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World launch for Wikipedia town paves way for global roll out across local communities

17 May

Innovative collaborative project puts Monmouth on the world map and provides access to almost half a billion people.

 Ahead of New York, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Beijing and Berlin, the global digital age reaches a new landmark this week as Monmouth, Wales officially becomes the world’s first Wikipedia town on Saturday 19 May. 

This world-first in information sharing will provide instant multilingual access to Wikipedia pages for smartphone users through data collection and recognition tools known as QRpedia codes.  Wikimedia UK, the charity body that promotes Wikipedia and other wiki projects in the UK, has been working in partnership over the past six months with the town of Monmouth and local government body Monmouthshire County Council on the project, known as Monmouthpedia.

The Monmouthpedia project creates multilingual versions of Wikipedia pages, about every notable place, person, artifact, flora, fauna in the town of Monmouth and makes them instantly accessible to smartphone users in the town through the installation of QRpedia codes in key locations. The clever part, according to the Monmouthpedia team, is that QRpedia codes display the content in the user’s own language. So, if someone from France whose device is set to work in French scans a code, the Wikipedia content will display in French. The same applies to any language that has related content on Wikipedia.

Roger Bamkin, a Director of Wikimedia UK and co-creator of QRpedia,said: ”We’re delighted that Monmouth is becoming the world’s first Wikipedia town. Both the quality and quantity of the new Monmouth Wikipedia content is outstanding, reflecting the rich cultural, historical and natural heritage of the town. At last foreign visitors cannot only read information in their own language, but they can edit it too.”

The project has galvanised the local community of residents, businesses and volunteers who have teamed up with the Wikipedia community to create hundreds of new articles about Monmouth in 25 different languages, as well as improving hundreds of others and according to Wikimedia UK, helps to make this a truly global project as well as a very local one. With the focus on collaboration, many of those contributors taking part have never been to Monmouth, or even the UK.

John Cummings, the local project lead, said: “Wikipedia is all about working to share the sum of all human knowledge with everyone. Monmouthpedia has shown that whole towns can make a contribution to this effort. Because QRpedia codes can be accessed in different languages they have been used throughout the world. I think that giving free access to information in this way allow us to have a richer experience of the world around us.”

Becoming the world’s first Wikipedia town has attracted numerous benefits for Monmouth, including a boost to both local tourism and business alike. Kellie Beirne, Monmouthshire County Council’s Chief Officer for Regeneration and Culture said: “Monmouth has always been known in the UK as a great place to visit and do business. We very quickly realised that embracing technology and fantastic global community projects like this benefits everyone in Monmouthshire and we are delighted to be involved in something so innovative, creative and forward-looking.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has taken a keen interest in the project from its inception and the fact that the world–launch is in Wales has not escaped his attention: “I’m really excited by the Monmouthpedia project. Bringing a whole town to life on Wikipedia is something new and is a testament to the forward thinking people of Monmouth, all of the volunteers and the Wikimedia UK team. I’m looking forward to seeing other towns and cities doing the same thing!”

Since its inception the project has been the subject of intense global interest and has been covered by media from all five continents, partly because of its simplicity. According to Wikimedia’s Roger Bamkin it’s this simplicity that makes the project replicable in every town, city and village around the world, a fact that the team is keen to highlight.

Roger said: “We’ve shown in Monmouth that all it takes is a little creativity, energy and cooperation to put a town on the map and take it to an audience of 480 million people a month. Monmouth may be the first Wikipedia town but we’re hoping for many, many more to follow. Your town could be next, and we hope it is.”

 Contact details

 For Wikimedia UK press enquiries please call Stevie Benton, Communications Organiser, on +44 (0) 20 7065 0993 or +44 (0) 7771 778 734.  You can also email press@wikimedia.org.uk or stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk

 For Monmouthshire County Council press enquiries please contact Helen Reynolds at HelenReynolds@monmouthshire.gov.uk or on 01633 644 788. 

For the Monmouthpedia project lead please contact John Cummings at john.cummings@monmouthpedia.org or on 07579 965 063.

