Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Tragedy: videos and slides from presentations Wikimanias (lately 2011 in Haifa)
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:49 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 September 2011 21:44, Michael Dale md...@wikimedia.org wrote: It will be a lot easier to import from YouTube once Timed media handler adds support for webm to commons. If you check out the wikivideo-l and commons lists for some recent example YouTube to commons scripts. I know this is not super useful info right this second, but there is hope on the horizon. How's Timed Media Handler (which will also allow WebM/VP8) going? ETA? The code exists and has been revamped a few times in response to reviews, but I'm not sure whether there are actually any assigned resources for pushing it to production at this time. Robla, Erik, can you clarify state on this? Is TMH deployment on the radar for the next few months, or does it still need to get put on the map? There's some notes on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TimedMediaHandler/statusabout earlier discussion of a September-ish production test, but not sure if that's current. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Tragedy: videos and slides from presentations Wikimanias (lately 2011 in Haifa)
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:02 AM, Brion Vibber br...@pobox.com wrote: The code exists and has been revamped a few times in response to reviews, but I'm not sure whether there are actually any assigned resources for pushing it to production at this time. Yes, there are. Ian and Neil are scheduled to do a code review of TMH, once remaining high priority issues with UploadWizard have been resolved, later this month. Before we've done an initial assessment of the code, it's hard to give a realistic deployment estimate -- there may be parts that need to be rewritten or taken out. So I won't commit us to a public date just yet, just to say that it's definitely something I'd like to see user-visible progress on this calendar year. All good news! The player support is definitely a lot nicer -- and I think we've been running extra JS stuff from that on Commons for a while. The generation handling of derivative files looks like the biggest candidate for potential breakage / rewriting from what I recall (it's still pretty basic in terms of managing processes, so if anything goes wrong it may be tricky to recover). Simply being able to upload larger files will be a big help as well; audio and video clips from eg conference talks are routinely hard to upload to Commons because of the 100mb limit we still have in place for plain HTTP uploads and limited access to upload-by-URL. The upload size limit could be bumped a bit more, but can only be bumped so far before it starts using too much memory during upload -- but there's been work on incremental uploads too, which for many modern browsers will be able to kick in automatically and will bypass that side of the limits, provide better upload progress feedback, and be more reliable in the case of flaky connections or having to put your laptop to sleep! IIRC the incremental uploads aren't part of TMH directly, but is also in Michael's sphere of awesome projectness. :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] YouTube and Creative Commons
(I'm not sure offhand if I'm set up to cross-post to Foundation-l; if this doesn't make it, somebody please CC a mention if necessary. Thanks!) On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:42 PM, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: Aside from the very real privacy issue, YouTube videos can disappear at any time. I would much rather we host them on Commons. A youtube2commons script is pretty easy to implement, but the big hindrance is the 100 MB upload limit on Commons. What are the plans (if any) to increase this? or help facilitate us (e.g. via the api, from the toolserver, ...) in uploading video and files that exceed the limit? There's been some ongoing work on TimedMediaHandler extension which will replace the older OggHandler (this provides the nicer video player we've got hacked in on Commons, and some automatic transcoding for different resolutions in the free Theora WebM formats). This still needs a little more work, and probably some improvements on the actual transcoding management and such, but this will help a bit in supporting larger files (eg by transcoding high-res files to lower-res they're more easily viewable). This isn't ready to go just yet though, and there's still the issue of actually uploading the files. Basic uploads by URL work in theory, but I'm not sure the deployment status. Background large-file downloads are currently disabled in the latest code and needs to be reimplemented if that's to be used. For straight uploads, regular uploads of large files are a bit problematic in general (they hit memory limits and such and have to make it through caching proxies and whatnot), but there's also been some new work on improved chunked uploads for FireFogg (and perhaps for general modern browsers that can do fancier uploads). Michael Dale can probably give some updates on this, but it'll be a bit yet before it's ready to go. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: Let me riff on what you're saying here (partly just to confirm that I understand fully what you're saying). It'd be very cool to have the ability to declare a single article, or probably more helpfully, a single revision of an article to use a completely different syntax. Yes, though I'd recommend jettisoning the word syntax entirely from the discussion at this stage, as I worry it distracts towards bikeshedding about unimportant details. Rather, it could be more useful to primarily think of data resources having features or structure. With images for instance, we don't make people pay too much attention about whether something's in JPEG, PNG, GIF, or SVG format. At the level of actual people working with the system, the file's *format* is completely unimportant -- only its features and metadata are relevant. Set a size, give a caption, specify a page if it's a paged format, or a time if it's a video format. Is it TIFF or PDF? Ogg Theora or WebM? Don't know, don't care, and any time a user has to worry about it we've let them down. We need to think about similarly concentrating on document structure rather than markup syntax for text pages. I definitely agree that the idea of progressively moving bits and pieces in that direction is a wise one. If we can devise a *document structure* that lets us embed magic templatey _things_ into a paragraph-oriented-text document and maintain their structural identity all the way to browser-ready HTML and back, then we can have a useful migration path: * identify possibly unsafe uses of templates, extensions, and parserfunctions (machines are great at this!) * clean them up bit by bit (bots are often good at many common cases) * once a page can be confirmed as not using Weird Template Magic, but only using templates/images/plugins that fit within the structure, it's golden. * depending on which flavor of overlords we have, we might have various ways of enforcing that a page will always *remain* well-structured from then on. That might not even involve changing syntax per se -- we shouldn't care too much about whether italic is i or ''. But knowing where a table or a div block starts and ends reliably is extremely important to being able to tell which part of your document is which. And heck, even if not everything gets fixed along that kind of path, just being able to *have* pages and other resource types that *are* well-structured mixed into the system is going to be hugely useful for the non-Wikipedia projects. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
