Wikimedia news/numero 81/en

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Wikimedia News n. 81, July 24th 2014

A screenshot of @Parlamento_wiki Tritter account, source:Twitter

Wikipedia and Twitter for transparency

Wikipedia and Twitter cooperate in forbiding 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, but 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 similaraccount 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”.

A close-up of the flier about "freed" monuments, by Alessandra Gasparini, [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

Wiki Loves Monuments becomes big(ger)

The new edition of Wiki Loves Monuments is growing and it reached the 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 digs with their camera. The Soprintendenza has “freed” all the monuments and the “emergenze” located in one of the most important sites of the world. Along with that, a long list of Monicipalities 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, just watch the blog, updated as soon as a new trip is planned, or you can suggest a destination by writing at contatti@wikilovesmonuments.it. The only requirement, it must be one of the participating Municipalities.

ANPI frees all the biographies

The ANPI plaque in Sesto San Giovanni (MI) - by Triangle rouge (Own work) [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

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

File:European Commission logo.svg

Logo of the European Commission, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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. Not only documents can be licensed, but they can also be i public domain (CC0). A list of licenses compliant to Open Source principles can be found here: Conformant Licenses

OpenStreetMap

Density of OpenStreetMap nodes, by Martin Raifer, [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

• 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, but power stations, metro lines and so on).

• Many newspapers reported about the #agenziauscite initiative (for example on the Corriere della Sera) but, after the addition of the attribution on the Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare, it is time for asking about the openess of the Italian land register.

• The new portal cycle.travel is devoted to bycicle 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 0.30 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.

Novità dal mondo wiki

Un'intervista durante Wikimania 2013, by Allan Aguilar (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

• L'appuntamento annuale con Wikimania si avvicina e questa volta toccherà a Londra. Ma in cosa consiste Wikimania? Fatevene un'idea guardando il video dedicato all'edizione 2013 a Hong Kong su Wikimedia Commons, oppure con sottotitoli in inglese su YouTube o Vimeo
• Dal 15 al 17 luglio si è svolto a Berlino l'Open Knowledge Festival, tutto dedicato al mondo Open Data. In calendario, anche un workshop sullo sviluppo di OpenStreetMap a supporto di questioni umanitarie, seguito anche dal nostro Tesoriere Cristian Consonni. A fare da moderatore Katie Filbert di Wikimedia Deutschland, membro attivo di Wikidata.
• Con una storica sentenza il Tribunale di Roma ha assolto Wikimedia Italia e Wikimedia Foundation dalle accuse mosse da Antonio e Giampaolo Angelucci, padre e figlio, imprenditori e politici italiani. Sono state due le sentenze emesse, la prima il 9 luglio (per Wikimedia Foundation) e ora la seconda in favore di Wikimedia Italia, con le quali il Tribunale ha esonerato sia la Fondazione americana, in quanto hosting neutrale, che il capitolo italiano dalla responsabilità sui contenuti pubblicati dagli utenti su Wikipedia.