Considering all the flared tempers surrounding whether or not to allow avowed pedophiles to edit Wikimedia projects, and whether or not it's okay to let 14-year-old Wikimedia admins to collate and file images of graphic adult pornography, and whether or not Ottava has ever taken a photograph of even a clothed child for fear of what yearnings it might set off at the photo lab, etc....

I think here might be a good place to take a time-out and review what the Wikimedia Foundation's "Wikijunior" project says about human anatomy, specifically, the reproductive system. Note, the Wikijunior project is geared toward those learners under the age of 12, thanks to a generous $10,000 grant from the Beck Foundation of Chicago.

Ready?

Here we go:


Yay! That was so informative for our little Johnnies and Susies, wasn't it?


If you explore Wikijunior a little bit, you might also learn which of the dinosaurs is sometimes known as "one of the dumbest dinosaurs".

So where does the stork fit in?

And if your favorite WikiYoungster hits recent changes:

• Exhibit 1

I'd like to contact the Beck Foundation to find out how well they feel their $10,000 was spent, but it's a bit difficult to even determine what is the "Beck Foundation".

According to Florence Devouard, the former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, it's this very industrial looking foundation, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, and specializing in building power plants to produce energy in impoverished areas.

According to Nicholas "Zaminum" Moreau, it's two different entities in the same post! It might be this defunct-since-2007 site, BeckLit.org. Or, it could be (according to what Zaminum attributes to Angela Beesley) TheBeckFoundation.org, which even Zaminum admitted in October 2005 was "defunct".

It looks like the most probable entity has evolved into:
Good Karma NFP (SearchLIT.org)
1433 W. Gregory #3
Chicago, IL 60640

Wayne Lown, the president of BeckLit.org has a non-working phone number.

Herb Walberg, the former chair of the Beck Foundation that seemed to run BeckLit.org, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. The phone number that the Stanford receptionist provides for Walberg, when dialed, is answered by someone who says "it's the incorrect number" for Walberg (so I won't repeat the number here, but it ends with -9175). Walberg is more permanently stationed at the University of Illinois - Chicago, but his contact number there, 312-996-8133, has been disconnected. I've attempted to e-mail Walberg, so we'll see how that goes.

Why is it that everything related to Chicago and the Wikimedia Foundation turns out to be so highly suspicious?

beckfound.org is The William and Irene Foundation. The $10K grant was from The John and Frances Beck Foundation.

They used to use becklit.org and thebeckfoundation.org, and still use SearchLIT.org. See Aetherometry for a rundown on the Beck Foundation and wikijounior.

They have a privatized domain registered, for whatever reasons. Funny thing for a foundation How and ever;

Registrant Name:William & Irene Beck Fdtn
Registrant Organization:William & Irene Beck Fdtn

This produces a bunch of other interesting hits.


Oops! Snap!

Does anyone find it interesting that the Wikimedia sources say that they accepted a $10,000 grant from the Beck Foundation, but that the Beck Foundation says (page 28) that they gave the Wikimedia Foundation a total of $15,000?

How much more alarming is it, then, that I have an explanation from a Wikimedia Foundation employee at that time, that the money was spent on "servers to get Wikibooks WikiJunior project running".

Did this tiny project of fewer than 1,200 pages of text really require $10,000 (or maybe $15,000) worth of servers to host content? Are we really to believe that Wikijunior cost $10 per new page created?

And, the project's end deliverables were supposed to be full-color, 48-page, glossy printed booklets. How many were actually produced? Probably fewer booklets were produced than $200+ bottles of wine Jimmy Wales has consumed.

No servers, No wine — What's to understand?

Jon

The return you've linked to is for the calendar year 2006, whereas the $10,000.00 was given in either 2004 (according to this) or 2005 (according to this) and is mentioned historically in the entry towards the bottom of this page. I can't see that returns for those years are available online.

The 2007 / 2008 annual report (here) shows the foundation as a patron for a donation in the £15k to $50k range, which would presumably be the $15,000.00 shown in the 2006 return, as the returns for 2007 and 2008 mention no other donation to Wikipedia.

No comment on whether they got value for money or not, though...

I'm not sure if my favourite part of the Human Body section was the wording of the heading "How to approach an organ?" or this sentence introducing the circulatory system: "The so called circulatory system involves everything that keeps our blood in order and flowing". So-called, because we aren't convinced that anything really circulates and we're hedging our bets. You know, like that whole "theory of evolution" thing that those godless science people tried to foist on us...

Also, even though it is in the section on the human body, I am amazed that WikiJunior would openly display a rock-hard penis!!!!

I am in private communication with Marianne K. Friedman, who oversees The John and Frances Beck Foundation. I've asked her for an opinion on how well the $25,000 with the Wikimedia Foundation was spent. We'll see what comes of that.

