notablog

...on Wikimedia Commons. The vote for the Picture of the Year 2008 has begun and like every year, I am flabbergasted with the amount of amazing pictures that Commons reveals.

I thought I would list here my criteria for choosing the pictures I supported this year. This is how I proceed:

• Look at the gallery
• Click on the pictures that catch my eye
• Enlarge them to see them at full resolution
• Go back to the credits page to see where the picture comes from.
• Vote

And these are the criteria I keep in mind when choosing to support a picture or not.

1. The picture needs to catch my eye. This starts with a thumbnail, so any picture that does not have enough contrast or does not present something "different" does not go past the first page.
2. The picture needs to be of "good quality". This means a high resolution to start with, but also a picture with as little grain as possible and with details as sharp as possible. In the case of diagrams and animations, the smoothness of the animation or the fact that the diagram is in svg will prevail.
3. The picture should be of "encyclopedic nature". There are lots of debates about what is an encyclopedic picture, but I guess that for me it means that the picture should find its place as an illustration in one of the Wikimedia projects.
4. The picture should be clear in its subject. This means that I pay attention to how the picture is cropped, what frame was chosen and whether it illustrates well the subject it is about.
5. The technical skills that the picture entails. This goes especially for panoramas or macros.
6. Who took the picture. I must say that I give plus points for pictures taken by "normal contributors" as opposed to pictures imported from Public Domain repositories (such as US governmental organisations). This is my little way of promoting the individual contributor. Mind you, I have supported some "imported" pictures when they were particularly to the point, or when they represent historical views or art pieces.
7. My subjective opinion or emotion also plays a role, there are pictures I simply love, others I just like. This is the personal factor to my vote. However, there are a few pictures I love but which are in my opinion too far from all of the other criteria to catch my vote as "picture of the year".

You'll find on Commons the list of pics I voted for in the first round.

Crédits Images :

• Vendeuse d'arachides - © Roman Bonnefoy, licence CC-BY-SA 3.0 - Source: Wikimedia Commons
• Ammonite lamp post at dusk, Lyme Regis - © MichaelMaggs - License CC-BY-SA 3.0 - Source: Wikimedia Commons (I didn't vote for that picture because although it is probably one of my favorite, I find it does not answer the "encyclopedic" criteria that I set myself).

It is interesting to see how far Creative Commons licenses have gone, and as interesting to note how much work there is to do in order to make free licenses enter everyday's world.

Netzpolitik reports that Al Jazeera put their video footage from the war in Israel under a CC-BY license, and that is great news indeed. It goes to prove how important free licenses are. In this conflict where so little footage is available, because journalists are not allowed to film, I find it fantastic that a news network, which primary goal should be to inform, allows others to use and reuse their information. The information is also of a critical nature, and although news networks are probably used to doing this, to engage in long conversations about what footage can be bought/used/reused would probably harm the quick pace at which this information should be made available. So kuddos to Al Jezeera for doing this, I can only wish more news networks and information sources would do so.

On the other end of the free license spectrum, I stumbled upon a completely different aspect of how people understand copyright while surfing on MakeTechEasier. I must say the last words in this post, which read:

Note: I have taken a lot of time and effort to write up this tutorial. You are free to link to this post, but please do not copy the whole article to your blog/website. THIS IS A COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL.

caught my attention. Especially this comment, which states:

I hope you don’t mind. i have added this as a howto on my webpage, and linked it back to you.

So I followed the link, and ended up on Dave Field's post about the same topic and there again, another line caught my attention:

The Writer has actually copyrighted his material, something i would never personally do, as its counter Open source [...]

The interesting thing here is the discrepancy between the intent (be more like Open Source) and the way copyright is understood (I would never copyright my work). At the time I wrote the commentary, the blog did not have any license information. As such, copyright in its strictest sense was enforced by default.

That is where there is so much work to do. Most people (and I don't blame them, it took me a hell of a lot of time to understand this copyright/free licenses stuff) are using the legal terms wrongly. A free license does not make the "copyright" disappear and you don't have to really "copyright" something since "copyright" _is_ there as soon as you are the author of anything. Of course, you can add a copyright on something provided there are no existing rights. But few people actually know that as long as there is no copyright/license information, any content should be presumed as heavily copyrighted. And few people know that "Open Source" does not necessarily mean dropping the copyright altogether, but rather making sure that the strings attached to the copyright allow better use and reuse of contents. It's interesting that the author of the MakeTechEasier post felt he had to add a warning at the end of his post. In an ideal world, everyone would know that since the source of the tutorial is clear (ie. he signed his post) his copyright should be respected.

And I guess it is our duty, as "open source" or "free content" advocates, to make these things clear and make sure that people understand tham. Hard task if any.

On a more personal note, I am glad and a bit proud that the blog's author decided to use a CC license for his blog after I wrote my commentary, and I can only hope one thing, is that he will spread the word ;-).

There is something smug about having the next president of the United States follow me on Twitter. Even if I am one in tens of thousands and it's probably not him twittering and all.

So I am back from Copenhagen, where I was at the 9th edition of Reboot.

Her eyes looked to see if she could find a way across. The buldozer was shovelling earth in front of her, stopping her in her mechanical movement.

You just have to find out who knows what

Well, the Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something has been a long standing slogan for the construction of Wikipedia. However, I am not going to linger on the Wikipedia aspect of it, but rather on the applications I see in other areas, and especially on the organisational area of Wikimedia.

Or how Wikipedia addresses its "customers" and how the form reflects the content

N.B. I started this post more than a year ago and never put it on line, so some of the information is somewhat obsolete, but I decided today to take it up again and leave the first part as I had written it then.

Reflexions on a lost career

We went to MIT today, to visit the Media Lab (Media Laboratory) and see what we could do there for the next Wikimedia Conference. The place is huge. As we arrived in Boston, we went to the FSF official launch of the GPL 3.0. The only thing I recall at that point is thinking well, this is just like any other university in the world; imposing monuments, shabby insides and notice-boards that have been so used they just look like a giant pinhole.That was when I entered through the front door. Now, the Media-Lab is situated in a white building not too far from the banks of the Charles River

When it's quiet enough inside my mind
When the devils have stopped playing the harp and drums
When the chickens have grown their teeth and become crocodiles
When angels light fires and fireworks play with the sun
When every man speaks Truth to every other man
Then, and only then,
Maybe, I can rest.

Where one learns that signs are an unknown concept on the other side of the Rhein