, as your imagination and HTML5 allow. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] List moderation
I'm taking the liberty of putting foundation-l on temporary moderation. Seriously, guys -- take the who's a bigger jerk threads offlist. The regular list mods may reconfigure any way they like once they wake up. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
On 10/2/09 1:21 AM, Aphaia wrote: Brion, congrats on your new opportunity and project and I'm bit on a relief to hear you would like to stay on our community, and I still remember the days you was a volunteer developer with great devotion (in those days e started to celebrate Brion Vibber Day) but still you won't be surprised I think your departure a loss in the project and you'll be greatly missed, though still your future is fully blessed by your friend Wikipedians. Dankon Brion for your all commitments until now and hopefully also in advance. a *hugs* :) By the way all, Liam's posted the first part of my interview w/ Wikipedia Weekly: http://wikipediaweekly.org/2009/10/03/wikipedia-weekly-83-farewell-brion/ We went way overtime so the second half will be in the next episode. :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads in Beta testing at labs.wikimedia.org
On 10/2/09 11:45 AM, Steven Walling wrote: Andrew, do you think LiquidThreads is stable enough for production deployment on a much smaller wiki, such as like less than 1,000 pages? The Portland WikiWednesday has a small MediaWiki install, and a couple years ago we had David demo LiquidThreads for us. We'd love to try it. The primary limitation right now I think is that the updated version ties in with changes in MediaWiki 1.16 development for cleaner integration, so it probably won't work if you're running a 1.15 or older stable release. If you're willing to live a little bit on the bleeding edge though, I know Andrew would love the testing feedback! -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
On 9/28/09 12:53 PM, Sage Ross wrote: As Kat Walsh alluded to on ... Facebook?!?... free/libre real-time services are more important than a lot of Wikimedians think (because we've spent so long pushing back against merely social uses of our wikis?). In the grand scheme of the things we care about, development in that area may be a more critical immediate need than continued work on MediaWiki. The social side is quite important here too... social interaction is probably one of the key areas we really need to improve on for Wikipedia/Wikimedia. No matter what else we improve technically I think we all are aware that there are serious problems with how people interact in our community, and that's one of the major stumbling blocks for new users. Wikipedia has had enough success that it's bought some time in terms of establishing the ability (and right) of people to control and use educational material how they want. There's still a lot to do, but the free culture approach is starting to pick up momentum. For so-called social networking services, it's still an uphill battle. Yep... what I do find encouraging is that many of the big social-networking services are picking up on the idea that easy interoperability is a win for everyone a lot quicker than, say, the IM wars of the 2000s or the email wars of the late 80s/early 90s. (Remember when CompuServer and AOL users couldn't email each other? Hah!) But that's something that could disappear quickly as long as it's a world where there's only a small number of big players... -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
On 9/28/09 12:56 PM, Anthony wrote: On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:31 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: I was really looking forward to you handing over the administrative part of your job and concentrating on coding, great things would have happened, I'm sure! No reason he can't keep coding. He just won't be paid for it. :) The more things change, the more they stay the same? ;) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
On 9/28/09 2:23 PM, Domas Mituzas wrote: Hi! And you'll still have commit access, so I hope to keep seeing Revert rXXX, totally broken Don't be so harsh on Brion, not every commit of his has been totally broken :-) *reverts domas* :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On 9/28/09 4:18 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: On 9/28/09 1:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip] plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp, Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page That config has been there for a month, but it might be broken in some way; as far as I know nobody's yet done any organized poking at the test site. We'll look it over in the next few days... It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them. Quick steps to try it out: 1) Find a nice page: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29 2) Hit the 'protect' link: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29action=protect 3) This page does not have a stable version; page stability settings can be configured. - click this link [ideally that next form will be better integrated into the protection form in future] http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Stabilizationpage=Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29 ^ At this point if you're an admin you can tweak the page stabilization settings which allows you to opt a page into FlaggedRevs. Switching it in for thie page to The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one, I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet). -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On 9/28/09 4:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: 3) This page does not have a stable version; page stability settings can be configured.- click this link [ideally that next form will be better integrated into the protection form in future] http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Stabilizationpage=Hurricane_Vince_%282005%29 ^ At this point if you're an admin you can tweak the page stabilization settings which allows you to opt a page into FlaggedRevs. Switching it in for thie page to The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one, I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet). And note there's a 'Stability' tab in Special:Preferences to tweak your personal prefs for viewing stable vs draft versions and how to show the interface. http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On 9/28/09 4:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: Switching it in for thie page to The stable revision; if not present, then the current/draft one, I now see the little 'sighted' box on the article page and have the review interface at the bottom (though some of the UI elements haven't been fully customized yet). I've added notes to these effects with sample links on the main page: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] lots of people please test this :-)
On 9/28/09 5:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote: I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list... Yay! :) Also added on the tech blog: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/ -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] lots of people please test this :-)
On 9/28/09 5:19 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote: Brion Vibber wrote: On 9/28/09 5:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote: I also forwarded this to the English Wikipedia mailing list... Yay! :) Also added on the tech blog: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/ Actually it bounced, on account of I am not a subscriber there now, and I've gotta run so hopefully someone else will do that for me. :) I've made a post on wikien-l for ya. :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On 9/28/09 5:23 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them. Holy crap! In my defense: It's pretty clear that no one was aware that it was turned up yet. The notice indicated that things were still being setup. Totally fair -- there was just plain bad communication there! We've got things going now and folks are getting set up with local admin crat accounts to start poking it, so it looks like we've got this finally resolved. :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009-