 Notes to editors

 1. Wikimedia UK is the Wikimedia chapter for the UK. It works to support, develop  and promote Wikimedia Foundation projects, such as Wikipedia. It does this by bringing together the Wikimedia community and by building links with UK-based cultural institutions, universities, charities and other bodies.

 2. Wikipedia is the largest reference work ever created. It’s the sixth most visited website in the world, attracting around 480 million unique visitors every month.

 3. The Wikimedia Foundation’s projects include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Commons.

 4. Pictures relating to Monmouthpedia are available here and here

 

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, Monmouthpedia, Wales, Wikimedia UK, Wikipedia

 

If You Have News, It Will Be Aggregated and/or Curated

30 Apr

 

The Pew Research Center has come out with a massive new report on the state of media as part of its Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it comes to a number of conclusions about where the industry stands—including the fact that Twitter and Facebook are still driving a fairly small amount of traffic to media outlets (although this segment is growing quickly) and that such tech giants as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft control almost 70 percent of online advertising. But one other thing that becomes clear from the Pew report is just how big a role aggregators of all kinds—both human and machine-powered—are playing in news consumption.

 

Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many newspaper companies and other traditional media outlets still seem to think the vast majority of their audience comes to them directly and prefers to read their content above all other sources. More than anything else, this is the core philosophy behind the rise of paywalls—which more and more papers are implementing—and also the millions of dollars media companies have poured into developing iPad apps and other walled-garden-style approaches to news delivery. The assumption is that readers will want only the content that comes from that specific outlet.

 

For many consumers, however, aggregators of various kinds are the way they consume their news now, whether through Web-based portals like Yahoo News or Google News, or through a variety of newer aggregation-based apps and services, such as Flipboard, Pulse, or Zite for the iPad, as well as News.me, Summify (which was recently acquired by Twitter), and Percolate. According to the Pew report, almost 30 percent of consumers get their news from a “news organizing website or app,” compared with the 36 percent who go directly to a media company’s website or app.

 

In effect, many users seem to be looking to generate their own digital-newspaper-style overview of the world rather than accepting one from a single media outlet, and if the content they are looking for comes from an aggregator like the Huffington Post because the original is behind a paywall, then so be it. The problem for media companies is that this kind of behavior is in direct conflict with most of the business models they’re relying on for revenue, whether it’s advertising or app- and paywall-based subscription services—which is why such media moguls as News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch continually accuse Google of “piracy.”

 

And the problem is actually even bigger than that, since the Huffington Post and Google News are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to aggregation and/or curation. Although Facebook and Twitter may not be huge factors in terms of news consumption at the moment—as my colleague Staci has pointed out at paidContent—with only 9 percent of users saying they get their news from those networks, that figure has grown almost 60 percent in the past year alone and is likely continuing to increase.

 

To some extent the curation phenomenon is helping mainstream news organizations, because people are sharing links that get clicked on and drive traffic back to news outlets. This is especially the case with Twitter, since the Pew report notes that a larger proportion of users follow official media sources there, while a majority of Facebook users get their news from friends and family members. But just as with aggregation apps and services, the content that any single media company produces just becomes part of the sea of content that is distributed through these networks.

 

On top of that, Facebook itself is becoming much more of an aggregator of news, through the “social reading” apps it offers from such outlets as the Washington Post and the Guardian. Although both newspapers have bragged about the number of people who have registered for their apps and shared content through them, the reality is that much of the benefit from that activity ultimately goes to Facebook—in terms of the time users spend on the site, the advertising they are exposed to, etc.—rather than the news outlet.

 

Emily Bell, the former Guardian digital editor who now runs the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, noted in a response to the Pew report on Twitter that social platforms like Facebook are becoming “frenemies” with media companies, since they generate traffic but also suck up much of the benefit in terms of advertising.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-19/if-you-have-news-it-will-be-aggregated-and-or-curated

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Posted in Advertising, Changing face of news delivery, News Curation, Project for Excellence in Journalism, The Pew Research Center

 

Back the Bid! Bringing Wikimania to Bristol

01 Apr

Wikimania is the annual conference for the Wikimedia Foundation (so basically the Wikipedia conference). This year it is in Washington, D.C. and in previous years it has taken place in Haifa, Gdańsk, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Taipei, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Frankfurt.

