(you can see links to these in the left-hand column of the article; please let me know if you can translate it into other languages).
Last December, I wrote to Transport Scotland, an executive agency of the Scottish Government’s Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department and as such accountable to Scottish Ministers, suggesting a plaque be erected on the station, noting this milestone, in collaboration with WikimediaUK, the registered charity that supports Wikipedia and related projects in the United Kingdom. I proposed that the plaque would include a QRpedia barcode, allowing overseas visitors to see the article in their preferred language.
I have today received their reply, which appears to employ a stereotypical bureaucratic lack of imagination.
Jordanhill station is owned by Network Rail and leased along with the vast majority of all other railway stations in Scotland to First ScotRail to manage and operate on a daily basis.
I have discussed with ScotRail your proposal to install a plaque at the station to mark the one-millionth article on Wikipedia about Jordanhill. We do not wish to take this forward.
ScotRail has been delivering a comprehensive station re-branding programme which began in 2008 and will be complete in 2014. There are Brand Guidelines in place for this programme which aims to simplify and unify all station branding and this includes the removal of information from third parties.
I’m open to suggestions as to how to proceed, and who (and whether) to lobby to have the matter reconsidered. What do you think?
During the first weekend of December, I was in Amsterdam, at the invitation of Wikimedia-UK and Wikimedia-NL (two of Wikipedia’s many “chapters”, which support the work of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects). I was there — along with Wikipedians from 22 countries — to participate in GLAMcamp, an unconference about GLAMWiki collaborations, between Wikimedia volunteers and Galleries, Libraries, Archves and Museums (GLAMs), including my work as Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive. Unlike most Wikipedia events, which are open, this one was an invitation-only event (though there was a public workshop on the Friday afternoon), so I was flattered to be invited.
I was asked to lead a workshop about QRpedia, the project with which I’m involved, which puts QR codes into GLAMs, linking to Wikipedia articles, but detects the language used by the GLAM visitor’s mobile device and serves them an article in that language or offers the alternative languages or a Google translation if none is available. Did you know Wikipedia exists in 272 languages? How many museums do you know that can afford to offer interpretive material in so many languages? Or even a few?
This QRpedia code links to the Hindi article about Qrpedia — but if you scan it with a phone set to use another language, such as English, guess what happens..?
Feedback about QRpedia was positive, and I was told of its use in India, though I’m still awaiting details. The biggest areas of concern expressed were the availability of statistics, so I was delighted to be shown this QRpedia stats tool created by the project’s developer Terence Eden; and the need to provide unique URLs for institutions, so we can distinguish, say, requests for the article on the industrial revolution from a museum in Amsterdam from one in Birmingham. We’re currently holding a consultation on how best to create custom URLs for that purpose, and input from museum colleagues would be especially welcome.
While at GLAMcamp, I also gave a brief talk on my work deploying microformats in Wikipedia, which aroused quite a lot of interest, and I’m now in discussion with representatives of a couple of non-English Wikipedias, who are looking to deploy them.
Our venue was Mediamatic, which doubles as an art gallery, and had an exhibition in progress about fungi. They kindly agreed to allow us, durng the event, to deploy the Netherlands’ first QRpedia code, on an exhibit about Fomes fomentarius.
Wikipedians from various countries queue to scan the first QRpedia code in The Netherlands
Of course, it wasn’t all work, and we managed to fit in two backstage museum visits, to the Amsterdam Museum (whose staff were particularly accommodating) and The Rijksmuseum, as well as some good meals and some local snacks, including broodje kroket, the moreish stroopwafel and the seasonal delights of banketstaaf, kruidnoten, and gevulde speculaas — all traditionally eaten on Saint Nicholas’ Day, the final day of my stay, when Sinterklaas visits.
We also spent an evening at “Boom Chicago” an hilarious comedy improvisation show, delivered by US/Canadian crew, in English. And guess who they decided to pick on?
Boom Chicago: I have no idea who this is supposed to be…
Sarah Stierch kindly videoed “my” guest appearance, complete with references to an answer I gave earlier in the evening, when I was asked to name a profession, and replied “Saggar Maker’s Bottom Knocker “.
After my QRpedia presentation, I was surprised and delighted to be asked to repeat it — four days later, in Hamburg, Germany! A very quick turnaround by Wikimdia-DE, who kindly funded my trip, meant I was able to book flights immediately upon my return to Birmingham — flying out via Zurich and back via Copenhagen. Spending my first, brief, visits to Switzerland and Denmark wholly inside airports, was bizarre.
