Investigations on Russian copyright

Quite some of you are probably aware of the past copyright duration flame wars and wild assumptions on Soviet and Russian copyright in en.wikipedia, de.wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia projects. Lupo was the hero who did dive into this complicated matter and did enlighten this stuck debate with plain facts.

Now he has produced a real masterpiece out of this debate. He wrote a series of 4 for Wikipedia articles that cover all aspects of this topic. I was in awe, when I read through the articles and am pretty sure that this is the best available compilation of the whole affair of Russian copyright, but read yourself:

Copyright in Russia

Copyright law of the Soviet Union

Copyright law of the Russian Federation

International copyright relations of Russia

I can only recommend reading them, translating them into other languages and using them as fact basis for your daily copyright work on this matter. I’d love if other people can do such a comprehensive analysis resulting in Wikipedia articles for other nations where we have comparable debates, too.

A funny side aspect: We extend Wikipedia in order to teach ourselves and keep our project alive.

3 points for the Wikimedia roadmap

There is no doubt there are some points the Wikimedia Foundation needs adress in the future if they don’t want to loose contact to their basis – their more than 700 different Wikimedia communities.

Do you want to act globally or locally?

Define the role of the Wikimedia Foundation. Do you want to be an international organisation that is only concerned about maintaining the multinational Wikimedia projects and multinational events such as Wikimania or do you want to be a local grass-root Wikimedia chapter in the US, too? If you decide against beeing the US branch of Wikimedia please encourage and support people actively founding a US Wikimedia chapter. There is a strong desire of US people to organize local events and who need backing and help such as info and promo material, logistical support or just a Wikimedia membership in order to do their local work best. The current state is a severe problem for the US Wikimedia community.

Don’t aim for perfect solutions.

The Wikimedia server administrators and MediaWiki developers have done a good job at making our servers more stable and reliable. This is definitely a good thing so I want to say a big thank you to all developers. But there are some things stalled for ages, which are ready since a long long time. Just two examples: The new Wikitex engine that provides features desperately needed since ages such as music markup in MediaWiki and single login, which is desperately needed for all people that work across languages and projects (not to mention the fact that maintaining the election is easier and more logical with single login). Do not aim a solution without any problems which is impossible, find a good compromise between technical stability and bold improvements. Both named features will have their side effects but we wouldn’t use wikis if we couldn’t sort them out quickly after we activated them. So Wikimedia Foundation please encourage your people and developers to a bit bold again sometimes (of course not so often like in the beginnings .

Inform people what is going on

The easiest way to keep people informed is encouraging local wiki project people to write a regular summary about what is going on in the Wikimedia Fondation and in MediaWiki. There are already some really helpful efforts such as the Wikipedia Signpost, the Wikizine and Projektneuheiten (technical information letter in de.wikipedia which keeps people informed about technical changes). Encourage even more people translating them and contributing to them. Create a tutorial how to do so for people that want to keep others informed and link it prominently in an appropriate place. And although it is a bit time until the next election: Think about ways how to inform people actively and individually that are allowed to vote about the upcoming election. Every big real life election informs the people individually about such things for a very good reason.

Improve existing structures first

Originally I wanted to post this as a comment at the blog for a proposed Wikimedia Pennsylvania Chapter but it doesn’t allow anon comments (grmbl, there are cute captchas and the like). So I post it here:

I totally support the idea of locally involved Wikimedians but I think that a regional Wikimedia sub-chapter can only be the the last step if needed at all. There are many more important steps in advance:

At first: Why not just joining the Wikimedia Foundation as a (support) member? Regretfully the Foundation web site doesn’t give any useful information how to join formally as a real member (well we are all Wikimedia volunteers so the point on their web site is nothing new). This is a pity as a large scale official (support) members would maintain the role of the Wikimedia Foundation as grass root based and not going into corporate whatever and of course regular financial contributions by support member fees mean a constant and reliable source of donations (of course this can only be one part).

In contrast for example the Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. directly encourages people to join and get an official (support) member and people actually do so and Wikimedia Deutschland can partly base their expenses on member fees. And of course every member can publically say that he is a Wikimedian, which in turn opens doors in circumstances you mentioned.

So my advice is go and persuade the foundation to make it easier to get an official (support) membership and you won’t need a regional chapter anylonger.

The next thing are regional meetups: A brief look into Wikipedia:Meetup reveals that there is a huge distance between different US meetup cities and of course people don’t seem to meetup regularly.

In Germany (but also other German speeking countries) Wikipedians meet regularly and in quite some cities and towns. See Wikipedia:Treffen_der_Wikipedianer for a comparison. Each regular local meetup has its own page and people organize themselves rather efficient around that scheme.

And of course IMHO these very much interconnected regular local meetups are one of the secrets why the German language Wikipedia is the second largest (although languages like Spanish and French have a much larger potential). At local meetups people freely discuss their new ideas and past projects, start new projects like joined sightseeing for new free images, organize workshops and new article projects and motivate each other.