Wikipedia:EUobserver cooperation/Correspondence

This is the full correspondence of the Wikipedia:EUobserver cooperation. Signatures and email addresses removed for privacy reasons.

From:    Erik Möller
Subject: EUObserver/Wikipedia cooperation
Date:    22 Sep 2003 12:25:40 +0200

Hi,

I'm one of the thousands of volunteers writing for Wikipedia:
        http://www.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia is a free, non-profit encyclopedia in many languages with over
150,000 articles in the English version alone. It is free not just as in
"free beer": articles may be re-used by anyone for any purpose, so long
as the same rights are granted for any derivative works. Wikipedia is
not only an encyclopedia but also publishes a summary of the news of the
day:
        http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_events

I am very interested in European politics myself and, together with
others, occasionally add important news from that area. However,
EUObserver already provides a very good summary of the daily news in
European politics. Given this, I propose a cooperation from which both
parties would benefit. EUObserver would get a constant stream of
visitors from Wikipedia (which is among the top 1000 websites), while
Wikipedia would be able to use the short intros from EUObserver under
its copyright terms. 

Let's take the story "UK comes nearer to Franco-German position on
defence" as an example. We would add the text "A meeting on Saturday (20
September) between France, Germany and the UK in Berlin saw Europe's big
three reach a more united position on the future of European defence."
to our "Current events" page, together with a link to the complete
EUObserver story. That is, we would use the summary text which you
publish on your frontpage and always link to the full text.

The catch is that these summary paragraphs would have to be either put
in the public domain or licensed under the GNU FDL (see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights ), granting everyone
the permission to re-use them in any way. But this would *only apply* to
these brief intro sentences, not to the complete articles. You would
give away the teasers and get visitors in return. We would get valuable
news summaries (linking them to pertinent Wikipedia articles and
possibly making modifications or additions) with links to detailed
analysis.

What do you think about such an agreement? Would this be acceptable to
you? If so, would you prefer to put the "teasers" in the public domain
(most convenient) or under the terms of the GNU FDL?

In any case, thanks for your continuing work on EUObserver. Hopefully
European citizens will become more interested in international issues as
the Union gets larger.

Sincerely,

Erik Möller

Response by Paul Kidner, business manager at EUobserver:

From:    Paul Kidner
Subject: Wikipedia and EUobserver
Date:    24 Sep 2003 18:04:16 +0200

Hello Erik

Thank you very much for your message and partnership proposal. I read it with 
interest and am looking forward to taking things forward. 

I have a few questions, which I am unclear about. If you could fill me in then 
I think we will have a stronger platform upon which we can move ahead.


READERSHIP:
Could you tell me a little more about Wikipedia in terms of how many unique 
users come to the news section, and how many referals you make on average. Do 
you have any other statistics on your readership? What other media do you 
partner with on similar terms? 


COPYRIGHT:
Also, as you will know, we link to articles and reference stories in media when 
we have used them as a particular source. How does this affect your copyright 
structures?

What is the difference between having the teasers in the public domain and 
having them under the terms of the GNU? Would that mean links and summaries 
appear in different parts of the site as well?


FUNDING:
I understand you are currently an open-source public domain. Do you have any 
source of funding and backing? Is all the work done on a voluntary basis? Does 
Wikipedia plan to generate some form of income through the site in the future?


The WIKIPEDIA NEWS SECTION:
Alternatively, you might also want to consider adding an EU section and/or 
hosting our news box on your site, which is updated live on your website every 
time a new article is posted on the EUobserver.com site. This will keep your 
news dynamic and can be formatted to fit the look and feel of your site. To see 
how this works please go to:

http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=46


In all I think answers to these questions could help boost us forward to the 
next stages. I think what I would propose if we can agree on working together 
is that we test the process over a three month period and see how it goes from 
there.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

Paul Kidner

Response by Erik Möller:

From:    Erik Möller
Subject: Re: Wikipedia and EUobserver
Date:    25 Sep 2003 00:40:48 +0200

Am Mi, 2003-09-24 um 18.04 schrieb Paul Kidner:

> READERSHIP:
> Could you tell me a little more about Wikipedia in terms of how many unique 
> users come to the news section, and how many referals you make on average. Do 
> you have any other statistics on your readership? What other media do you 
> partner with on similar terms? 

