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755:"The Wikimedia Foundation sympathizes with cultural institutionsâ desire for revenue streams to help them maintain services for their audiences. And yet, if that revenue stream requires an institution to lock up and severely limit access to its educational materials, rather than allowing the materials to be freely available to everyone, that strikes us as counter to those institutionsâ educational mission. It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopedia serves any public interest whatsoever."
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186:, the General Counsel is responsible for "maintaining and developing the legal and contractual infrastructure required of a US-based nonprofit foundation which operates internationally; maintaining and developing policy and legal defenses relevant to the operation of a Top 10 multilingual information website created via the efforts of a broad, international volunteer community; advising the Wikimedia Foundation and the global Wikimedia movement on ethical and mission-driven policy positions."
547:, efforts to found a South African Wikimedia chapter (the first on the continent) are well underway. Kerryn McKay, who is director of the non-profit African Commons Project and is working on the founding of the chapter, said it "started with a kick-off workshop last September that pulled together Wikipedians from around the country. We are now finalizing the by-laws and are awaiting approval from the Wikimedia Foundation," and expect the chapter to be operating in the second quarter of 2011.
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475:. Other aspects of Russian culture that shaped the numerous conflicts and affairs recounted in the text include nationalism and the fact that "the subject of homosexuality is still taboo". On the other hand, the project has dealt with issues familiar to English Wikipedians, such as large-scale sockpuppet abuse and a case of a closed mailing list used to coordinate actions against other users, described as "very similar" to the English Knowledge's
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494:" with a "back of the envelope estimation on the proportion of users that are editors", based on the WMF's statistics. Between February 2008 and December 2010, the resulting graph shows "a 42% decrease in the proportion of readers who edit at least five times a month". He said that the "discrepancy between rising readership and stable or sinking editorship should raise major concern". In a related blog posting ("
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537:), drawing on her perspective as a board member of Wikimedia Germany, the oldest of the around 30 Wikimedia chapters (founded in 2004), which currently has around 12 employees: "In the constellation of Wikimedia Chapters, it is the only one with such a strong presence of staff at all. Other chapters have hired people, but no other chapter, as far as I know, has more than 3 permanent employees."
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471:. It depicts the project's history as defined by a continuous struggle between "Allowists" and "Restrictors" (user groups with differing attitudes towards the necessity of strict rules, similar to the Inclusionists versus Deletionists antagonism on the English Knowledge), which they attribute to the high "uncertainty avoidance" observed for Russia in sociologist Geert Hofstede's
226:, where he handled legal affairs in 15 countries. Before that, Brigham was the Assistant US Attorney in Southern District of Florida, Senior Liaison Legal Officer in Paris, Federal Appellate Attorney, Associate with Finley, Kumble, Wagner et al., and Judicial Law Clerk. Wikimedians have been welcoming him to the Foundation on the
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taking the job for experience-building reasons. Wikimedia is only cutting-edge in a narrow sector of law. Most of the job seems to be rather mundane legal housekeeping, and dealing with constant copyright and libel complaints. Thus, it'd be interesting to know why it appealed to him, what drew him to the position. --
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context, an array of matters related to policy and regulatory compliance, issues such as privacy, and helping us with the challenges of opening a new office in India." m|Oppenheim talked to "hundreds of connectors and candidates" for the position, and around 12 short-listed candidates were interviewed.
