*Wikipaka preroll music*
Bernd: Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is accessible for anyone.
Knowledge is being presented in so many different ways, some of it is text, and
you can easily access and skim through it, some of it you have to see and some of it
you have to touch and experience. We're having this remote experience today. Right
now, I'd love to be in Leipzig with you, work together with you. But we can't
because times are crazy and the digital world at least makes it possible to gain
knowledge in a different way. And of course, we at Wikimedia Deutschland, we
see that and we try to provide good content for everyone. We try to help the
community of the wiki-sphere, of the wikiversum, like in the Wikidata community
and the Wikipedia community or Wikimedia Commons and so many more projects, to
access great sources to make it work in different contexts. To be able to remix
knowledge, to put it to good use and to reach an audience worldwide. It's been 20
years now and Wikipedia has started without much photos, and there is even a
debate going on whether photos and images are a good for the Wikipedia because text
you can easily edit and anyone can do it. But photos and videos, there's a whole
different approach and there's a whole more skills to or other sets of skills to
be able to access and to edit it. And that makes it harder to renew stuff and to
adapt it. But also to create it and the communities and the volunteers in the
wikisphere, they are sometimes having a hard time to get good CGIs, for example,
or to get good graphics to make those, to make beautiful articles and to make good
shows. They are not always available. It costs money. The studio, the equipment and
the graphics they are producing. And there's already a lot of money spent on
producing that kind of content, and we want to bring that to good use in
Wikipedia and in the other spheres. We have been reaching out or we have been
approached by the community to reach out to the public broadcasters. And that's
what we did. And this is our journey. And I want to go on this together with you, a
little bit of recap and then a way of you to help us with that mission and to also
reach out and bring good content into the public sphere to really be able to help
others, to help educators in these crazy times. And, yeah, together make the sum of
all knowledge available to anyone in different ways. Not only text, but also
videos like this one. So the talk is called "Public service, public value", and
that subline is "When Stars Collide". There's a reason for that. You know, I
could talk now about how stars are going around each other and they attract each
other and then they come together and there's a bang and sometimes there's a
neutron star and shooting all kinds of crazy stuff out of it, which we can then
measure here on earth. I could also show you this video, and I think the video
provided here, it was NASA content, would be a much better way to approach this
knowledge. And the beautiful thing about this, not only because it's good stuff
coming out of it and which matches the talk, but also that the NASA content is
not copyright protected, most of it, because it's provided by a federal agency
and there is the US copyright law. But also the ESA, the European Space Agency,
it also now provides content under a public, under an open license, which can
be adapted. So we had a big publicly funded agency, the ESA, which produced
good content, scientific content, which could be used to or could be put to good
use. And they decided to adapt Creative Commons licensing to adapt open licenses,
so that people could do good stuff with it. And that's what we wanted the public
broadcasters to do as well, which was not an easy task. But we had great experiences
and cooperations and we're working together now really good. The public broadcasters
in Germany are having a budget of about eight billion euros per annum, and they
make content available online. Well, you can access it. You can't really download
most of it. You cannot remix it, which is a problem for educators because remix is
like a standard case, everyday case for teachers. I used to be a teacher. I took
screenshots, put them on papers and built little quizzes out of old stuff or not
used a whole broadcast, but parts of it. And that's not really how I can use public
broadcast most of the time, because it has all rights reserved and I can just use it
in a noncommercial manner. And there lies the first problem. What is noncommercial?
When I'm teaching in a public school, ok. But when I'm teaching in the afternoon
to in kind of overtime paid by the hour to help a student privately or when I'm having
a blog or a website and there's advertisements on that to pay the fees for
the hosting. Is this or do I then monetize the content or if there's a private
partnership and the sponsoring there of putting it in student paper and publishing
it and then selling the student paper because they're printing stuff costs, is
this then monetarized? Is this commercial, is it not? So there's a whole can of worms
right there. So the content that's provided by the public broadcasters bottom
line is not usable for anyday use and not usable for Wikipedia, at least not for
remix and republishing issues. That's bad. And that's especially when there's
8 billion euros every year going into those public broadcasters. That should be
something we should engage in. Now we approach them, and in most cases, when you
approach the lawyers of the public broadcasters, they say, well, we'd like if
you use that content, but if you are asking me for permission to use that
content in that specific context, I have to say no. If you are, if you ask me, I
have to say no. And this is a bullshit situation right there. I mean, you have
someone who provides good, nonfictional content, which should be used for
educational use. He wants it to be used in that way. There's an educator who wants to
use it in that way. But we can't come together because of licensing policies.
