Re: [Foundation-l] Usability wiki
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Guillaume Paumier gpaum...@wikimedia.org wrote: Le samedi 29 janvier 2011 à 21:35 +1000, K. Peachey a écrit : I must disagree with that, fragmenting discussions all over the place just makes things worse, It would be much better to keep these discussions centralized on somewhere like Meta or Mediawiki wiki (or possibly Strategy as well) instead of scattering them onto obscure wikis where they don't have as much viewage. Yes, that was exactly the rationale behind the closing of the usability wiki. I can try to elaborate a bit, since concerns were raised. As such, it makes sense to use mediawiki.org as the main workspace for Wikimedia developers, rather than to have a separate wiki. It might also help paid developers mix more with volunteers developers. I want to really underline this point. If it's MediaWiki related, it belongs on mediawiki.org. Moving things elsewhere fragments discussion and planning. I'm also lazy and don't want to look at other wikis ;-) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Translatewiki illustrates how low internationalisation is in the priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: Before Translatewiki existed it was possible for Wikimedia/Wikipedia users to improve the translation of the Mediawiki software's message used on their project into their own language. You still are. It's called the MediaWiki namespace. That has never changed. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] January 15 retro?
2011/1/12 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDT4s6yLwvg :D This was hilarious. Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFxWhzJWJ4U -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Future donation drive suggestion
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Chris Lee theornamental...@gmail.com wrote: Regardless of how I feel on the matter, this person does make a good point. I have come across many people who view Wikileaks as irresponsible and dangerous. Calling out our non-affiliation with Wikileaks on the donation page seems fairly drastic. However, because this may be a common misconception, clarification should be made *somewhere*. A blog post on the subject was posted back in early December. http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/what’s-in-a-name-in-the-case-of-‘wiki’-lots-of-things/ -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost forever. I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in the past to locate such backups. I asked various people who might have had one. I had given up hope. The history of particularly old Wikipedia articles, as seen in the present Wikipedia database, is incomplete, due to Usemod's policy of deleting old revisions of pages after about a month. The script which Brion wrote to import the article histories from UseMod to MediaWiki only fetched those revisions which hadn't been purged yet. I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever, and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog. In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from January 15 to August 17, 2001. I've put the two log files up on the web, at: http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z The 7-zip archive is only 8.4MB -- much more manageable than today's backups. rclog contains IP addresses. The Usemod software made IP addresses of logged-in users public, so the people who made these edits had no expectation that their IP address would be kept private. That, coupled with the passage of time, makes me think that no harm to user privacy can come from releasing these files. -- Tim Starling I have to say this is super cool. It's like digging up a time capsule right before the 10th anniversary. One of my favorite early edits: This is the new WikiPedia! The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch, without peer review process, etc. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor, that the result will necessarily suck. We aren't so sure. So, let's get to work! -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Anti-vandalism bot census
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:35 AM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: I need your help for compiling all the nicks of those bots. You can help adding info to the page, but if you don't have free time for that, write only the nickname and I will retrieve all the available info about the bot. MartinBot is missing, but it's was a clone of VoABot III, not sure how you want to list that. There was another anti-vandal bot I remember someone running back in '05 or so when I joined, but I can't remember the name of it to save my life. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Anti-vandalism bot census
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: MartinBot is missing, but it's was a clone of VoABot III, not sure how you want to list that. There was another anti-vandal bot I remember someone running back in '05 or so when I joined, but I can't remember the name of it to save my life. -Chad Yeah you can ignore that, I missed the note near the bottom about all the AVBOT clones. And the one I couldn't remember the name of was Tawkerbot2. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Moderation (was: should not web server logs (of requests) be published?)
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Ryan Lomonaco wiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: - Non-moderators should feel free to take a more active role in cooling down discussions. Moderators can't watch the list 24/7, and just one post imploring a few heated participants to think before they hit send can be very helpful. I'm hardly a frequent poster here these days. I mostly just lurk on this list so I can keep somewhat abreast of things that are going on. However, as a longtime participant, this strikes me as a fairly useless idea. The thought has crossed my mind from time to time to jump in and say hey guys, let's cool it with the ad hominems and get back to point A/B (probably in a slightly more sarcastic manner, as is my style) But then I end up trashing the draft and saying to myself Why bother? I'm just going to be shouted down or called a troll. I'm also pretty sure I'm speaking for a not-insignificant number of people who are subscribed but who rarely (if ever) post. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Surely there are ways to publish policies which don't require a formal board resolution every time something changes. Also, any emergency exceptions could always be documented later, after the emergency has been resolved. The policy shouldn't change based on minute implementation details. Like Andre said, it is designed to describe the general policies, not the specifics. A page on wikitech like [[Log rotation procedures]] would both document the process and be citable to those who have questions. And it doesn't need a board resolution at all :D -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] wikimedia fundraiser
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:17 AM, luke lenny lennybodom...@gmail.com wrote: why can't wikimedia publish advertisements and generate revenue and become self-reliant,self-sustainable , instead of asking for funds from user every year again and again... Because we prefer having Jimmy stare us down once a year to having Viagra sit in the sidebar all year long :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:56 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Their current problem is that they have never had to think about this stuff, ever, and suddenly find themselves with no support and desperately gathering cash to pay their ridiculously overpriced hosting ($700/mo). There is no reason that site shouldn't run on a moderately priced VPS. I'm talking in the $100/mo range, or less, even. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 5:44 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Steven Walling wrote: Just a reminder: If you're interested in issues like what the Board is and who it answers to, you should definitely be in the Movement Roles IRC meeting tomorrow (1500 UTC in #wikimedia-roles, see the announcement on Foundation-l earlier). For Christ's sake, another channel? Of course! It was pointed out earlier today that we probably need #wikimedia-irc-channels to coordinate the creation of new channels ;-) -Chad (PS: I suggested creating a new wiki for it :p) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Free culture?
