Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-04-25/News and notes

News and notes

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By Bri, Oltrepier

An exclusive photo of Italian academics celebrating the return of cultural heritage to the public domain paradise.

Partial victory for public domain as Italy eases restrictions on digital reproductions of cultural heritage

In the end, it seems like the Italian Ministry of Culture did get the memo (kind of). As reported by Piergiovanna Grossi for Wikimedia Italy (in Italian), on March 21 the MoC published a revised version of the controversial decree that had aimed to introduce minimum fees for the commercial use of digital reproductions of state-owned cultural heritage, including works in the public domain, a decision that had received widespread backlash from the academic community and had been criticized even by the national Court of Audit – see previous Signpost coverage.

The new bill brings some encouraging updates for researchers who work with and produce open access material: academic publications of every kind, newspaper and magazine articles and art catalogues, together with brochures and other publications (printed in up to 4,000 copies) involving exhibitions and cultural events, have all been exempted from having to pay fees for using reproductions, in line with the so-called Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code (CCHL), an Italian law originally approved in 2004 to "support the role of cultural heritage institutions in sustainable economic and social development".

However, both Grossi and University of Florence professor Paolo Liverani remarked that the bill and the CCHL still present some legislative flaws and confusing passages that could be detrimental for freedom of access to and sharing of reproductions of cultural heritage in the public domain. In an analysis for JLIS.it (in Italian), Liverani noted how the MoC "didn’t have the courage to [fully] abandon the previous formula [of the bill]" and hold public conversations with academic and cultural experts in the rewriting phase. As a result, the original fee system has been kept in place, despite being "neither acceptable, nor practically feasible", especially outside of Italy, as confirmed by a recent sentence from the trial court of Stuttgart (source in German), which rejected the MoC’s request for compensation in order to allow toy company Ravensburger to use a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man for a new model of their 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle series. Among other aspects, Liverani also points out at the mistaken definition of "open access" provided by the bill, which is generically indicated as "publications freely accessible by everyone in virtue of not having a cover price", without any clear reference to the various types of Creative Commons licenses.

Plus, the decree still requires local cultural institutions to individually review requests submitted by applicants which do not belong to any of the categories exempted from payment: this bureaucratic process might not only take a toll upon the boards' economic and human resources, but also put researchers at risk of unequal treatment, since the bill could be interpreted differently depending on the area. However, as argued by Grossi, this same aspect could also lead to wider freedom of access to and reproduction of cultural heritage, if local institutions prove virtuous enough to extend exemption rights to other categories; she also noted that such organs have the right to cut fees entirely, which might be particularly beneficial to institutions in lesser-known areas and/or with lower budgets.

Overall, Grossi and Liverani agree that, despite some notable issues, the new version of the MoC's decree is a step back on the right track, although the former reminds that "it's now the turn of cultural institutions, the scientific community, researchers and volunteers (presumably including Wikimedians, nsp) to test these concessions and see how far we can go". – O

WMF white paper on privacy and research ethics: community feedback request

Wikimedia Foundation staff have presented a draft for the "Wikimedia Research Best Practices Around Privacy Whitepaper". Creation of such a whitepaper outlining privacy guidance for academic researchers to avoid doxxing contributors was requested last year by the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee in one of the remedies of the arbitration case on World War II and the history of Jews in Poland. The Arbitration Committee said:

Formal request to the Wikimedia Foundation for a white paper on research best practices

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T337883

1) The Arbitration Committee formally requests that the Wikimedia Foundation develop and promulgate a white paper on the best practices for researchers and authors when writing about Wikipedians. The Committee requests that the white paper convey to researchers the principles of our movement and give specific recommendation for researchers on how to study and write about Wikipedians and their personal information in a way that respects our principles. Upon completion, we request that the white paper be distributed through the Foundation's research networks including email newsletters, social media accounts, and web publications such as the Diff blog.

This request will be sent by the Arbitration Committee to Maggie Dennis, Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability with the understanding that the task may be delegated as appropriate.

Passed 11 to 0 with 1 abstention at 16:30, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Updated to include Phabricator tracking at 09:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Community feedback on the draft presented now is invited by 30 April. The WNF has also scheduled a Conversation Hour:

* Join us for a Conversation Hour on 23 April 2024 at 15:00 UTC. This conversation will be guided by some questions to encourage actionable feedback. Join via Google Meet.

• We encourage you to use the talk page/discussion feature to provide your input. If you need a private space to communicate your feedback, you can do so by sending an email to research-feedback@wikimedia.org with "privacy white paper" in the subject line.

