Does wikipedia like videos within articles?

From my experience the Pointer video was removed a couple of times from the german wikipedia article related to that topic and then also brought back to the article. So it seems like there isn’t any consensus within the community yet about having videos. Interestingly enough I was asked by some wikipedians to submit my video for a video competition they are doing. So the goal of this competition is to have more content creators like me to upload their material to commons and include it into Wikipedia articles. This effort seems to be founded by money which was donated by the users. There seems to be a similar project in the english wikipedia. So well at least money is flowing towards the direction of creating more video content. 
Even though these seem to be strong arguments I have the feeling that not the entire Wikipedia community supports this movement – or one could call it strategic move. 1 year ago without knowing about these kind of efforts I have tried to include some of the web science videos to wikipedia articles. For example I included the following video:

to the corresponding wikipedia article it was removed with a statement of saying this would be video SPAM which in my opinion is a little bit of an overreaction.
A summary of the discussion can be taken from my slides of my talk at the german open educational resources conference:

If you are interested you can find the entire discussion at the discussion page of the ethernet frame article

Problems for creating video Content for Commons:

Obviously there is a problem about the copyright. So for example I have pointed out in the past that creating a screencast during lecture on a Windows machine means committing a copyright violation since the the start button and the windows interface by Microsoft EULA are protected by copyright. Also in former discussions at #OER13de we agreed that it is hard to collaboratively edit videos (sorry link in german language) because the software often is not free and wikimedia commons does not support uploading the source files of the videos anyway.

Conclusion

It is not clear if video content will survive in Wikipedia even though some strategic movement is put into that idea. The people who are against this have pretty decent arguments and I also say that it is really hard to have a tool for collaboratively editing video files. If one does not have such tools even access to the source files of the videos would make it hard for people to work on this together. So I am curious to see what the competitions will bring and how the discussions on movies will evolve over time.
At least in wikiversity we are able to use our videos for teaching as we anticipated and I am pretty sure this space won’t be affected by the ongoing discussion.

I understand that the following article is written in a very personal way. But this thing seems to me so unjust that it is just unbelievable. So this is my sad story of me trying to bring free educational resources to the world and having Microsoft indirectly not allowing me to do so  The following article is dedicated to Aaron Swartz:

Background:

• I fought hard to be able to create a massive open online course on web science.
• I compared platforms to host the MOOC and brought up good strong and valid arguments for our university to allow me to go for an open variant instead of the proprietary way.
• I am even supervising my student Sebastian Schlicht to implement a lot of features on Wikiversity to create a better user experience for content creators and learners.
• Wikimedia Germany asked me to write a guest article about the first real OER MOOC and I got a talk accepted at OERde14 where we present a way for others to easily follow our path in creating open educational resources on wikiversity.
• Related to similar problems I have been co-organizing an open access conference at oxford and helping to set up related work.

Copyright is f*** up on this planet.

We have been creating almost all of our so far 69 produced videos by ourselves. The videos which which we did not produce ourselves have been published under a creative commons by licence by the copyright owners. In one case I even called a professor in the united states and asked him to change the licence of his videos on Youtube such that we could reuse them within the Wikimedia commons ecosystem which he did (:
So you might think everything is alright. The guys paid attention to proper licences if they used material by others and for the rest they created everything themselves. Unfortunately this is not true.
For some of our Flipped classroom sessions we created hangouts on air with screen casts of our Smartbord. Currently our university only supportes the smartboard software SMARTNotebook on Microsoft Windows. Creating a Screencast on a Microsoft operating system is critical since there is the Microsoft Start button visible and also the user interface of SMARTNotebook. At least the microsoft interfaces are protected under copyright and I belief similar constraints will hold for SMARTNotebook. This has the consequence that we cannot put a creative commons licence to these materials. Consequently we must not host the materials on Wikimedia Commons as wikimedia commons supports only free content.
What we can do now is to move the videos to Wikiversity which allows material with a fair use licence. Ok great I can still host my course but parts of it are not free anymore. Don’t be afraid you don’t have to pay, like you have to at other sites. But you loose a lot of your freedom. You cannot remix, correct, translate, […] the videos. In particular I am not even sure if I am legally allowed to publish the videos under the terms of Fair Use. I am not an American citizen and my university clearly is a German institution. The Fair Use law is an United States law. Ok we are hosting the materials on an American Website but will this be sufficient? Last time I had a similar law problem and asked the law consultants from our university the only answer I received was: “Better take the material down. You don’t want to end up in a law fight”. Ok so not only we have absurd laws influenced from money making industries, we are also scared of the industries.
On the other side being forced to move to Fair Use licence will allow me to include a lot of creative commons materials where the NC tag is placed to the licence. Not that I now don’t want to do any open educational resources. But the quality of the MOOC also suffered from not being able to include CC-NC material. 

