Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-08/News and notes

Second museum gets Wikipedian in Residence
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (said to be the largest of its kind in the world) recently invited Wikimedians for a "backstage pass" tour, as described by Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) on his blog. It is currently hosting Lori Phillips (User:HstryQT) as a Wikipedian in Residence (see GLAM/TCMI and Wyatt's guest post on the museum's blog), making it the second institution to use this concept, after the British Museum's pilot project earlier this year (see Signpost coverage).

Lori Phillips intends to "mine the museum" to discover good illustrations and material that could be used for Wikiprojects; they have already started photographing their collection for Commons along with compatible copyrights for Wikimedia's use. The Children's Museum is dedicated to the concept of "Family learning" and currently has no online catalog of their collection, but plans to have one soon. Lori Phillips is also helping the Museum Studies course run by IMA conservator Richard McCoy (User:RichardMcCoy) to write Wikipedia articles about notable artworks in the Indiana Statehouse.

Wyatt and Phillips talked with the staff about their concerns in working with Wikipedia. When asked by a staff member about Wikipedia's responsibility to minors, Liam Wyatt explained that Wikipedia is not censored for age-appropriateness, and there is ongoing work being done with issues related to controversial content. He also noted that there is "nowhere else on the unrestricted internet that is dedicated to making NSFW information as un-titillating as possible." In a staff-only presentation he pulled a Google result for "Sex" and chose Wikipedia's entry from the top results, he proceeded to show the article and the accompanying images - from human conception to an illustration of Sexual Dimorphism in a Pheasant. He mentioned that the staff was impressed with the educational and yet direct approach of Wikipedia.

See also Phillips' summary of a November 2 talk by Wyatt and Adrianne Wadewitz at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, "Wikipedia & GLAMs" (an interactive Prezi presentation by Wyatt), and last week's Signpost coverage of Liam Wyatt, Katie Filbert, Lori Phillips and Richard McCoy attending the "Museum Computer Network conference".

for sanity
The October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. (a gathering of an estimated 215,000 people to protest extremes in US media and to promote reasoned political discourse) featured numerous demonstrators bearing signs adapted from Wikipedia's "citation needed" template, among them Wikipedian (and Wikimedia Board member) User:Mindspillage (Kat Walsh), whose website shows some amusing juxtapositions with other signs at the rally. References to the template in popular culture date back at least to the July 2007 "Wikipedian protester" cartoon by webcomic xkcd (tooltip comment: "SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION"), which has since been used in turn on Citation needed to illustrate the concept, and had inspired earlier such demonstration signs. In 2008, Boing Boing reported on an artist who had printed little "citation needed" stickers for a "culture jamming" project, to mark dubious claims on public ads and signs.



Briefly

 * Illustrated licensing tutorial: On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, Guillaume Paumier has announced the availability of an illustrated licensing tutorial for Wikimedia Commons, commissioned from a freelance illustrator as part of the Multimedia usability project. Within three days, Wikimedia translators have already produced about 20 translations and about a dozen localized SVG versions.
 * Research consultant: Dario Taraborelli has been hired by the Wikimedia Foundation as a Research Consultant. He will be advising on and supporting strategic research projects for the foundation.
 * "A bad first date?": A draft schedule for the GLAM-WIKI conference on November 26/27 in London has been announced. Alongside keynote presentations by Sue Gardner and Cory Doctorow it includes a talk by Tom Morgan, Head of Rights and Reproductions at the London's National Portrait Gallery, titled "Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery - A bad first date? A perspective on the developing relationship between Wikipedia and cultural heritage organizations" - in reference last year's legal issues (see Signpost coverage: "UK public gallery threatens Wikimedian" and the article National Portrait Gallery copyright conflicts; it is not publicly known whether they have been resolved yet).


 * Citizendium's finances running low: After the free collaborative online encyclopedia project Citizendium adopted a governance charter in September (see Signpost coverage), its newly elected "Management Council" took over leadership of the project from the outgoing editor-in-chief, its sole founder Larry Sanger. During this process "it has come to light that the financial situation of the project is not as sound as we had thought it to be", according to a November 6 announcement from the Council on the Citizendium forums. An earlier thread on the forums, titled "Finances running dry by the end of the year", was apparently publicly visible by accident and removed from public view soon, but not before having been captured, discussed and summarized at RationalWiki (its existence was later acknowledged by Citizendium's Managing Editor). It quoted an internal email from Sanger, where he warned that "we have just $1800 in the account and our hosting costs $700/month. ... It turns out that CZ's main benefactor ... is no longer interested in supporting CZ." Earlier this year, Sanger had told the Times Higher Education that he was considering "handing the reins to a university or a scholarly press" to ensure Citizendium's future (see Signpost coverage).