And now it's legally right, but it still feels wrong. And we could, other than
piracy, we can do something about it. I mean, the content. The public broadcasters
provide their editorially independent, so they may be publicly funded, but the
politics stay out of way of the editorial process. So there may be some in the
supervisory boards. And there's as a whole debate going on about that in Germany, for
example. But the editors are free and there's good content produced and content
you can trust on. Content where there's a whole set of producers behind it who fact
check and who, if they make a mistake, make it right again. The public
broadcasters are not for profit. And they want to provide public content as they
call it a public value. And I think we can help with that. We have this beautiful big
platform where anyone who's searching for information lands at some point, whether
he's approaching it via speech assistance, which is then asking Wikipedia or Wikidata
for information, or whether he just puts it into a search box and then finds it and
accesses, for example, the text in Wikipedia. The content can be reused in
all kinds of manners because it is public, it is openly licensed. Most likely...
there's a whole range of licenses you can choose, we choose the most open licenses
for Wikipedia. That's a community decision. CC-BY, CC-SA or even CC0. I
won't go too deep into that. But you just have to remember, you can use that
content, you can remix it, you can put it into another content. You always have to
name the source of it. If it's not zero, you always have to name the source. And if
you edit it, you have to make that visible. Yeah, but the content provided by
the public broadcasters in this case, the ARD which is a public broadcaster in
Germany, is, of course, provided with all rights reserved. So you can't do a lot with
it. You can access it still. It's good stuff. And there's a lot of years in the
mediathek in the end, and YouTube and stuff. But there is potential. I'll show
you why. We had a campaign then, it was called public money, public content. You
may see where this is coming from. And we approached the public broadcasters to work
together on this. This was the same argument I just made here to you. In every
step of the way, we worked together with the community and with the awesome people
of Wiki loves broadcast. And we are... I'll come back to that in a minute... so
first, some public broadcasters in this case funk, which is a cooperation between
the two big public broadcasters in Germany. They are for producing content
for young people and younger audiences and they try to like summarize Wikipedia
pages, which is a problem for the community, because I say, well, it's nice
if you summarize it, but if the article changes, can we then change the video? No,
video editing is more expensive and you have to have certain programs for that and
skills that fewer people have. So there's a smaller community to do it. So that's
not content we really can use in Wikipedia. Although the videos were quite
high quality, they were rejected by the Wikipedia community. We came together in
best faith, but this just didn't work out as it sometimes does. Next try was to
provide pictures of people. In this case, there was reportage, a portrait of an
actor or actress in this case. And they put that in Wikimedia Commons so that it
could be used, for example on Wikipedia and it was used in several pages and also
on pages all over the Internet, always with a little mark that the content was
provided by the public broadcaster, which is fine. But community or some community
members said, well, this photo is well too good to be publicly licensed, so there's a
whole other can of worms and another problem right there. We overcame that with
a great pilot project, which I want to talk about right now. And if you're
listening in a public broadcaster working together with public broadcasting
somewhere in the world, you should now be very interested. Because what we achieved
here is openly licensed content being reused on all sorts of sites. We cannot
track everything, but we can track what we already did, like in the mediathek, in the
channels of the ZDF and on the YouTube channels and stuff. We can see how often
this content was approached and was used. We can track how much it was used in
Wikipedia and how often it was clicked on. And we can guess because it has been
published as well because provided under free and open license on Schulserver and
stuff like that - so on networks for schools and on servers that provide
educational content. And we can see that it's being adapted there and that the
communities, the educational community really wants to do things with it and is
putting it to good use. How much? Come to that in a minute. First, the ZDF started
with climate and environmentally connected content and provided a material from there.