Our server statistics are at
http://www.wikipedia.org/stats/

As you can see, we've experienced enormous growth in the last few
months, which is in part because of our high Google ranking and large
number of articles (a search for "Wikipedia" on Google returns 2,830,000
results, when 3 years ago, it would have returned none).

We have many more statistics on article count, growth patterns, search
engine awareness, mean article size, average number of times Wikipedia
articles are printed with a HP Deskjet 600C on Sunday afternoons and so
on. (Kidding on the last one, but the amount of statistics is
staggering.) The overview page for these is on:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

And if you really want data, IBM has used Wikipedia pages as the basis
for one of their latest research projects called "history flow" to
examine how collaboratively written pages develop over time:
http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/index.htm

OK, now I'm just showing off ;-).

The downside of our growth is that we have always grown somewhat faster
than our equipment -- just recently we acquired a second server but it
became clear that this wasn't enough just a few weeks later. You may
experience some intermittent slowness, which is particularly frustrating

for our contributors. But I am confident that these problems will be
solved (see below).

The "Current events" page received 22110 hits last month and is among
the most popular individual wiki pages. This is in part due to the fact
that it is linked from every Wikipedia page in our menu. The "Current
events" section is still under heavy development in terms of content,
style and structure. It has been maintained since January 2002 and is
growing into a kind of Wiki-news site within Wikipedia proper. It may
eventually become a spinoff project.

As to our general working principles, the articles about Wikipedia and
Wikis might be helpful:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

You could spend many weeks reading all the megabytes of debate and
philosophy about wikis that have been amassed over the last couple of
years; the truth is that Wikipedia has grown beyond everyone's
expectations, and the quality of many of our articles is much higher
than that in traditional encyclopedias (while many others still need
improvement, but relatively few are really bad).

> COPYRIGHT:
> Also, as you will know, we link to articles and reference stories in media when 
> we have used them as a particular source. How does this affect your copyright 
> structures?

That's not a problem, as linking is generally recognized as a
fundamental right and not at odds with copyright at all. Our readers
will certainly appreciate the additional source material.

> What is the difference between having the teasers in the public domain and 
> having them under the terms of the GNU? Would that mean links and summaries 
> appear in different parts of the site as well?

The GNU Free Documentation License is a quite sophisticated open content
license that applies the so-called "copyleft" model that is also found
in most open source software. The basic idea is: "If you use our stuff,
we expect stuff you make from it to be free, too." More precisely, if I
use material that is licensed under the GNU FDL in one of my documents,
then I am expected to license the entire document itself under the FDL.
So Britannica could not take articles in Wikipedia, make improvements
and preclude others from distributing these derivative works for free.
No such safeguard exists for public domain material. Also, the FDL
requires giving credit to the original author.

From your perspective as copyright holder, the difference is probably
minimal. If you want to encourage wide redistribution of your intros, I
would recommend putting them in the public domain, but then you have to
rely on the honesty of others to properly credit you as a source. If you
want to follow the "open content" idea of contributing them to an
information commons where they must remain, the FDL is the way to go.
Both options would be fine with us, and none would affect any other
material on your site unless you explicitly choose it to.

> FUNDING:
> I understand you are currently an open-source public domain. Do you have any 
> source of funding and backing? Is all the work done on a voluntary basis? Does 
> Wikipedia plan to generate some form of income through the site in the future?

