Whacky Wiki heads for disk down under

LAST MONTH a non-profit organisation was created to become the local Argentinan chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. And at the CAFECONF open source conference it began its evangelising work with a series of keynotes.

The organisation is still not officially a Wikimedia local branch but will soon be, says Patricio Lorente, adding that they have already completed the legal registration of a "civil society organisation" and the election of him as its director and other 14 seats at the ORG's management, including two renewed local figures of the OSS advocacy camp as Jorge Chaparro and Beatriz Busaniche from the Via Libre foundation.

The only pending task is apparently the approval of the Mothership. He also added that the organisation responsible for Wackypedia is becoming a global organisation, by opening up "local chapters " in most countries.

Wikimedia Argentina's Lorente

Among the tasks of this local chapter will be creating an off-line version of the Spanish language Wackypedia on CD, with the aim of having it reach schools without Interweb . He mentioned the open sauce nature of the MediaWiki software, the software bits that power Wackypedia under the hood, enabling the hordes of users to delete entries at will. In case you want to create your own Wackypedia or modify how it works, you can: it is distributed under the GPL licence.

Local Wikimedia chapters, with the new ones hight-lighted in cyan.

Patricio Lorente said they will try to make Argentina the host country for the 2009 edition of the "Wikimania" world conference, and also try to make " Wikipedia Off-Line" a reality. No, he doesn't mean bringing down the web site, but creating CD, DVD, and even print editions of it, in dead-tree version, presumably for reading while sitting on the ... couch.

Neutral Point of View
Lorente said Wikipedia encourages what is called a 'Neutral Point of View'.

But of course there's no such thing. He elaborated on the concept: "What Wikipedia calls neutral point of view is that every single different point of view on the subject matter gets its space on the entry".

He then put an example involving abortion: "Wikipedia will never say 'it's murder', nor will it say 'it's a human right'. Since it's a highly controversial subject, what Wikipedia will strive to is to show both points of view. It'd say that some religions or groups consider it a murder, and that some social movements consider it a right".

There is an emphasis on education at CAFECONF and Lorente's keynote was no exception. There were apparently a lot of teachers watching the speech, and they asked questions with regards to the use of the Wackypedia in schools and asked him for recommendations on how to better use the Wikipedia in the classroom. Lorente was very clear: "You must read the Wikipedia with a critical eye".

He also recommended teachers to check the "editing history" of every article to find out how many people contributed to it, if the article has been recently involved in an "editing fight", and if more than one point of view on controversial subjects is included.

Finally, he also dubbed the Wikipedia "a success" because "there's more people who want to do a positive contribution than there's people who want to do harm". He said that Wikipedia's policies are discussed with the community, and that there are automated processes in place to prevent vandalism. For instance, he said that if someone deletes an entire article or a big chunk of it, the system will automagically restore it to its previous state. Other processes require manual intervention by the human editors, he noted.

Detection of copyrighted content taken from other sources is also mostly automatic, he said. So if someone contributes text copied verbatim from another web site, a message appears telling the contributor to please check the text to ensure he has the rights to post it.

Fair Use does not exist
It was time for Q&A so we INQUIRED: "To your knowledge has the Spanish language Wikipedia had any problem with content owners with regards to the use of images depicting TV shows, actors and the like?" I asked this having in mind local media conglomerate Clarin which recently forgot to take its collective medication and went on a frenzy reporting thousands of TV programme videos from its Channel 13 TV station which were uploaded to YouTube and which the firm reported one by one as copyright infringements and brought down, later re-uploading a small amount of those to its own videos site which is slow as molasses and doesn't offer the same flexibility as YouTube-.

Patricio Lorente said "the Spanish language Wikipedia doesn't accept the concept of Fair Use for contributions". He explained that the whole concept of "Fair Use" is a legal construction in the U.S. of A., up North in the far military power numero uno -the latter are my words. He added that since legal systems, jurisprudence and and frameworks vary widely in the whole Spanish speaking "Americas", that the Wackypedia has taken the official position not to accept "Fair Use" in the whole region.

He concluded the reply and the very interesting keynote by saying that it was still "not a bad deal" in the case of TV images in Argentina, because under the local copyright law, such pictures would be free for use after 22-25 years, which means that images of TV programmes as recent as 1982 can be used already. µ