 21, 2009 by wittylama

Here is the introductory article from the front page of the first edition of the first newspaper in the Australian colony – The Sydney Gazette March 5, 1803. As the indefatigable director of the National Library of Australia’s “Australian Newspapers” digitisation project (ANDP), Rose Holley, said in her presentation at GLAM-WIKI – this is a manifesto that the Wikimedia movement would feel strong ties to. I can imagine that if the publishers of that newspaper had been alive today, they might well have been Wikimedians – and vice versa.

http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/625438

[Innumerable as the Obstacles were which threatened to oppose our Undertaking, yet we are happy to affirm that they were not insurmountable, however difficult the task before us.
The utility of a PAPER in the COLONY, as it must open a source of solid information, will we hope, be universally felt and acknowledged, We have courted the assistance of the INGENIOUS and INTELLIGENT :— We open no channel to Political Discussion, or Personal Animadversion :— Information is our only purpose; that accomplished, we shall consider that we have done our duty, in an exertion to merit the Approbation of the PUBLIC, and to secure a liberal Patronage to the SYDNEY GAZETTE. ]

Replace “political discussion with [[WP:SOAP]] and “personal animadaversion” with [[WP:NPA]] and you’ve pretty much got the essence of what the Wikimedia movement is all about. We’re even starting to “secure liberal patronage” through donations like the one announced today from the Hewlett Foundation!

I’d like to also point out how absolutely amazingly cool the “Australian Newspapers” project is. You might notice that the link given to find that image above is specific not just to the newspaper, not just to the daily edition, not just to the page – but specific to the article! They have made a persistent and stable URL to every single article in every single newspaper edition they have. Furthermore, all the newspapers they have scanned are in the public domain and have a “save as PDF” “save as picture” and “print” function. That’s how I made the above image. Too easy.

Furthermore – notice that they encourage the public to correct the text. That’s right – a national cultural institution that’s not afraid of asking the public for their help – and they have the most stunning statistics about how much (and how well) the public is helping. They even have their own hall of fame for the most prolific text-correctors.

Finally, if you go to the “about” page for any of their scanned newspapers you’ll see that they’re live-linking the first few sentences from the respective Wikipedia entry. See the page for the Melbourne Argus here for example. This is a fantastic use of what Wikipedia does best – simple descriptions of specific things. It’s not the National Library’s job to write descriptive passages for every single newspaper in Australia’s history – it’s ours.

Here are all the specs, usage stats, workflows, ORC and Metadata info, system architecture, CMS, correction system structure… http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/project_detail and here’s their title availability info with a link to the tantilising “titles coming soon” list.

Posted in History, museums | 3 Comments