– AK

Iranian ex-Steward globally banned by WMF

Mohsen Salek at Wikidata 2022 in Istanbul

Former Steward Mohsen Salek (User:Mardetanha) was globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation on 8 April 2024.

Mohsen has been a prominent movement figure for many years, a past co-author of Wikimedia "Diff" blog posts and the recipient of an honorable mention in the Wikimedian of the Year 2016 event for creating the Persian-language version of the "Wikipedia Library".

– AK, G

Brief notes

[[File:|center|300px|]]

Example filler image and caption.

• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the four newest Wikimedia movement affiliate throughout the first quarter of this year, including the Wikimedia User Community Group Niger, the Telugu Wikimedians User Group, the Wikimedia Community User Group Cyprus and the Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana.
• New administrators: None to report; the last RfA was conducted in February.
• Record low active administrators: The number of active administrators is still falling since the record reported in the last issue of The Signpost. The new record low is 436, set on 18 April check for update before publication, and has not been above 450 since March 8.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week:
  • Simple English Wikipedia reached 250,000 articles.
  • Irish Wikipedia reached 60,000 articles.
  • Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
  • Moksha Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles.
  • Xhosa Wikipedia reached 2,000 articles.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Pool, which will be followed by Exploration. Please be bold in helping improve this article!

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• News has just come in on the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Persian Wikipedia has surpassed 1 million articles. --Andreas JN466 14:46, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

@Jayen466: Thank you, I'll add it to the list! --Oltrepier (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

• Do you have any information for the reason for the global bans, especially for Mohsen Salek? Your links just take one to a log page. Was there a discussion about this? Or was it just a mysterious "office action" where no justification is provided? It just seems like this global ban might be based in political reasons which would be a huge disappointment I think. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:56, 25 April 2024 (UTC)```

There was some speculation in the Signpost newsroom, but it didn't progress to where we thought it made responsible elaboration on what was published. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:37, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I met Mohsen at a conference — such a gregarious conversationalist and delightful person to have around! I'm very curious about what happened. I'll miss seeing him around. Crunchydillpickle🥒 (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Liz, this is very worrying. It reeks of political censorship. --NSH001 (talk) 20:50, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

It's so weird there's no note on why, or the lack or a reason, especially given the last Signpost issue's discussion of Wikipedia's transparency mentioning blocks as an example. //Replayful (talk | contribs) 21:17, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

• About the Graph Extension: I made the comment on the Telegram channel that this is one of the cases where the relationship between the volunteer community & the Foundation has not been successful. By this I am not blaming the Foundation (well, not having a prompt fix is arguably their fault), but that we volunteers have allowed ourselves to become helpless when faced with a problem like this. There was a time when a problem with the software presented itself that the volunteers with programming experience &/or knowledge would simply come up with a patch themselves to fix the problem. But now we expect the Foundation to fix all of the problems we encounter.
  So what was preventing one or more people who were tired of the Foundation's lack of action doing something? The source code is available for download; it could have been put on a test bed & one or more volunteers could have hacked out a patch, then submitted it to the Foundation. That patch then would have to be seriously evaluated -- rejecting it out of hand would be a bad look for the Foundation. Definitely it would require testing before being applied, which would lead to bugs identified, & the submitters informed. That's part of the software development process. Worst case would be volunteers confirming the Foundation's statement that fixing this was a difficult task. Nevertheless, something would be happening, & we volunteers would feel empowered.
  In short, this issue about the Graphs extension is a sign that the volunteer community have adopted learned helplessness into our culture. And it is up to us to expunge this defect, because it does not critically affect the Foundation. --- llywrch (talk) 18:05, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

We at Wiki Project Med have been working on integrating OWID for nearly a decade now. This initially began as a collaboration with WMF staff using the graph extension. When that failed we duplicated OWID on the wmcloud.[1] And than imported that into a mediawiki.[2] To get it on WP we were told it needs to move to production servers and have a WMF team to manage it. We next looked at just bringing OWID in directly via a gadget after getting reader consent which is now live in EU WP.[3] There is currently discussion regarding if this will be permitted.[4] I guess we will see. But the community is working on various potential solutions. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:29, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

While i agree that learned helplessness is part of the problem here, i think it goes further than that. It looks like the articles were intentionally kept in a broken state in order to try to put presure on WMF to implement a preferred solution. There are failures here on all sides. That said, i think the biggest problem is that once you dig, there is wide disagreement among the community about what "graphs" should be. Its hard to fix a problem when you can't even figure out what you are supposed to be fixing. Bawolff (talk) 02:11, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

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