Archive for Wikipedia
Tunisia`s 7hell!
Many things have changed in Tunisia since one year ago. For me, the most relevant -and the most charming- is that the fall of Ben Ali`s dictatorship has opened a Pandora vase which, in this case, was full of good things that have been repressed and hidden. The vibrant creativity of the Tunisian youth is one of them. The few times I visited Tunisia during Ben Ali`s regime I had the impression it was a suffocating country. They were trying to sell us foreigners the idea of the carte postale (postcard), of the safe beautiful country not touched by any problem, and no political or security issue. They use to pass us boring (according to me) Tunisian films that were the exact projection of what the former colonial powers (especially France) wanted to see coming out from this country. And I could see no youth`s activities, except from the one I witnessed online, done by the brave Tunisian activists, like Nhar 3ala Ammar, the flash mobs, the protests, daring videos like the ones posted by Astrubaal.
But the post-14 Janvi Tunisia is an explosion of creativity. And the vibrant Tunisian youth is driving the change, organizing youth generated media activities, grassroot events, communities meet-ups. I`ve recently visited the amazing office space opened by the Nawaat folks near Tunis` Casba -a beautiful, historic place which in 2011 witnessed huge mass protests that have brought down two governments after the fall of Ben Ali-. It`s a traditional Arabic house, which reminds me of the Damascene houses I`ve lived in, where Nawaat has set up its offices and the awesome hackspace, the first one in Tunis, whose activities are coordinated by open source advocates Kangoulya and Ali Hentati. They are carrying out a number of projects dedicated to openness, freedom of expression, free and open software together with the many open communities that are present in Tunisia (Ubuntu, Mozilla, etc).
This upcoming Friday 27th Jan at 7pm they`ll be hosting a community talk regrouping these communities, Creative Commons Tunisia, Wikimedia (who`s trying to set roots in Tunisia), and Nawaat of course. The same day, at 2pm, Wikimedia will present Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and try to get more Tunisians helping creating original online content in Arabic.
And on the 28th at 6 pm, Arty Show Galery in La Marsa, Tunis, will be hosting the first Creative Commons Salon in Tunisia, celebrating openness and creativity. A CC-licensed film about Tunisian cyber police by Kerim Bouzoita will be shown, and many “open” artists will be featured as CC-friendly rap group Armada Bizerta and the comics collective Yaka. The Tunisian bloggers` association will join and give a talk, as well as Nawaat and Kangoulya who will present the OpenData and OpenGov projects.
Tunisian activists have in fact started campaigning for 7hell (ouvre-open), a movement which regroups bloggers, techies, artists, politicians and who ever is interested in pushing openness and transparency. The OpenGov and OpenData campaign promoted by 7hell activists is the sign that Tunisia is moving in a very interesting direction, towards building a direct link between citizenship and institutions. It is the sign that Tunisian revolution was not an “anti”movement only; it is indeed an ongoing revolution and a pro-active movement trying to achieve a real change in civil society and institutions, not only a regime change.
Wikipedia welcomes its 100,000th article in Arabic
Wikipedia has reached a total amount of 100,000 articles written in Arabic. It’s a good news, cause it means content in Arabic is growing over the web, but still lot of things can be done in the Region, if we think that there are 22 countries officially speaking Arabic. Hope this is just the first step of a fast growing process.
Thanks to Michelle for pointing out this news!
Wikipedia goes Creative Commons BY-SA!
After a consultation vote held in the past few weeks within its worlwide community, Wikipedia has finally voted in favour of publishing its content under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.
This is a great news that contributes even further to foster the cooperation among organisations as Free Software Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons and to create a larger worldwide community who cares about knowledge sharing and culture. Mabrouk to everybody!
This is the press release coming from the Wikimedia Foundation:
May 21, 2009
San Francisco, California — Earlier today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a resolution that will bring about significant changes to the way the content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, will be licensed. This resolution follows a vote among the international Wikimedia community. More than 17,000 votes were cast, with strongest participation in English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Chinese. 88% of all voters who expressed an opinion supported the change.
All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as proper credit is given and modifications are made available under the same terms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using a license which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms. The decision will result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects moving from the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content license. The GFDL, which has served Wikipedia since its inception, will continue to be supported where possible, but not to the detriment of interoperability.
The licensing change means that all Wikimedia project content will be more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content and easier to re-use. “The volunteers who work on Wikimedia projects have very strongly supported making their contributions available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) in addition to the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),” said Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Chair, Michael Snow. “Updating our license terms will support Wikimedia’s charitable mission, by making our projects legally compatible with others that have chosen the CC-BY-SA license. Our free information and educational content can be shared more readily and will be easier for everyone to use.”
Wikipedia has historically been licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which was developed for software documentation by the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman, with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users. At the time of Wikipedia’s inception in 2001, it was one of the few licenses available for works other than software which focused on granting freedoms to re-use and re-distribute information.
Since their creation in 2002, the Creative Commons licenses have provided a practical and simple means for authors to choose licenses that grant broader freedoms than publication under normal copyright. They have since seen strong adoption in science, education, photography, music, and many other areas. Major search engines, photo sharing sites like Flickr, universities, archives and libraries have all begun supporting the Creative Commons licensing model, and the idea of a culture which grants broad freedoms to remix and re-use information has become mainstream.
Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, offered the following comment on the announcement of the licensing decision: “Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.”
Because Wikipedia’s license was chosen by project founder Jimmy Wales when Creative Commons hadn’t yet been created, Wikipedia’s early commitment to free sharing and free re-use has actually worked against legal interoperability. Moreover, because the GNU FDL was designed for software documentation, some of its requirements (such as the requirement to include a copy of the license text with each copy) have encumbered re-use of Wikipedia content. The licensing update was possible because the Free Software Foundation agreed to modify the GNU Free Documentation License in November last year.
As the decision to re-license was approved by both the Wikimedia volunteer community and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the organization is now taking steps to update all its licensing terms through June. With the dual-license system in place, content can be be further re-used under either the GFDL or the CC-BY-SA license, but the GFDL will be dropped from content objects where this is necessary to support remixing it with existing CC-BY-SA content.
