Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force.

I fail to see any trademark problems here. Trademark law exists to avoid confusion among customers with regard to brands, logos, and names. Based on the EFF’s article, it appears that all this site was doing was using the name to refer to the site itself, not host a faux Wikipedia or deceive Wikipedians into going to Wikipedia Art instead. The site itself even has a disclaimer at the top of the page denying any involvement with Wikipedia. I for one am grateful that the EFF has not overlooked their principles on free speech just because the site in question just happens to be Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation should retract their accusations and apologize immediately (or at the very least provide an explanation for this action).

• Electronic Frontier Foundation

Licensing Sanity - Credit: Brianna Laugher (CC BY)

Wikipedia is voting to switch to CC BY-SA from the GFDL.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

…

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Do it.  CC BY-SA FTW.

• Creative Commons

We described the suit previously, but it’s worth a recap, if only for some of the choice quotes involved. The case was filed by a literary agent, Barbara Bauer, who apparently ran afoul of a small horde of Internet users. It’s difficult to reconstruct the temporal sequence of events based on the defamation suit she filed, but it seems likely her problems started when her name appeared on a list of the 20 Worst Literary Agents, hosted on the now-defunct site 20worstagents.com. According to accusations made there, Bauer was on the list because she’d inflated her credentials and never successfully closed a deal; she was also called a “scam artist” and a “con.”These accusations were picked up by a large number of personal blogs, where they were frequently amplified. In her complaint, Bauer quotes different blogs as referring to her as “that lunatic,” her colleagues as a “posse of dumbshits,” and their actions as “random nuttiness.” In addition to roughly 20 private individuals, a few larger organizations that hosted some of the blogs were also named in the suit, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In an event that should surprise no one, some of the accusations made their way into a Wikipedia entry, and Bauer names the Wikimedia Foundation as a defendant in her suit.

This is where the Communications Decency Act comes in. Section 230 of the act states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Wikimedia’s lawyers argued that the claims be dismissed, as it was an interactive computer service, and any defamatory information came from another content provider.

Although Bauer’s lawyers fought the motion, Judge Jamie S. Perri of New Jersey’s Superior Court found their arguments uncompelling. In an extremely cogent ruling running less than two pages, Perri granted Wikimedia’s motion, and dismissed all charges against them “with prejudice, and without leave to amend.” If Bauer can find evidence that a representative of Wikipedia was responsible for the offending text, the charges could be refiled, but otherwise, Wikipedia’s off the hook.

I’m glad this turned out well. Sorry about the late posts. Two more headed your way shortly.

• Ars Technica
• EFF
• USA Today

To speed up progress, researchers are creating a program to take data from an existing “Gene Wiki” and post it as stubs to Wikipedia. Instead of fighting Wikipedia, with their project, they’ve decided to work with it.

Since the launch of the project, the researchers have found the number of edits on mammalian gene pages to have doubled.

The researchers hope to create a positive feedback loop among scientists to improve the project and encourage community contribution.

“I think the idea of community intelligence is a proven model that will undoubtedly have a place in scientific research,” Su told iTnews.

This is certainly an important step in pushing the legitamacy of Wikipedia (as well as learning more about our genes).

• IT News
• Slashdot
• Plos Biology