Free Culture and Wikipedia

Freedom to create and distribute without paying tribute

Presentation for Open Web Day

Joseph “Jojit” BallesterosWikimedia Philippines

What is Free Culture?

The term Free Culture was first coined by Lawrence Lessig

In Free Culture, you don’t need to ask permission to copy, and

share and use each other’s work.

What is free in Free Culture?

According to the Definition of Free Cultural Works

(freedomdefined.org) started by Erik Möller, a Wikipedian and

Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a

cultural work is free if:

• Freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it;

• Freedom to study the work and to apply the knowledge acquired from it;

• Freedom to make and distribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression; and

• Freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works.

In short, freedom is the key:

S - STUDYU - USES - SHAREI - IMPROVE

What are Free Cultural Works?

Your work must be licensed under one of the Free Culture license or under public domain

GFDL

Benefits ofFree Culture Works

•More economical than copyright works

•Freedom of exchanges of ideas• It can be distributed to people who

do not have access to these works especially the people who cannot afford expensive copyright works

•Easier to study and works can be improved

One of the most successfulFree Cultural Work

is

WikipediaThe Free Encyclopedia

Mission, vision and history of Wikipedia

“When I write, I use Wikipedia 30-40 times a day, because it's so useful. When I write, I

don't remember if some person was born in the 6th or the 7th century, or how many Ns are in the name Goldmann. Until a few years ago, things like that would cost you so much time!”

– Prof. Umberto Eco, U. of Milan, Italy, author of “The Name of the Rose”

– The Wikimedia Mission

Our mission is to empower and engage people to collect and develop educational content

under a free license and disseminate it effectively and

globally.

– The Wikimedia Vision

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely

share in the sum of all knowledge.

That's our commitment.

Wikipedia was started in January 15, 2001

by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

Some Wikipedia statistics

Wikipedia is the most popular open content and free content

encyclopedia.

In the Alexa rankings, Wikipedia is always on the Top 10 websites

since 2007.

Currently, Wikipedia is on number 6:1. Google

2. Facebook3. YouTube4. Yahoo!

5. Baidu.com

6. Wikipedia7.Windows Live

8. QQ.COM 9. Amazon10. Twitter

Traffic for Wikipedia(all languages)

•(Monthly requests, for period: 1 Apr 2011 - 31 Mar 2012)

••11,630,000,000 / month

•(476 million unique users by 31 Mar 2012 for all Wikimedia projects)

••387,666,667 / day•16,152,778 / hour•269,213 / minute

•4487 / second•

285Number of languages Wikipedia is written in

(as of February 2013)

Over 23,000,000Number of articles in Wikipedia in all of those 285 languages

(as of November 2012)

Can you imagine the number of volumes to

be printed for the English Wikipedia

alone?

Currently, the English Wikipedia is more than 4 million articles.

So, it would take around 1727 volumes in 9 stacks.

Here are the biggest Wikipedias that have more than 800,000 articles:

EnglishGermanFrenchDutchItalian

Russian SpanishPolish

JapaneseSwedish

So... who writes Wikipedia?

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Mike E. Perez, Mark Decker,

Jacob Brubaker

Image credit: CC-by-sa

by Meredith R. Talusan

And... no women?

Sure, there are women Wikipedians!

from Wikimedia CommonsPublic Domain Author: Василий Меленчук

from Wikimedia CommonsCC-BY-SA 3.0 Author: Yumolives

from Wikimedia CommonsGNU Free Documentation LicenseAuthor: Lisarlena

from Wikimedia CommonsPublic Domain Author: Nikita

But too few!

87%of Wikipedians are male

Wikipedia is collaboratively written by people like

you.

Contributors are not paid.They are all volunteers.

Wikipedians help each other to make Wikipedia articles better.

Most active users are driven by their passion to distribute free

knowledge to the world.

Wikipedia is free from advertisements.

The organization behind Wikipedia

Volunteers provide content to Wikipedia while the non-profit

Wikimedia Foundation supports it.

Wikimedia Philippines is a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation serving Filipinos

here and abroad.

Not all websites or projects that have “wiki” on it are run by

Wikimedia.

These are the Wikimedia projects:WikipediaWiktionaryWikiquoteWikibooksWikisourceWikispeciesWikinews

WikiversityWikimedia Commons

MediaWikiWikivoyage (under beta)

Wikidata (under development)

Culture of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is free to edit and free to use.

Content is licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 and nobody owns any article in

Wikipedia.

Core policies of WikipediaNeutral point of view (NPOV)

Assume good faithDecide by consensusNo original research

VerifiabilityCivility

No firm rules

Demo

Contact Wikimedia Philippines:

www.wikimedia.phinfo@wikimedia.org.ph

membership@wikimedia.org.phtwitter@pinoywikipedia

fb.me/pinoywiki

My email:jojit@wikimedia.org.ph

Questions?