On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I don't think we're in danger of outlawing sharp criticism on Foundation-l. If I had to give a guesstimate of the content breakdown of Foundation-l traffic, it would look something like: 10% news/events/media coverage 10% pointless digressions 10% snarky comments 10% trolling Only 10% for trolling and pointless digressions? Sir, you give this list far too much credit. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Free culture?
On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: And that's just one of many sections erroneously blaming the WMF for content issues. For example, A WikiProject of topic lists has existed since November 2007, but it is still half unfinished and the 100 articles about the hundred United States Senators have been shown to render erroneous, if not libelous, information. Obviously, the Foundation is not responsible for these issues. Just to point out...saying it's a content issue, not a Foundation issue means absolutely *nothing* to the vast majority of people out there. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Mariano Cecowski marianocecow...@yahoo.com.ar wrote: Would it be possible to change the source for editing and then back to be stored? I can think of a couple of problems to solve, including image and template names, or language links, but all of them should be solvable, and that should keep everyone happy, right? Possible? Maybe...would need work. I guess it comes down to whether it's deemed to be worth the work or not. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation-l word cloud
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 6:10 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 October 2010 10:51, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: Although I don't have a issue with it, but you may wish to double check the licensing you have attached to those uploads, since from understanding is that copyright and ownership does apply to emails. Not even within Commons level of copyright paranoia is a word count chart encumbered. I'm sure we can find somebody to debate it, if you'd like to go down that road ;-) Nemo: This is really cool! -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:02 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 October 2010 13:54, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Mariano Cecowski marianocecow...@yahoo.com.ar wrote: Would it be possible to change the source for editing and then back to be stored? I can think of a couple of problems to solve, including image and template names, or language links, but all of them should be solvable, and that should keep everyone happy, right? Possible? Maybe...would need work. I guess it comes down to whether it's deemed to be worth the work or not. In this case, the problem is a visceral hatred by some persons on ro:wp of anything even slightly Cyrillic. The Cyrillic letter was even missing from the ro:wp puzzle globe for a time. (I see it's present in the current version.) I've been around long enough to know this is very true. So treating this as in any way merely a technical problem will not resolve the cause of these regular messages. I see the messager has resorted to spamming multiple lists now. This has been going on for what...2 years now? 3? I'm tired of getting spammed a few times a year and dragging this horse out of the ground to flog it a few more times. Possibly putting it at the bottom of the *long* list of other problems in need of resolution (e.g. all the volunteer work that's backed up a year or more, as Simetrical noted on wikitech-l) would be an idea. Because everything else is more urgent and indeed more important than one annoying nationalist spammer. I think was saying pretty much the same thing ;-) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/9/7, Kropotkine_113 kropotkine...@free.fr: There is absolutely nothing wrong with it on french Wikipedia. My interpretation : French admins are happy to see their powers increased, and to mimic oversighters with it. You don't seem to understand how the feature works, despite repeated explanations. Non-admins, especially newly-registered ones might be too shy or not aware that they are allowed to have an opinion on such issues, and feel that when developpers install a new software on your wiki, (if they only find out that the software has changed: many changes are quite invisible) you just have to shut up and smile. I agree that the learning curve for contribution into the development process is probably unnecessarily high for a newcomer. That being said, this feature (along with almost all others) are developed using a public bug tracker, a public code repository, and public code review. Both Bugzilla and Code Review are open for anyone to comment on. If you *want* to become involved in the development of MediaWiki and take interest in what's in store for the software then by all means do so. But don't sit here and make accusations that none of this was ever announced. That is simply not true. As Tim said, this feature was in development for years, and was no secret. The time for commenting has since passed, and I think this thread is going nowhere real quick. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: A real-time feed of external links is overkill. As mentioned by others, the chief problem is linkrot of old links. All we need to do is dump the contents of externallinks.el_to from the database once a year or so, run a hex to ASCII conversion on it, zip it, and email it to someone at the Internet Archive. Anyone with access to the databases should be able to do this fairly easily. Rather than trying to engineer a complicated system that will take a year to implement, why not take this simple approach that will take care of 90+% of the problem? Ryan Kaldari Why once a year? We already get a successful externallinks dump every dump cycle. Even the enwiki one is only half a month old[0]. If someone wants to work with Internet Archive or anyone else on this, the data is already there. -Chad [0] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100817/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes update for July 28
On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: For a variety of operational reasons, we plan to leave the feature running while the community decides whether to keep the feature on, assuming that process lasts no more than a month or so after August 15. Wanted to expand on this point a bit. The justification is that turning off Pending Changes is quite a bit of work and would clutter the logs (all of the Pending Changes pages would be Semi-Protected so they're not all immediate targets for vandalism). It would be a lot of work with no net benefit if the community decides to keep the feature on. This applies to both the operations staff as well as the community (they would have to mark everything with pending changes again after it was reactivated). If the community decides to not keep the feature, a little extra time of leaving it on during the discussion period wouldn't hurt--and would give people a chance to do some last-minute evaluation if they're on the fence. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki
On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, The Acehnese Wikipedia is a young project. They are entitled to their mistakes. It is for this reason important that we first talk with them about what it is that they do. We should not start talking TO them about what they are to do. The current talking TO them is not polite and will not lead to positive results. +1 -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 3:55 AM, Gerard Meijssen
gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote:
Effort will be concentrated on further
development of vector and support for other skins will consequently be an
afterthought. Expensive at that.