May I respectfully suggest that further discussion on this thread be taken offlist until new arguments come to light which have not already been posted? -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Moderate this list
On 9/11/09 12:45 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote: Isn't temporarily blocking such a user a way to calm him/her down? I Yes it might be the way, but far not universal way. And it should be the last (ultimate) in moderator toolkit, far not the first to be used. The fundamental mechanism of moderation isn't to restrict posters from speaking, but to give them a chance to reconsider the tone of their message between hitting send and the time the post goes out to everyone, possibly aided by getting direct feedback from the moderator about the tone. Goodness knows I *wish* plenty of my posts had been moderated, after the fact! -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On 9/9/09 9:41 AM, David Gerard wrote: As Erik points out, at a certain point we have to actually write new code to support new ideas. Else projects we could do at Wikimedia becomes projects we can do with a wiki engine. IMO we need to do that for the projects we already have before we take on new obligations! We still have very poor software support for: * Commons -- We need a sane upload and post-upload workflow (eg review and deletion), and a clean system for handling structured metadata (descriptions, authorship, licence info). Some of this is being worked on now with Michael Dale's video media work, and the Ford Foundation grant will let us put more resources into the workflow metadata side, so this is the one I worry the least about. :) * Wiktionary -- Really needs to be rebuilt as a structured system. It's very hard to query Wiktionary or extract its data usefully, and there's a lot of duplicated manual work maintaining it. There was some third-party work done in this direction (Ultimate Wiktionary/WiktionaryZ/OmegaWiki) which was very interesting but never got the community buy-in to push that work back towards the live Wiktionary. * Wikibooks -- We still have very poor native support for multiple-page books or modules, which complicates navigation, search, authoring, and downloading. Tools like the Collection extension are making it easier to download a batch of related pages for offline reading, but someone still needs to build those collections manually and they don't provide other navigation aids. * Wikinews -- Workflow on Wikinews has been aided by tools like FlaggedRevs but is still a bit awkward. Native support for things like exporting feeds of news articles is still missing, leading to a lot of workarounds and manual effort being expended. * Wikisource -- better native support for side-by-side translations, annotations, and extracting/citing primary source material from the other sites like Wikipedia would be very helpful. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On 9/8/09 3:56 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/9/8 Pedro Sanchezpdsanc...@gmail.com: Geographical/atlas/map kind ofproject granted, there's wikimapia and other external equivalents but we (Wikimedia) are lacking it Is there any point us doing something that already exists? What would be better about a Wikimedia version? Our current direction is to coordinate with external resources rather than create them from scratch, where we've got compatible goals and ideals. For instance, rather than creating our own map system from scratch we're working with OpenStreetMap to integrate mapping, using our own rendering servers with a copy of the public data and making it easier to stick maps in wiki pages for starters, with easier ways to get into the upstream system to improve location name translations and mapping data. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF seeking to sub-lease office space?
On 9/4/09 3:27 PM, Anthony wrote: On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Chad's analysis was correct. The SF staff have been looking for a new office for some time, and last I heard they were in the process of negotiating a lease on a prospective space. Subletting the old office will be desirable at least until the lease there expires. Thanks, I also see it was in the annual report that you're moving from the 3,000 sq ft place to an 11,000 sq ft one. I had been told (incorrectly) that the 3,000 sq ft was only a portion of the Stillman location, but after reading that this makes sense. The building we are currently in is physically subdivided into two spaces. Wikimedia occupies one part (3,000 sq ft) and another company occupies the other (I'm unsure the exact size, but it's larger than ours). Is the staff currently using the Wikia sublease space going to move too? Yes; the purpose of finding a larger space is to have enough room for our current and forseeable future staff. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
On 8/27/09 9:39 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/8/28 Gregory Maxwellgmaxw...@gmail.com: If the results of this kind of study have good agreement with mechanical proxy metrics (such as machine detected vandalism) our confidence in those proxies will increase, if they disagree it will provide an opportunity to improve the proxies. This kind of intensive study on a few small sample with a more automated method used on the same sample to compare would be more achievable. If the automated method gets similar results, we can use that method for larger samples. I would certainly be interested in seeing such a result. Generally speaking we can expect a strong correlation between vandalism and machine-identifiable reverts -- it's a totally reasonable assumption for a first-order approximation -- and it would be valuable to confirm this and see how much divergence there might be between this count and other markers. Most interesting following this would be take into account the effects of flagged revisions and how this could affect initially-displayed vs edited revisions. Has there been similar work targeting German-language Wikipedia already? Robert, is it possible to share the source for generating the revert-based stats with other folks who may be interested in pursuing further work on the subject? Thanks! -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO Senior Software Architect, Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?
Because we haven't had a chance to finish final review fixups on it. Should be done in the next few days. (Why are there like 500 replies to this from people we've already talked to directly and know what's up?) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Question to post...
On 8/13/09 12:23 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: (I went on, on IRC, to point some examples of the behavioural change that happened towards the end of 2007 (per my cruddy memory) where non-widely-linked redirects basically fell out of the google index... search terms like Jesus bug or many other things like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Redirects_to_scientific_names ... if we cared about the traffic flux from google we'd see what we could do to fix that) Worth looking into; have we got some collected info and sample queries to poke at? [I would recommend moving further detail discussion on this end of things to wikitech-l.] -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Question to post...
