Wikipedia’s new license

Wikipedia has a new license. At least, that’s the theory. Starting June 15, new edits to Wikipedia will be dual licensed under the GFDL 1.3 and CC-BY-SA 3.0. Editors should be careful, however. Under the updated copyright policy, reusers will be informed that they can comply with the licenses’ attribution requirements simply by linking to the article (or, in print sources, by printing the URL of the article). Be sure you’re comfortable essentially releasing your edits into the public domain whenever you contribute to Wikipedia.

Picture of the Year?

The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year for 2008 has been announced. “Biandintz eta zaldiak – modified2.jpg“, by Mikel Ortega and Richard Bartz, has won. Boldly announcing itself as a “retouched photo” which has been “improved in many ways”, the ethical questions surrounding the photoshopped image seem to have not even been considered. Looking at the original photo (displayed here) and the explanation made by the original photographer, Mikel Ortega, there were two major types of alterations made. First of all, the tones and shadows were altered by the original photographer. Thus the unreal look which is probably what makes the image so popular. Secondly, a horse was removed from the background. This was the main edit made by Richard Bartz, who also did some additional tone mapping.

The altered image is not a depiction of reality. I suppose that’s fine as long as this is made perfectly clear, though I find it hard to see how such an image can fit within the Wikimedia Commons project scope. And as it turns out, the changes aren’t made perfectly clear, neither within the Wikimedia Commons nor on Wikipedia where it is used. Wikimedia Commons presents the altered image as the original, and the English Wikipedia, in what might as well be an example of exactly what not to do, the caption and surrounding text renders the removal of the third horse quite a relevant alteration.

No Scientologists allowed

It’s official – Scientologists are not welcome at Wikipedia. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of sensationalism, but in a bold move, the English Wikipedia’s arbitration committee has declared “All IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates, broadly interpreted, are to be blocked as if they were open proxies. Individual editors may request IP block exemption if they wish to contribute from the blocked IP addresses.”

It’s good that the arbitration committee is willing to relinquish the notion of “anyone can edit” rather than let the Scientologists destroy Wikipedia, but I doubt the majority of Wikipedians would even admit that they’ve done that, let alone establish consistent principles to combat all the other groups trying to spread their false notions. Deceit and hypocrisy flow from the top down at Wikipedia. It’s too bad, because the world really needs a comprehensive free encyclopedia accessible over the Internet.

Smartphones

The Palm Pre went on sale this weekend, and Apple announced the iPhone 3G S (IIIgs?) today. And I think I’ve finally made my decision – I’m going with an Android phone. I carefully compared the Blackberry Storm, the iPhone, the Palm Pre, and the HTC Dream (G1), and the G1 has all the features I need to get started in the smartphone space. I only say “get started” though. The iPhone is probably the best product of the four today, but the openness of the Android platform makes it the hands down winner for me for the long run. The few places where Google is not open are both understandable and well mitigated. Sure, there’s no root access on the G1, but Google provides the Android Dev Phone, which acts as the reference implementation for those who want to develop on an unlocked phone. Sure, Google has removed certain apps from the Android Market (its version of the app store), but this is an understandable agreement it made with T-mobile and apps can still be installed on an unhacked phone by directly downloading the packaging file. Sure, there is some DRM (digital rights management) support, but forcing people to take a few extra steps in order to pirate software is a good thing, and the DRM is optional in that software developers can choose to release their apps as “copy protected” or “not copy protected”.

I can’t wait until more providers start coming out with Android phones. I can’t wait to see if Verizon really does allow any and all apps to run on its 700Mhz network. I can’t wait – literally – I’m pretty sure I’m going to go ahead and buy a G1, and I’ll pay $100 to get out of my contract after 6 months if something all that much better comes along. Hopefully I’ll be able to write a few apps over those 6 months. I’ve played around with the SDK, emulator, and Eclipse, and it looks like a relatively easy platform to program for.

Images:

• InfoAnarchy logo, public domain, author unknown
• Biandintz eta zaldiak by Mikel Ortega, CC-BY-SA 2.0
• Scientologists Are Not Allowed To Google Scientology by Theda Bara, CC-BY-NC 2.0
• Bugdroid, copyrighted by Google, available under CC-BY 3.0