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Wikimania 2014

Posted on August 11th, 2014 16 comments - (Comments closed)

By Andreas Kolbe

With contributions from Jake S, Nathalie Collida and Triptych

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The Wikimedia movement’s 10th Wikimania conference at the London Barbican (6–10 August 2014) concluded on Sunday. Two years ago, when discussing the London bid for the event, Jimmy Wales had confidently stated,

I spend a lot of time in London, and believe I can help significantly with ensuring a well-funded conference at a great venue, with VIP speakers (academics, politicians, media, entertainment). I have extensive and good relationships with the UK press and believe I can help land great press coverage for the conference. I’m a big fan of this bid.–Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:36, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately for Jimbo, those extensive and good relationships weren’t quite enough to overcome the healthy skepticism of the UK press towards his almost blatant contempt for the EU’s recent “Right to be Forgotten” ruling. This culminated in a frankly embarrassing Newsnight interview with James O’Brien, in which Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling, at a time when the economies of half the EU’s member-states are already close to the brink, and with energy prices set to rise precipitously during the coming winter.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the Wikimedia Foundation actually upped the ante by publishing a list of take-down notices received from Google, thus eliminating any chance victims

…continue reading Wikimania 2014

Wikimedia needs your nipples

Posted on October 14th, 2013 9 comments - (Comments closed)

by Moxie

Background

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A couple of years ago a bored teenager took a couple of photos of himself and posted them to Wikimedia Commons. The first photo was of his bare legs, the second photo was of his nipple. Then for some reason, probably because he’d grown up a bit, he wished that those images weren’t on online any more. At the beginning of January 2012 he made a formal request asking Wikipedia commons remove the photos for him. Simply enough, you may think, but this is Wikimedia Commons, and things are never simple there.

Deletion Requests

Within a twinkling of an eye it was declared that photos of teen boy nipples are highly educational – request denied. But not before another user “VolodyA! V Anarhist”, who in 2000 was convicted of child pornography offences, had told him that:

Without any other information apart from “please delete” i hope that admins will have common sense to close the request and keep the image.

The kid tried to make the same request twice more, until some nasty mean old administrator James L. Woodward came by to threaten him:

You have nominated File:Teen_boy’s_Nipple.jpg for deletion three times without a reason acceptable to Commons. If you nominate it again, or take any similar action, you will be blocked from editing on Commons.

James L. Woodward has “more than 30 years of high technology management experience. Jim has raised over $15 million in venture capital and has been CFO of several public companies. He has been the founding CFO of a variety of successful companies” but apparently is unable to pass up an opportunity to post a threat.

Meanwhile the requests to have the photo deleted were denied, denied, and denied, “VolodyA! V Anarhist”

…continue reading Wikimedia needs your nipples

The tragedy of Wikipedia’s commons

Posted on June 19th, 2013 8 comments - (Comments closed)

By Gigs

This article appeared originally in the Wikipedia Signpost, June 12, 2013.

I’ve long thought that we should get rid of the Commons as we know it. Commons has evolved, through the actions of a tiny group of people, into a project with interests that compete with the needs of the various encyclopedias that are the primary users of Commons, and the reason it was created. It’s also understaffed, which results in poor curation, large administrative backlogs, and poor policy development.

First, some background information. Commons was primarily created so we could share media between various wikis, with a secondary goal of being a free media repository. When Erik Möller proposed the idea of Commons, he also proposed an inclusion criteria, “Material would be eligible for inclusion in the Commons if it is useful to at least ONE Wikimedia project [including potential future use].”

At no point during initial discussions was it proposed that the inclusion criteria basically be the mere fact that an image was free. There was an implicit assumption throughout that the files would be free, and also encyclopedic in some way.

From inception until 2008, the main inclusion criteria at commons was the media be “useful or potentially useful” to a Wikimedia project, reflecting Möller’s initial proposal comments. In 2008, a replacement policy was proposed and implemented by User:MichaelMaggs, with half a page of feedback from about six other editors. These six editors (some seemingly unwittingly) redefined the scope of Commons from a repository of files useful to Wikimedia project, to files “useful for an educational purpose”.

This unchallenged action by a tiny group of people changed the scope of the project such that any media file with a free license can be included, since it is extremely easy to argue that any media is

…continue reading The tragedy of Wikipedia’s commons