On 8/13/09 5:28 PM, Angela wrote: On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: So— I tried 20 random words, and the WP result was lower in four of them, the same in the rest. No pattern really... We still have the problem with article at funny name; redirect from common name; common name search on google gives squat, which I consider to be much more major. A simple solution to this is using the canonical tags which all major search engines started supporting earlier this year. That's been deployed for a while, eg: link rel=canonical href=/wiki/Foobar / at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On 8/12/09 12:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote: While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia. With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly old guard Wikimedians as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming unfriendly to new participants. Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too? On the contrary, getting the old guard more active is essential in resolving such community issues -- Wikipedia was much more newbie-friendly in its first couple of years than it is today, and we need to recover that spirit. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report
On 8/12/09 6:18 AM, Chad wrote: Just thinking aloud here, but as to methods for accessing the content: A) Extends FileRepo to work with their data, however they happen to give us access to it B) Provide something similar to Special:Import, that will go retrieve their data and import it to a format MediaWiki can handle Both are certainly feasible with the current code base; it's not going to require some massive re-write of anything. We've already got the latter in the pipeline with Michael Dale's work on the add media wizard: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Add_Media_Wizard This includes the ability to search remote media repositories and import particular resources from them into the wiki. In testing this is implemented for for instance pulling videos from the Internet Archive's video collections (kindly pre-transcoded into Ogg Theora -- thanks IA guys and gals!) As this matures some more and the backend support gets merged into our live deployment, this'll be rolled into the advanced editing tools the Usability crew is working on. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On 8/12/09 1:48 PM, Steven Walling wrote: Let me clarify: I'm not actually arguing that anything is wrong with the election system, the results, or having old hands on the Board. On the contrary. I'm just wondering if this election (even if it's not unusual) might be conflated with the PARC stats on the community that have gotten so much attention from the media lately. That's all. a) I doubt it and b) I gave an example response of why that's not a bad thing -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:
On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior. Yay! Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits. We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's privacy. Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them from users. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote: I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel 24x7 ;-P ). The team seems to function well - servers seem decently stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is up to industry standards for large website operations. At some point tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and organizational knowledge. Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been increasing the ops staff this last year. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
I'm very excited to announce some new upcoming hiring for tech... I've also posted this on our tech blog which is mirrored on Planet Wikimedia: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- Back in 2005, Wikimedia brought me on as the Foundation's first paid employee after two years leading MediaWiki development as a volunteer. Naturally as the *only* member of the tech staff, I started at the top: Chief Technology Officer. In the 4 years since, we've gone from one tech employee to a dozen, from 50 servers to 350, from upstart novelty to established web juggernaut. As our operations and our staff have grown over the years, so have my responsibilities. Beefing up our tech staff is in some ways just like adding servers to our data center -- we can get more things done with less task switching, but scaling still has its overhead. With the increase in administrative and organizational duties, I've been less and less able to devote time to the part of the job that's nearest and dearest to me: working with our volunteer developer community and end users -- Wikimedians and other MediaWiki users alike -- who have bugs, patches, features, ideas, complaints, hopes and dreams that need attention. The last thing I want to be is a bottleneck that prevents our users from getting what they need, or our open source developers from being able to participate effectively! Multicore brain upgrades aren't yet available, so to keep us running at top speed I've suggested, and gotten Sue Erik's blessing on, splitting out the components of my current CTO role into two separate positions: As Senior Software Architect, I... * maintain the MediaWiki development roadmap * give timely feedback and review on feature ideas, patches and commits * ensure that end-users and bug reporters are treated respectfully and that their needs are met * get developers users involved and talking at local and worldwide events as well as online * represent the face of the developers interacting with our user community (both Wikimedians and third-party MediaWiki users) As CTO, I... * set high-level strategic priorities with the rest of WMF * handle administrative management for the Wikimedia Foundation's technical department internal IT ** budgeting ** vendor relations purchase approval ** hiring personnel details * work with the fundraising side of WMF to seek out and make use of potential resources: ** grants for projects we need ** in-kind donations of infrastructure ** sharing development work with like-minded orgs * ensure that the operations team has what they need to address current and predictable future site needs * ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly * plan and implement internship programs and volunteer dev events both on-site and elsewhere I'll continue to act in both roles until we've found a satisfactory candidate to fill the CTO position (full job description will go up soon), at which point I'll be freed up to concentrate on being a full-time Senior Software Architect. (Yes, I'll review your patch!) I will of course continue to work closely with our eventual CTO... the idea is to find someone who'll make the decisions I would have wanted to if I only had time. ;) -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Voluntary self-regulation of multimedia service providers
On 8/7/09 12:25 AM, private musings wrote: actually - might a WMF 'code of conduct' for projects be a good idea? (as in something perhaps a dollop more pragmatic than 'comply with our mission statement'!) - sounds like an idea for the strategy wiki... :-) I'd say yes, but that a code of conduct is primarily about personal interaction, reminding people to treat other people reasonably. This is traditionally covered by common-sense rules like http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick -- but sometimes we really need a few basics written down! ;) As far as things apply to _types of content_ that's a much trickier road to navigate; we want to concentrate not on limiting _what_ can be posted but _how it's presented_ and discussed... preferably civilly and respectfully. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On 8/7/09 11:12 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote: I think this is a fantastic idea. I think the biggest problem the tech side of the WMF has had over the last year or two has been prioritisation and splitting the job like this should help that no end. I'm curious - would the Senior Software Architect report to the CTO? If so, that means Brion has, technically speaking, proposed his own demotion - there aren't many people big enough to do that! It sure beats letting the organization succumb to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On 8/7/09 3:06 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: It's not just about resumes, it's also about being taken seriously when communicating with others. A Head Software Architect will probably be taken more seriously than a Senior Software Architect, since the former shows you are the boss, that latter could be one of many. Having many folks at that level is be a condition dearly to be wished for! -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On 8/7/09 2:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: By containing the magic words senior and architect the proposed Senior Software Architect is, in my experience, not inconsistent with industry naming practice for the most important tech guru who isn't primarily a manager. It's not a bad title in any case. (I was previously a manager and made a decision to hire a boss because I realized I'd rather be doing technical work than performance reviews. These days I'm just a lowly 'Senior … Engineer', and I'm quite happy with that, thank you very much) Exactly. Now, if we really think of a _totally badass title_ before we get the business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :) Remember... titles are only useful when they're actually descriptive; otherwise they're just fluff. Certainly when I'm doing hiring I'm far more interested in asking what somebody did at their previous job than in what it was called... -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On 8/7/09 3:39 PM, James Forrester wrote: 2009/8/7 Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org: On 8/7/09 3:06 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: It's not just about resumes, it's also about being taken seriously when communicating with others. A Head Software Architect will probably be taken more seriously than a Senior Software Architect, since the former shows you are the boss, that latter could be one of many. Having many folks at that level is be a condition dearly to be wished for! Well, in my experience it shows that the organisation's overall architecture is poorly thought-out, and with insufficient resource expenditure on correcting it (or, for that matter, stopping the rot getting even worse). But yes. :-) Well ideally it would be because we really do have that much work to do... ;) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] mo.wikipedia is not yet renamed to mo-cyrill as it was promised !!