Think about this again:

We as a university – and in the very end as a society, since the university is payed by tax money – pay high licence fees to Microsoft in order to be allowed to use their crappy Software. We are then forced by the administration that if we want to use modern technology like smartboards we have to use Microsoft Software. We pay high wages for professors, me and technical staff to create an free and open online course. And now Microsoft – which I did not even choose to use  but was forced to use by our university which is just following the the majority vote of computer users – is telling me that I cannot publish the content I  created under the license that I want.
You might say: Hey guy calm down. What’s the problem? The course is still online and nothing has changed. But that is the problem that everything has changed. We don’t pay attention to the subtleties as a society and wonder why we are having unjust laws.

Conclusions:

We need to think about our law. It is us who makes them anyway! Regional laws are conflicting with the idea of a global network (Fair Use for example). Many ideas of copyright are just not suitable to a tech driven world in which sharing, citing and giving attribution and fame to people who create something has been fundamentally changed. These laws like the ones mentioned are just outdated an ridiculous. Also other laws like https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren (sorry for a link to German wikipedia. I might translate the article at some point in time) fall into this category.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

I go a little further than the definition and really require an open licence and also open formats of the documents:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be is an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

Taking this into account I’ll now compare OER platforms which offer services to host a MOOC. The upshot is that I would suggest to host your MOOC either on Khan Academy or on Wikiversity.

Kahn Academy

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational website created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The stated mission is to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere”. It is strongly supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and won the Google 10 to the 100 award giving them 2 million dollars. Currently the content is translated to various languages including German. You can find more information for instructors on the website at https://www.khanacademy.org/about

1. Overhead: You have to learn the Khan academy software
2. Open: Anyone can create courses on Khan academy. I am note quite sure about including videos since khan academy seems to require some standard branding.
3. Licence: CC 3.0 by Share alike
4. Hosting time: As long as the project is founded.
5. Open Format: The website provides an API to obtain data at http://api-explorer.khanacademy.org/ also all (?) source code of Khan academy is available: https://github.com/Khan
6. Feedback:Various Feedback mechanisms are provided as explained on the website
7. Quizes: Yes
8. Community:As far as I understand instructors cannot collaborate within the software
9. Audience:Yes: more than a quarter billion lessons have been delivered.
10. Support: There are a lot of online courses training the coach
11. Online Meetings: There are Q&A style discussions related to every content created
12. Account Management:
13. Risk: Besides Khan Academy running out of money I don’t see any risks

Recommendation: Khan Academy is a very good platform to choose once you want to host a massive open online course. The material as free and open. The platform and community is very active and there is a lot of outside support. Exporting data doesn’t seem to work yet but there seems to be the will to be open in the future. Anyway Khan Academy is the only open educational resources platform that offers you a user experience that is closest to the otherwise commercialized MOOC format.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content. Like Wikipedia it is offered in several languages. The English version of wikiversity seems quite active where as the German version is currently being restructured.

1. Overhead: Wiki markup language is very easy to learn. also there is the network of wiki tutors that can come to your place and teach you how to use mediawiki
2. Open: Anybody can contribute to Wikimedia projects
3. Licence: CC3.0 SA BY
4. Hosting time: Forever as long as Wikimedia exists
5. Open Format: Data base dumps are available and the software is open source
6. Feedback: So far there is little feedback for instructors but there are potential ways of changing this.
7. Quizes: yes
8. Community:Instructurs help each other out and also share content among each other. Minor mistakes in the material are quickly corrected.
9. Audience:There is a large audience, if the video content is uploaded to wiki commons and included into related wikipedia articles there is a high visibility of the MOOC at the targeted audience.
10. SupportEspecially in Germany there is the Mentoring network of Media wiki users who teach best practices of using media wiki software.
11. Online MeetingsHolger Brenner also uses media wiki on wikiversity to create online meetings but this is rather tricky
12. Account ManagementThere exist different user roles in media wiki but those are not really reflecting a student / teacher relationship
13. RiskBasically there are none. The data base dumps as well as the software are available for download. Even if the platform closes oneself can still easily host the content.