So, a few days after Amsterdam, I found myself delivering a localised version of my presentation to staff from the various museums that make up the Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg (Foundation of Historical Museums of Hamburg), as well as enjoying a tour of the Hamburgmuseum and even a little birdwatching (my German bird list now includes Grey Wagtail, Fieldfare, Peregrine and Buzzard, among more common species) But best of all, we were able to deploy Germany’s first QRpedia code at the museum.
Martina Fritz of the Hamburgmuseum scans the first QRpedia code in Germany
So, two national firsts for QRpedia, and five airports in five countries, in five days for me. I have to say, much as I enjoyed it, speaking about Wikipedia in Dudley a few days later wasn’t quite so glitzy!
My thanks to everyone involved for making the two trips both possible and memorable, and especially Peter Weis in Hamburg, who sacrificed two days of his own time to make sure I was kept entertained. I came away from GLAMCamp with renewed enthusiasm for working with the GLAM sector, and a bunch of new friends and contacts with whom I can share tips and requests for advice and assistance.
I do a lot of editing on Wikipedia. Sometimes I approach someone connected with a subject I’m writing about (or the subject themself), and ask them to provide an “open licensed” image. In other words, an image whose copyright they own, but given a licence which allows anyone to reuse it, even for commercial purposes.
With a few exceptions, only images made available under such licences can be used on Wikipedia.
Creative Commons
The commonest form of open licence is Creative Commons — a set of legalistic prose documents which cover various ways of licensing images.
Some Creative Commons include “non-commercial” (“NC”) clauses; these are incompatible with Wikipedia, because people are allowed to reuse content from Wikipedia in commercial situation, such as in newspapers or in apps which are sold for use on mobile devices (provided they comply with other licence terms). The same applies to “no derivatives” (“ND”) clauses, which mean that people cannot edit, crop, recolour or otherwise change your picture when reusing it.
The Creative Commons licences compatible with Wikipedia are:
“Attribution” means that the copyright holder must be given a credit
“ShareAlike” means that if someone uses your picture, anything made with it must have the same licence
It’s important that anyone open licencing an image understands what that means. For example, Wikimedia (the organisation behind Wikipedia) suggests that people donating images are asked to agree to the following:
I acknowledge that I grant anyone the right to use the work in a commercial product, and to modify it according to their needs, as long as they abide by the terms of the license and any other applicable laws.
I am aware that I always retain copyright of my work, and retain the right to be attributed in accordance with the license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be claimed to have been made by me.
I am aware that the free license only concerns copyright, and I reserve the option to take action against anyone who uses this work in a libelous way, or in violation of personality rights, trademark restrictions, etc.
I acknowledge that I cannot withdraw this agreement…
That depends on the circumstances, but CC-BY-SA fits most cases, giving the re-user the greatest flexibility, while protecting the copyright holder’s right to be recognised.
So, how do I open-licence an image?
There are a variety of ways to open-licence an image. Here are some of the commonest:
Upload your images to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
Upload your images to Flickr, specifying one of the above open licences
Upload your images to your own website, with a clear and unambiguous statement that they are under a specified open licence
My images are on Flickr, how do I change the licence?
To open-licence a single image in Flickr:
Selecting an open licence in Flickr's pop-up dialogue
View the specific image
Under “Owner settings”, alongside current licence setting (perhaps “All Rights Reserved”), click “edit”
In the pop-up window, check one of the compatible licences
Not necessarily. Some commercial photographers release low- or medium- resolution copies of their images, and sell high-resolution copies, but most people take images for personal purposes, which have no commercial value, and for which they will never be paid. Open-licensing them enables the community to benefit, at no cost to the photographer. Think of open-licensing your images as a way of giving back to the community which has given you so many open-source tools, without which the web would not work.
If this post has inspired you to openly-licence your images please let me know, in the comments.
And yes you can use other people’s open-licenced images, including many of mine, free. Help yourself!
Caveat
Yes, I know there are other open licences, and more complex use-cases. This is intended as a beginners’ guide. A competent lawyer will be able to provide you with legal advice. I offer more general advice to institutions wanting to open-licence their images or other content, or to work with the Wikipedia community, as part of my professional services.
I’m pleased to announce that for ten weeks from next Monday, 11 July, I shall be working, part time, as the Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive, supported by Wikimedia UK.