So they came together with the producers, the editors, with everyone involved
in the process, and they said - in cooperation with us, we also
gave some hints maybe: We cannot give the whole episode of takes, which is big,
beautiful and very expensive and has a lot of third party content into the public
domain or into licenses openly. It's just too expensive and not really... we cannot
really do that. But there is some content inside these episodes which
is built or which is produced completely in-house, which we can target and which we
can buy the licenses for without straining our budget too much. So videos, CGIs,
short pieces that are being produced anyway. They just have to be licensed
under a CC license as well and then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. So this was the
way to go for the ZDF and for the TerraX team. And they did it and they put a lot
of videos there, which was then adopted by the community, the Wikipedia community. So
the ZDF didn't do any editing in the Wikipedia, they just gave their input,
their content to the Commons, and then there was good stuff happening by the
community. They adapted it and put it into mostly German speaking because, of course,
it's German videos, German speaking Wikipedia, German language Wikipedia
articles, also some English Wikipedia articles. But there was also another
beautiful thing happening, as you can see right here. They also did, they started to
do read-ups because they saw it's good, it's high quality content. We can build
upon that. We can remix it and we can read of it in Dutch, in Welsh, in Esperanto,
and we can put subtitles on there in Latin and in Dutch and Catalan and in Spanish.
So. This content is now free and is evolving, and it's good, high quality,
nonfictional, mostly scientific content that helps the Wikipedia communities to
further reach their audience, to help provide knowledge to everyone, even if
you're maybe visually impaired or mentally impaired or you just don't want to read
a long text right now because your head is buzzing and there's not enough coffee in
the world. And you can just watch a video to maybe grasp the idea of this specific
article or this paragraph there a little better. It's another way of providing
information and it works together like a charm. And we can see that also by the
numbers on which those files are approached, so we tried first to do a page
view analysis, so we took all the content we monitored: In which sites is the content
implemented in or embedded in? And then tried to measure the viewership of the
pages, which didn't really work, because there was - and now it's over - 120 files
and we cannot really reproduce that. And we also tried to do a media view counter,
which also then strained at some point - it exceeded the limitations of the tools
we were having to measure that as soon as the files were too many. So we could like
add a direct comparison of files, how they're performing, how they're doing, but
we couldn't really track all of them. So then a great colleague of mine, he built
this beautiful mediaviews too, so that you can really monitor a whole category. So we
can now monitor how often the files in the category of TerraX provided videos - you
see the shot links right there, bit.ly/terrax30 - the last 30 days of his
of TerraX content from Wikipedia Commons. And we can see a monthly usage of over a
million views, which is a lot. Because this is not just someone randomly browsing
and finding this video and it's auto play. But searching for information on a
topic like as Taj Mahal or like the Harbor of Carthago or something like that. Or
covid vaccine. And then they're clicking on the article, they're clicking on the
video and view it and this is a very qualified account right there. And this
happens over a million times with content that the ZDF has provided now. Every
month. And still growing. And that's good in several ways. First, it's great for the
community because they can more easily reach the audience and they can help the
audience understand the topic better. It makes Wikipedia more beautiful for the
audience. Of course. We just talked about that. And also for the content provider
because, of course, the content is branded. There's a little logo in there
and it's called "video is provided by TerraX". I have stated the brand a few
times now. And of course, anyone who uses it has to quote the ZDF and give
attribution, which is good for the brand and it makes it more likely that at some
other point when you're searching for information on the topic, you'll be
circling back to TerraX, for example, and hopefully to Wikipedia. But there's
more. We have done some high level roundtables where we brought together
unions, teachers unions, as well as journalist unions, as well as young
journalists, people who work in research and universities, library organizations
and, of course, the Wikipedia community, to see how we better can work together and
what we can do and how we can monitor it and what is likely to be done and what
not. Because, of course, also the public broadcasters have wishes for the community
and for Wikimedia Deutschland and as well as the other way around. Our main
arguments here are that it improves the public good. It saves taxes. If schools,
public schools don't have to buy additional video content, for example, but
can use the content that is already publicly funded for free. It strengthens
the cooperation between different spheres of making knowledge available. And it's
further helping them reaching the audience on exactly the platforms that they're
searching for on, that they're searching for information on. So, as I said, our
campaign was called "public money, public good". And there were some reactions and
we had some great cooperations coming up then. At this point I have to thank all
the stakeholders as a part of the campaign. Not only the Chaos Communication
Club, Chaos Computer Club, but also the libraries association, the teachers
associations in Germany and Kiron University and some others that you can
see there. If you're a stakeholder on an international level and want to join this
claim for more content provided by the public broadcasters, reach out to me,
bernd.fiedler@wikimedia.de, and we can talk about it or maybe after that in the
Q&A. So we wrote a lot of letters. There were 10000 little postcards being sent to
the public broadcasters where anyone could put a little comment. I want to use that,
because ... And there were a lot of educators, teachers and knowledge workers
who reached out to us and said, finally, I want to use or have used in a limited way
the content already. And there's so much more and so much better stuff I want to do
with it. I want to screenshot it and put it on the paper and then build a Quiz out
of it, whatever. And there are the limitations of copyright and the Creative
Commons licensing makes it easier for me. Also, the idea is a second... or another
really big public broadcaster in Germany also tried to adapt Creative Commons
licensing. They did, even with their most important broadcasts like Tagesschau,
which is the news broadcast for every German. They are providing graphics and short
videos under a Creative Commons NC ND and so none for commercial and no variations
of stuff. So at least it is available indefinitely now. So it can be linked upon
and it can be used in certain ways, especially in schools. But you cannot
release it in a Wikipedia right now. They also put some podcasts like the
coronavirus update, which is like one of the most listened to podcasts right now, a
scientific podcast here in Germany under CC license, which is also a great step.
