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In the USA, all government works are in the public domain, which leads to NASA images and others being usable by the public and due to the copyright status, also by Wikipedia.

In Germany, a different concept was chosen. The general idea is that mostly private corporation want to use works by the government, e.g. publishers of books, maps, etc. In order to give a bit of the money spend on the works back to the taxpayer, everyone who wants to use those images has to pay royalties. This results in slightly less costs for the taxpayer, which is exactly the goal of that concept.

However, this approach is no longer viable. In the digital age, everyone is a potential user of works by the government, including works like maps and satellite images. NGOs like Wikimedia Deutschland (the German chapter of Wikimedia and supporter of the Wikipedia project) are lobbying to free those images. But the laws are, as usual, at least 10 years behind the technological and sociotechnical development.

For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons and help.

Also, props go to Wikimedia Deutchland, which arranged this donation.

for all the donations he raked in.

Is there anyone here that can translate wikipedia.de's homepage for us?

Here you go, translation of wikipedia.de's current page:

In accordance with the injunction granted by the district court in Luebeck on Nov 13th 2008 to Lutz Heilman, member of parliament (Left Party), the Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is forbidden from "redirecting the internet address wikipedia.de to the internet address de.wikipedia.org" as long as "under the internet address de.wikipedia.org" certain statements are published about Lutz Heilmann. Until further notice the service of wikipedia.de will have to be discontinued in its existing form. Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. will appeal this injunction.

The Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is not the publisher of the "Wikipedia" which is published under de.wikipedia.org and has no influence over its content. Instead, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is a non profit organization to further free knowledge, which simply educates about the usage of Wikipedia. The operator of the Encyclopedia is the Wikimedia Foundation, a foundation that is incorporated in Florida, USA with headquarters in San Francisco.

If you want to support us, you can donate for us. More information under http://spenden.wikimedia.de/ That you for your help.

Our thanks go to JBB Lawfirm for the fast and competent help.

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~cmackenzie/wotd-rss.php

This is:

"Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. 20 euros a copy, 1 euro from each copy to go to Wikimedia. They're taking the intro section from 25-50,000 articles for the 1000-page book, to be released in September. Who says open source writing can't work?"

Oh Please.
I'm by no means a professional (I do mainly web stuff and contributions to wikicommons) and for these humble needs GIMP just doesn't cut it. The 'guts' are no where near as advanced, image quality after manipulation with the GIMP is often degraded with my photos. The GUI must have been designed either by an idiot or a sadist (considering the name of the app, I would venture the latter), I mean ... it doesn't even have resizable brushes, for fuck's sake!

• #3: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• #4: Naruto
• #5: Guitar Hero III
• #9: Harry Potter
• #10: Halo 3
• #11: Transformers (film)
• #12: Heroes (TV series)
• #13: Vanessa Hudgens
• #14: Luciano Pavarotti
• #15: Bleach (manga)
• #17: 50 Cent
• #18: Sex positions
• #19: World Wrestling Entertainment
• #20: Sex (PC terms like homosexuality, AIDS, contraception, etc. are mentioned, but any sort of anatomy isn't there... possibly due to the family friendly policy)

Or, you know, because they don't want to?

~~~~

Six degrees of wikipedia already exists. http://tools.wikimedia.de/sixdeg/

No, not really. [Note: takes a while to load.]

~~~~

It comes of having more than 3000 edits on signed pages alone (and that being 3/5 of my edit count) it gets to be habit before hitting submit you type "--~~~~" I have a similar problem with gmail chat (the only IM I use) ... I start all my lines with "t" since I have t bound to chat in counter strike :)

Wikipedia is not built on credentials. That Essjay occasionally pointed to his hoax bio when editing articles may have influenced other editors, but did not gain him special privileges. The privileges he does (to this day) have are janitorial, not editorial, and were based on the fact that he made thousands and thousands of edits, most of them administrative in nature (of the 19891 edits he made, only 1372 were in the article namespace -- see edit count tool). There is no process by which a person with an academic degree can simply go in and say "I am an authority, therefore I'm right." This kind of model was abandoned when Wikipedia replaced Nupedia, where contributing academics did indeed have to validate their credentials.

