Wikipedia began 8 years ago today and now exists in 265(!) languages with over 10 million articles among them. In those 8 years Wikipedia has grown from an outlandish dream and into a reality far more outlandish than the original dream — it now seems silly to compare Wikipedia to past encyclopedias, for while Wikipedia … Read More “Happy birthday Wikipedia!”
Our final commoner letter of this campaign comes from Jimmy Wales, who needs no introduction. If you haven’t contributed, now is the time. Please help spread this letter far and wide. Now, Jimmy Speaks… —————– Dear Creative Commoner, Creative Commons recently celebrated its 6th birthday, and I want to take a moment to ask for … Read More “Final Commoner Letter: Jimmy Wales”
The globe lit up last week to celebrate the birthday of a community and organization now in its sixth year. Creative Commons, as demonstrated by these events, is about more than just free legal tools — it’s a powerful idea that has spread the world over. In Chennai the CC Birthday Party merged with the … Read More “Global CC Birthday Parties”
Erik Möller of the Wikimedia Foundation announced a questions and answers document concerning the possible licensing update for Wikimedia Foundation projects to CC BY-SA. On “What will happen next?” We will present a proposal for dual-licensing all Wikimedia projects currently using the GFDL, by January 15, 2009. It will be published on the foundation-l mailing … Read More “Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted”
It is one thing for the relatively nascent Wikipedia to embrace free culture as a way to create and share new cultural works, but it is another thing for established media players constrained by traditional markets and economic forces to embrace free culture. Despite this, it is becoming less difficult to convince incumbent mainstream press … Read More “Free Culture Swimming Upstream”
The Free Software Foundation has just released version 1.3 of its Free Documentation License containing language which allows FDL-licensed wikis to republish FDL content under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license until August 1, 2009. Excepted from this are FDL documents originating elsewhere unless they have been incorporated into the wiki prior to November 1, 2008. This … Read More “Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3”
After the fantastic success of Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, Wikipedia, The Open Planning Project, Free Culture @ Columbia, Free Culture @ NYU and Creative Commons have all teamed up to organize another free culture photo scavenger hunt hunt for this Saturday, September 27th! This time we’ve really stepped up the awards. The grand prize for the … Read More “Wikis Take Manhattan!”
The most frequently used audio and video formats on the web are not open (they’re software patent encumbered), which has hindered the development of free and open source media tools. Open audio and video formats face a tough chicken and egg problem: not interesting to publishers if not supported in software, and not interesting to … Read More “Cool open video news from Wikimedia”
Creative Commons uses Semantic Media Wiki for both our external wiki and our internal task and project management system. As opposed to a normal wiki where text is “flat”, the text and data inside a SMW can be structured in sophisticated ways that allow for meaningful querying of knowledge statements of the corpus. To give a … Read More “Semantic Media Wiki Quick Reference Guide”