And there's a reason why they are hesitant to put content under a more open license,
not only because of licensing issues and because of the money you have to pay for
it, but also in fear of... there's some uses they don't want. In our experience,
though, we see that on the ZDF content. There's a lot of good stuff happening with
it. And none of the fears were matched, none of the fears really came true. There
are adaptations and there are read-ups, but they are good. They are in the way we
would have wanted it. And sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and see
good stuff happening. Right. As of right now, so licensing policies and the public
broadcasters, they make... so the bad stuff is happening anyway, people will
steal it, will adapt it, will put little horns on people's heads and whatever, and
they don't really care about copyright, which also would not be possible with
Creative Commons, because there's limitations to that licensing given with
Creative Commons and putting it in a context where it's not right is one of
those limitations. But whatever. But Creative Commons makes the uses you want
to give, you want to make possible, available. And that's all very much
cheaply. And there will be stuff coming out from the idea, I hope. As of now,
there is the chair of the ARD, of the big public broadcast in Germany, and they say
it's a cornerstone. It's an important building block on which where, how to make
our content available indefinitely as possible and easily accessible as
possible. Even this press release, though, you see on the photo right there, there's
all rights reserved. This is copyrighted content, which I quote here. So way to go.
But there's good stuff. There's good faith. I have good faith. And there's a
lot of goodwill on all institutions. And we're working together to that common
goal. There's also a global task force of public broadcasters and they're saying: We
share the common duty to inform, educate and entertain. The engagement with
audiences of all ages across all ranges of broadcast and online services is critical
to our success in serving them whenever, wherever and however they want. And to
reach that, dear public broadcasters all around the world, whether you're the NPR,
the NHK, the PBS, the BBC, the RAA, CBC, EBC or ORF.. Your content should be freely
licensed, wherever possible. It should be paid fairly. It should be accessible
everywhere and it should be accessible any time. And then we can build upon it. And
there's all kinds of good stuff shooting out of it. And we can measure that now.
So our mission is clear. And there's a lot of good people working together on all sides
to make it possible, and I have to thank all the partners that we have been doing
great stuff up until now and will be doing great stuff in the years to come. And the
community, who is open for adapting the content and putting it to good use on
different Wikipedia pages. And if you're a public broadcaster and you think, well, I
want that, I want a part of that. Feel free to reach out to us and we will make
and bring this thing international. Our arguments condensed are there at
bit.ly/publicbroadcast on the medium block of the Wikimedia Foundation where we're
trying to commodate this whole talk into a few paragraphs. Thank you for listening,
for attending this session here. And I'm very happy to take your questions now. And
to gather, free, more great content to build amazing stuff out of it.
Thank you very much.
Herald: We are now connected to our speaker remotely. Not by satellite, just
like the usual public broadcasting studios do, but via Internet, because we are
modern. With Bernd Fiedler, who is our correspondent today, more or less. Hello
Bernd, how are you today? Bernd: Hello. I'm fine, and I hope you all
as well. You've heard a lot and I hope you have some questions for me.