{{fact}}?
I know quite a bit of effort goes into maintaining Monobook and Modern,
and issues in either get fixed rather quickly. It's only the old skins (Chic,
Simple, CologneBlue) that have been forgotten. And that's hardly the
WMF's fault...they're ignored by volunteer developers as well.
-Chad
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Re: [Foundation-l] Creating articles in small wikipedias based on user requirement
On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: This is not only directed at you Gerard, but to all the top-posting perverts (sorry, but I do think you are in the minority on this issue), on the list. [more ranting of the same] On behalf of everyone else on the list, please allow me to thank you for bringing up this useless argument for the Nth time on this list. Bravo, truly. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases
On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: ...if for example I was qualified to review a staff member's patch (which I'm not), I might want to think twice about what audience gets that feedback. --Michael Snow Why? If they're contributing a patch to MediaWiki, they should go through the same public patch/feedback - commit/feedback cycle as everyone else. The only acceptable time to develop in private is when we're looking at active security vulnerabilities, and even then once a patch has been written the code is committed and the issue becomes public knowledge. Can we be a bit harsh sometimes? Sure. But we're equal opportunity offenders here. Anyone who submits code--staff or volunteer--is subject to the same treatment on Bugzilla and Code Review. If your patch sucks, we're going to tell you about it, and there's absolutely no reason to sugarcoat it. If someone can't take public criticism, then quite frankly they probably shouldn't be working on open source software. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases
On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:25 PM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Chad, I'm hesitant to reply to your note, because I feel like defending the staff against the community is a bad role for me: it tends to polarize and divide, rather than helping us all work together well. And I think I do, for the most part, agree with you. I personally think it's part of your job :) I'd much rather have a boss who stands up for me than one who lets me get dragged under the truck. I've worked both, and the former is certainly preferable. And I certainly don't think of this as us-vs-them, as someone (Rob?) pointed out earlier, we're all on the same side here! (As someone pointed out here the other day, Wikimedia recruits with that in mind: all our job postings specifically call out that people need to be comfortable in an open, collaborative environment, and we aim to only recruit people who can thrive in that context. We've learned the hard way to really probe on that in hiring interviews -- to pose open-ended scenario questions, and to use real-world examples. Practically everyone believes they are inclined to be collaborative, but that doesn't mean their definition is the same as ours. And we've found, unsurprisingly, that people who are already members of the Wikimedia community are pretty much the only people guaranteed to be risk-free in that regard: to a certain extent, hiring outside the community always carries a certain amount of risk. Which is fine and unavoidable: we do what we can to pick people we believe can succeed.) But I do want to make one small point that I think is sometimes missed. And that is, the staff can't take wikibreaks. Volunteers are always free to take a break if they get irritated or discouraged or stressed: their contribution is voluntary, and they can walk away any time. The staff can't. They need to come in every day and work hard, even on those (fortunately fairly rare) days when they are getting yelled at on mailing lists, when it might be harder than usual to feel motivated. That is a very good point, and I do think people forget it (myself included). As a volunteer, you can walk away for days/weeks/months if you get overwhelmed/pissed off/bored with contributing. We also get the benefit of being able to work on the stuff that interests us 100% of the time, not necessarily what the Foundation needs. Staff of course do not have these luxuries--at least not if they want to stay employed :) On a minor sidebar, I'm a huge advocate--and I know others are as well-- of making sure that staff have some time to work on things that interest them in addition to their normal work. Some stuff we do is boring, and being able to relax and do something that is interesting, challenging or fun makes us happier (and IMHO a bit more productive). We try really hard to hire people who are personally resilient, and I think we've succeeded at that reasonably well. Personally though, I think harshness and offence are mostly avoidable, and I think we should avoid them whenever we reasonably can. (Of course, I am female, and women are socialized to value harmony more than men. It doesn't stick for us all, but it did stick a fair bit, for me.) Personally, I think it's mostly possible to be frank without being rude, and I think it's worth trying to do that. I'm not arguing that people should handle the staff with kid gloves: I would actually argue, and have argued, that an uptick in kindness would be good for everyone. I realize that not everyone needs that, and it's obvious that not everyone will get it, whether they need it or not. But I think it's a worthy goal :-) Mailing lists can be ruthless ;-) But yes, we could all could do well to be a bit nicer sometimes. The pseudo-anonymity of the Internet sometimes encourages people to be a bit less judicious in how they say things. I've personally said things that were a little overly sarcastic, overly blunt, or probably just downright rude and I know others have too. But we all mean well and we're all working toward a common goal. The majority of Wikipedia's growth occurred entirely under volunteer- driven effort. Now that we've got a Foundation-driven staff, there are bound to be some struggles as everyone settles into their roles for the long-term. The Foundation and community are growing up, we're facing a few growing pains, but I think it's a Good Thing. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: From: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, June 7, 2010, 8:55 AM On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. That post can only being seen as an example of agressive disrespect of other cultures by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB This post can be seen as furthering an OT fork of this (otherwise productive) thread. Can everyone who wants to discuss the cultural sensitivities surrounding lynching please take it offlist? Thanks. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Archivage down?
