Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-07-04/News and notes

News and notes

Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director; Wikimedia lawsuits in France and Germany

Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director

In his opening address to Wikimania 2016, co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that Katherine Maher will be the new executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation:

Jimmy Wales announces the Board's decision to appoint Katherine Maher as the WMF's third executive director (23 min 20 s).

“

Katherine has been a steady force of leadership and joy and commitment to Wikimedia values since joining the Foundation in 2014. She's been a long-time advocate, even before joining us, of global open communities. As you probably are aware, she's been our head of communications before she took on the executive director role. ... Katherine has something that many in the tech world find easy to lose—what I call "intuitive empathy". She truly understands that our community is about people, and that people come before technology. She fosters the human connections through communication and astute governance ...

I have a big, big announcement. Yesterday in our Board meeting, in a unanimous vote, we appointed Katherine as ED of the Wikimedia Foundation [rapturous applause, asks Katherine to come forward]. This ended her time as interim, it ended our search for an executive director. This is not just a surprise decision to all of you; it was a surprise decision to those of us on the Board. We came into the meeting, we heard a report from the staff engagement survey, we had all been talking to staff, ... the level of engagement, excitement, positive feelings about coming to work every day, has been absolutely astonishing since Katherine took the reins, and we all looked at each other in the Board meeting [to] discuss the executive search, and we [said to each other] what are we looking for? Here we are! This is what we wanted all along. So, here's Katherine.

”

Luis Villa, lawyer, programmer, and former C-level at the Foundation directs his main advice to the Board.

The Foundation published a press release on 24 June announcing the appointment, which has come after the tumultuous events surrounding the early departure of the previous ED, Lila Tretikov, after less than 18 months in the job. Maher was appointed interim ED starting 14 March, largely on the basis of advice from the WMF's "C-level" executive team, and shortly after was interviewed by the Signpost. A search to fill the post in a permanent capacity began in May.

Soon after Maher's permanent appointment, the Signpost asked seven prominent Wikimedians what, in their view, are the most urgent priorities for her to pursue over the next 12–18 months. Luis Villa (LuisVilla) is a lawyer and programmer who worked as deputy general counsel and then senior director of community engagement at the WMF for three years until his departure in early 2016. We approached him explicitly because of his close experience within the organisation, from which he now has a little distance:

Josh Lim suggests more responsiveness to the changing needs of communities in developing countries

“

Katherine will be an excellent ED, but her job is very difficult: the movement faces many challenges, and WMF has relatively limited resources. So I won't second-guess her by picking any immediate priorities. The board, however, has clear urgent priorities:

Strategy: The board shares blame for the Knowledge Engine fiasco, because they did not effectively help set strategy. It must work with Katherine to define strategy, and lead editors to make it a movement strategy, not just a WMF strategy.
Board effectiveness: The board must do a post-mortem of their work of the past two years (staff/exec/ED turnover, situation with James H., Knowledge Engine, etc.), and implement solutions for the problems they identify (for example, by improving their HR capacity or improving board member recruitment).

”

Vassia Atanassova prioritises community trust, transparency, and engagement.

In the same address at Wikimania, Jimmy Wales announced Emily Temple-Woods (Keilana) as joint Wikipedian of the Year, along with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Rosiestep) (separately covered in this edition). Their concerns were shared by a number of the respondents. Temple-Woods told us: "I think the most important thing Katherine will need to do at the beginning of her tenure is to rebuild trust between the WMF and the community. Everything else can come from that." Stephenson-Goodknight believes "Katherine's most urgent priority is assuring there's a healthy workplace environment for staff and movement environment for the community."

Josh Lim (Sky Harbor) is the president of Wikimedia Philippines: "I feel that her main priority at this time should be to rebuild trust in the WMF and reaffirming that it is on the community's side. We've seen what happens when change comes from above and is "dictated" to communities; let's hope Katherine's leadership will see more empowering leadership coming from the ground up, and will in turn lead to meaningful outcomes that will allow the WMF to be more responsive to the changing needs of our movement, especially as it pertains to communities in developing countries where the WMF continues to do poorly."

