Ona Vinyamata

Thank You, Wikipedia

“Imagine if every person on earth could share in the free and total access to all human knowledge.” Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Dear Ona,

Thank you for your gift of EUR 15 to the Wikimedia Foundation, received on November 19, 2010. I’m very grateful for your support.

Your donation celebrates everything Wikipedia and its sister sites stand for: the power of information to help people live better lives, and the importance of sharing, freedom, learning and discovery. Thank you so much for helping to keep these projects freely available for their nearly 400 million monthly readers around the world.

Your money supports technology and people. The Wikimedia Foundation develops and improves the technology behind Wikipedia and nine other projects, and sustains the infrastructure that keeps them up and running. The Foundation has a staff of about fifty, which provides technical, administrative, legal and outreach support for the global community of volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia.

Many people love Wikipedia, but a surprising number don’t know it’s run by a non-profit. Please help us spread the word by telling a few of your friends.

And again, thank you for supporting free knowledge.

Sincerely Yours,

Sue Gardner
Executive Director

* To donate: http://donate.wikimedia.org
* To visit our Blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org
* To follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/wikimedia
* To follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/wikipedia

Web 2.0 suicide

“Unfriend” became Oxford’s Word of the Year 2009, and over the last week I can confirm many of my social network contacts have encountered virtual dilemmas, aware or not of Oxford’s choice. The trend dilemma seems to be:

1. “I add someone as a friend” or “I confirm someone as a friend” (both, then, beeing active decisions).
2. I feel annoyed by the fact that this people I now consider “friends” are not giving me as much feedback as they would in real life.
3. Taking advantage of the pretended distance Internet gives, and the possibility to communicate massive messages, I post an incendiary status update threatening silent people in my news feed with a determined will to delete all those contacts that appear to be just watching my conversations instead of participating on them.

In my opinion, we haven’t had the time to think which use we want to give to, let’s say, Facebook. We love having lot’s of friends and being able to communicate with all of them easily, even to distribute an ideal self through tagged pictures and cool statuses. Most don’t master the art of privacy and ignore lists of friends related to a specific limited profile. We get to the point in which we believe people only add or accept us as friends in order to broaden the list.

Does it really matter? For me, what’s important is the connections you establish and how much access you give to them. A social network is not real life, and for instance, I don’t accept people I don’t know (in real of virtual life). I don’t have the need to talk to all of them, but the value for me is being able to easily contact them if I feel like it, or just be in the know. Of course one can choose to have a really closed and elitist network of real life close friends, but in my opinion that’s not Facebook in it’s full potential.

All those who get too much trouble with virtual dilemmas, can always commit virtual suicide and disappear completely from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter. Grab the Ethernet rope an voilà! Disconnected.

Manifesto on the Rights of Internet Users

A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. We also declare that:

1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.
2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.
3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.
4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.
5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.
6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.
7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.
8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.
9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.
10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

Translation from BoingBoing.