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Yann Forget yan...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-June/ Why is there no message after Thu Jun 3 06:59:53 UTC 2010? Thanks, Yann See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/48380 -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: In this discussion we don't merely have personal preferences, we're arguing principles of design and hypothesizing benefit for the readers. And, excluding the foundation staff, we appear to have a broad, if not complete, consensus that the inter-language links should come back. In the community-operated model this would already be done by now. I'd like to echo Phoebe's +1,000,000 first of all. I agree with everything you've said. I'd like to touch on this one particular point. The community HAS spoken and clearly wants it back the way it was. A volunteer even did so [0] but was reverted [1] with the message that UI changes to Vector are off-limits without some sort of prior discussion and approval. This sits with me _very_ badly. I don't disagree (in principle) that changes to our user experience should be discussed and not implemented via fiat. But when you've got overwhelming consensus that this is the right course of action, reverting the change and declaring it off-limits to our committers is just wrong. Our volunteer developers do a pretty good job of judging and implementing community consensus, and saying that some things aren't negotiable sets a bad precedence. Of course I don't suggest we start a revert war in SVN over it, but I do think that Trevor's revert should be backed out and the full list restored until a better long term solution is thought out (per Erik's e-mail). -Chad [0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/67281 [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/67299 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 6:21 AM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: Contradiction aside, I think that what you've proven here is that under no circumstances should any engineer be permitted to name anything. We should institute this as a rule in Wikimedia development in general. Oh why not? We end up with great features like the Spam Blacklist ;-) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 3:16 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 05/22/2010 09:25 AM, MZMcBride wrote: If I were a betting man, I'd say the next deadline will be before Wikimania! When that passes, everyone can get distracted spending six months focusing on the annual fundraiser and we'll see you in 2011. Think I'm wrong? Prove it. Would you care to become a betting man? It would be a deep and abiding pleasure to take your money. My friend Ben Franklin is pretty sure you're wrong. As a third party, I would love to see both of you stick to this and follow the bet through to payout, one way or the other. :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 10:02 AM, putevod pute...@mccme.ru wrote: On Fri, 21 May 2010 15:50:32 +0200, Daniel ~ Leinad danny.lei...@gmail.com wrote: I thought it is up to the community how the interface is translated into Polish. It is not problem in translation to one language. There is problem in source language. All translations should have the same sense as in source language. Leinad No, this is up to you. In Russian Wikipedia, we had a vote how the status of the patroller should be called. (Accidentally, my suggestion has been accepted). Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l All aspects of the interface are indeed configurable, like you said. And this is useful when projects want to tweak the wording or add additional information. They should not be used to illustrate different concepts across the different languages though. And as Daniel has pointed out, there is a difference between the meaning of sighted and checked or review and approved. These differences may be subtle, but they do matter. And it should not fall on the communities to fix translations that have worked just fine for quite awhile now. When you change the meaning of an English message in MediaWiki, you affect all other supported languages as well. This is a regression in FlaggedRevs. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs - Do you forget about other projects?
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:32 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On the other hand, I think for FlaggedRevs the implied link between languages is weaker than a lot of other bits of MediaWiki. The FlaggedRevs extension is extremely configurable, and on top of the technological model the social model could plausibly vary quite a bit as well. Just to keep them straight, we've been calling the technology FlaggedRevs, and the English Wikipedia use of that tool Flagged Protection, because the English Wikipedia use is pretty different. There are two things wrong here. The first is attempting to reuse messages for different purposes. If the workflow and ideas behind the UI are different, then there need to be different messages, not changing of ones that work just fine and make plenty of sense to the thousands already using them. I'm aware of the distinction between FlaggedRevs and Flagged Protection, but it leads to the second problem. If the two proposals are so vastly different and their UIs different enough to cause issues with people already using it: why was it not done as a new extension entirely? Rather than trying to turn FR into the one-size-fits-all reviewing tool, it seems to me that we should've started a second extension. Of course it's too late to turn back now. Daniel is definitely right that we hadn't been thinking about the effect of our localization on other projects. Internally, we've been thinking of ourselves as localizing the German version, which is the leading use and the one we're most familiar with. We had been localizing the English strings to the planned English Wikipedia use, without considering their role as a default translation source for other, different uses of the extension. I'll certainly take this back to the team and see if we can come up with ideas to resolve the conflict, but if anybody has ways we could solve this problem, I'd love suggestions. William Short of forking the Enwiki changes to its own extension (which isn't feasible at this point, I'll be the first to admit), I would suggest trying to segregate the two as much as humanly possible. The UIs and workflow for what the English Wikipedia wants FlaggedRevs to do and what it's been doing on other wikis for years are vastly different, and trying to reuse aspects of one in the other (especially messages!) will just confuse people already happily using FR. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!