The host city is chosen, not surprisingly, in an open, wiki-like manner by members of the Wikimedia community and bids are invited from cities/communities that are interested in organising the event.

Thanks to some amazing work primarily from Steve Virgin, a board member of Wikimedia UK based locally, Bristol has entered a bid for the event in 2013. There is some stiff competition (including London which I find slightly strange with two bids from the UK..as if anyone needs another event in London!) and the bid from Hong Kong in particular looks very compelling.

That said the Bristol bid stands out in my opinion (no bias there of course!). Steve has pulled together a hugely impressive list of local organisations and companies who have agreed to support the bid and the city has a vibrant Wikipedia community as well as a wonderful potential venue with Bristol Uni supporting the event. Plus god knows we know how to throw a party :)

I think an event like this in the city would be a real opportunity to get alot of new people interested in Wikipedia beyond just a tool to settle the occasional pub argument and as evidenced by the huge success of things like Ignite Bristol people in this city love to learn as long as its a little bit fun as well! Not to mention the support I’m sure the event would get from our friends down the road in Bath who have just delivered an amazing Digital Festival.

I’m hoping to convince organisations like JISC, the Research Councils, Mozilla and Creative Commons where I know they have a commitment to ‘open content’ etc (and where I know the odd person!) to say some supportive things in public as well.

I think the Plone Conference back in 2010 organised by Matt and the guys at Netsight demonstrated Bristol was a great venue for big geeky conferences and bringing Wikimania to the city would be a real win I think and I encourage everyone I know to ‘back the bid’ even if just with the occasional tweet.

http://digitalbydefault.com/2012/03/31/back-the-bid-bringing-wikimania-to-bristol/ 

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013_bids/Bristol

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Posted in Bristol Wikimania 2013, Wikimedia UK, Wikipedia

 

Oooaaarrrr, Wikimania 2013 could come to Bristol

01 Apr

Just a quick post to register my support for an exciting local project.

Some fine folk in Bristol have been quietly working hard to submit a bid to bring the annual Wikimania event to the city. Bristol already attracts influential writers, journalists, media types and whatnot with the popular Festival of Ideas. And Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently paid a visit to Bristol. Despite being up against cities such as Hong Kong and Surakarta – which are more, well, well-known – there’s a spirit about Bristol best summed up as ‘So what, we’re gonna have a go anyway’ and it would be amazing if we won.

Find out more and support here.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013_bids/Bristol

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Posted in Bristol Wikimania 2013, Wikipedia

 

8,200+ Strong, Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access

21 Mar

 

Evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen made this t-shirt design in support of the Elsevier boycott.

 

Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research. Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.

 

But the fight for open access is just getting started.

 

Seem dramatic? Well, here’s a little test. Go to any of the top academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full article, mind you…not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You’ve just logged one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR. Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.

 

Paying a high price for academic journals isn’t anything new, but the events that unfolded surrounding the RWA was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It began last December when the RWA was submitted to Congress. About a month later, Timothy Gowers, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University, posted rather innocently to his primarily mathematics-interested audience his particular problems with Elsevier, citing exorbitant prices and forcing libraries to purchase journal bundles rather than individual titles. But clearly, it was Elsevier’s support of the RWA that was his call to action. Two days later, he launched the boycott of Elsevier at thecostofknowledge.com, calling upon his fellow academics to refuse to work with the publisher in any capacity.

 

Seemingly right out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, researchers started taking a stand in droves. And the boycott of Elsevier continues on, though with less gusto now that the RWA is dead. It’s important to point out though that the boycott is not aimed at forcing Elsevier to make the journals free, but protesting the way it does its business and the fact that it has profits four times larger than related publishers. The Statement of Purpose for the protest indicates that the specific issues that researchers have with Elsevier varies, but “…what all the signatories do agree on is that Elsevier is an exemplar of everything that is wrong with the current system of commercial publication of mathematics journals.”

 

The advantages of open access to researchers have been known for some time, but its popularity has struggled.