ARKive is an initiative of the charity Wildscreen, based in Bristol, which aims to promote the protection of threatened species using the emotive power of wildlife films and photographs, which it obtains from its impressive list of donors and makes available through its website. ARKive’s patron is SirDavidAttenborough. Its backers include BirdLife International, Conservation International, The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), The United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) , The World Wide Fund for Nature, the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic (Kew) Gardens, and the Smithsonian Institution. You can also view an ARKive layer in Google Earth, built in collaboration with Google.
Wikimedia UK is a not-for-profit organisation (registration as a charity pending) which exists:
…to help collect, develop and distribute freely licensed knowledge (and other educational, cultural and historic material). We do this by bringing the Wikimedia community in the UK together, and by building links with UK-based cultural institutions, universities, charities and other bodies.
In other words, to support and promote Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and related projects.
As Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador, it will be my role to assist ARKive in working more closely with Wikipedia editors, improve Wikipedia articles about a number of endangered species, and work with the editors of the the many non-English versions of Wikipedia to have articles translated. You can read more about the role, and follow my progress, at the Wikimedia UK project page.
I’m very much looking forward to working with my new colleagues at ARKive, and honoured to be involved with such a prestigious organisation. The role nicely bridges my professional web work, my Wikipedia activities and my love for wildlife, including being a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club (a registered charity) and a voluntary warden for the RSPB.
I’ll mostly be working from home, but plan at least six visits to Bristol, some overnight, where I shall also be running a couple of outreach events. I hope to meet some of Bristol’s local Wikipedia, geek and social media community while I’m there — please ask any contacts you might have, in such groups, to get in touch.
I appeared on Carl Chinn‘s radio programme on BBC WM this morning, to discuss my eight years of editing Wikipedia.
During the interview, I took the above picture of Carl. Afterwards, I drove home, cropped the picture, uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons (the repository for open-licensed media, allied to Wikipedia) and used it to illustrate the Wikipedia article about Carl — all while he was still on air and thus able to tell his listeners about it near the end of the show.
I’ve done several radio interviews, about the web (including some with Carl, back in the 1990s), my books on Pink Floyd and about birdwatching and my role as a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club. I really like doing them.
and it occurred to me, both that a fantastically high number of Wikipedia links are tweeted, and that Wikipedia URLs are relatively long. This latter fact might have been significant, if Matthew had needed to say a few more words, or was talking about something with a longer name. He could have shortened his link, using, say, Bit.ly, but then he’d have had to repeat the stem:
Reading about Clothianidin http://bit.ly/dE6pUf and bees
which is hardly shorter, and disrupts the flow.
What if we agreed a special tag, say W# or w:, used like this:
Reading about w:Clothianidin and bees
and Twitter clients automatically swapped that for a Wikipedia link:
Twitter clients could allow users to set their preferred language-version of Wikipedia, and perhaps find the relevant translations of articles (which Wikipedia could better facilitate, using rel=alternate headers), authors could also specify a language, such as w:fr:brie or w:de:München
Over the last few weeks, I have been imagining a website for UK citizens and visitors; where they can enter their postcode and be served a page or pages of hyperlocal links about everything to do with where they live. This post is me continuing that thinking out loud; comments — including the constructively critical — are actively solicited.
Links could be almost anything, from local government services (via DirectGov and OpenlyLocal) to public transport information; from maps to fun things. They would either link to sites which use postcodes as as an argument; or would be built using the target site’s postcode-lookup API.
The site would avoid the need for each hyperlocal website to compile its own list of such links.
Here are a few such links, based on a randomly-selected postcode, B23 6UH (I simply opened a local newspaper and picked the first advert that used a Birmingham postcode). Note that the first link is computed; the rest use the postcode directly.
User would also be able to suggest additional links if they find a good web service which takes a postcode as a locator — for now, please feel free to do so in comments on this post, and I’ll add them to the above list. Purely commercial links, like individual chains’ store locators, would be excluded (a few paid for links, clearly identified as such, might generate enough revenue to cover hosting costs).
As can be seen from the above, the site wouldn’t actually store or generate content; just links. The links could be clustered under headings, or on sub-pages, like “maps”, “local services”, and “fun stuff”.
It might also be possible for the site to determine the user’s nearest postcode, using their browser or device’s GeoLocation feature, or by selection from a map. The site would also accept partial postcodes, such as “B”, “B23” or “B23 6”.
