IDF Spokesperson releases images under CC-BY-SA license
The spokesperson unit of the Israel Defense Forces began publishing its photographs online (on its Flickr account) under a free Creative Commons license. This move follows a long and protracted process of legislation promoted by WMIL in discussions in the Science and Technology Committee of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. While legislation meant to free any work created by the Israeli government of copyright has not yet been accepted, the move by the IDF is certainly motivated by it. Hundreds of IDF Spokesperson images are now in use on Wikimedia projects. WMIL released a widely circulated press release condoning the move by the IDF spokesperson.
Pages uploaded to Commons
Wikimedian-in-Residence in Israel Museum, Jerusalem
On September 18th, Yair Talmor became the first ever Wikimedian-in-Residence in the Israel Museum and in Israel in general. Talmor, an art teacher with academic background in art, will be employed for a two months period at the museum, concentrating on tutoring museum staff on wiki editing, organizing events of public outreach such as editathons and backstage tours, uploading material from the museum's library and enhancing Wikipedia articles about prominent Israeli artists. His employment is funded in part by WMIL.
While the focus of the project is in Hebrew, there's also some work on material in English.
Haifa University Faculty of the Humanities
On September 22nd, a large meeting was held at Haifa University between members of staff from the Faculty of the Humanities and volunteers from Wikimedia Israel. This was a preparatory session for a large-scale project in which students in various courses will write Wikipedia articles as part of their academic assignments.
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
WMIL representatives met with a Deputy Director of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They are very interested in releasing some of their material under free licenses and in receiving further training from WMIL about Wikipedia editing. A training session is planned for October 5th.
Israeli Ministry of Education
Tomer Ashur, Deror Lin and Amir Aharoni met with the people responsible for Internet ethics and safety education in the Ministry of Education to start planning one-time experimental classes for elementary school pupils that will teach them to understand Wikipedia's background, to read it correctly and to understand the right conduct on talk pages. The lessons are scheduled for November and chapter members are preparing the detailed lesson plans.
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