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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/News and notes

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News and notes

Foundation report; gender statistics; DMCA takedowns; brief news

Foundation's report for January: Anniversary impact, Brazil and India travels

The Wikimedia Foundation's monthly report for January has been published, much of it related to the celebrations of Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15. The Communications Department observed that although journalists and other commentators have often been very critical of Wikipedia since its inception, "as the 10th anniversary approached, the international media seized the opportunity to reassess: this resulted in hundreds of stories around the world that were overwhelmingly positive" (an observation that had similarly been made by Sue Gardner and some Wikipedia critics, see Signpost coverage). The report called the shipment of "more than 80 Wikipedia 10 celebration kits" (with T-shirts, buttons and stickers) from the WMF to event organizers worldwide "an important pilot for the Wikimedia movement: new data about customs, logistics, and postal services for a wide range of nations has been gathered, and new processes for soliciting orders from chapters or other groups for timely delivery have been developed." Preparations to set up a Wikimedia merchandising webstore are underway.

The Human Resources Department reported a downside of the celebrations: "A large percentage of the staff in San Francisco was out for at least a week with the 'WikiPlague', a variant of the RSV virus that we seem to have caught at the 10th Anniversary Party." The department also reports that it has "started tracking metrics for new hires and the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole, and will start compiling anonymized data regarding diversity and other internal characteristics so that we stay mission-aligned."

Staff members of the Global Development department spent time in India and Brazil in January, and progress with the "Catalyst Projects" for both countries was reported.

Among the visitors to the Foundation's office in January, the report records representatives of IT firm Trivad, Inc, three consultants from communications firm OMP (a former employer of Chief Community Officer Zack Exley) attending a "Wikipedia brainstorming", the CEO of Paymentwall (a company offering ecommerce solutions) and the CEO of Charity Navigator.

Wikipedia's gender gap examined further

DMCA takedowns of fair use and US-Gov-PD images

The Foundation complied with two more DMCA takedown requests last week, continuing the recently established custom of making copies of them available on its website (cf. previous Signpost coverage).

The first request came from the US Department of Health and Human Services, concerning photos on Commons that apparently had been mistakenly designated as public domain by publishing them on the government's own websites: "Although the images had been posted to the public NCI/NIH Websites in the past, that posting was done in error. ... The photographs are protected by a license agreement and none of the parties involved ... has ever intended for the image to be in the public domain." Last month, the photographer had contacted the NCI, who took down its own copies of the images and notified the Wikimedia Foundation.

Another DMCA takedown request last week resulted in the deletion of a photo that had been illustrating the article about 1960s style icon Talitha Getty. According to the image description page as still available in Google's cache, the image had been uploaded on 15 November 2010, copied from another website with a resolution of 344 × 457 pixels, with a standard non-free content rationale as it is frequently used for portraits of deceased persons, which includes a fair-use claim.

Briefly