 

It’s clear that all forms of print media, including newspapers, magazines, and books, are in a crisis in the digital era (remember Borders closing?). The modern accepted notion that information should be free has crippled publishers and many simply waited too long to evolve into new pay models. When academic journals went digital, they locked up access behind paywalls or tried to sell individual articles at ridiculous prices. Academic research is the definition of premium, timely content and prices reflected an incredibly small customer base (scientific researchers around the globe) who desperately needed the content as soon as humanly possible. Hence, prices were set high enough that libraries with budgets remained the primary customers, until of course library budgets got slashed, but academics vying for tenure, grants, relevance, or prestige continued to publish in these same journals. After all, where else could they turn…that is, besides the Public Library of Science (PLoS) project?

 

In all fairness, some journals get it. The Open Directory maintains a list of journals that switched from paywalls to open access or are experimenting with alternative models. Odds are very high that this list will continue to grow, but how fast? And more importantly, will the Elsevier boycott empower researchers to get on-board the open access paradigm, even if it meant having to reestablish themselves in an entirely new ecosystem of journals?

 

As the numbers of dissenting researchers continue to climb, calls for open access to research are translating into new legislation…and the expected opposition. But let’s hope that some are thinking about breaking free from the journal model altogether and discovering creative, innovative ways to get their research findings out there, like e-books or apps that would make the research compelling and interactive. Isn’t it about time researchers took back control of their work?

 

If you are passionate about the issue of open access to research, you’ll want to grab a cup of coffee and nestle in for this Research Without Borders video from Columbia University, which really captures the challenge of transition from the old publishing model to the new digital world:

http://singularityhub.com/2012/03/18/8200-strong-researchers-band-together-to-force-science-journals-to-open-access/

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Posted in Cambridge University, Elsevier, JSTOR, Malcom Gladwell, Michael Eisen, National Science Foundation, Rsearch Works Act, Timothy Gowers

 

EU commission admits mistake on Acta

21 Mar

The European Commission has said it was surprised by the scale of opposition to a global anti-counterfeit treaty, having underestimated the power of social media to mobilise protesters. Maros Sefcovic, a commission vice-president, on Tuesday (20 March) admitted his institution was caught on the back foot when thousands of people earlier this year took to the streets to protest the agreement.

“What is the power of the people? We saw it recently here in January and February when we suddenly realised that, in spite of the freezing temperatures, we had thousands of people in different squares in Europe protesting against Acta.” Acta – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – is meant to protect intellectual property rights, as well as target counterfeit goods and generic medicines, but critics say it undermines freedom of expression and privacy.

The European Commission, negotiating the treaty alongside EU member states since 2008, has often been in the firing line over the secrecy of the international discussions.But the issue really flared up when it and 22 member states signed the document in January and formal ratification began. “We saw how our absence in the world of social media on this particular topic caused us a lot of troubles,” Sefcovic told a Brussels audience. “I think this is a lesson for all of us that we have to be much more active and in a much more communicative mood when it comes to such sensitive topics in the future,” he added.

The protests took place in several cities in Europe, resulting in a series of member states deciding to suspend ratification. The European Parliament, which can reject the treaty, received a two-million strong global petition against Acta. The commission for its part made tactical semi-retreat in February by saying it would turn over the treaty to the EU’s highest court to see if it breached any EU laws, particularly on privacy. “We saw this huge wave of communication on the social media to which we didn’t react on time (causing) the situation where we need now to backtrack a little bit and look for reassurances from the European Court of Justice,” said Sefcovic. But some believe the commission took the easy way by seeking to depoliticise the discussion and focus it on legalese. Martin Schulz, head of the European Parliament, recently suggested that by taking the court step, the commission had removed the immediate chance for parliament to discuss an issue that citizens feel strongly about.

http://euobserver.com/871/115646

 

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Posted in ACTA, European Commission, Marps Sefcovic

 

Newspapers the fastest-shrinking industry in the U.S.