Recommendation: Mediawiki software is very flexible and offers a lot of opportunities. The software itself is not best suited for the “commercialized” massive open online course format. The biggest drawback is the missing analytics for instructors to see how the course is proceeding. On the other side if one actively uses wikiversity (which I did on my last course) one gets a lot of personal feedback. Wikiversity has a lot of trust (provided by wikipedia) and users to explore content and attract many new people. Also wikimedia really follows the concept of free content without any limitations. Finally Mediawiki is open source and also extensions can be included into Wikiversity if the community agrees to that.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library located at www.oercommons.org that provides a web-based infrastructure for teachers and others to search and discover Open Educational Resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials. OER Commons is a project created by ISKME, an independent non-profit organization based in Half Moon Bay, California, founded by Lisa Petrides in 2002. Launched in 2007, OER Commons aggregates Open Educational Resources, which are teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed for anyone to use and reuse, in order to support a global network for engaging with flexible, adaptable curriculum

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: to anybody. I don’t know about content moderation
3. Licence: Creative commons
4. Hosting time: hosting can be on any website.
5. Open Format: all formats supported
6. Feedback: No
7. Quizes: No
8. Community: Yes
9. Audience:not of students but rather of teachers collecting teaching material
10. Support: No
11. Online Meetings: No
12. Account Management: No
13. Risk: No

Recommendation: OER Commons is a very interesting approach since a lot of content that is needed for an open MOOC can be drawn from OER commons. All of the MOOC content can be integrated into OER commons and from this hub being spread to other instructors again. The platform itself doesn’t seem suitable to host an entire course. I think anybody who does a MOOC should submit his material to OER commons. This works really easily even if the content is just provided as a web link. I did this with my last course which was hosted on wikiversity

European MOOC platform open up ed

The european union created its own mooc platform under www.openuped.eu/.

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: only selected partners
3. Licence: partner choice
4. Hosting time: you host the mooc yourself
5. Open Format: your decision
6. Feedback: possible
7. Quizes:possible
8. Community: There is a network of partners but it’s hard to say how much collaboration exists
9. Audience:your own students
10. Support: n/a
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: possible
13. Risk: None

Recommendation: This platform seems interesting since there is political will behind. Right now it seems to only aggregate MOOCs from various partners so there is no hosting service offered. On the other side you maintain the licence of everything and can probably add an existing MOOC to the index of the platform ==> Nice to have but for now it cannot work as a standalone hosting service. Also it is not clear if you can participate since they work only with selected partners.

P2P University

Peer to Peer University (P2PU) is a nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. Peer 2 Peer University was started in 2009 with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The main learning management system for P2PU courses is called Lernanta (the Esperanto word for “learning”). P2PU also hosts a wiki and an OSQA server for questions and answers.

1. Overhead: low
2. Open: Anybody
3. Licence: CC SA BY
4. Hosting time: I did not spot video content
5. Open Format: As far as I see there is no standard format used
6. Feedback: through discussions
7. Quizes: no
8. Community: there are strong partners like mozilla connected to the project
9. Audience: doesn’t seem too large
10. Support: there is a lot of teaching about the platform in courses on the platform. since courses are p2p I assume there is quite some support
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: probably not
13. Risk: This platform doesn’t seem to be mature yet. Will it survive?

Recommendation: I like the approach of this learning platform but I have the feeling it is much more targeted towards learning groups from students. It also doesn’t seem to be very mature and it is not quite clear to what place it will develop. Also I could not find data base dumps on the website which decreases my trust into the platform.