The two runners-up for Wikipedian of the Year were Vassia Atanassova (Spiritia), a member of the Wikimedians of Bulgaria user group, and Mardetanha, a long-time steward and Farsi-speaker. Atanassova said: "one of the urgent priorities should be returning the community's trust in the capability of the Board and the ED to be transparent and engaging the community in the process of decision and policy making." Mardetanha told us: "I think the ED has to work on lost trust [between the] WMF and community, and to have better connection with local groups. The ED needs to pay a lot of attention to the communities from weaker countries—to be reachable to community members, to have better oversight on WMF expenses, and to make the hiring process more transparent."

Risker stresses executive hiring, stabilisation, and then progressive change.

Risker currently serves on the Wikimedia Foundation's Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), which scrutinises and recommends funding for large bids by eligible WMF affiliates. She is a former member of the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee:

“

In the first 12–18 months, I'd say a very early priority is for Katherine to fill in the gaps at the executive level, especially the CTO role. The newly constituted Board has already made it clear in public comments that the development of a strategy and some longer range planning is a significant priority—one that other communities can depend on in order to establish their plans. From my own perspective, I think the full appointment will allow for stabilization and then progressive, considered changes as movement priorities are re-examined and modified.

”

T

Wikimedia lawsuits in France and Germany

There were important developments in two Wikimedia lawsuits in June: a victory in France, and a defeat in Germany.

As reported on the Wikimedia blog, the Paris Court of Appeals has ruled in favour of the Wikimedia Foundation in a right-of-response suit, defending the Foundation’s status as a hosting provider:

The Court acknowledged that the Foundation merely hosts user-uploaded content and does not have knowledge or control over the data stored as it merely provides, free of charge, “the infrastructures and the organization framework allowing internet users wishing to do so, to build projects by contributing and editing content themselves” without playing any active role.

As a result, the Foundation does not have an obligation to allow the complainant, Élizabeth Teissier, a French astrologer, to make her own posting on Wikipedia in response to an article about her.

The defeat in the German case does not seem to have been reported on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. As described in a WMF blog post last November, the suit brought by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum against both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland “concerned copyright claims related to 17 images of the museum’s public-domain works of art, which have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.”

The Reiss Engelhorn Museum pointed out that the images were created by its in-house photographer and demanded the removal of the images from Wikimedia Commons, as their presence on the site—where they were marked as being in the public domain—had led to multiple cases of unapproved re-use, including commercial re-use.

The Wikimedia Foundation argued that as the works photographed were in the public domain, the resulting photographs, aimed merely at creating a faithful reproduction of the underlying work, should also be in the public domain. The court disagreed, ruling that the work of the museum's photographer is protected regardless of the public-domain status of the photographed work, and justified its decision by pointing out that creating faithful reproductions of art is a far from trivial task, requiring special effort and expertise to set up and light the shot in order to arrive at an image that correctly represents the colour hues and details of the original, and that freedom of information does not include the right to appropriate and profit from the skilled work of others without asking permission.

In a statement posted on the Wikimedia Deutschland blog, the Wikimedia Foundation expresses the view that the German court’s decision is erroneous, that even if the photographs were subject to copyright, they would not be subject to copyright in the United States, and that the decision whether the images—presently housed in a special category on Commons—should or should not remain on Wikimedia Commons thus lies with the volunteer community. While the Wikimedia Foundation was found liable as a contributor to copyright infringement (“Störer”), the suit against Wikimedia Deutschland was dismissed, as Wikimedia Deutschland does not manage the Wikimedia Commons site.

Reiss Engelhorn Museum general director Alfried Wieczorek welcomed the court's decision and explained that the suit was not motivated by any ill-will towards Wikipedia:

As far as we are concerned this case is not about harming Wikipedia, or of us fundamentally disagreeing with this project. On the contrary: we have great sympathy for the Wikipedia project, and share with Wikipedia the object of spreading knowledge. But in this case, the question for us is who should decide whether and especially how our holdings should be made available. Even if one supports the free public accessibility of cultural items on Wikipedia, it is difficult for us to comprehend that a single Wikipedia author claims the right to decide on their own to release to everybody the results of work created with public funds on Wikipedia for free and thus also for commercial use.

