Wikimedia news/numero 81/en
Official bulletin from Wikimedia Italia Association.
Wikimedia News n. 81, July 24th 2014
Wikipedia and Twitter for transparency
Wikipedia and Twitter cooperate in forbidding arbitrary and anonymous edits to articles about corridors of power around the world. Tom Scott, an Englishman, had the idea of creating a series of Twitter profiles to highlight all the edits to Wikipedia pages about powerful entities; then on July 9th Ed Summers, an American, created congress-edits: a profile where all edits to Wikipedia from anonymous users with IP addresses related to the US Congress can be showed. The goal is to preserve the transparency and reliability of Wikipedia. A similar account was just created also for Italy: its name is @Parlamento_Wiki and its stated goal is to “publish Wikipedia edits performed anonymously from the Italian Chamber of Deputies or the Senate of Republic”.
Wiki Loves Monuments becomes big(ger)
The new edition of Wiki Loves Monuments is growing and it reaches the large public: with the brand new joining of the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia the contest is now richer in possibilities for people visiting the archaeological site with their camera. The Soprintendenza has “freed” all the monuments and the “emergenze” (protrusions) located in one of the most important sites of the world. Along with that there is a long list of Municipalities and Institutions, accessible in the dedicated page of the contest website. There are also planned trips in August and September to take pictures of participating locations: to know where to go, just watch the blog, updated as soon as a new trip is planned. You may also suggest a destination, writing at contatti@wikilovesmonuments.it. The only requirement is that it must be one of the participating Municipalities.
ANPI frees all its biographies
The ANPI (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani - National Association of Italian Partisans) published all the 3072 biographies of Resistance Women and Men under a CC BY-SA 3.0 IT license: thanks to the choice of a free license, a project started on Wikipedia to facilitate the creation of new articles and the extension of the existing ones using that material. This effort is part of the bigger “Biographies project” of Italian Wikipedia, that gives guidelines for consistent and easy to understand biographies published on Wikipedia.
The European Commission endorses Creative Commons licenses
The European Commission recently invited Member States to use licenses compliant to “open” standards while publishing their documents. The published guidelines aim to support institutions of different countries in complying to the Directive in public sector information re-use.
Documents may be licensed, but the Commission urged the Member states to put them in the public domain (CC0 license) as much as possible.
A list of licenses compliant to Open Source principles can be found here: Conformant Licenses
OpenStreetMap
- OpenGeoFiction is a website based on the same application behind openstreetmap.org (from database to messaginng) with a difference: the represented world is not the real one, but a fictional one. Many users are using it to draw a plausible world set in our time (no orcs or elves: rather power stations, metro lines and so on).
- Many newspapers reported about the #agenziauscite initiative (for example on the Corriere della Sera). Now that the attribution on the Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare has eventually been added, it is time for asking about the openness of the Italian land register.
- The new portal cycle.travel is devoted to bicycle mobility, with a route planner based on modifications to the famous routing engine OSRM.
- OpenStreetMap Foundation announced the first corporate members.
Events and announcments
- From July 21th to August the first: during those two weeks, Wikimedia Italia offices will be open from Monday to Friday from 9.30 to 13.30.
- Saturday August 2nd 2014, Monastero Bormida: Simone Cortesi, Vice-president of Wikimedia Italia, is going to talk about Monferrato maps: from historic cartography to digital revolution. The panel is part of the exhibit "IL MONFERRATO, 500 ANNI DI ARTE, GRANDI ARTISTI IN UN PICCOLO STATO": open from July 5th to October 26th. Wikimedia Italia members can access at a discount rate of 5 euro, by showing the membership card.
News from the wiki world
- From the 15th to the 17 of July, Berlin hosted the Open Knowledge Festival, devoted to the Open Data world. A workshop about the development of OpenStreetMap to support humanitarian issues, followed also by our treasurer Cristian Consonni. Katie Filbert of Wikimedia Deutschland, active member of Wikidata, was the chair.
- The Court of Rome, acquitted Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia Foundation from the charges moved by Antonio and Giampaolo Angelucci, father and son, businessmen and Italian politicians. The two verdicts, the first on July 9th for Wikimedia Foundation and now the second one in favour of Wikimedia Italia, relieved both the American foundation, as a neutral hosting provider, and the Italian chapter from any responsibility about content published by Wikipedia users.
Notice: this newsletter is exclusively intended for information about Wikimedia Italia, both to its members and to the general public; as per Art. 1, Comma 2, Legge 7 marzo 2001 no. 62, it is not an editorial product