This is getting good. I hope to be able to share some things. No wonder Florence and Angela didn't respond to me.

I hope you can. Greg, these investigations of yours are one of the most useful things on WR. May they continue and flourish.

OK, that wasn't that funny.

What did you mean by "that", Lar?

The story is coming together now. Just need some confirmation that no books were ever printed. I'm checking here and here.

Score one for Yahoo! Answers, in finding Big Cats!

"Copyright: Theresa Knott, Robert Horning, Gabriel Hurley, et al (GNU Free Documentation License)"

Do any of these editors receive money from the sale of these books? I gather not.

Since Lulu is a self-publishing outfit, it would likely take a cut right off the top, in addition to their original production fees. I'm guessing any proceeds after that (not very likely) would go straight to the WMF.

I'll be self-publishing my own upcoming e-book on Lulu, so my understanding is similar -- Lulu takes a cut, including production costs in the case of paper books, and the person providing the content gets all of what's left-over.

In this case, the content-provider is a mysterious entity called "Various Contributers" (sic). I have strong doubts that the account traces back to the Wikimedia Foundation in any way.

The "publisher" is "Free and Open Books Project" (only the one hit on Google, which is to the Lulu page).

£12.00 or so for a 42 page book seems a bit steep, and somewhat ironic coming from someone calling themselves Free Books, particularly that it's available for free here, but weirdly the Wikibooks page (here) has a link through to the Lulu page - I guess that if anything the account belongs to Gabriel Hurley (Munchkin guy), going by this blog post. Note the slightly nebulous "All profits will go towards the production of other open content publications".

Wasn't there someone doing something similar on Amazon a while back? Taking text off Wikipedia on various countries, repackaging it and selling it for a huge amount of money?

The bottom line is someone other than the people that actually worked and wrote the articles, gets the cash. A virtual license to print money with no workforce costs involved. "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" - Johnny Rotten.

Good find with that blog post, PTB. You're growing on me, man.

Hmm, interesting copyright notice on that .pdf :



I've always understood that the Wikimedia foundation was not claiming copyright on the content, nor on the format of the articles themselves. I wondering here exactly what the WMF could claim ownership over...and if they indeed are, doesn't that make them the defacto publisher of the content?

As far as the "contributing authors" who actually created the content, it serves them right that not only are they no longer owners of their creations but they aren't even mentioned in the copyright notice...

The GNU Licenses says that they have to attribute at least 5 of the principal authors, or all if fewer. The pdf does that in the section below the paragraph quoted.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with claiming copyright. The presence of the GNU license also clearly implies that the WMF does not own the copyright.

The copyright notice is much more important than the presence of the GNU license. In this case, the claim of ownership by the WMF has fairly large ramifications, if that is not a mistake due to....somebody's ignorance about copyright in general...

I suppose it's possible the WMF is claiming some portion of the copyright over the published book—for whatever minimal creative input they may have had (layout, etc.) and not for the Wiki-material which comprises the bulk of it.

I think if somebody took an article I wrote on Wikipedia and incorporated it into a book, I'd feel flattered for a brief moment, then continue going about my day. Shrug.

The money we save on editors, proofreaders, and designers gets passed on to you! Enjoy this sample:We can't say "death" so just leave it blank...

I suspect, and hope, that there's a word missing in that sentence...

Here is a photo of the cat.

In 2005 there was no statement that wikipedia did not own copyright:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=34564122

As they were using a GNU license there may even have been some similar nonsense of assigning copyright to WMF in much the same way as the GNU license had nonsense about assigning copyright to the FSF.

They dropped the implied claim in August 2006.

The Examiner.com story about Wikijunior is now published.

Make sure you read what the head of the Beck Foundation had to say about how their money was spent!

Support investigative reporting of this kind by leaving a comment at The Examiner, please.

Comments on the story are pouring in. Thanks, everyone.

And now one of the Wikibooks faithful is alerting that community about the Examiner article. That should account for another 4 or 5 page views on the article.

Thanks for investigating this.

Cedric comments there that "It wouldn't be the first grant they've had to return because they wouldn't or couldn't comply with the grant conditions. "

It would be good to back that up with examples. meta:Grants doesn't mention many. Is there a list anywhere of all the grants that the WMF has received?

Did the Philip Greenspun illustration project, discussed on WR, end up with the grant conditions met? Round 1 is still listed as closed, but I don't see any results, and someone anonymously claims they haven't been paid, and that coordinators are not answering emails.

Let's not forget Danny's "The Core Contest." He explained on WR that he had financial difficulties and was unable to pay, but it's a pity, and it ranks in the pantheon of WMF's broken promises - even though Danny was offering the money on his own initiative, not as a WMF employee.

Thanks. WR thread
There were two other prizes from Danny, listed at Wikipedia:Danny's_contest; did those winners end up getting paid?

