Wikimedia Germany asks for "reworking" of Funds Dissemination Committee; should MP4 be allowed on Wikimedia sites?

Wikimedia Germany (WMDE), the largest national affiliate, has authored an extensive critique of the Funds Dissemination Committee's process for issuing funding recommendations for the various large organizations in the movement.

The FDC is a major component in the Foundation’s global grantmaking apparatus, within the organization's annual plan grants. Composed entirely of volunteers and supported by WMF staff, the FDC makes recommendations to the Foundation's Board of Trustees on funding levels for large Wikimedia entities. In the most recent round, WMF staff assessment scores for the 11 affiliates (10 of them national chapters) were largely positive, though they came with significant criticism. Four returning chapters' scores were sharply reduced compared with those a year ago—for the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. This year's FDC recommendations saw no affiliate receive all of its requested funding, with cuts of 6–70% to initial requests; even so, the amounts awarded to returning applicants were mostly significant increases over last year's allocations.

While the FDC recommended that WMDE receive €1,296,000 for its first round (2013–14; two rounds per year), the chapter had requested €1,800,000—losing roughly a quarter of its original request. The staff assessment, while downgrading WMDE's score from an enviable 53 last year to 44 this year (falling significantly in ratings of "impact", "ability to execute", and "measures of success"), detailed extensive risks in WMDE's budget proposal, including its planned staffing:

WMDE's message to the FDC focused on what they see as three key "risks" inherent in the FDC's approach to this round of funding.

1. With all of the chapters not receiving their requested funding, WMDE believes that this could lead to inflated requests, where chapters would ask for far more than actually desired in the hope they will get all they desire.
2. More seriously, WMDE critiqued the FDC's recommendations, which in their view reduced the funding requests without giving sufficient cause. "In general, it is not clear from the FDC’s explanations of its decisions what applicants should have done differently in order to receive the full funding amount. Its explanations often mention the 'growth rate', but how does one define healthy growth and unhealthy growth?", said WMDE. "It is difficult to grasp why a budget has been described as 'large' or certain metrics as 'poor' if no frame of reference is given. This prevents the entities in question—as well as future applicants—from learning from their previous mistakes."
3. Applying only to WMDE's funding request for this year, the last point emphasized that the FDC cut WMDE's request because, in part, it had not spent all of the funding granted in the year previous. Continuing such practices with other chapters could lead to an "end-of-year spending frenzy" from chapters unwilling to lose money.

Other complaints range from "inappropriate expectations" of small and/or young chapters and organizations, with the argument that they are currently held to the standards of the established chapters, and the expanded bureaucracy such an accountable process requires. Piggybacking on their desire to cut through the red tape is the issue of the FDC applications themselves: "An unbelievable amount of effort goes into this entire process—on the part of the chapter, the WMF and the FDC", WMDE stated. "Do we have any statistics on the number of staff and volunteer hours ... that the process entails?"

Wikimedia Germany's "way forward" combines "reworking" and simplifying the process with finding a "joint and truly global strategy that has been accepted by all members", a line that has received little comment but would presumably decentralize the Wikimedia grantmaking structure by requiring agreement from major players. The message closed with an invitation to the upcoming Wikimedia Conference with the aim of a "thorough reworking of the FDC process."

Reception to the proposal on its talk page ranged from Pundit faulting the German chapter in a bulleted list, noting that they did not mention that many of the chapters received more money than the year before and did not list what WMDE thought of as the FDC's "mistakes", though also praising the chapter for remarking on the amount of bureaucratic overhead. Jan-Bart de Vreede, the chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, commented that "I might not agree with all of [the feedback], but it is very useful to have nonetheless ... [an] evaluation [of the FDC process] is currently planned at the end of May. [WMDE's executive director] is a member of this group so I have no concerns that the experiences described here will get lost somewhere." Kevin Gorman remarked that "It's great to see sincere, good faith engagement between major movement entities about serious matters such as the FDC."

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has asked for comment (RfC) on the future of video formats in the Wikimedia movement. The RfC, which as of publication is failing, asks participants about the use of MP4 videos, which is the most popular video format used today and is prevalent on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, but the use of it is encumbered by patents, and license arrangements would have to be made with MPEG-LA. The RfC asks the community to give opinions on whether to move forward with some steps: embracing MP4 in some form for uploaded files, transcoding them to open formats, or some combination of these.