Hi Cetateanu -- As replied previously, we don't yet have infrastructure for conveniently renaming sites. Given that the site has been locked for years and there's nothing to replace it with at mo.wikipedia.org, it's no higher on our priority list than the other sites that have language code renames pending. Since we've been in the midst of a slow migration of external text storage as well, it's slid farther back on the burner than planned. I'll see if we can make sure it's on the radar at least... The problem isn't intractable, but merely inconvenient, and due to the number of sites databases needing renaming it needs to be scripted and tested for safety first: * Ensure language/localization files have been updated for new language code * Lock site * Rename public file storage subdirectories * Rename private file storage subdirectories * Ensure all site config entries have been updated for new language code * Rename core database on primary database cluster (create new database, rename all tables, drop old empty database) * Ensure that all slave databases were properly updated * Rename blob databases on all external storage clusters (for each of 22 clusters, create new database, rename all tables, drop old empty databases) * Ensure that all slave databases were properly updated * Make sure it didn't break anything _else_... * Unlock site * Rename or move data dump archives * Check if anything else needs cleaning up in recent changes channels, interwiki links, or other output. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) Cetateanu Moldovanu wrote: *Hi, I want to remind you that on 26 Nov 2008 **http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-November/047554.html** you have promised that subdomain name mo will become mo-cyrl, it's July now and mo is still not yet renamed.* * * * If you cannot rename please delete it altogether. Hope to get a ETA, or to know at which point is the progress. Brion Vibber and his superiors, please make a room for this task to be done, also I (as a programmer) can volunteer to help you do this thing if you have a lack of resources ! IT'S IMPORTANT ! * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Chrome to support Ogg Theora video natively
El 5/28/09 1:56 PM, Kat Walsh escribió: Another step towards an open web -- Google's Chrome browser is going to support Theora video natively with the HTML5 video tag: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/05/google-chrome-3-adds-html5.html http://codereview.chromium.org/115625/diff/1/2 (Mozilla has already committed to this--and funded some of our development of video support also!--and it looks like Opera will as well. Video site Dailymotion is now using open video as well: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=1312 ) If it weren't for Wikimedia using it, this work probably wouldn't have gone into enabling native browser support for it. So thanks to all for your work on this. :-) Woohoo! :D Welcome to the cool kids' table, Google! ;) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
El 5/14/09 4:14 PM, Mike.lifeguard escribió: While this may be true for Wikipedia (English Wikipedia?), it is certainly not true of Wikimedia project generally. For example, Wikibooks has a subproject Wikijunior which is an attempt to create high-quality children's books. Part of the defined scope here is that the books are appropriate for children. While I despise censorship (cf my recent posts, or my statements on Commons) this is commendable in my mind. Though I don't participate in generating content for Wikijunior on a regular basis, I do think it is a worthwhile project, and is an important alternative to be mentioned during such discussions. Spiffy! Sounds like it needs more lovin' and attention, I forgot it was even there. ;) There is a safe sandbox at Wikijunior (well, semi-safe, English Wikibooks still gets vandalism, though we now have FlaggedRevs [which could use a config change; it's in bugzilla :D] Found it in the general sea of issues and have moved it to Rob's work queue. :) -- brion ) where people concerned with such things can generate appropriately-censored content for children. -Mike On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 10:29 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote: Slippery-slope arguments aside, it seems unfortunate that as creators of educational resources we don't actually have anything that's being created with a children's audience in mind -- Wikipedia is primarily being created *by adults for adults*. That's fine for us grown-ups but we're missing an important part of the educational market. Like it or not, part of creating educational material for children is cultural sensitivity: you need to make something that won't freak out their parents. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
El 5/14/09 7:31 PM, Thomas Dalton escribió: 2009/5/14 Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com: On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/14 Fred Bauderfredb...@fairpoint.net: I suggest that Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not include Wikipedia is not a manual of sexual practices. It could be phrased Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra. What about pictures of Muhammad? Descriptions of Chinese human rights violations? Articles about evolution? etc. etc. etc. The reason that Wikipedia is not censored is because we cannot censor one thing and maintain neutrality without censoring everything else that might offend somebody and we would end up without anything left. Though technically challenging, I've long believed that the best answer is to develop some system similar to Categories that could be used to flag content that is potentially objectionable on various grounds and then provide the tools to create filtered streams that remove that content. That would good. We can't choose what should and should not be seen by our readers without violating neutrality but there is nothing stopping them choosing for themselves. IMHO any restriction that's not present in the default view isn't likely to accomplish much. The answer an objecting parent wants to my daughter saw a lady with semen on her neck on your website is *not* you should have told her to log in and check 'no sexual imagery' in her profile! Slippery-slope arguments aside, it seems unfortunate that as creators of educational resources we don't actually have anything that's being created with a children's audience in mind -- Wikipedia is primarily being created *by adults for adults*. That's fine for us grown-ups but we're missing an important part of the educational market. Like it or not, part of creating educational material for children is cultural sensitivity: you need to make something that won't freak out their parents. The challenge here isn't technical, but political/cultural; choosing how to mark things and what to mark for a default view is quite simply _difficult_ as there's such a huge variance in what people may find objectionable. Sites like Flickr and Google image search keep this to a single toggle; the default view is a safe search which excludes items which have been marked as adult in nature, while making it easy to opt out of the restricted search and get at everything if you want it. Generally sexual imagery is the prime target since it's the biggest hot-button save the children issue for most people -- many parents wouldn't be happy to have their kid read list of sexual positions but would rather they read the text than see the pictures, even if they're drawings. Ultimately it may be most effective to implement something like this (basically an expansion of the bad image list implemented long ago for requiring a click-through on certain images which were being frequently misused in vandalism) in combination with a push to create distinct resources which really *are* targeted at kids -- an area in which multiple versions targeted to different cultural groups are more likely to be accepted than the one true neutral article model of Wikipedia. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)
El 5/7/09 5:36 PM, geni escribió: 2009/5/8 Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu: This usability study is so tiny. I want MediaWiki to be really, really good. Please tell me you guys hope to go large scale with the remote testing setup. Nit just mediawiki. Looks like we need to improve the paths through the help namespace. The primary target on the help pages is to make key pieces like the markup cheat-sheet available quickly, easily, and universally. Wikia's got a cute little editing-help-sidebar version of this which we've considered adapting or taking as a model for that purpose -- it gets you some important stuff without taking you out of your editing environment. Style guides, licensing recommendations, etc are another level of help page which needs more consideration, but remain of secondary importance. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)
El 5/8/09 9:21 PM, phoebe ayers escribió: About this: on en:wp, at least, under user preferences/gadgets, users can turn this on themselves by clicking the Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page box. Is there any particular reason not to turn this on by default for everyone? Could be (one small) problem (temporarily) solved. We disabled the section-0 edit link a couple years ago because it interfered with the floating infoboxes and images which appear at the top of most pages. Finding a way to put it back that's reliable and interferes with neither floating boxes nor the various badge icons that a lot of templated put in above the line is on the task list. :) Once it's back permanently we can dump the temporary gadgets. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Congratulations to Gdansk!