The Wikimedia Deutschland blog post asserts that the museum forbids visitors from taking pictures of the artworks in question; German press reports say that while photography in the museum's public display areas is forbidden, permissions to photograph artwork are granted upon request.

The Wikimedia Foundation has said that it will appeal; judging by comments from the media, it seems likely that the case will eventually end up at the German Federal Court of Justice.

AK

Brief notes

The Signpost is moving to a fortnightly publication schedule.

Fortnightly Signpost: Given the present shortage of contributors, the Signpost is moving to a fortnightly publication schedule.
Wikimedia UK: Wikimedia UK has released its annual report 2015–16 and announced that Chris Keating has stepped down from the board after five years of service.
Wikistudies: Announced on Wiki-Research-L: “Wiki Studies is an interdisciplinary, open access, peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Wikipedia and higher education. We are interested in most all of the same topics hosted on the research listserv and the newsletter, including articles about pedagogical practices, epistemology, bias, mission, and reliability. We will not charge for submission or publication, and will offer open access to readers. We will host on Open Journal Systems. We are just getting started. We are recruiting editors, and plan to have a presence at the upcoming Wiki Conference North America in San Diego 7-10 October 2016. We hope to publish our first volume in March of 2017, consisting of submissions received by 31 December 2016.” The website is: Wikistudies.org.
Archive.is removed from spam blacklist: Following a recent Request for comment, archiving site archive.is has been removed from the English Wikipedia's spam blacklist.

Minister Bussemaker posts her first article and opens the Writing Week on Cultural Heritage.

Dutch minister starts article to open Writing week on Cultural Heritage: On 29 June Dutch minister Jet Bussemaker of Education, Culture and Science opened the Writing week on Cultural Heritage by posting the Dutch version of the article whose English version is Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels. Flemish minister Sven Gatz of Culture and Brussels minister-president Rudi Vervoort are participating as well and will send a certificate of participation to a Wikipedian who writes about Cultural Heritage in their respective regions. See Commons:Category:Writing weeks cultural heritage 2016.

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4 July 2016 (all comments)

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Thanks to Katherine for agreeing to take on this very difficult role. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:54, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Do you know when the critical question synthesis of the meta:2016 Strategy/Draft WMF Strategy and its discussion is due back from the strategy process facilitator contractor? It's been "(coming soon)" redlinked in the infobox there for over three months now. @Katherine (WMF): do you know? EllenCT (talk) 21:44, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This promotion from within is sure to be the best approach. At this stage of an organization's lifecycle, there is no substitute for institutional memory and experience, and dropping in some outsider just because they have a good leadership record at some completely different sort of entity would probably have been a mistake. As I told Katherine a few months ago, I didn't think the "provisional" nature of her promotion in the wake of Tretikov's departure should mean "temporary"; glad I predicted correctly. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 17:17, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think removing archive.is from the blacklist might be the best thing right now. At least at the Video Game WikiProject a lot of dead websites we use there are on Archive.org have been hit with robots.txt. WebCitiation I believe can also get their archives taken down with DMCAs. We're gonna need archive alternatives. GamerPro64 19:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is a big win for the sports articles, which have short half-lives. Hawkeye7 (talk) 01:26, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It may be worth "lobbying" Archive.org to stop honoring robots.txt on sites that are news and secondary sources. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 17:19, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I would definitely do that if I knew how because of some rather important websites for the Video Game Projects are suffering from link rot or are dead. GamerPro64 03:27, 9 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why the report failed to name the plaintiff in the French case, Élizabeth Teissier. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 14:04, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Because this was just a very brief summary—with a link to the WMF blog post explaining the matter in detail—and the name was hardly important to the principle the court ruled on. Then again, no objection to mentioning it either. Andreas JN 466 15:22, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This was one of the things that Wikipedia does well. Wikipedians compiled a list of faulty predictions that she had made. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:28, 6 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For http://wikistudies.org (mentioned in "Brief notes"), see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=wikipedia+education.—Wavelength (talk) 18:42, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How about German Wikimedia community organizes some protests in front of the museum? The museum is wasting its and WMFD money on pointless grandstanding lawsuits, and hurting free culture. Some pickets and demonstrators could make them see how stupidly erroneous stance they are taking. Also the more attention is drawn to idiotic policies preventing photographing and reusing museum content, the better. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A well-considered suggestion. If I lived in Mannheim or its vicinity, I would not hesitate to create a few (German-language) placards depicting such sentiments as "Public art belongs to the public" or "Publicly owned museum is wasting taxpayer funds on frivolous lawsuits" or "Disseminate knowledge instead of suppressing it" and spend a couple of hours each day picketing in front of its entrance. Those who are not within a reasonable distance of Mannheim may decide to submit notes of protest and condemnation on the museum's website. —Roman Spinner (talk)(contribs) 15:19, 6 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, compromise is not good enough for us now. We really need to have the court ruling overturned. Otherwise, the public domain will be thwarted by institutions holding the originals of artworks and images, like the people who fence off access to public beaches. Hawkeye7 (talk) 04:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The comment by the German museum spokesperson reveals a major cultural difference, I think: The idea that there could be something wrong with "releas[ing] to everybody the results of work created with public funds" just does not compute for many of us, including anyone from the United States. The very fact that it was created with public (i.e., taxpayer) funds, not private expense, is why it should, in this view, be in the public domain; US caselaw overwhelmingly leans in this direction. Given that the WMF servers are US based, I'm skeptical that any German legal "long arm" concept is a threat to the foundation.