12 Mar

Using five years’ worth of data from the Council of Economic Advisors, LinkedIn has calculated how the job rate has grown or declined in various industries, finding that between 2007 and 2011, the U.S. newspaper industry shrunk the most of any other industry analyzed, LinkedIn reported. While the “internet” category and “online publishing” are two of the fastest growing industries, up 24.6 percent and 24.3 percent, respectively, from 2007 to 2011, the newspaper business lost the greatest percentage of jobs, down 28.4 percent, Business Insider explained. Such depressing numbers about the newspaper industry should come as no surprise considering that, in 2007, The New York Times Company was trading for about USD 25 a share, and in February 2012, USD 6.56, according to another Business Insider article. And as The Atlantic pointed out with some telling graphics, print advertising in newspapers has “collapsed.” Despite the growing internet and online publishing industries, a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellency in Journalism showed that newspapers’ online advertising revenues are not making up for print ad losses, as for every USD 1 gained in digital advertising, USD 7 are lost in print revenue

http://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-9277-newspapers-fastest-shrinking-industry-us

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Posted in Advertising, Business Insider, Council of Economic Advisors, Linked In, New York Times, Online news, Publishing, The Atlantic

 

EU songwriters urge antitrust probe of broadcasters

02 Mar

Songwriters from 28 European countries urged EU antitrust regulators on Wednesday to investigate broadcasters, including the British Broadcasting Corporation, Mediaset and British Sky Broadcasting , for allegedly making unfair music publishing deals. The European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA) said in a formal complaint filed with the European Commission’s competition division that the broadcasters had breached EU antitrust rules. It said composers were frequently forced to assign the copyrights to their music to a publishing company owned by the production company or broadcaster as a pre-condition prior to being given a commission. Other broadcasters named in the complaint include TF1, ZDF Digital Medienproduktion GmbH, RTL Group, SAT 1, ARD, Rat Pack Filmproduktions GmbH, The Studio Hamburg Group, Grundy UFA TV Produktions GmbH, Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana S.p.A., NTR, RTL Netherland, DDB Amsterdam, Sky1, ITV Studios Limited, ITV plc and Zodiak Media Group. ECSA represents more than 12,000 composers and songwriters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/29/ecsa-broadcasters-eu-idUSL2E8DSCBT20120229

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Posted in ARD, BBC, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), Copyright, European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA), ITV, Mediaset, Publishing, Rai, RTL, SAT1, TF1, ZDF Digital

 

Australia: ABC to integrate Facebook and Twitter into programmes

24 Feb

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has teamed up with the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation to introduce Facebook and Twitter content to its programmes as part of the broadcaster’s social media strategy. ABC’s manager of new media services, Chris Winter, told Fairfax Media: “It’s about allowing people to engage a little more than they have been able to in the past with what they’re watching. “One of the great prompters of conversation is what you’re watching on the telly. In the past we sat in the lounge room and talked to the person sitting next to us, in the future it will become easier and easier to engage with people who are not in the same room.” The broadcaster wants to engage with viewers using smartphones and tablet computers while watching TV content. Developed by National ICT Australia (NICTA), the technology can overlay online discussions currently occurring on Twitter discussion on top of any show across the ABC’s multiple channels.

http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2012022420044/abc-to-integrate-facebook-and-twitter-into-programmes.html

 

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Posted in Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Facebook, Twitter

 

Associated Press sues ‘parasitic’ news agency over licensing claim

15 Feb

Associated Press is suing a digital news agency, claiming that it uses unlicensed content without paying licence fees. AP, which claims to be the world’s biggest news agency, said on Tuesday it had filed a lawsuit against Meltwater News in a district court in Manhattan. Meltwater News allows its clients to monitor breaking news stories from around the world, including content from AP and other agencies. AP is seeking an injunction and substantial damages from Meltwater News in the copyright infringement action. Tom Curley, outgoing chief executive of AP, accused Meltwater News of a “parasitic” use of content produced by news agencies. AP claimed in its court filing that Meltwater News refuses to pay licence fees for the content it allows users to monitor in the US. The Norway-based firm also has a “vast archive” of AP stories dating back to 2007 which users can store and access despite them not being available online, according to the filing. AP has fought a long-running battle against websites and search engines listing its content. In 2009, the agency went head-to-head with Google over its Google News index, but has since struck licensing deals with the search giant and other internet portals such as Yahoo and AOL

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/14/associated-press-sues-digital-agency?newsfeed=true

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Posted in AFP, Associated Press, Changing face of news delivery, Copyright, Meltwater News, Newswires

 
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