Tomasz Ganicz escribió: 2009/5/7 Dedalus deda...@wikipedia.be: Congratulations to the Poland team for winning the Wikimania 2010 bid! Thank you :-) Actually we are all very happy but also shocked in Poland. Now, we feel great responsibility to organize Wikimania as well as we are able or even better :-) The Polish Wikipedia community has always been strong and active, ever since the earliest days when Polish was broken out to separate hosting for a while to demonstrate the need to upgrade our wikis for proper Unicode support. Congratulations -- it'll be great to meet all you guys on your home turf for a change! :) I think all three biding team deserve congratulation as all of them did great job as well, and Wikimania could have been be a success in Amsterdam or Oxford. They were all great bids, which is why the poor bid committee was stuck so long making their decision! :) Here's holding out for 2011 and 2012... -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] site notice not accessible to users with disabilities
[snip] As we've told you several times, we've made a deliberate trade-off choice. 1) The sitenotice is **not required** to use or operate the site; it's an extra. As such, not seeing it in an unsupported browser doesn't interfere with your ability to use the site -- this is called graceful degradation and is a web best practice. 2) Using JavaScript includes to maintain the notice avoids problems with caching and search engines indexing a temporary notice text for a long period. So far this is the best way to provide a dynamic notice to the majority of our visitors without causing problems for others. If you have technical suggestions for alternate implementations, they're welcome in a more relevant channel such as wikitech-l. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Fwd: Phorm opt-out for Wikipedia.org and related domains]
After some internal discussion on whether opting out of the Phorm user-profiling system in the UK would legitimize it, we're going ahead and requesting an opt-out for all the domains under the Wikimedia Foundation's control. For background see eg: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2009/03/22/open-letter-call-for-major-websites-to-opt-out-of-phorm/ -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) Original Message Subject: Phorm opt-out for Wikipedia.org and related domains Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:28:11 -0700 From: Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org To: website-exclus...@webwise.com CC: privat...@lists.wikimedia.org To whom it may concern -- The Wikimedia Foundation requests that our web sites including Wikipedia.org and all related domains be excluded from scanning by the Phorm / BT Webwise system, as we consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy. Here is a list of our domains which should be excluded (please exclude any and all subdomains as well): wikipedia.org wikipedia.com wikipedia.co.uk wikipedia.cz wikipedia.fr wikipedia.info wikipedia.lt wikipedia.net wikipedia.nl wikipedia.org.br mediawiki.com mediawiki.org quickipedia.net quickipedia.org toolserver.org vikipedio.com vikipedio.org wikibook.com wikibooks.com wikibooks.cz wikibooks.org wikicitaty.cz wikidata.org wikidisclosure.com wikidisclosure.org wikidruhy.cz wikifamily.com wikifamily.org wikigis.com wikigis.org wikijunior.com wikijunior.net wikijunior.org wikiknihy.cz wikimania2006.org wikimania2007.org wikimaps.com wikimaps.net wikimediacommons.co.uk wikimediacommons.de wikimediacommons.eu wikimediacommons.info wikimediacommons.mobl wikimediacommons.net wikimediacommons.org wikimedia.cz wikimediafoundation.com wikimediafoundation.net wikimediafoundation.org wikimedia.hu wikimedia.li wikimedia.lt wikimedia.org wikimedia.pl wikimedia.se wikimedia.us wikimemory.org wikimorial.com wikimorial.org wikinews.org wikipaedia.net wikipedie.cz wikiquote.com wikiquote.cz wikiquote.net wikiquote.org wikislovnik.cz wikisource.com wikisource.cz wikisource.org wikispecies.com wikispecies.cz wikispecies.net wikispecies.org wikiversity.com wikiversity.cz wikiversity.org wikiverzita.cz wikizdroje.cz wikizpravy.cz wiktionary.com wiktionary.cz wiktionary.org Thank you for your time. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco +1 (415) 839-6885 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiSym 2009 in Orlando: Call for Papers - posters deadline April 24
On 3/8/09 9:46 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: A reminder that WikiSym 2009 will be in Orlando, Florida, from October 25-27. The deadline for submitting papers, workshops and panel proposals is March 27; April 24th is the deadline for posters, demonstrations and WikiFest (practical experience) proposals. [snip] For more information, see the Call for Papers: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/tiki-index.php?page=Call+for+Papers Just a reminder to all that the CfP is still open for posters, demonstrations, and WikiFest proposals -- the final deadline for these is April 24. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] mo.wikipedia is not yet renamed to mo-cyrill as it was promised !
