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:
[email protected]@pinoywikipedia
fb.me/pinoywiki
My email:[email protected]
Questions?