On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Stillwater Rising stillwateris...@gmail.com wrote: There's been many legal opinions presented in this forum, but the one that really matters is that of the Office of the Attorney General. I would suggest that Mike Godwin contact Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer (ask...@usdoj.gov ask...@usdoj.gov?subject=usdoj%20comments or (202) 514-2000) and report back to the Foundation as to what his recommendations are. If any records needed to be kept, I think Mike would already know. If people needed contacting on the issue, I think he'd have done it (maybe he has, I don't know). In any case, I think Mike knows how to do his own job. He is the lawyer after all, and the overwhelming majority of us are not. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Motives?
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: What's shocking? There's no revelation in your post. Do we need yet one more thread discussing Jimmy's actions? +1. Thank you. We don't, especially when most of them keep getting spawned by the same people. Adam: You've been repeating yourself for days and haven't added anything new to the conversation. Until you can come up with something worthwhile to say, please stop posting to foundation-l on the subject. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo Wales acting outside his remit
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Adam Cuerden cuer...@gmail.com wrote: I, of course, agree that the Félicien Rops image is offensive, and we have no reason to needlessly offend by putting it in articles where less-offensive images are equally encyclopedic. However, it's also by a notable artist, and, as such, can be used to illustrate his work, the subjects you mention, and other similar cases and thus shouldn't be permanently deleted. without discussion, as part of an effort to make Commons entirely child friendly which has little support outside of Jimbo himself. The point is not whether images should or shouldn't be used to illustrate specific articles, the point is that Wales has decided, on his own, that all images that are at all pornographic should be deleted, and has gone about deleting images by notable artists, and when challenged, stonewalled completely by saying that no discussion of his actions would be heard until he had finished his disruption, and all the images were already gone. I'm not one of Wikipeda's porn editors. I didn't know these images existed in advance. But I worried that the new policy would be used to censor art, and, it turns out, was completely and totally correct. -Adam. Well, do you need a picture to explain a dildo? File:Franz von Bayros 016.jpg is more or less art, but File:Félicien Rops - Sainte-Thérèse.png which is used on three Wikipedias to illustrate the use of a dildo has some real problems with being offensive to Catholics (Of course Japanese or Chinese Catholics don't matter, but they do). Much better to use a photo of the woman using a dildo or at least an eye-witness report published in a reliable source. The image could, of course, be used appropriately to illustrate an article on caricatures or something about anti-catholicism. Fred Bauder Adam can you please stop starting a new thread for every new point you wish to make. More threads just increases noise. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible project
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: But just as we don't support multiple wiki platforms or mailman itself, we aren't generally a project host. Have you talked to the FSF about hosting such a service, considering your FOSS focus? Over the years, I've seen two general approaches to trying to launch a new Wikimedia site. The first is trying to come up with a *new* idea for a wiki. They start discussion on here or meta and typically it dies out because people lose interest in trying to flesh out a new project. The second approach that I've seen used is trying to get the Foundation to adopt some existing project. This also tends to fail as people get caught up over specifics (licensing, etc) and then lose interest. Or it gets said that Wikimedia is not a host* for projects. I'm curious to know, how does one start a new project in Wikimedia anymore? -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to reply to a mailing list thread
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:41 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Hello -- Some of the people posting to this mailing list don't seem to understand how to write a decent, readable reply to a mailing list thread... What possible good did you see coming from this thread? You /knew/ it would produce a bunch of I agrees and I'll post how I wants and go nowhere useful at all. Lame. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia e-mail
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 March 2010 19:44, Nicholas Moreau nicholasmor...@gmail.com wrote: Has anyone else got this weird message, a pseudo-phishing attack? Yes, lots of people have got it. It's all over the mailing lists and other forums. I would just ignore it if I were you. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Freedom fighters? They've got my account! I'm sure they'll be just as trustworthy as that prince in Nigeria I've been forwarding my bank details to. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Pt-Portuguese Wikipedia
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Virgilio A. P. Machado v...@fct.unl.pt wrote: Mark, A page in the Portuguese Wikipedia could shut out the community at large. A bilingual page would be very hard to pull off. As far as I can tell, non-Portuguese discussions are not welcomed there. I looked at Meta and saw no place for a page like that. Could you be more specific? That's why I brought the question to the list: I really don't know where a discussion like that could take place within the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Going back to my initial posting: «Perhaps the question is not the creation of a new version of Wikipedia, but to make the Portuguese Wikipedia appealing to all readers and writers (editors) of the Portuguese language. There might be solutions and proposals to address this problem which have been kept from seeing the light of day, for untold reasons. It might be worthwhile to open a page where the discussion could be centralized.» Like Chad pointed out, even within this discussion, there have been posts suggesting several helpful rules and technical approaches. Solutions from different projects could be brought together and would be available for all those where they might be useful. This would make the discussion less specific to the Portuguese Wikipedia but more valuable to the Wikimedia community. Even with that broader scope I don't know where to start. If there's not already a place like that, where would it appropriate to create one? Sincerely, Virgilio A. P. Machado At 17:44 24-03-2010, you wrote: I think there are two options: Meta and pt.wp itself. My personal opinion is that it does not need to be bilingual, but that is of course up to you. On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Virgilio A. P. Machado v...@fct.unl.ptwrote: Thanks Chad. I know that, but what kind of page (what title)? Where? Would it be alright to be bilingual? Sincerely, Virgilio A. P. Machado At 23:25 23-03-2010, you wrote: It requires you to take initiative to start the page and try to draw others into a discussion. You don't need anyone's permission to do that. Also, I think it was (briefly) glossed over before, but there /is/ the Language Converter code in MediaWiki that could be leveraged to help some here. I don't think it's necessarily a magic bullet, but it's worth exploring. I know nothing in Portuguese, so I don't really grasp how widespread the discrepancies are, but I assume there's rules to describe them. Social solutions are also helpful, like the aforementioned American/British and Cyrillic/Latin issues mentioned earlier in the thread. A combination of social and technical solutions might just help bring some closure to this issue. -Chad ___ 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 For lack of anywhere else, start it up at [[Portuguese language issues]] or something. I'm not a regular metapedian, so there might be a better place--I just can't think of a *specific* place offhand. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Pt-Portuguese Wikipedia
