Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-06-15/Op-ed





Commons Picture of the Year: Wikimedians crowded out by external uploads
I could have written the usual, relatively uncritical Signpost coverage of the results of the Commons Picture of the Year competition in "News and notes" or as a "Special report", as we did here, here, and here, for example. But this year feels like the right time to take a look at a fundamental issue concerning the competition.



I should say up-front that I'm neither photographer nor photographic critic; indeed, my last international trip amply showed a talent for turning great photographic opportunities into forgettables. However, I do have a passing acquaintance with the English Wikipedia's featured picture forum from the two years for which I wrote the Signpost's "Featured content" page. There I was first exposed to the expert opinions of our regular reviewers, and it was through reading their comments, as a weekly drop-in observer, that I could at least learn the basic criteria and even a few technical terms (alas, without impact on my flunky tourist photography). In highlighting featured promotions I also became aware of a fundamental difference between featured pictures and the other featured forums: articles, lists, and topics are solely the work of Wikimedians; in contrast, featured picture candidates are of three types: first, those that have been wholly created by a Wikimedian; second, existing images selected and improved—often very skilfully—by a Wikimedian; and third, existing images merely selected and uploaded without input except for categorisation and a short description note on Commons. Items in these categories involve strikingly different levels of skill and creativity by our people, but if promoted, they're given the same featured status regardless.

I don't mind lumping images of these three types together in a single forum, whether on the English Wikipedia or on Commons, which has its own featured process: there, the throughput and number of active reviewers are just too small to fractionate them into categories. All the same, I must admit to a slight bias in my featured content Signpost coverage towards highlighting the work of Wikimedians over raw uploads from elsewhere. It seemed proper to give more oxygen to creative skill and originality in the community than to great images just grabbed from out there because they happen to be freely licensed.

However, the double-round annual Picture of the Year competition—open to raw uploads of external images, apparently on equal footing—is huge by comparison, and affords much more opportunity to corral those three types of images so that the design and photographic skills of our community can be more fitly recognised. In round 1, 3678 people cast more than 175,000 votes for the 1322 candidates; in round 2, more than 4000 people cast 11,570 votes for 56 finalists (the top 30 overall and the top two in each category). While the competition does aim to encourage uploads to Commons, it seems odd to put all into the same bag, whether the fruits of the highly creative work of community members or merely upload grunt. In any event, this year NASA images won both first and sixth places: I'm sure NASA isn't even aware of these accolades, and probably wouldn't care either way. Are we squandering our social rewards?

Kudos to all place-getters: there's some remarkable work here. However, allow me to bemoan the fact that the second round is not judged by a panel of experts after a democratic vote for the first round. In my view, the second-placed image belies the wealth of artistry in so much Islamic architecture: we're faced with half the image seriously underexposed almost to the point of black, the rest a bath of oversaturated colour without compositional depth. The design of the stained-glass windows does not appear to be worth highlighting—not to me, at least. With apologies to the photographer, I'm disappointed.

To return to the theme of astronomy, the third place-getter, taken from an external site, is indeed striking technically and artistically in several respects, although the gendered and vaguely sexualised title was clearly not thought through ("Milky Way lying above a lady"). At least there's a human in the picture.

David Illif's photograph of The Long Room at Trinity College Library gained fourth place and exemplifies this Wikimedian's prolific contribution to our repertory of article-ready pictures—and his talent for capturing grand interior perspectives.

Fifth place went to an image of the Seljalandsfoss waterfall in Iceland, by Diego Delso, who will be well-known to Wikimedia's featured-picture communities. His work also won 11th place with an image of a basilica church in Colombia, in which ornate gothic revival protrudes from a richly structured craggy hillside. The seventh and eighth place-getters were taken from Flickr, and No. 12 was released by the British Ministry of Defence.

No. 9 was of a pine-forest in Brazil just after dawn, by Heris Luiz Cordeiro Rocha. Here, light and shape combine to produce a serene, fog-streaked landscape. Tenth was Arild Vågen's picture of Rådhuset metro station in Stockholm, in which symmetry, straight lines, and reflection sit astonishingly within earthen walls and ceiling, challenging our preconceptions of railway stations as industrial forms.

Despite my misgivings about the structure of the competition, it has been a pleasure as usual to view so many entries of technical and artistic beauty. Congratulations to all involved. Tony1

Copyleft matters: Why Wikidata should move from CC0 to the ODbL
Andreas Kolbe's thought-provoking piece "Whither Wikidata?" sheds light on several troubling trends regarding the usage of Wikidata by third parties. Google and Microsoft, who secured well over half of Wikidata's initial funding, are now enjoying the fruits of our community's hard work with absolutely no strings attached. No considerations of public good.

As Kolbe shows, Wikidata usage by these companies lacks attribution, and this means end-users don't know the provenance of the data they are served up, and the community loses potential new editors. We are also harmed in a third way: any modifications made by others to this rich dataset do not return to the community at large: as far as Google and Bing are concerned, Wikidata is very much there to exploit as "free" as in "free labor".

Copyleft is the only assurance we editors have that our work will not be proprietarized (privatized, in plain English) down the line by third parties, who only truly care about free culture insofar as they can cash in on it, completely ignoring the spirit of sharing that is the cornerstone of our community.



A solution for this problem would be to move to a copyleft license. The Open Database License (ODbL), for instance, was designed for datasets such as Wikidata, and has been used most notably on OpenStreetMap. ODbL's "ShareAlike" provisions (much like those of CC BY-SA) would be a tremendous step forward for our project, as it would ensure that Wikidata and its contributors are credited and that any derivations of this work will be released freely for all.

We should not fear vain threats made by those who wish to use us as mere free labor for their enterprises. Wikidata's mission is not "to be the most used dataset in the industry". Its purpose goes way beyond that: we are translating knowledge into structured knowledge.

We should not bend to the power of industry monopolists. No amount of venture capital or ill-disguised "donations"—really investments made with certain expectations in return—should interfere with our goal of making knowledge accessible. In this context, accessibility means "trickling down" freedoms; every downstream user needs to have the same guarantees we are granting upstream.

Ideally, this should not be a controversial point. Among all Wikimedia projects, Wikidata is conspicuously alone in not being copylefted. Perhaps we should start asking why that is the case and whose interests benefit from weak licensing choices, and start to organize ourselves to fix this. NMaia