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News and notes

NPG copyright irony; Citizendium's finances; Credo accounts donated; brief news

On WikiEN-l, Scott MacDonald reported that the National Portrait Gallery website has copied text from the Wikipedia article for the Baroque portrait artist John Michael Wright for its own entry (WebCite) on the painter (another entry was suspected to have similar problems). Following investigations on the talk page, it turns out that MacDonald's allegations are well-founded. The Wikipedia article—which happens to be today's Featured Article on the main page—was edited in 2007/2008 to incrementally reach the current wording, while the National Portrait Gallery website added the material much later than that. Such reuse is allowed, but must be accompanied with the appropriate attribution under the terms of Wikipedia's copyleft Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, whereas the NPG's entry claims "© National Portrait Gallery, London 2011".

The National Portrait Gallery have previously raised the threat of a lawsuit in English courts against Derrick Coetzee, a Wikipedia and Commons administrator, who had made a bot that copied photographs of out-of-copyright paintings from the gallery website and uploaded them to Commons (see Signpost coverage from 2009-07-13). While the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. makes such copying legal under U.S. law, it is unclear whether the photographs the NPG had made of the artworks had copyright in the United Kingdom.

Citizendium releases financial statement

The Management Council of Citizendium, an English wiki encyclopedia project like Wikipedia but with "gentle expert guidance", started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006, has released a financial statement. After changing hosting providers, the monthly cost of hosting the site has dropped from around $700 a month to $319.90. The site's current funds stand at $2,092.17 and thus the hosting of the site is paid for until September.

After the financial problems the Management Council inherited were revealed in November, there was a successful donation drive which raised $2,776.09 that month, and a further $934.33 in December. The Council have stated they are hoping to get a number of regular donors (between 20 and 30) to give between $11.25 and $17 a month to host the site. Three contributors have agreed to this, although as the active user base is around 70 (down from a high of 200), finding enough to support the site may prove difficult unless a corporate or non-profit benefactor steps in.

It was mooted after the financial revelations in November that the Wikimedia Foundation could support Citizendium, although Sanger quickly rejected the suggestion. Citizendium also has yet to work out how to incorporate itself as a new legal entity now that it has broken links with the Tides Foundation. The lack of incorporated non-profit status means contributions are not tax-deductible, which may reduce the number of larger donations.

400 Credo accounts for Wikipedians

This week, Wikipedians will be able to apply for an account on Credo Reference (formerly Xrefer), a subscription-based reference site that contains full text articles from a variety of different publishers and reference works (listed here). To give some examples, a search on a medical topic might bring up results from the Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, the Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists, Black's Medical Dictionary and the Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia, while a search for a German philosopher brought up results from the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Who's Who in Christianity, and the Encyclopedia of German Literature. Interestingly, topic pages on Credo reuse images from Wikimedia Commons, and Credo has announced that their topic pages are "The Librarian’s Answer to Wikipedia".

Wikipedians who do not already have access to Credo or a similar database through library or university subscriptions will be able to apply for an account donated by Credo starting at 22:00 UTC on Wednesday at Wikipedia:Credo accounts (WP:CREDO). The criteria include having a working e-mail address setup, to have 3,000 non-minor edits to article space and to have been involved in Featured Article or Good Article writing or reviewing, or being active in a content-focused WikiProject.

Credo Reference previously donated 100 user accounts in March 2010.

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/News_and_notes