Summary

I hope I did not oversee any platform. My advice is to go for either Khan Academy or Wikiversity and submit your entire course as well as pieces of the material to OER Commons. In that way I would also suggest to add part of the content of your course to wiki commons if can enhance any given wikipedia article. I think it is probably personal choice whether to go for Khan Academy or for Wikiversity. Personally I would probably go for Wikiversity since I already had good experiences and my trust to this platform with respect to long term sustainability is higher. Also out of the box more languages are supported. In any case: When you want to create a MOOC don’t let yourself be blinded by commercialized platforms and offers just because they look nicer. Education is something that belongs to the citizens!

1. Free content: The focus of these platforms (Khan Academy, Wikiversity, OER Commons, P2P university,…) lies in freeing educational content from the publishing industry. In most cases the focus seems to be on content and not so much on learning paths or didactics or pedagogy. The argumentation seems to be like: “first we need the content, next we can think about how to use it”. Have alook at my blog post: http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/comparison-of-open-educational-resources-services-to-host-your-mooc/ to see which open platforms perform well.
2. Commercial: There is a rising industry (Coursera, Udacity, edX, iversity,..) trying to commercialize massive open online education. Commercial platforms usually have high quality content and strong relationships with universities (most often ivy league) serving a lot of classes in this new format. Courses are usually not available under an open licence. So far most content is available at no cost and the business model is related to certification but also sometimes to tuition fees.
3. Self hosted with the use of a learning management system: There are various learning management systems (OLAT, Moodle, Google Course Builder, ILIAS,…) available as open source software which enables one to host a MOOC oneself. Most of these systems are made for eLearning and but lack this MOOC feeling of excellent usability. Often their intent also is not primary to be open.

This means besides this article I will publish three blog articles comparing platforms for each of the 3 different approaches. There is a German list of Learning platforms on Wikipedia as well as the MOOC Template in the English wikipedia from which I extracted the following lists

Platforms for online education

• MIT OpenCourseWare 
• Khan Academy 
• China Open Resources for Education 
• OpenCourseWare 
• Peer to Peer University 
• Academic Earth 
• Edulanka 
• ALISON
• Udacity 
• Coursera 
• Duolingo 
• edX 
• Canvas Network 
• Futurelearn 
• OpenHPI

People related to online education

• Anant Agarwal 
• Stephen Downes 
• Salman Khan 
• Daphne Koller 
• Peter Norvig 
• Andrew Ng 
• George Siemens 
• Sebastian Thrun

Not all of the platforms are relevant for a Web Science MOOC but still I extracted some of the most relevant sites and added a fiew others. As for the evaluation methodology we did a little survey and identified some possibilities. Since there are so many hosting services and possibilities we tried to find some dimensions that are important to us in order find which hosting service makes the most sense. We will use the following dimensions for our evaluation:

1. Overhead: How much overhead is associated providing the content for a certain platform infrastructure?
2. Open: Will the platform accept our course?
3. Licence: Who has the copyright and how is the licencing model?
4. Hosting time: How much time of hosting does the platform guarantee?
5. Open Format: Will the course content be in an open format so that we can easily export the data from the host and take it to some other service?
6. Feedback: Feedback for instructors like how long do people interact with some content?
7. Quizes: Will quizes be supported in the Platform
8. Community:Is there an active community and exchange of instructors?
9. Audience:Is there a large audience using the platform?
10. Support: is there active support from the platform?
11. Online Meetings: Does the platform support meetings of students and teachers on the cyberspace?
12. Account Management: Is it possible to have different roles for the accounts (e.g. student, tutor, creator,…)?
13. Risk: What are the risks of using this particular platform?

At least my goal would be to find a service with the following answers to our dimensions:

1. Overhead: Little overhead to submit the course material.
2. Open: The platform should be open to any course.
3. Licence: We should maintain the copyright or the licence should be at least creative commons
4. Hosting time: forever
5. Open Format: data export of the material is needed. e.g respecting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMS_Global
6. Feedback: In order to improve we need Feedback
7. Quizes: We need various forms of quizes
8. Community:A community of instructors with which one can exchange and from which one can learn would be amazing.
9. Audience:In the end good content will win but the larger the audience the better
10. Support: A platform that offers support with problems is preferable
11. Online Meetings: It would be nice if the platform supports online meetings of users with Q&A systems or even with video chat.
12. Account Management: Multiple account roles would support the learning process.
13. Risk: Obviously we want the risks to be minimized

I am looking forward to your feedback of missing platforms or other dimensions for the evaluation of the learning platforms.