Herald: We're still waiting for questions. You can still ask them by the IRC or
Twitter with the hashtag #rC3Wikipaka. We're listening to all of them and will
relay them to our speaker here. You had an interesting slide at the end of your talk,
towards the end of your talk, with Tom Buhrow, who was stating something along
the lines of "CC licenses are an important part of what the public broadcasting
institutions in Germany are doing." And at the very bottom right - you made me aware
of that, I didn't even see it first - there was an "all rights reserved" clause.
That looks to me like there is a cultural, cultural obstacles still to be surmounted,
to be surpassed. Is there any hope that this cultural change is taking place?
Bernd: Yes. Herald: OK, but it wasn't OK. How would
you say this? Bernd: Well, it's really not easy. They
are buying licenses and then they can do limited stuff with it, and they now have a
lot of contracts, and if you have a big ship like, the ARD or the ZDF, you have
all kinds of standard contracts. And you have to change those first before you can
do anything. So that's a chicken and egg problem. They also say we can't because they
are not, the contracts are not there. So I can't waive any rights. And the public
broadcasters say, well, they also wouldn't agree to it. So we don't have the
contracts yet. But there's a big cultural change going on right now. That's a lot of
effort and a lot of editors, a lot of content creators who want to try out
stuff, who are reaching out to us. But it takes time, because it's a big wheel we're
trying to turn here and big wheels take time to start turning.
Herald: Well, 2020 has taught us to be patient and wait for changes, but there
might be some people in the audience who don't want to wait. And what you told me
about these standard contracts sounds awfully familiar for people who work with
public administrations, who are facing similar problems with subcontractors and
people they depend upon. And one way that has been shown in that realm would be to
provide boilerplate licenses that the institutions can actually use and reuse.
Has anybody tried that? Bernd: Yeah, well, they are using Creative
Commons right now, but... I think - what exactly do you mean with boilerplate
licenses? Herald: Yeah, of course. I mean, Creative
Commons is, of course, a boilerplate license for sublicensing. But you told me
about, as far as I understand, that the public broadcasting institutions use
subcontractors to actually produce their content. And they would have to enter
contracts and new licenses that permit sublicensing under Creative Commons
clauses. So if somebody, let's say Wikimedia or some other instance, were to
provide the public broadcasters with boilerplate licenses for their
subcontractors, wouldn't that be an option?
Bernd: Uh, if we... Herald: Not to want you to drop the hot
potato in your lap, but... Bernd: We can't look that far into the
contract business of the public broadcasters and their subcontractors. But
this is exactly what we had with TerraX in the end. So they have, they are having
subcontractors. And at the very beginning of the process, of the broadcasting
process and production process, they said, well, let's try this and we will take some
stuff and release it under creative comments. Are you all right with that? In
an ongoing production and most contracts are already set and you always go back to
the same contractor - you can't really do that. That's, that's hard. You just, you
need an outside impulse for that. And that's where the audience comes into play,
because I bet all of you have a loved podcast or some broadcast that you see at
the public broadcasters and you want to bring to the Commons or content you
want to bring to the Commons. And of course, you can reach out as it is a
broadcaster. You can reach out to the Redaktion and say, we want to do that and
we want to see that in the Commons. Why isn't it? And then they have to ask the
legal people and the legal people then sometimes consult with us and then we can
try to do something. So it's big wheels, but many, many small angles where you can
attack. Herald: That sounds like a call to action
for me. People who are watching right now are listening right now. Where would they
direct such a question? Would they add ZDF or add ARDPresse or whatever on Twitter,
or is there any way that is more impactful? Maybe send a fax or something
like that? Bernd: You know what? Do that right now,
during this Q&A, you can add ARDPresse or ZDF to do just that. And there are people
there watching that and watching it. And the more impulses there are, the more
likely they will be moving. But also a standard email. They operate like every
Programmbeschwerde, every input from audiences is being read at the public broadcasters
offices. So just type an email and say, I love your content. Why isn't it Creative
Commons? Cheers, and there you go. This helps us a lot. And it helps the people
inside the houses, inside the public broadcasters who really want get things
going. But there are also the ones who say: We don't really need to change that,
do we? But you and us, we have to show them that the future lies in Creative
Commons licensing and not just getting on with not providing open content and
deleting stuff that is good and that could have been reused if only it would have
been licensed correctly. Herald: OK, so we are not screaming into
the void, but we have allies within the broadcasting authorities that really want
our help, actually, is that true? Bernd: It is. And there are a lot of
people doing the hard work. I mean, my job is easy. I'm sitting at the outside and
saying, why don't you, why couldn't you, oh that would be a good idea. And they are
confronted with all the people who know the ifs and whens and who always say "no,
because" and they're finding reasons why this shouldn't be possible. But we are now
going on from the production level because the content providers, they want their
products and their content to be remixed. We also gain from the political level
because that's important for the public broadcasters, obviously. And we are going
on from the Intendanten, so from the chair level. I mean, everyone working at the ARD
and the ZDF, there is a little bit... if they try something new, they can fail and
they can get smacked over the head with people who are angry at them. Because
there are so many angry people out there who attack the broadcasters all the time. And
if they see that it works at one public broadcaster, like at the ZDF, it's very much
more likely that another public broadcaster will also try. That's a trial,
that course of action. Herald: Well, this is...