I already posted this on some of your user pages, but I have finally acquired a Wikipedia Reivew account, so here we go:

Hello, I am the Gabriel Hurley mentioned earlier in this thread. There was a discussion and whether or not I had good intentions. I want to assure you that Jimmy Wales is aware of the book I have been attempting to publish. Indeed, it was originally supposed to be a collaborative project on Wikibooks, but all the collaborators have disappeared, and it's mostly up to me. I am half-way through revising the layout of the book. You can get an idea of what it will look like by previewing the PDF at http://www.scribd.com/doc/2490736/Wikijunior-Big-Cats. All the profits that I make from the books will go towards covering the expenses related with reserving ISBN numbers. Any questions?

Moderator's note: In the interest of privacy, several posts relating to the issue referred to below were moved to this thread (viewable by WR contributors only).




I have removed all comments on the article that contained personally-identifying info about the boy. I also added the following explanatory comment:



There's a strict limit on the number of characters allowed in a single comment, so that was my best attempt to document what happened, without bringing any further embarrassment to the minor. I've also asked Somey if this thread here could be put out of sight of the major search engines.

Yes, actually, I have several questions...

1. Why do you presume that the awareness of Jimmy Wales matters in any of this?
2. Have ALL the collaborators actually "disappeared"? Strange, then, that I had e-mail correspondence with one of them just last week, after a grueling 30 seconds of trying to hunt them down.
3. How much did you pay out-of-pocket for the ISBN numbers?
4. After the costs of the ISBN numbers have been recuperated, what will happen to the subsequent profits?
5. How old are you?
6. Have you ever before published a book for sale?

I look forward to your answers.

If we can take him at his word that he's a Winnipeg city planner, then I doubt that Mr. Munchkinguy's age is really an issue. As for the ISBN number(s), I don't know how many he reserved, but there are accredited agencies that handle this, and you basically pay them a fee - typically between $20 and $40 USD per number (with volume discounts if you buy them in larger "blocks"). In the US you have to buy them from Bowker, in blocks of 10 minimum, so it ends up being at least $250, and usually more like $350 once you add in various "additional services." It may be cheaper in Canada, of course.

His last edit to the Wikibooks page was two years ago, but presumably there was a point where he moved the content into a production file of some sort for final proofing, layout, etc. Bear in mind that the book was deemed "finished" back in late 2005...

If he's working on the final print layout now, then that's not bad. Typically layout is the second-to-last step in the process before your work actually gets turned into a book. The last step, of course, is to have your publisher either go out of business, or tell you that a "money crunch" has forced them to put your project on the "back burner," unless of course you want to pay for all printing and distribution expenses yourself (with them retaining full rights, naturally).




Only the actual embarrassing parts, but OK, done!

Because there was a question about whether I was profiting off the work of others. I emailed Mr. Wales, and he has no personal objections to what I am doing.


Not collaborators of Wikibooks, just of the layout. Maybe they have revived themselves; I sort of gave up on the project last year.


ISBN numbers in Canada are free, but there is a price for something called Legal Deposit. After I have completed the layout, I need to send two copies to Library & Archives Canada. The price of this is ordering two copies of the book "at cost" from Lulu.com and then sending them to Ottawa.


After that, I will sell the books "at cost".


None of your business. Let's say I'm old enough to buy alcohol in the United States.


No, but I did typeset the Juice literary journal at the University of Winnipeg.

But if I understand this you get a seven-digit registrant ID (N-NNNNNNN-N-N) being the scarlet letter of vanity publishing.

So we're not talking about an actual print run, then? You're still going to do everything via Lulu.com, at least for the foreseeable future...?

I'm not saying that means you don't (or didn't) have good intentions, and to be fair, Mr. Button initially just pointed out that your statement (on your blog, IIRC) about the profits was "slightly nebulous" - hardly an accusation of malfeasance, IMO, though these days I suppose it doesn't take all that much.


The fact remains that the only significant cost to the WMF for "Wikijunior" would have been printing (of the promised "48-page pamphlets"), and they printed exactly doodley-squat after receiving a $25,000 grant. The money went into the WMF Black Hole™, and whatever printing that's been done has been handled by non-staff, using online POD services, with the out-of-pocket expenses apparently not covered by the WMF at all.

Indeed - I wasn't suggesting malfeasance, I just thought that the wording you used to describe what would happen to any profit generated lacked certainty and clarity. That, and I take any opportunity to use the word "nebulous", which I think is probably one of my favourite words. It's certainly in the top three.

Just one: How many copies were actually printed?

Sounds awfully familiar. Let me see...

Ah yes, here it is -- "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."





So, you felt that as long as Mr. Wales clears something, it's all good? Here's a hint, Munchkinguy...

FIND A NEW ROLE-MODEL.

Er... what? I never said anything about role models. Really, you should be more polite to people or you might scare them away from trying to do good things.