Vera de Kok - WikiMedia & GSoW

Vera de Kok - QED - 2014

In November 2015 The Wikipedia community was awarded the Erasmus Prize for "For "[promoting] the dissemination of knowledge through a comprehensive and universally accessible encyclopaedia. To achieve that, the initiators of Wikipedia have designed a new and effective democratic platform. The prize specifically recognises Wikipedia as a community — a shared project that involves tens of thousands of volunteers around the world.""

The Wikipedia Community wins the Erasmus Prize

In this video the first person you see is GSoW member and WikiMedia admin Vera de Kok. I want you to know how proud we are of Vera, she has been a part of the GSoW project since March 2012, when she was deleting one of my images I was uploading because it did not have the correct licensing. Vera noticed the "theme" of many of my images and realized that we shared a lot in common, we both were critical thinkers out to improve Wikipedia for the betterment of everyone. And we both loved photography.

Vera has not only uploaded thousands of photos taken personally, but has been responsible for adding 11,552 images (so far) and audio to WikiMedia Commons in order for them to be used freely on the Internet and in Wikipedia projects.

There is no way to be able to show you a representative sample of her achievements as they are far too numerous. But if you are curious about what she has achieved take a look at her WikiMedia Contribution account.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=50&user=1Veertje&ilshowall=1

To be clear, Vera did not win the Erasmus Prize, but she is one of many bright lights in the world of Wikipedia that is doing far more than her share of work. She is one of many amazing people who volunteer their time helping to educate the world.

We at GSoW are very proud of WikiMedia and very very proud that we count Vera de Kok as one of our own.

Thank you Vera for all that you do.

Leon, Jelena, Vera and Peter at QED recording podcast for Skepticality

Short tutorial on how to use Cat-A-Lot on Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is the media database of the Wikimedia projects. It is structures using categories, I've blogged about how categories work on 'Commons before. Yesterday Leon asked me if I knew a tool that would easily categorize a batch of images. Cat-A-Lot is a usefull tool for this. I made a short screencast explaining how to use it:

Guest article - OTRS on Wikimedia

The following is from one of the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia team, Vera de Kok, all the way from The Hague.  We are a team that has all different skill sets, which is why we need each other (and you).  Vera is the expert in all things Wikimedia Commons related.  She is very patient with us lowly text only editors (I'm #1 on the list) and helps explain licensing rules on Wikipedia, sometimes over and over (to me mainly).  Anyway, here she is explaining what OTRS is. 

Previous article from Vera about downloading from Flickr. 

Thank you Vera for all the work you do.

==========================

OTRS, no it’s not scary.

When you place media files on Wikipedia, they have to have a free license, because Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia . This is easy when you yourself have created the photograph, or when it has been published under the right CreativeCommons license on Flickr.

But sometimes images are send in by third parties, and that can raise some red flags; especially when those pictures have been published before on the web. For these kinds of situations we have the OTRS system. Which stands for Open-source Ticket Request System. This system processes e-mails that verify if the owner of the photographs really has agreed to the license agreement.

In order to process tickets quickly, the standard form should be used:

I hereby affirm that CHOOSE ONE: [I, (name here) am] OR [(copyright holder's name) is] the creator and/or sole owner of the exclusive copyright of [SPECIFY THE WORK HERE - describe the work to be released in detail, attach the work to the email, or give the URL of the work if online]

I agree to STANDARD CHOICE; SEE BELOW FOR MORE INFORMATION ON TYPE OF LICENSE: [publish that work under the free license "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0" (unported) and the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).]

I acknowledge that by doing so I grant anyone the right to use the work in a commercial product or otherwise, and to modify it according to their needs, provided that they abide by the terms of the license and any other applicable laws.

I am aware that this agreement is not limited to Wikipedia or related sites.

I am aware that I always retain copyright of my work, and retain the right to be attributed in accordance with the license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be claimed to have been made by me.

I am aware that the free license only concerns copyright, and I reserve the option to take action against anyone who uses this work in a libelous way, or in violation of personality rights, trademark restrictions, etc.

I acknowledge that I cannot withdraw this agreement, and that the work may or may not be kept permanently on a Wikimedia project.

[SENDER'S NAME AND DETAILS (to allow future verification of authenticity)]
[SENDER'S AUTHORITY (Are you the copyright-holder, director, appointed representative of, etc.)]
[DATE]

Translations of this form into other languages are also available here.

The standard license in a CreativeCommons-Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. But you can choose one that is also on the list. Be sure to not forget the version number of the license, because forgetting that makes it invalid.

This has to be send to  permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. If the author of the photograph has not send the permission directly to this e-mail address but to you, you have to forward it along with a link to where the file is posted on Commons and by include headers. This is a bit tricky the first time, here are instructions on how to do that in some of the more popular e-mail clients:

• Yahoo
• Gmail
• Outlook express

If you use another e-mail client, try googling “[client name] + include full headers” and you will very likely find instructions. Once you have send the e-mail to the OTRS system, you may want to include the otrs pending-template on the file page to let patrollers know it’s already coming.

That’s it.