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We should definitely interview him, for a
Signpost feature, and ask him that very question. But I still can't imagine the answer would be very surprising. Knowledge is a phenomenal and unique global project and he gets to be the head honcho of the entire legal department. It's low on paperwork and
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No, I'm not suggesting anything about a "hidden issue coming to trial". Rather, being a lawyer for a nonprofit tends to be low-pay/high-aggravation, and the
Wikimedia Foundation certainly fits that pattern. His career is as a prosecutor and business lawyer. Plus since he's quite experienced, he's not
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retorted "Yes: we learnt to stand up to odious and reprehensibly fraudulent claims of copyright on public domain works. ... Derek did nothing wrong and is doing nothing wrong." Dcoetzee said that the three images were just a "sample" and that he planned "no further uploads for a while, just gathering
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last
October for undisclosed reasons. In late October, human resources firm m|Oppenheim was charged with finding a replacement for Godwin. Sue Gardner noted the challenge to recruit a person who "can handle a broad range of legal issues including the legal defense of our projects in an international
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relationships (Galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and in
December took up a fellowship position at the Wikimedia Foundation, strongly advised against copying the reproductions: "Of course, legally and ethically the community and WMF's position remains that you can't copyright a PD artwork
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Seems there's little mystery as to why an accomplished and credentialed expert would want to work for one of the greatest projects in the history of the world in a position to take on all variety of cutting edge threats with a minimum of corporate or institutional bureaucracy among a community of
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the hiring of Asaf Bartov (from
Wikimedia Israel) as "Head of Global South Relationships", and a contract extension of Egypt-based Moushira Elamrawy to serve as "Chapter Relations Manager". As explained by Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead, the new positions replace the initially
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on IRC (attended by community members and some
Foundation employees and trustees) has been published. Topics included ways to preserve the momentum shown in the many local meetups that celebrated Knowledge's tenth anniversary, Knowledge's "gender gap", possible changes in the Foundation's
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identification procedures for volunteers that would extend the mandatory identification to all OTRS volunteers and retain the identification data at the
Foundation, a planned extension of the "Wiki Loves Monuments" contest held by the Dutch chapter last year, and Wikimania 2012 bids.
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It was discussed whether Google's terms of services permit such reuse, whether it would still be legal under copyright in case of the lack of such permission, and whether it might offend cultural institutions that are collaborating with
Wikimedia or could intend to do so.
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Declines in readers editing articles are not welcome but could, in part, be a function of bots dealing with obvious vandalism or similar factors. It would be interesting to see graphs of active-editors-to-total-article-number ratios, which may show more dramatic changes.
310:). However, from a pragmatic point of view the advantages of having a dozen gigapixel images of important paintings (as awesome as that would be) would, IMHO, be outweighed by the blow this would deal to our reasonably good-standing in the cultural sector these days."
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data on local storage". He also indicated that the legal concerns from the NPG case do not apply to museums in the countries like the US where the public domain status of faithful reproductions of 2D public domain artworks is more clearly established than in the UK.
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Well, being WMF counsel is many things, but "stable" and "welcoming" are not words I'd use to describe it. The money is also pretty low, especially given it's a senior lawyer position. Now, it's certainly possible that he's made a pile from his time at
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to include banners (after reaching its financial goal) "to ask people to contribute - not financially, but with their knowledge. We will target readers, and encourage them to become editors", but Sj indicated that while "some general-purpose
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high on interesting people. And it's for a good cause. After a career as decorated as his, it seems like a fitting continuation of his work, if not a compelling mix of geeky reward and public service.
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planned "Chapter
Development Director" and "seek to enhance WMF's relationships with and support of chapters and other groups/individuals in the movement". Together with Newstead, both will attend two
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456:), who around the end of September started an eight-week research project under the Foundation's Community fellowship program to develop methods for writing histories of Wikimedia projects (
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372:). The version of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Harvesters" uploaded by Dcoetzee (see above), while reduced to 280 megapixels from Google's 4.5 gigapixels, compares favorably to a
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announced that he had started to download and archive some of the images in full resolution, and has already uploaded three of them in a somewhat lower resolution to
Commons (
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412:. To celebrate this cooperation, there will be a Backstage Pass and GLAMWIKI event on April 9, 2011 at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. This marks the first
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It was also debated whether Wikimedia projects have a need for such high resolutions at all. Dcoetzee defended their usefulness, pointing to an essay titled "
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Recalling the 2009 legal threat of the UK's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) against Dcoetzee for similar uploads of reproductions of public domain paintings (
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As well as Commons, it's been a matter of heated discussion on internal-l (which, despite the name, is mostly a chapters list these days, I should clarify).