://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l It requires you to take initiative to start the page and try to draw others into a discussion. You don't need anyone's permission to do that. Also, I think it was (briefly) glossed over before, but there /is/ the Language Converter code in MediaWiki that could be leveraged to help some here. I don't think it's necessarily a magic bullet, but it's worth exploring. I know nothing in Portuguese, so I don't really grasp how widespread the discrepancies are, but I assume there's rules to describe them. Social solutions are also helpful, like the aforementioned American/British and Cyrillic/Latin issues mentioned earlier in the thread. A combination of social and technical solutions might just help bring some closure to this issue. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is fun
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Tyler programmer...@comcast.net wrote: That's not what I asked. I said, in 2001, Wikipedia was founded, right? The earliest edit in edit history is 2002. What was the home page in 2001 then? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Some revisions from a long time ago don't exist anymore. Such is life. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2010/3/1 Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com: I think it would be great if someone on the project could put the initial tone aside, turn the other cheek, and let everyone interested (and I know there are several) know what's going on. Hi Austin et al., William has already posted extensively on this topic, so I'll keep it simple. Since our last update in January [1], Aaron has continued to work [2] through the list of issues [3] specific to the enwiki feature request called Flagged Protection. The current version of FlaggedRevs has dependencies on MediaWiki core that haven't been deployed yet, and the labs sites run on the same code tree, so Aaron is now backporting the extension to work with the currently deployed MediaWiki version, so he can pull the update to labs. Rob has also separately re-purposed one of the servers from our main cluster, which Aaron and Rob will set up as a separate testing environment that can run any code, but which will need to resemble a roughly production-equivalent system setup so that any observed behavior matches what we will observe in a full production deployment. William will post a more detailed update once the new code is available for public testing. We'll need to test both the enwiki setup and common existing configurations to ensure that we're not breaking any pre-existing configurations, as we're not intending to fork the extension. Looking forward, our UX team has recently contracted Ryan Lane to develop a new QA pipeline that supports easy spin-up of prototype sites, as well as automated interaction testing using Selenium. [4] So far, they've been using Linode VMs for prototype.wikimedia.org, but their performance characteristics haven't been consistent with our needs. We're very thankful for Aaron's hard work on the FlaggedRevs extension over the years; it's really almost entirely due to him that the extension is now in active use in more than 20 wikis, with more than 1M pages patrolled in dewiki alone. That's an amazing achievement for one young, talented engineer. And we're also grateful to William and Howie for helping to guide the process, especially after Brion's departure. With that said, the concepts of FlaggedRevs pre-date even WMF itself, and first development work began when the organization just had a tiny number of employees. As a result, the process has involved almost every single stakeholder in the Wikimedia movement (having an opinion, not writing actual code), and as a product development process, been entirely broken. We'll see it to further deployment, but of course it's not the panacea that some people think it is; everyone means something different when they talk about it, and there's a lot more work to be done in the problem-space. Through investments like the UX team, WMF is now building its capacity for team-based product development, and ultimately, the tools we develop to deal with quality assessment, moderation and labeling (and IMO labeling is just as much a component of the BLP problem as edit moderation) will need to be part of our overall product roadmap and be tackled by the team as a whole. But, there are no shortcuts: new hires take time to get productive, legacy projects need to be carefully transitioned, and operations capacity (both staffing and resources) needs to grow commensurate with new challenges. WMF is doing more than ever before to serve its mission, but aspirations typically grow more quickly than foundations. All best, Erik [1] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/flagged-revisions-your-questions-answered/ [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/aaron [3] http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157 [4] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resources#Interaction_testing_automation -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm curious as to whether there's anything official behind this poll[1] on en.wikipedia to simply turn on flagged revs in the form that the Germans use it until the proposed enwiki changes are ready. -Chad [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/poll ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevisions status (March 2010)
Even better is [1], since it includes commits to FlaggedRevs other than Aaron's. -Chad [1] http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki?path=/trunk/extensions/FlaggedRevs On Mar 4, 2010 1:20 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 03/04/2010 09:59 AM, David Gerard wrote: William has mentioned there are software checkins, etc... This appears to be the best source: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/aaron William ___ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists.wikime... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:47 AM, Peter Gervai grin...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 04:26, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're misconstruing who is doing what here. The Foundation is not the person required to send the counter notice, nor do they have the freedom or the obligation to involve themselves in a copyright dispute between TI and another user. It's not their determination to make whether the action is necessary or not. So they are not and not theirs. Who is and whose it is? :-) (Unobfuscating: I guess he wanted to know what to do to get the information back up.) g ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l By looking on the other sites that seem to be posting it. I don't see how posting their signing keys helps anyone trying to learn about the company. This sounds like a new case of we want to post it because they don't want it posted -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Legal decision should be taken out from project's communities jurisdiction and given into hands of professional lawyers or at least people who had copyright law practical training. While I don't agree that we need to take this away from the community and hand it to a team of lawyers, I must say that the practical training caught my eye. Would it be possible for the Foundation to get Mike--and other people who actually know what they're talking about--to get a guide to handling copyright questions together? It would probably help a lot of people who are unclear on some points, as well as help remove some grey areas (like the scenario that brought us here now). This may be a terrible idea, but I'm just throwing it out there. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedic OCD