The service could perhaps be “widgetised” for inclusion on other sites. And of course, it would be possible to link to the site using postcode as an argument.
The site would, of course, make data available in RSS, OPML and open data formats; and use microformats.
Unfortunately, though be willing to collate and maintain the links and code some HTML, I lack the programming and graphic-design skills to make such a site, which means that I must rely on the good will of others. Can you help? Should I organise a hack event (a day, or an evening) at a Birmingham venue, to work on this collaboratively?
Or does such a service — curated, rather than spammy — already exist? Would it belong better as an adjunct to an existing service like OpenlyLocal or DirectGov?
<span class="citation book">Mabbett, Andy (2010). <i>Pink Floyd - The Music and the Mystery</i>. London: Omnibus,. ISBN <a href="...">9781849383707</a>.</span>
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Pink+Floyd+-+The+Music+and+the+Mystery&rft.aulast=Mabbett&rft.aufirst=%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3BAndy&rft.au
=Mabbett%2C%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3BAndy&rft.date=2010&rft.place=London&rft.pub=
Omnibus%2C&rft.isbn=9781849383707&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Pink_Floyd_The_
Wall_(film)"><span style="display: none;"> </span></span>
And here it is again, with line breaks inserted for clarity:
<span class="citation book">Mabbett, Andy (2010). <i>Pink Floyd - The Music and the Mystery</i>. London: Omnibus,. ISBN <a href="...">9781849383707</a>.</span>
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004
&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook
&rft.genre=book
&rft.btitle=Pink+Floyd+-+The+Music+and+the+Mystery
&rft.aulast=Mabbett
&rft.aufirst=%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3BAndy
&rft.au=Mabbett%2C%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3B%26%2332%3BAndy
&rft.date=2010
&rft.place=London
&rft.pub=Omnibus%2C
&rft.isbn=9781849383707
&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Pink_Floyd_The_Wall_(film)">
<span style="display: none;"> </span>
</span>
Some people complain that the presence of COinS bloats pages which have many references: for instance, note that my name, the publisher (“Omnibus“), publishers’ location (“London“), ISBN etc., plus the article’s URL, are repeated in the title attribute of the span which has class=”Z3988″, used to denoted COinS metadata.
<span class="citation book hCite"><span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">Mabbett, Andy</span></span> (<span class="dtstart">2010</span>). <i class="work">Pink Floyd - The Music and the Mystery</i>. <span class="publisher vcard"><span class="label">London</span>: <span class="fn org">Omnibus</span>,. ISBN <a href="..." class="isbn">9781849383707</a>.</span>
Despite adding semantic class names (hcite, author, vcard, fn, dtstart, work, publisher, label, org, isbn), and span elements on which to hang some of them, this is markedly more compact (down from 614 to 363 characters, excluding the redacted URL), easier for humans to read, doesn’t require lots of escaped characters and doesn’t repeat any of the data. The processing burden on Wikipedia’s servers would also be lower.
The primary tool used for accessing COinS metadata is Zotero; whose authors have already indicated to me (in conversation) an interest in parsing such a microformat.
Discussions of what to include in the proposed citation microformat on the microformats mailing list stalled sometime ago, but that doesn’t stop an organisation like Wikipedia from developing a draft, implementing it, and presenting it to the wider web community for discussion, improvement and ratification. The draft could have 1–1 mapping with the properties in COinS, to facilitate ease of conversion by parsing tools.
I suggested at the event that this problem could be solved if staff from each UK council simply started a Wikipedia article about their council, where none already exists.
As each UK council is, inherently, (to use the Wikipedia jargon) notable, there should be no issue with this, provided that they are mindful of Wikipedia’s policy on conflicts of interest (which explicitly allows for such editing), and the requirement that articles maintain a neutral point-of-view, and be referenced. Short “stub” articles can be created in the first instance.
(If council staff are hesitant to do so themselves, then I can help to pair them up with volunteer Wikipedia editors who will assist them, or create articles directly.)
Update: Added Dudley & Lichfield district examples.
What it doesn’t have, though, are links to any of the articles, let alone to the edits under discussion (such as this edit).
The Telegraph needs to understand that the word “Web” in World Wide Web refers to the interlinking of articles on different sites.
Adding links to the articles and edits discussed would serve at least two purposes. It would provide evidence to support the allegations the paper is making; and it would be a convenience and a courtesy their readers.