If implemented in full, the change would allow the uploading and viewing of freely licensed MP4 videos on Wikimedia projects; there are also options to only allow their viewing or uploading.

Such a change has been prominent in the planning of the Foundation's multimedia team, because despite Wikimedia, Mozilla and Google's efforts, free video formats have yet to enjoy widespread use:

Surprisingly, the proposal falls far short of what might potentially have been put to the community. A key part of the request—perhaps lost in the lengthy textual background—is that uploaded MP4 videos would be stored in both MP4 and a free file format, such as WebM or Ogg Theora. If the vote is successful, the Foundation has committed to developing tools that would convert uploaded files from MP4 to a free format, and vice versa.

However, the proposal faces significant opposition from Wikimedia users. The MP4 format is not free software; some of the patents on it will not expire until 2028. Their position is summarized by the Foundation as an ideological conflict: "They view MP4 support as a fundamental shift in our values—and a major setback for the open and free software movements. They are prepared to stick with the current status quo, even if this means that millions of users are unable to view or contribute MP4 video content on our sites." Martijn Hoekstra commented that adding patented formats to Wikimedia sites means stepping back from the goal of being a free repository, while darkweasel94 went farther: "We should apply pressure on others to support free formats, not surrender to others' pressure to support patent-encumbered formats. It's already bad enough that Firefox is going to support it—we don't need Wikimedia to become yet another traitor to the movement (free software/free culture, broadly construed). Then the companies with an interest in MP4 can really declare their victory."

Other opponents were far more pragmatic. Geni was the first to oppose the vote, quoting a camera manual's stipulations on recording in MP4 and contrasting it with the free CC-by-SA standard: "This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard."

• Wikipedia, Wikivoyage birthdays: On 15 January, Wikipedia turned 13 and Wikivoyage marked the first anniversary of its reincarnation under the Wikimedia Foundation.
• English Wikipedia
  • Quarterly update: The quarterly update consisting of all changes to the English Wikipedia's content policies has been published at Wikipedia:Update. Volunteers to restart updates of deletion and enforcement policies are requested.
  • Pending changes: The request for comment on pending changes, level two—a function that is not actually described on the relevant Wikipedia page—is steadily lengthening, with 11 proposals.
  • Surveillance awareness day: English Wikipedians are hoping to take "special steps" with the main page's content to promote awareness of intrusive surveillance mechanisms that have been put in place around the world, but the idea has received significant resistance from community members.
• The Great Book of Knowledge, Part 1: A CBC Radio One program with moderator Paul Kennedy and contributor Philip Coulter explored Wikipedia's effect on the world. Part 2 will be aired next week.
• Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): The Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel, in consultation with community members, has authored a blog post on the EFF's website exploring the importance of the public domain on Wikimedia projects (see related Signpost op-ed: "Why the year 2019 is so important").
• Wikimania 2015: Bids for Wikimania 2015 have opened. There are currently five open unofficial bids: three in Africa, one in Europe, and one in Asia.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-15/Serendipity

2014-01-15

Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles

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By Daniel Mietchen

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk.

It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started—largely to make it easier to share scholarly research—most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.

This has placed Wikipedia in an awkward position with respect to its verifiability policy: "all material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists and captions, must be verifiable [so that] people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source." Combined with the policy on identifying reliable sources, the paywall dilemma faced by editors and readers becomes clearer: "many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources." Not only this, none of the academic journals most cited on the English Wikipedia are open access (PLOS ONE breaks the drought at No. 22 on that list).

While WP:PAYWALL advises: "Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access". Commenting on a draft proposal that Wikipedia articles should preferentially cite open-access literature, one editor wrote that "verifiability isn't an option if people are expected to pay in excess of $20 to view a single article ... over closed- or toll-access resources of equivalent scholarly quality". That draft proposal—started in 2007 when the English Wikipedia was half its current age—died quietly like so many.

But what if we could just mark references as being open, rather than preferentially citing them over closed ones? WikiProject Open Access is currently exploring the options, and the Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators (OAMI) at the National Information Standards Organization has been working on a set of recommendations for how to provide information about the use and re-use rights of scholarly articles. A draft version was released last week, and public comments are invited until 4 February.

These recommendations boil down to two metadata tags:

• <free_to_read>, which signals whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration, and
• <license_ref>, which points to a stable place on the web containing the licensing terms applicable to that publication.

