Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-10-16

In a mailing list post on Sunday, Jimbo Wales discussed a possible scenario—what copyrighted works would the Wikipedia community want purchased and released under a free license, with a budget of US$100 million? Wales indicated that an anonymous donor might be willing to purchase a number of works and freely license them.

Suggestions poured in about what the money could be used for. Some users suggested that the money be used to try and reduce copyright terms, but Wales noted that the money was not for general use, and would be handled by an outside party, not the Wikimedia Foundation. Other suggestions included a variety of images, books, textbooks, encyclopedias, fonts, newspapers, and other sources.

No specific information is available on the source of such a fund, or on a timetable for the fund's development. Wales did note that he wished for the fund to be sustainable, and was open to suggestions on how to ensure this.

Replaceable fair use

In a marginally related area, fair use images, where a free image could easily be generated to replace them, can now be deleted after a

Cyclist Floyd Landis, who finished first in the 2006 Tour de France but is fighting a positive doping test that would strip him of the title, is now pushing his case on the Internet. Facing an appeal before the United States Anti-Doping Agency next year, Landis dubbed this approach "the Wikipedia defense".

Landis announced on October 12, 2006 that he had published a number of documents in the case "to support his innocence in the alleged positive doping test". These included his attorney's motion for dismissal, a document package containing test information, and a

Landis did not set up an actual wiki, but attempted to draw on the collective resources of cycling fans, using the internet to allow widely distributed review of evidence in his case. He succeeded in getting the community to establish its own wiki independent of him personally, based largely on the Daily Peloton Forum discussions noted below. The topic had already drawn intense interest in a variety of places, including Landis's Wikipedia entry, which has figured as something of a battleground. The release serves as both a public relations strategy and a way to potentially strengthen his appeal. As Landis put it, "Why turn down free brainpower?"

In anticipation of the release of these documents, Landis had been personally posting on the forums at the Daily Peloton cycling website. He is largely out of action while rehabilitating from hip resurfacing surgery performed in September. As the documents were about to be released, Landis said, "I am sure you guys will find every mistake, even things we haven't noticed."

In forum discussions, Landis agreed with sympathetic posters who pointed to this as a "wisdom of crowds" approach, while asking others not to judge him based on incomplete information from media reports. He encouraged people to look at all of the evidence, saying, "We'll call it the Wikipedia defense, and I would have given everything to you sooner but had a very hard time selling the idea to the lawyers." At the same time, he said that not all of his arguments against the test had been revealed: "We are not going to compromise our defense by telling all of it."

Logo votes begin

The fourth and final phase in the search for new logos for Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wiktionary began this week. The previous phase had identified the best variant of proposed logos, and a vote will now take place to determine the new logo for each of the three projects. This is the third vote in the process of designing and choosing new logos, and the votes will last until 31 October.

Milestones

This week, the

• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 35,000 edits.
• The Arabic Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
• The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
• The Ukrainian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The Low Saxon Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Sundanese Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wiktionary has reached 200,000 entries.
• The Lombard Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Javanese Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Japanese Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 160,000 articles.
• The Min Nan Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Newar / Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Wu Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Chinese Wikinews has reached 500 articles.
• The Tagalog Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 38,000 articles.
• The Greek Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
• The Greek Wiktionary has reached 65,000 entries.

Use of Wikipedia free image content

The

• Starting with
  Jdorje's track map generator. A link to Wikipedia's 2006 Atlantic hurricane season is included, although the images
  are not identified as being from Wikipedia.
• In a BBC News online article on the new flag of Lesotho, the flag image is credited to Wikipedia and Zach Harden
• In an article on the unexpected results in experiments into
  elementary particles of matter, Physorg.com uses an image (uploaded by German user Aegon
  ) from Wikipedia that illustrates the known particles using a penguin analogy.

A recent effort to discuss deletion of a number of anonymously created articles upset the editors at