Bernd: a little bit "Beamtenmikado" Herald: That's very close to your heart
because, I mean, we do have our WTFalpha night program and we would have loved to
include Bernd das Brot in that. So for all the people who are right now composing
tweets at ZDF... Bernd: copyrighted...
Herald: Well, maybe in the future and maybe we're depending on all the people
composing tweets right now at ZDF, for all the activists who do have experience with
mass mailing members of parliament, they actually know that mass mails that follow
a template are, well, not as not as impactful as individual letters. So is it
a detriment if they include in the in their tweet, the ÖGÖG hashtag or any other
campaign mode? Bernd: the German slogan for "public
money, public content" - "öffentliches Geld, öffentliches Gut", ÖGÖG. Yeah, well,
you can do that. So we can we can monitor it a little bit and see who else is
interested in that. You can also reach out to the Wiki loves broadcast group in
Wikipedia. They're a group of activists who have experience in that and who are
standing by to help public broadcasters understand the Wikipedia and to see
whether and where the content fits. So there's a lot of ways to engage in that.
And if you have ideas for that or just questions, you can reach out to me any
time. You have my address. That's mediumarticle@wikimediafoundation or you
can just write me bernd.fiedler@wikimedia.de. And yeah, I'm
happy to help. Yes, that's good stuff. We want to have it in the public domain.
Let's make it possible together. I need help.
Herald: That sounds like a call to action in the background chat that we have
before we went live, you mentioned something about big, did you say the big
gulf of material that's already been produced and is in the kind of legal
limbo, that it's not so easily released right now. Can you talk a little bit more
about that? Bernd: I think I misunderstood the
question of the... Herald: I mean, we have a similar
situation in the United States with the works that have been published after the
1920s, where copyright law has been made more stringent and original creators can't
be contacted anymore. Bernd: Yeah, we have two courses of action
that the public broadcasters are trying right now. I mean, if you if you're
sitting on a treasure box, you want to open it up and share it. If it doesn't get
less, that's where... so the idea is trying to provide content that they
already have produced, but clearing the rights for that stuff that's already is
produced is a pain in the ass. And it's really hard and sometimes impossible to
reach every creator who was connected with a production. So everything that's in the
past is kind of lost for our goal for Creative Commons license, especially stuff
that's being produced and that has been released after 1970 or so. So they are
opening up the archives and that's really a treasure for Wikipedia. They can then
link to it and they can at least access it indefinitely. But the other course of
action seems to me much more sustainable - to see in which new productions from now
on we can implement Creative Commons licensing and so that we can only look and
walk into the future here. Although I'd love to see all the good stuff I've been
seeing on the air already, too, to become Creative Commons, but that's really hard.
Herald: Well, not to end on a dystopic note, but to go forth with the utopias,
there is a way to to open at least the future releases. And you've shown
us how to do that. And we thank you. I mean, we are the unofficial public
broadcasting cosplay channel at rC3. So anybody who's interested in having more
interesting night program for future programing, please contact Bernd. Bernd,
thanks again so much for being on air right now with us and keep up the good
fight in the name of the love of public broadcasting.
Bernd: I'm counting on you. See you soon. Herald: See you, bye Bernd!
*Wikipaka postroll music*
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