The recommendations don't include:

• a definition of the term open access;
• specifications as to which licensing terms would be acceptable, or whether and how they should be version-controlled; and
• suggestions for icons that may be suitable for signalling the content of the proposed tags.

Similar recommendations have been put forward in a more broadly scoped draft report from Jisc, the UK body that supports senior-high-school and higher education. The draft had been was released for public comment in September, and its final version is still being worked on. A related report from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories looked at components of license clauses in use by scholarly publishers.

One of the organisations involved in the NISO Workgroup is CrossRef, which is working on including the proposed tags into their metadata and making that information available through their API, in collaboration with the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Open Article Gauge, developed by Cottage Labs with support from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), already provides article-level information about licensing terms for a subset of the scholarly literature; PLOS has signalled an interest in implementing a system that would provide licensing information for references cited in articles published in its journals, which are among the most well-known open-access journals.

The NISO document contains a scenario quite similar to searching for illustrations for use in Wikipedia articles:

“

A user wishes to use visual images from an article, either in a single case or in some automated re-use pipeline. Acting in good faith, the user seeks licensing information, e.g., at PubMed Central or a similar source, to ascertain his/her rights. However, in some cases the article licensing metadata is contradictory or incorrect. For example, an article might be properly licensed under CC BY, but the publisher (or whoever is adding metadata) is making conflicting licensing statements or identifies other restrictions not provided for in the license.1

”

The reference 1 (broken in the NISO document) refers to the November 2012 open-access report (part of the Wikimedia GLAM newsletter), which lists examples of such conflicting licensing statements and served as the basis for a more detailed analysis published and presented last October.

It is the potential for these kinds of incongruencies that motivated the NISO group to opt for signalling only the stable home (the URI) of the licensing terms and not individual use and re-use rights. Many publishers use licensing terms incompatible with Creative Commons licenses, and to understand their implications, Wikipedia users might need legal assistance; this makes it difficult to see how signalling those terms (other than perhaps by way of {{closed access}} or {{subscription required}}) would incur any benefit to those users.

The case is different for Creative Commons licenses: their URI (e.g. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) already signals re-use rights, making it easy to implement the <license_ref>, while their corresponding <free_to_read> tag can always be set to "yes", and compatibility with the NISO recommendations would be ensured.

On Wikimedia sites, a number of external link icons are already in use that act on certain elements of a URI—for example, a lock icon for HTTPS, as in https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek (which is this week, a period of action around copyright, organised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation). So having the CC BY icon displayed right next to external links that contain the string "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/" would be straightforward. Once the licensing information is available via the CrossRef API, a link to the appropriate CC URI could be added automatically to template-based references (e.g. by way of Citation bot, which was migrated to Wikimedia Labs last weekend).

Since Wikidata has enabled phase I support for Wikisource on Tuesday, it would even be possible to link to the full text available from Wikisource (see also the Wikisource vision) and to the corresponding Wikidata entry, as demonstrated in the reference. Of course, there is room to economise on space, such as by linking the icons directly rather than adjacent text bits, and if the article is covered on other Wikimedia platforms (e.g. Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikispecies), the corresponding links could be included as well.

Currently, Wikidata items can be created for sources supporting statements on Wikidata, but the details of whether and how other sources (e.g. those supporting statements in a Wikipedia or Wikibooks page) are to be handled—or whether Citation bot should be ported to Wikidata—remain yet to be worked out. Two taskforces have been created to work on this: one for books and one for periodicals.

Irrespective of the details, I think that if Wikipedia articles were to signal the openness of scholarly references they cite, this would go a long way towards raising awareness of open licensing among users of Wikimedia content, amplifying similar efforts by open-access publishers and even Google, whose image search by re-use rights (available since 2009) was simplified this week.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Williams, J. T.; Carpenter, K. E.; Van Tassell, J. L.; Hoetjes, P.; Toller, W.; Etnoyer, P.; Smith, M. (2010). Gratwicke, Brian (ed.). "Biodiversity Assessment of the Fishes of Saba Bank Atoll, Netherlands Antilles". PLOS ONE. 5 (5): e10676. Bibcode:2010PLoSO...510676W. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010676. PMC 2873961. PMID 20505760. CC0 full text media metadata

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