There's some long and boring history here, so I'll try to make it short.
In 2001 Internet millionaire Jimbo Wales decided he wanted to fund an
open content encyclopedia, so he created a peer-reviewed encyclopedia
project called "Nupedia", employed people to do the reviewing, write up
the policy and so forth. It turned out, however, that the process was
far too bureaucratic, and the target audiecne too limited. In early 2001
he tried another principle and launched Wikipedia as an experiment --
using the wiki model of openly editable pages to create an encyclopedia.
This is now Wikipedia, quickly becoming the world's largest
encyclopedia, and it is still funded by Wales.

In order to guarantee Wikipedia's long-term survival and to allow us to
experiment with other projects (there is now a wiki-based dictionary and
a wiki-based textbook project), the so-called "Wikimedia" foundation was
launched in June 2003. Wikimedia is our umbrella non-profit
organization. We are planning a major fundrasing effort for October, and
things are looking very good so far. 

Yes, all work is done by volunteers. We have volunteer sysadmins,
volunteer programmers and, of course, thousands of volunteer writers
from all around the world. I'm a volunteer myself: developer, sysadmin,
author, and wiki-admin. And, as you can a see, part-time project
ambassador. ;-)

It is unlikely that Wikipedia will ever die. That's because even if the
Wikimedia foundation fails (which I consider highly unlikely -- we have
lots of good karma and good press), anyone can take the content and
setup a mirror or "fork" of the site. ibiblio.org has already offered to
host Wikipedia if necessary. I have set up a read-only mirror myself. So
any cooperation with us will likely result in substantial long-term
dividends.


> The WIKIPEDIA NEWS SECTION:
> Alternatively, you might also want to consider adding an EU section and/or 
> hosting our news box on your site, which is updated live on your website every 
> time a new article is posted on the EUobserver.com site. This will keep your 
> news dynamic and can be formatted to fit the look and feel of your site. To see 
> how this works please go to:
> 
> http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=46

I am a great fan of syndication and think your setup here is very well
done, but Wikipedia is all about people collaboratively whipping
articles into shape, and your brief summaries would be a good basis for
us to work on. It strikes me as unproductive for us to have editors who
paraphrase what others have already said to avoid copyright problems,
when we can solve the issue through cooperation for out mutual benefit.

Let me know if these answers help. A three month test sounds like an
excellent idea.

All best,

Erik

Response by Paul Kidner:

From:    Paul Kidner
Subject: Re: Wikipedia and EUobserver
Date:    29 Sep 2003 16:56:45 +0200

Hello Erik

Thank you very much for your detailed response. It has given me a good 
overview, which makes the prospect of a partnership a lot easier. 

I am happy at this point to move things forward and set up an experimental 
phase to ensure that the partnership can work for both parties. Will you begin 
to use the teasers and links to our site? If so, then you can let me know when 
these are posted and we can check check how things are working and refine 
anything we need to. I am happy for these to be in the public domain.

Also, how can we can be put on the proper directory list on the Bomis search 
engine? Who can I contact to discuss this with?

Let me know if you need anything else.

Best regards


Paul

Response by Erik Möller:

From:    Erik Möller
Subject: Re: Wikipedia and EUobserver
Date:    30 Sep 2003 02:32:52 +0200

Paul,

this is great! I have summarized the terms of our agreement here:

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EUobserver_cooperation

I have used October 31 as a deadline for our trial period. Let's review
our cooperation at that point.

Three summaries from EUobserver have been added to "Current events" for
September 29, 2003; you can see them here: 

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_events

(Sep. 29 was a busy day -- search for "catch-22" to get to the relevant
items.)

The summaries have been modified somewhat, e.g. I added an explanation
regarding the MEP representation at the IGC, and someone else added
another quote from Albright to the item about her. This is how Wikipedia
works -- everything is a work in progress. As agreed, each summary ends
with a link to the EUobserver story from which it was originally taken.

There was generally a very positive reaction from the Wikipedia
community -- I hope this works out for both of us.

All best,

Erik