On 4/6/09 3:28 PM, Casey Brown wrote: On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Cetateanu Moldovanu cetatean...@gmail.com wrote: * you have promised that subdomain name mo will become mo-cyrl, it's april now and mo is still not yet renamed.* None of the wikis have been moved yet, it's not that this situation is specific to mowiki. No idea why this was sent to foundation-l since I already answered directly... Wikis have not been renamed yet since we have no infrastructure for doing it. The requests are in the system and will be reached when we have an opportunity to set up a renaming infrastructure -- none of the renames are high priority, and there are plenty of things most members of this list would rather see us do first. :) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Planning to tighten TorBlock settings]
Soliciting feedback on Tor blocking settings... Please comment on wikitech-l or the tech blog if possible to centralize discussion but we'll keep an eye out on these lists too. :) http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/planning-to-tighten-torblock-restrictions/ -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Tech updates: code updates going live to Wikimedia sites
After a few weeks of bug fixes, we've caught up with MediaWiki development code review and I'm pushing out an update to the live sites. This fixes a lot of little bugs, and hopefully doesn't cause introduce too many new ones. :) * Change logs: http://ur1.ca/2rah (r47458 to r48811) As usual in addition to lots of offline and individual testing among our staff and volunteer developers, we've done a shakedown on http://test.wikipedia.org/ -- and as usual we can fully expect a few more issues to have cropped up that weren't already found. Don't be alarmed if you do find a problem; just let us know at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ or on the tech IRC channels (#wikimedia-tech on Freenode). We should be resuming our weekly update schedule soon -- I won't be doing a mega-crosspost like this every week! -- and will continue to improve our pre-update staging and shakedown testing to keep disruption to a minimum and awesome improvements to a maximum. I'd also like to announce that we've started a blog for Wikimedia tech activity MediaWiki development, in part because I want to make sure community members can easily follow what we're working on and give feedback before we push things out: * http://techblog.wikimedia.org/ I'd very much like to make sure that we've got regular contacts among the various project communities who can help coordinate with us on features, bugs, and general thoughts which might affect some projects distinctly from others. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] dumps
On 2/23/09 5:31 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: Copying the Commons list. I am interested in hosting (and running some scripts on) copies of the commons media dump on offline regional servers for offline-reading purposes. This is difficult without an image dump. Awesome -- can you work with an rsync3-over-ssh setup? Email me and we'll set it up. (Reminds me -- Greg, can we make sure we've got yours going again?) -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikia leasing office space to WMF
On 1/23/09 11:49 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote: Could we have more detail, please, on the note that Wikia matched the best offer? Were the other ten higher bidders also given the opportunity to match the best offer? Why was Wikia chosen on a second and adjusted offer basis, rather than choosing the good-faith firm that submitted the lowest offer initially? Was the first low bidder given the chance to further discount their rate? If so, what was their response? If not, why not? I'd appreciate answers to those questions as well. Wikia's space is physically closer to WMF's main office than the best other bid, making it easier for the project team to work with the main office. (We'd much rather keep them *in* our main office, but we're simply out of room!) The fact that Wikia also has software developers working on MediaWiki usability is a big plus as well -- being physically close to Wikia's office makes technical collaboration with their team easier, which translates directly to benefiting end users. These benefits would be present even if the price didn't match the best other offer, but would have been outweighed by a significant price difference (or being able to increase our primary space at an effective cost, say by taking over the space next door which is alas not currently available). Wikia has been doing intensive work on the usability front and making the code available to public, so I look forward to collaborating with the Wikia technical and product teams to exchange ideas and learn from their work. There is a certain amount of logic in working with one of the biggest non-WMF MediaWiki users on this project. Bingo. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
On 1/15/09 11:19 AM, Brian wrote: Chad, What more would you like me to do, specifically? The first things that would help would be: 1) Stop looking to blame someone for past wrongs 2) Think of something that *would* actually help, and do that When a discussion starts in a negative direction, and continues on and on and on in that direction, it ends up alienating the people you would need to be working with to accomplish your goal -- it all ends up sidetracked as a big ad-hominem debate about who's a bigger jerk and nothing actually productive gets done. If you'd like to push for more active evaluation of SMW and introduction of either SMW or a refactored, slimmed down data storage/query system to testing and production use, I think that's great! We've been looking at it for years and hoping we'd have a chance to poke at it some day; it's the beginning of a new year, projects are starting up, and this is a time that we're setting priorities. But it would probably be better to focus on positives like thinking about what can be accomplished and getting interested parties excited about working together than to repeat over and over that you believe a past decision was wrong -- even if you're absolutely sure that it was. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Now hiring for Wikipedia Usability Initiative
I'm very happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is now opening hiring for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative! Realized by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, the goal of this initiative is to measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation. We have three positions open, all local in San Francisco. See the linked pages for details and how to submit your CV: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Interaction_Designer_(project) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Sr._Software_Developer_(project) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project) The new team will be lead by project manager Naoko Komura, who was very helpful in organizing localization and translations for our recent fundraiser, and will coordinate closely with me and the rest of Wikimedia's core developers. Also joining the project will be Wikimedia staff developer Trevor Parscal. As always, all of Wikimedia's software development is open-source, and we expect to be able to roll improvements into the live Wikipedia environment and general MediaWiki releases over the course of the project. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Don't know how linked we still are with wikia...
On 1/4/09 5:19 PM, effe iets anders wrote: But was that connection close enough (even in the old days) to complain here about copyright violations there? I think Tim had a good point here :P *nod* The Wikimedia Foundation is not, and has never been, involved with Wikia in a capacity which would make foundation-l an appropriate place to report a complaint about content on one of Wikia's thousands of user-created wiki sites. You should contact Wikia's admins directly if you want such a problem taken care of. If one is instead making the argument that Wikimedia should distance itself from a wiki hosting company due to offense taken at user-created content on a site hosted by that company, well that's probably not the best argument but I guess you can freely make it here. :) The relationship between WMF and Wikia is basically on the order of some of the same people are involved [many fewer now than before], much of the same technology is involved [still true], and because of the above, occasionally both companies find it convenient to share resources [mainly our techs talk to each other, and sometimes we'll split spare capacity on some physical resource at a fair market rate]. This is not a particularly closer relationship than we have with other companies and organizations in the fields of wikis and open source/content stuff. -- brion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Some Ideas About Technical Stuff/Community Relations Improvements