Instead, Wikipedia is built on content policies such as Neutral Point of View and Attribution. A typical featured article will have dozens or even hundreds of references for every key statement that it makes. The authors of the article, on the other hand, are not even mentioned; Wikipedia is largely egoless.

In this way, Wikipedia is the least harmed by a revelation of fake credentials. Unlike Larry Sanger's Citizendium, Wikipedia does not grant special privileges to those who claim to be experts. This explains Jimmy's initial "bleh" reaction: "So he faked his bio -- like that actually makes a difference in Wikipedia!" I disagree with this initial reaction (faking academic credentials is seriously unethical), and as noted above, the fake bio may have subtly influenced other editors who deferred to him instead of researching the topic on their own. But these are social dynamics, and if anything, this revelation will improve these dynamics.

I don't believe there is a strong need for us to validate any statement someone might make on their user page. I do agree with you that Essjay's claims should have been verified before he was given the janitorial roles that he ended up with, and recommended to the media as an interviewee. Here, we have been careless and are already discussing internally how to deal with this in a reasonable fashion. For example, there's nothing wrong per se with a Wikipedian wanting to remain pseudonymous, but they should disclose this to the reporter interviewing them. And faking credentials is certainly unacceptable in all circumstances.

As a massively volunteer-driven project, Wikipedia's community represents the entire breadth of humanity. The community rewards good behavior and ostracizes or even bans those who violate the written and unwritten norms. Now that Essjay has violated the community's trust, it is doubtful that he will ever regain it. If we were more credential-driven, then it would make sense to strongly call for validation of any claims like the ones Essjay made. As it is, verification when users cross certain thresholds of internal importance, and a renewed skepticism for anything a person might claim about themselves, should be sufficient. Certainly, this episode is a cautionary tale--but it is so especially for those who rely on identity, rather than the quality of a user's contributions.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=38.89763,-77.03658&i e=UTF8&z=17&ll=38.897939,-77.036766&spn=0.003774,0 .013561&t=h&om=1&iwloc=addr which is taken from http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php? params=38.89763_N_-77.03658_E_type:landmark_region :US which is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_house you don't really need to look that hard

Look at some of the most popular articles. With results like that, itg is obvious people are using Wikipedia for low culture and therefore vandalism. Wikipedia needs to encourage more visits to the more encyclopedic topics in order to succeed. Unfortunatley its not even fun to vandalize Wikipedia anymore. If google didn't treat Wikipedia so well In its search results Wikipedia would have to focus on quality in order to attract vistors. Unfortunatley users like Zocky are to interested in advertising how much Naruto fancruft Wikipedia has (see the main page history and discussion) rather than aiming for Quality.

This is the last time I talk about Wikipedia. I have tried Wikipedia for several years but keep getting screwed by idiots. Even Jimbo Wales likes playing games on various forums about his critics. Even Myspace, AOL and Walmart have more culture than Wikipedia these days. Wikipedia has gone down the drain.

Any self respecting culture geek such as Trekkies and Otakus would avoid it and go for quality fan guides than the fancruft tripe on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, it's own name is an insult to itself. Might as well say Welcome to CelingcatPenispedia on wheels!

After all, it seems that Wikipedia readers are more interested in much different topics anyhow.

A somewhat related issue is using a Wiki to prepare contents for a book. I believe that there is lot of future in this since writing is more difficult than formatting, and using a wiki helps to organize ideas and collaborative work (testing it right now).

Now, for MediaWikis there is a sort of procedure. The German Wikipedia community seems to have the best experience so far and some reader really have been published in paper form.

WikiReader Handbuch and a Magnus' magic MediaWiki-to-XML-to-stuff converter

Btw there is also the idea that one could some day directly produce PDF from Wiki. A script for print on demand is on source forge .

Maybe a ./ reader went through the experience making a book from Wiki and could tell us how it went ...

A few clarifications for the pedant in all of us: First, Wikipedia is under control of the Wikimedia Foundation these days, not just Jimmy Wales; second, the "German club" in question is actually the German chapter of the Wikimedia foundation and not just some totally random club. And yes- wikipedia.de remains down even as de.wikipedia.org remains up.