• how to integreate a SuggestBox instead of a textfield into the GWT Starter project
• how to set up the neccessary stuff (extending a SuggestOracle) to fire a remote procedure call that requests suggestions if the user has typed something.
• how to override the necessary methods from the SuggestOracle Interface

So here we go with the second part of the screencast which you can of course directly download from wikipedia:

Feel free to ask questions, give comments and improve the screencast!

Max report on semantifying

• DBPedia resources are to be linked with “resources” in the URI not with “page”
• SMW requires the pre-fix “foaf:” or “mo:” or something else for EACH imported property
• Check the Special:ExportRDF early to see if your properties work
• Properties / Predicates , no difference with SMW
• How to get data to freebase depends on the backlinks and sameas to other ontologies as well as entering data in semantic search engines
• Forms for user data entry are very important!
• As a non-scientific person without feedback I would not have been able to implement that.
• DBPedia and music ontology ARE not interlinked with SAMEAS (as checked on sameas.org).
• Factbox only works with the standard skin (monoskin). For other skins one has to include it in the PHP code oneself.

Main article

The online wiki Rock in China has been online for a number of years and focusses on Chinese underground music. Prior to starting implementing Semantic Mediawikia our wiki had roughly 4000 content pages with over 1800 artists and 900 records. We used a number of templates for bands, CDs, venues and labels, but apart from using numerous categories and the DynamicPageList extension for a few joints, we were not able to tangibly use the available data.
DPL example for JOINT between two Wikipedia Categories:

<DynamicPageList>
category = Metal Artists
category = Beijing Artists
mode     = ricstyle
order  = ascending
</DynamicPageList>

{{SemanticVenue
|Image=
|ImageDescription=
|City=
|Address=
|Phone=
|Opened=
|Closed=
|GeoLocation=
}}

As can be seen from the above template both predicates (City) and properties (Opened) are being proposed for the semantic class VENUE. Semantic Mediawiki is implementing this decisive difference in a very user-friendly way by setting the TYPE of each SMW property to either PAGE or something else. As good as this is, it somehow confuses if one is talking with someone else about the semantic concept in principle.
A major problem had been the implementation of external ontologies which was not sufficiently documented on the semantic mediawiki page, most probably due to a change in versioning. Especially the cross-referencing to the URI was a major problem. As per Semantic Mediawiki documentation, aliases would be allowed, however with trial and error, it was revealed that only a property with a domain prefix, e.g. foaf:phone or owl:sameas would be correctly recognized. We used the Special:RDFExport function to find most of these errors, everytime our URI referencing was wrong, we would get a parser function error.
First, the wrong way for the following two wiki pages:

• Mediawiki:smw_import_mo
• Property:genre

Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/ |[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

And now the correct way how it should be actually implemented to work:
Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/|[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:mo:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

The ontology with most problems was the dbpedia, which documentation did not tell us what the correct URI was. Luckily the mailing list provided support and we got to know which the correct URI was:

http://www.dbpedia.org/ontology/

Being provided that, we were able to implement a number of semantic properties for a number of classes and start updating our wiki pages to get the data on our semantic database.
To utilize semantic properties within a wiki, there is a number of extensions available, such as Semantic Forms, Semantic Result Formats and Semantic Maps. The benefits we were able to gain were tremendous. For example the original JOINT query that we had been running at the beginning of the blog post with DPL was now able to be utilized with the following ASK query:

{{#ask: [[Category:Artists]] [[mo:origin:Beijing]]
|format=list
}}

However with the major benefit that the <references/> extension would NOT be broken after setting the inline query within a page. Dynamic Page List breaks the <references/>, rendering a lot of information lost. Other examples of how we benefitted from semantics is that previously we were only able to use Categories and read information of joining one or two categories, e.g. Artist pages that were both categorized as BEIJING artists and METAL artists. However now, with semantic properties, we had a lot of more data to play around with and could create mashup pages such as ROCK or Category:Records on which we were able to implement random videos from any ROCK artists or on which we were able to include a TIMELINE view of released records.