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Brion Vibber wrote: Please see my reply on wikitech-l. :) Archive link: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-December/040611.html (Cross-posting is great for announcements, but trouble for discussions... :D) - -- brion -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAklBjWoACgkQwRnhpk1wk44MXgCgrxm3ygotRZDB1sKbRMiiLjXd ZvEAoMO0xJpyG4mUF7wu97XLhqWWnOnO =Lclp -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 [snip] We're already aware of the UNICEF study extensions and will be reviewing them alongside other ongoing usability testing and development projects throughout 2009. - -- brion -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkk1dG0ACgkQwRnhpk1wk44zRACgicVPx/0RbyJfFmwNxccY8uwR vfYAnj66ZEn+uWRWZbF1H1cU167HCn4u =YY3K -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EN Wikipedia Editing Statistics
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Nathan wrote: Wow, someone had more than 10,000 edits in February of 2002. That's probably Conversion script. :) - -- brion -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkk0WRoACgkQwRnhpk1wk45UngCfdUkZa1wV8zskTs6kvdADgyyX SjgAni2hvsPi5h3XbkXaUF5QtmWLKULD =Dahu -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Language codes to rename
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, Do not forget the als.wikipedia.org. It stands for Alsatian, but the als code is the Tosk language. The gsw code is the code that should have been used. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=gsw Adding it to my list, thanks! The nrm.wikipedia is also using a wrong code. nrm is Narom, a language from Malaysia. Nourmande is not recognised as a language, consequently there is no code available for it. I propose to use qaa for this. http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp#R I'd recommend roa-x-norman (generic Romance code with an extension tag) rather than a private-use identifier. Private-use identifiers are meant more for things like internal coding within an application; such as where you'd want to indicate that a document is not in a human language, or maybe a special mixed setting that's specific to your organization's internal usage such as not yet inspected for coding or something. Per spec: These identifiers may only be used locally, and may not be used in interchange without a private agreement. The purpose of using language codes on the web as we do is explicitly for interchange with browser software, end users (as a navigation marker in the URL), and content reusers. - -- brion -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkkx0hcACgkQwRnhpk1wk44wGgCg09XgjA6cu1G+SRQLzEsBAXLZ 1ToAnRC6BfYMDAr086q34+qG1K4OBrsf =VpUJ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Language codes to rename
For quick background, it's pretty painful to rename a database in our system, and we currently have a lot of bits in our configuration that make automatic relationships between the database name and the domain name, so this has delayed renaming of some language subdomains for a while. It's not impossible to have them be different, just fairly awkward. :) I'd like to get these done soon, but before we get started, I want to make sure the queue is complete and ready to go. I've currently got four language code renames that I see being requested... == Aromanian == roa-rup.wikipedia.org - rup.wikipedia.org roa-rup.wiktionary.org - rup.wiktionary.org https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15988 ISO-639-2 code 'rup' was added in September 2005, and can supersede the generic 'roa' code with 'rup' subtag. This seems pretty uncontroversial. Existing domains and interwikis would be redirected. == Low German == nds.wikipedia.org - nds-de.wikipedia.org nds.wikibooks.org - nds-de.wikibooks.org nds.wikiquote.org - nds-de.wikiquote.org nds.wiktionary.org - nds-de.wiktionary.org https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8540 Reasoning: Disambiguation of country variants to create a portal site (nds-nl.wikipedia.org exists as well). The original request is almost 2 years old and didn't seem to have any clear consensus; is this still desired? Creating a portal site could cause difficulties with URL compatibility, and I don't really recommend making this change without clear consensus from the community there. Note that nds.wikipedia.org includes a link on the front page to nds-nl.wikipedia.org. == Moldovan == mo.wikipedia.org - mo-cyrl.wikipedia.org mo.wiktionary.org - mo-cyrl.wiktionary.org The official Moldovan language is the same as Romanian, using Latin script and same orthography as on ro.wikipedia.org. Latin script was officially adopted in 1989, replacing Soviet-era Cyrillic script; use of Cyrillic script is still official in an unrecognized, lightly-populated breakaway region but if people there use it, they don't seem to edit Wikipedia... The 'mo' language code has been officially deprecated from ISO 639-1/2 as of November 3, 2008; Moldovan in general use is just Romanian, and is covered by ro.wikipedia.org. mo.wikipedia.org has not actually been edited since December 2006. mo.wiktionary.org seems to have 4 definition pages, which only contain translations (no definitions!) Being inactive, these projects could be closed in addition to / instead of the rename. Use of tag 'mo-cyrl' would follow existing IANA-registered language subtags such as 'bs-Cyrl' and 'bs-Latn' for Cyrillic and Latin script variants. Most likely, for compatibility we would redirect the existing 'mo' URLs to the new 'mo-cyrl' ones, but they would now be visibly marked by the subtag as being yes we know, it's Cyrillic here. If we're going to lock the site as well, adding a sitenotice pointing to the Romanian wiki is probably wise. == Belorusian old orthography == be-x-old.wikipedia.org - be-tarask.wikipedia.org https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9823 Some time ago we swapped around the Belorusian Wikipedia, moving the previous version which was primarily using a non-official orthography, from 'be' to 'be-x-old', and re-establishing be.wikipedia.org using the official state orthography. There was later a request to rename 'be-x-old' (using a non-standard code) to 'be-tarask', a IANA-registered subtag which is rather more descriptive. IMHO this change should not be terribly controversial -- if we're not closing it, we may as well give it its official RFC 4646-registered code. Old domain and interwikis would be redirected. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] FlaggedRevs status/news?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Dovi, you're already in the queue which is being worked through; should be done within the next few days. - -- brion Dovi Jacobs wrote: Gerard, thank you for your kind comments. I think the system you have set up at Betawiki is extraordinary, and is a fantastic tool for helping people access the sum of all knowledge in their own languages. The qqq messages are a fantastic idea (though I can't quite see where to find them of Betawiki...) For Hebrew we would like the extension set up with due haste. We prefer translating the messages when we can test their meanings in context and revise our translations accordingly. We also plan to make some important local modifications to the interface that are Wikisource-specific (such as the parameters for defining the quality of a page), but we cannot even begin to do so until the extension has been installed! This last factor is a need that Betawiki, outstanding as it is, cannot provide for. A good part of the interface has already been translated in any case. It would reflect good will on your part if you clarified that while your suggestions are personal recommendations, you nonetheless understand that the decisions of communities with other views should be honored and implemented. I ask the developers to implement the decision of the Hebrew Wikisource community as found in Bug 14648, along with the other languages that they have kindly implemented recently. We have been waiting for this for quite a long time, and will provide a quality localization of the system messages. While Gerard's views on localization-as-prerequisite-in-every-case are important to consider, he is not a member of the community that has requested the extension. Link: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14648 Dovi ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkkmFKkACgkQwRnhpk1wk440swCcDyDiB6NM5YOQpYYzeMEnnpgr kSoAmwcKijgLQw7zxU14JMpX2eZlNauS =18ay -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