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: Does anyone else suffer from this problem, whereby you listen to or watch any kind of programme and think I could add that to Wikipedia! For me, there's so many facts I encounter every day that having that thought becomes overwhelming. I just wonder if I'm alone. User:Bodnotbod ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I used to, but they have a cure for that now. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 4:32 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: There's also the wikireader: http://thewikireader.com/index.html I've played with one of these and I must say, they're pretty awesome. wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Pascal Martin pmar...@linterweb.fr wrote: It s possible to buy a usb key with okawix http://www.okawix.com - Original Message - From: ster...@aol.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 9:27 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia Why would anybody want to buy it if it is possible to download it for free? download is impractical, it takes too long. Often you want it offline, when no internet-connection is available. Or you want to have a fixed version, not overwritten by updates. Or you want to have it in case it stops and goes offline and is maybe no longer available one day. The German version is being sold in Germany, but not the larger English version. ___ 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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I can second the WikiReader! But yes: we do not charge for access to our content. Both the sites and the database dumps are usable without any charges, and have been since inception. If people want to do things with that content--download, analyze, sell, create a business model around it--they're all certainly allowed to do that, as long as they follow the license and give credit where credit is due :) The WMF's role is to facilitate generation and dissemination of content, not hiding it behind a paywall. I'm glad that products like the wikireader and other offline media like DVDs exist. It means that people find our work valuable, and that means a lot to me. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Peter Gervai grin...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 14:01, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: I can second the WikiReader! But yes: we do not charge for access to our content. Both the sites and the database dumps are usable without any charges, and have been since inception. If people want to do things with that content--download, analyze, sell, create a business model around it--they're all certainly allowed to do that, as long as they follow the license and give credit where credit is due :) Apart from that dumps are often outdated, images aren't available, et cetera Or were there changes about that recently? g ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Last I heard, all the dumps were coming in at fairly regular intervals, barring the enwiki full-history-all-namespaces dump. Image dumps are needed, yes. The OP said he just needs the text anyway :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia
We had that. They called themselves the Association of Member's Advocates. They were disbanded because everyone saw them as a huge waste of time with 0 net benefit. -Chad On Nov 26, 2009 8:56 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I already pointed out that you cannot impose friendliness. Our current state is one in which any particular admin may sit on any particular editor with or without adequate cause and that editor has nearly no power to affect a hearing. There is no advocate for the editors who are not admins. Until that situation changes, we cannot claim to be moving toward a friendly environment. What we need is an Office of the Editor Advocate. Any arrested person has the right to an attorney, provided free of charge by the state. That is what we need. Advocate-attorneys who are on the side of the arrested editor. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) wrote: If we're going to have a thread, let's focus on the substance of the article. This is a digression. This seems to beg the question: What do we mean by 'on topic'? In the present circumstances, is it about the actual content of the WSJ article, or is it about the availability and verifiability of WSJ material as raised in Gerard's originating post for this thread? Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l The topic is about the WSJ's writings about Wikipedian participation. That is all. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Font support for our domains
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, The news is that you do not need the .org part anymore in the Latin script. You mention that you do not know if it will be popular ... this is the kind of thing that will slowly grow and then mushroom. Where you indicate that domain names are squatted, there are procedures to gain those names. For a project like Wikipedia it is obvious that we can gain specific domains.. The thing is what word in Cyrillic or other script will be the one that we will use. Thanks, GerardM 2009/10/30 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs Gerard Meijssen wrote: According to an article on the BBC website, it is now possible to have a URL that is completely in the script used for a language. This means that a Russian URL would be completely in the Cyrillic script and it would not need to end with .org. I would like the Wikimedia Foundation to get the necessary domains to support the scripts that we have language versions in. The BBC article explains that people do find the need to move from one script to the other as problematic and cumbersome. Obviously, we can have the necessary mapping from our current Latin based URLs to the ones in other scripts. This will be an important feature because we want people to easily move between our projects. I'm not sure how popular such domains will become. However, I believe at least a few key ones should be registered, in order to prevent squatters and protect the trademarks. It appears that 维基百科.comhttp://xn--3js032e7ich4g.comis already registered, though it doesn't point anywhere. 维基百科.orghttp://xn--3js032e7ich4g.orgis still free... ___ 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 This got talked about on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC this evening, her guest was one of the editors from BoingBoing. Thought it was cool that it's getting some high-level media mention :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office move completed