Owl:sameas (or sameas)

On various of our pages directly to Wikipedia pages.
However we learnt that the property

foaf:primaryTopic

is a much better and accurate property for this. The sameas property should be used for semantic RDF pages, i.e. the respective DBPedia RESOURCE page (not the PAGE page). Luckily we already implemented the sameas property mostly in templates, so it was easy enough to exchange the properties.
Having figured out this issue, we checked out both the freebase page as well as other pages, such as DBpedia or musicbrainz, but there seems to be no “submit RDF” form. Hence we decided that the best way for getting recognized in the Semantic Web is to include more links to other RDF resources, e.g. for our Category:Artists we set sameas links to dbpedia and music ontology. For dbpedia we linked to the class and for music ontology to the URI for the class.
Note on the side here, when checking on sameas.org, it seems that music ontology is NOT cross-linked to dbpedia so far.
Following the recommendations set forth at Sindice, we changed our robots.txt to include our semantic sitemap(s):

Sitemap: http://www.music-china.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom
Sitemap: http://www.rockinchina.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom

Going the next step we analyzed how we can include external data on our SMW, e.g. from musicbrainz or from youtube. Being a music-oriented page especially Youtube was of particular interest for us. We found the SMW extension External Data that we could use to connect with the Google API:

{{#get_web_data:
url=https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&q=carsick+cars&topicId=%2Fm%2F03cmgbv&type=video&key=Googlev3API&maxResults=50
|format=JSON
|data= videoId=videoId,title=title
}}

And

{{#for_external_table:
{{Youtube|ID={{{videoId}}}|title={{{title}}} }}<br/>
{{{videoId}}} and {{{title}}}<br/>
}}

See our internal TESTPAGE for the live example.
Youtube is using its in-house Freebase ID system to generate auto-channels filled with official music videos of bands and singers. The Freebase ID can be found on the individual freebase RESOURCE page after pressing the EDIT button. Alternatively one could use the Google API to receive the ID, but would need a Youtube internal HC ID prior to that. Easy implementation for our wiki: Include the FreebaseID as semantic property on artist pages within our definitions template:

{{Definitions
|wikipedia=
|dbpedia=
|freebase=
|freebaseID=
|musicbrainz=
|youtubeautochannel=
}}

Voila, with the additional SQL-based caching of request queries (e.g. JSON) our API load on Google is extremely low as well as increasing speed for loading a page at our wiki. Using this method we were able to increase our saved YOUTUBE id tags from the original 500 to way over 1000 within half a day.

• Press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_to_go_dark
• Letter to Users: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout 
• User discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action see below for a saved copy!

This is such an important move of democracy that I was standing still for a couple of minutes after I heard of this! 1’800 active wikipedia authors moderators and administrators collectively agreed to make this move in order to show a protest! I am very excited to see where this will be going and what impact this has. Freedom of the internet is what makes this such a beautiful space. Everyone spread this word! discuss this! Don’t let anyone take the freedom of speech and information sharing from you!
Since the user discussion and poll won’t be available tomorrow I attached them to my blogpost.
http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wikipedia-SOPA-initiative-Action-Wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia.html
I will not comment on this any further. Please everyone Have your own oppinion and act with responsability.

• AVL Trees
• Red Black Trees
• Divide and Conquorer
• Backtracking
• Heap (data structure)
• Dynamic Programming

Find at least 5 mistakes or passages that could be improved. Write down what is wrong or what could be improved. Give a justification for your statements and write down your suggested new version of this very passage.
To get inspired you can find mistakes by looking at the discussion page of the articles or at the version history. You might also be able to look the same article in versions of other languages!
Here are some example types / things that could possibly be improoved:

• pure mistakes
• semantics of links
• semantics of pictures
• articles could explain easy concepts in difficult words
• missing cites
• missing links to original scientific work
• …

Further discussion
I am really excited how many students will try to do this exercise and how well it is accapted and what the quality of the answers will be…
I would also love to receive your feedback, thoughts and comments about this kind of exercise! Mabe you have some ideas that could be extended or you asked students to do similar coursework?