Copyright and other content laws differ all over the world, and the entire online content sphere operates on the principle that you follow the laws of the country you're hosting in. Otherwise anything that, say, Chinese law wanted to suppress would have to be removed from servers in Canada and Borneo. The real world does not work that way, so I'm skeptical the German decision could actually affect what's on WMF server. However, I strongly agree with WMF's decision to appeal, since the negative ruling would harm the free flow of information out of Germany, from sites hosted there, and I'm glad to see the foundation taking an activistic position on free content (even if I also think WP's own internal WP:COPYRIGHT rules are too restrictive of fair use, mostly in furtherance of libre principles rather than legal requirements). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 17:17, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

While a German decision would not be binding on other countries, it could be cited as a precedent. That often happens in copyright cases. Hawkeye7 (talk) 04:58, 9 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The museum can try to talk like this is about some principle, but the only principle to be seen here is the ability of someone to take a public domain work, lock it up, say no one can take a picture of it, say their own picture is "really quite a lot of effort" and deserves copyright protection despite the lack of originality, and thereby turn that piece of cultural patrimony into their own private money well forever and ever -- unless that is, people get so ticked off that they simply expunge all conception of the work from public dulture, Wikipedia, books on art history etc. and simply are content to permanently erase it from history, which surely is the nobler and more satisfying option. Wnt (talk) 23:25, 13 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with most of the replies on this issue, and particularly with the one immediately above. The gallery is not taking public domain works and locking them up, it is preserving and displaying them for the public to see. And it is not saying "no one can take a picture of it", it has said "permissions to photograph artwork are granted upon request." It has used public money to pay a professional to photograph the artworks, and the resulting images are the gallery's property. Its decision not to make them public may seem odd, but it is acting within its legal rights. Maybe it is doing this as a consequence of its deal with the photographer, who does not want to see anyone making commercial use of their work. Anyway, it has the power to do as it chooses with the images in which it holds copyright under German law. I believe that Wikipedia is wasting money on this case. Maproom (talk) 21:00, 20 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure she's great and all but it seems like this person has a few hundred edits total, that is, including both her WMF and personal account (User:Maherkr 221 + User:Katherine (WMF) 149), and that's only roughly since she's been associated with WMF. How can a person lead this community without knowing about what it's like to be an editor? Jason Quinn (talk) 18:42, 16 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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