Book publisher apologizes for plagiarizing photos by Wikipedians, brief news

Last month, Wan Li Book Company, a leading Hong Kong publisher, released A Speaking Map of Hong Kong – a multimedia guidebook to Hong Kong history and geography. It was soon discovered that it used some 100 photographs from Wikipedia and Flickr without any copyright acknowledgement. When comparing any page from the book with the relevant Wikipedia article about the corresponding district of Hong Kong, one can almost certainly find a Wikipedia picture replicated exactly in the book.

Aware that the book in question is actually the sequel to A Speaking World Map, a similar interactive book by the same publisher, a writer on Hong Kong Inmedia, set out to buy the previous book in search for more copyright violations. Instead, he was surprised to discover copyright acknowledgements for various pictures in the book. Those credited included both individual photographers and organisations such as the United States Geological Survey. For one illustrated photograph, the acknowledgement was so delicately written that it included the photographer, the illustrator, and the Tajik Agency on Hydrometeorology who provided the original data. A skim through the inside covers of the two books reveals that they were compiled by the same chief editors.

The publisher did leave a line in A Speaking Map of Hong Kong as a defence: "We were unable to contact some of the old street photographs' owners due to a lack of information. Copyright holders should feel free to contact us." However, Wikipedians noted that every picture description on Wikipedia and Flickr is clearly accompanied by the username of the author, and the copyright licence under which the author released the picture. The infringing book did not credit anyone in compliance with the licences; neither did the publisher leave a comment to the authors asking for authorisation.

Jeromy-Yu Chan, president of Wikimedia Hong Kong, called it the largest infringement of Wikipedia images in Hong Kong's history. A Hong Kong freelance writer filed a case against Wan Li Books with the customs.

On August 14, one user identifying as deputy editor-in-chief of the publisher posted an apology on the talk page where the infringements were being discussed. The user stated that the editor for the book had resigned and that all copies would be recalled and destroyed, and asserted that the apology was made "not on legal grounds, but out of conscience."

• Wikimedia's annual fundraising campaign is scheduled to begin on 7 November this year. Donations from the fundraising drive are still the single largest source of income for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters. Community members are invited to propose messages for the banners that will run during the fundraising campaign. Also, there are plans to increase awareness and outreach this year through social media websites. Anyone interested in participating is invited to join in and work on the campaign through the fundraising page or by contacting Philippe Beaudette (philippewikimedia.org). Last year's fundraiser generated considerable controversy about the choice of banners (see Signpost coverage), but became the most financially successful one in the Foundation's history, bringing in over $8 million (Signpost coverage).
• As part of the Geograph Project, every part of the United Kingdom and Ireland with the exception of the Channel Islands have been photographed. The first batch of 250,000 pictures were uploaded on Wikimedia Commons from December 2009 to February 2010 (see Signpost coverage). Multichill has announced that he recently received the remaining 1.5 million images and is planning to upload them to Commons. The Geograph project is sponsored by the Ordnance Survey, with a similar project planned for New Zealand next. Photographs selected in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant features from every 1 km × 1 km grid square in the British and Irish National Grid System.
  

  

• On Meta, the Contribution Taxonomy Project was started last week by longtime Wikimedia volunteers Steven Walling and Damian Finol, in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department. In the announcement, Walling explained it as a research project whose goal it is "to try and highlight highly active volunteers who may not participate in tasks that produce a high edit count. By creating a detailed taxonomy of sorts for all the different roles users can take in a project, we hope to get a better picture of who the most active contributors are and what they are doing."
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• As announced earlier (see last week's Signpost coverage), a workshop was held at George Washington University from August 10–12 for the Campus Ambassadors participating in the Public Policy Initiative and the WikiProject United States Public Policy. A mix of experienced Wikipedians and university representatives, the participants received training in presentation skills, teaching Wikipedia and using Wikipedia in the Classroom. Frank Schulenburg, the WMF's Head of Public Outreach, has posted a video (8:21) recorded at the workshop. – The Campus ambassadors will be partnering up with Professors in the Fall and future semesters in designing and teaching courses that involve the use of Wikipedia. The campus ambassadors will also be charged with sustaining and expanding the program to other Public Policy professors and professors of other subjects. As part of this mission, the Ambassadors were asked to consider reaching out to students on their campus as well, to create student organizations like the one currently at the University of Michigan and being organized at James Madison University.
• Wikimedia Polska have published their English-language chapter report for January to July 2010. Among other activities, it mentions the chapter's own toolserver, the chapter's support for the recent Wikimania conference in Poland (although it was not directly involved in the organization, it paid for 17 participant scholarships), an event called "Wikiexpedition" ("Wikiekspedycja") to visit "selected places, which are not well covered in Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia Commons" (results), and the "Wikimedia Polska Conference 2010" with 110 participants.
• Wikimedia Catalonia (not an officially recognized Wikimedia chapter) have published their English-language report for July 2010.
• Dmitry Chichkov has provided a list of "most reverted pages" on the English Wikipedia (i.e. those where reverts form the largest percentage of the edit history). Based on an older dump and restricted to pages with more than 1,000 edits, the most reverted page – apart from a few user pages – is, curiously, Help:Reverting, with 49% of edits consisting of reverts. Among articles, 69 (46%), Nipple and Apple sauce (both 45%) had the largest portion of reverts.
• On her private blog, Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, presented preliminary results from her informal survey among Wikimedians about the goals for the Foundation's five year plan (How Wikimedia will measure success over the next five years). The plan has been developed by the Strategic Planning Project since last year (see also the Sister projects report in last week's Signpost) and Gardner "wanted to gather some additional input" about its movement priorities before presenting them to the Board of Trustees later this month. The survey can still be filled out "until roughly 7PM UTC, Wednesday August 18". – Sue Gardner will also hold IRC office hours, a public chat, on Thursday, August 19 at 17:00 UTC [3].

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