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Apart from the diplomatic concerns, the images also present technical challenges, their full resolution exceeding the 65536 x 65536 pixels maximum of the
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880:, and views this as a kind of public service. Again, I don't mean to imply any negative reason. But it would make a good question for an interview. --
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I understand clarification is currently being sought from Google on whether they really meant to attempt to enclose public domain works with an EULA -
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titled "This month in GLAM" has been started on the Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, the
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Maybe he just got tired of the upper legal crust. I know I would. the WMF position is a stable, welcoming position with a strong following.
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suggested using banners like those of the fundraiser to invite contributors, drafted by WikiProjects to indicate their specific needs. As
368:" already contains a few detail images that were excerpted from Google's reproductions (one of them currently being used in the article
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352:"), Witty lama strongly criticized him for the new uploads: "Didn't we learn anything from the NPG fiasco, especially you Derreck!?"
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799:, he's quite an experienced litigator. It'd be interesting to know more about why he's taken the job with Wikimedia Foundation. --
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has started a series of blog posts titled "Wikimedia Chapters: We Want to Hire Someone, Where Do We Start?" (
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Echoes of the NPG public domain controversy: Reuse of Google's gigapixel art reproductions debated on Commons
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Harvested from the Google Art Project: "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Metropolitan Museum).
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New General Counsel hired; reuse of Google Art Project debated; GLAM newsletter started; news in brief
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on whether and how to upload those that show public domain works to Wikimedia Commons.
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passionate volunteers. Are you suggesting we have some hidden issue coming to trial?
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File:Giovanni Bellini - Saint Francis in the Desert - Google Art Project.jpg
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English- and French-speaking Geoff Brigham received his law degree from the
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Dirck Hals: FĂȘte champĂȘtre ("Garden party"), 1627 (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam)
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last week, which hosts very high-resolution images (up to more than 10
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in Washington DC, and a BA in Political Science and French from the
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Not to be presumptuous, but it was probably all of the awesome.
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Protecting the public domain and sharing our cultural heritage
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I'm surprised you didn't quote the WMF blog post on the NPG,
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specifications and the 100MB file upload limit on Commons.
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Want to get your content out there? Put it in Knowledge.
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And my apologies to Derrick for calling him "Derek"! -
578:: The Foundation's Global Development Department has
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File:Van Gogh - Starry Night - Google Art Project.jpg
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merely by making a faithful reproduction of it (cf.
731:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
553:: On his blog, Wikimedian Gautam John has posted "
404:Coinciding with Knowledge's 10th anniversary, the
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333:). The full 1.6 gigapixel version of one image,
301:, who has long been known for his work on such
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446:A "social history" of the Russian Knowledge
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561:Log of general Wikimedia IRC meeting
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408:announced that they were starting a
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362:Why we need high-resolution media
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216:Georgetown University Law Center
190:The office was created in 2006 (
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523:Professionalization of chapters
473:framework for assessing culture
380:Monthly GLAM newsletter started
364:". The newly created category "
178:the hiring of Geoff Brigham as
727:add the page to your watchlist
591:500 featured article milestone
555:Thoughts on Knowledge in India
423:has been pronounced a success.
392:In other GLAM-related news, a
245:Interactive large-image-viewer
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551:History of Knowledge in India
477:Eastern European mailing list
465:"attempt of a social history"
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603:Military history WikiProject
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174:On February 4, Sue Gardner
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228:Foundation-l mailing list
169:New General Counsel hired
279:After the launch of the
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948:looking for new talent
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448:: Maryana Pinchuk (
208:leaving the project
743:Google Art Project
711:Discuss this story
691:Arbitration report
681:WikiProject report
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632:"News and notes" â
585:m:IRC office hours
567:of the February 5
513:discover Wikimedia
394:monthly newsletter
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366:Google Art Project
308:Bridgeman v. Corel
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795:According to his
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696:Technology report
607:featured articles
569:Wikimedia meeting
543:: According to a
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47:View Latest Issue
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718:transcluded
671:In the news
398:first issue
348:coverage: "
337:, has been
200:Mike Godwin
194:coverage: "
676:Gender gap
370:Tudor rose
299:Witty lama
285:gigapixels
265:Dirck Hals
263:Detail of
163:SvHannibal
79:Share this
74:Contribute
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866:Mar
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255:)
247:(
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