On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 6:55 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/10/27 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: Blog post by Jay is now up: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/27/wikimedia-finds-a-new-home/ First photos here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_149_New_Montgomery More pics will come with time for those who can't get enough of seeing office environments. ;-) So who's idea was it to model it after Terry Gilliam's Brazil? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l We can manage to create 3d copies of the globe but we can't manage to fix the logo? For shame ;-) In all seriousness, new office looks nice. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving foundation-l
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l hasn't had any edits in a couple weeks now. Have we decided this isn't such a big problem after all? Have we given up? Just waiting a few months for someone to post a complaint so we can repeat this all over again? Austin? Ryan? Anyone? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l If I've noticed nothing else in the last 4 years, it's that Wikimedians have very short attention spans when it comes to these sorts of things. We all talk about our bright and shiny ideal future and throw around a few ideas. Someone starts a page (or an entire wiki) to discussing the issue. People edit briefly and furiously, then stop caring. -Chad ___ 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 Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/9/28 Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org: I'd like to share some exciting news with you all... After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I'm going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites. Obviously I've talked with Brion in person, so he knows this, but I will say it publicly too: he will be hugely, enormously, massively missed. What Michael says is true: people have a right to pursue their dreams and goals and personal development wherever it takes them, and I too am happy that Brion will continue to be moving forward the free culture agenda and helping to build a better ecosystem of projects and organizations. I've got an account on identi.ca which I haven't yet used: perhaps my first use of it will be congratulate Brion on his new job :-) IMO Brion is the single most central figure in the Wikimedia movement, second only to Jimmy. His work with us should be honoured and celebrated. We'll be doing some of that inside the staff within the next few weeks, and I expect the Board will plan something for him too. But we'll need to be creative: after all, there is already a Brion Vibber Day. New ideas are welcome :-) Thanks, Sue ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l And on that note, I propose we rename MediaWiki to BrionWiki. Added benefit: we can finally put the name confusion to rest ;-) In all seriousness though. Brion: best of luck on the new job and with future endeavors. You will be missed greatly by both devs and Wikimedians alike. And you'll still have commit access, so I hope to keep seeing Revert rXXX, totally broken -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CheckUser Abuse
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Ferrer ad...@some-day.org wrote: Checkusers in Russian Wikipedia abused the 'checkuser' rights (for example linked to me unrelated edits from open proxy with marasmic vandalism -- create marasmic attackpages-like topic on «Request for Administrators» about Kalan, obviously with a view to Kalan thought that I was a degenerat-pəderast); also mail send to Wikimedia Foundation. Such decisions are very bad name in the wiki projects. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l You've stated this. You've been told to contact the Ombudsmen if there's an issue. No need to re-state yourself (again) on foundation-l. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
It is in usable condition ;-) -Chad On Sep 24, 2009 3:37 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/9/24 Jonathan Kallay y...@kallay.net: It seems to me that a new Wikipedia-inspired project could help address the many civility/noise... Thoughts? Feature suggestions for LiquidThreads? That's the Wiki-ish forum solution that one day is hoped to be in usable condition ... - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists.wikime... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
Exactly. Its certainly closer to realization now than it has been in the past. -Chad On Sep 24, 2009 9:11 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: It is in usable conditio... The current testing of LiquidThreads and tweaking of the interface is here and the Dev's (user:werdna) personal wiki: http://wiki.werdn.us/test/view/Talk:Main_Page please go and poke around and submit feedback http://wiki.werdn.us/test/view/LiquidThreads_Feedback. I expect that this will be brought into usage on the Wikimedia projects progressively but it will be happening sooner rather than later IIRC. -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/found... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundatio... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Why are we revisiting something from 2007-08 financial planning two years after it happened and 15 months after the final report? Because there isn't enough data on the mistakes that are being made today. 15 months ago, there was oh, the dumps will be fixed real soon now and that money which wasn't spent will be spent in 2008-09. But today we know no, 15 months later they still aren't fixed and no, that money will get rolled into the general budget where it won't even be spent. Have you not read people's replies to this? All dumps are working except for the full enwiki history. That's certainly a lot better than before, when pretty much every dump was failing. They've got all but one dump for one wiki working, and that's still being worked on too. What more would you ask? -Chad ___ 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
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/9/10 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/9/10 Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com: There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guidance Ah, well found! I didn't think to check that page - the title doesn't suggest it would contain such info. I must say, I am amazed that this was approved: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_PT/Start-up WMUK managed to get set up without paying for any meals and all meetings have taken place in pubs or rooms we've got hold of for free. Paying nearly $3,500 for that out of charitable donations is patently ridiculous. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I hadn't read that either. Ridiculous, I agree. I doubt people are donating to the WMF for them to send the money to the Portuguese chapter for their lunches. The only part of that budget that makes sense to me is the legal fees, and they're certainly not a back-breaking amount either. -Chad ___ 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 Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:10 PM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/9/4 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: Yes, as noted in our 09-10 plan, we are relocating to a new space, as a consequence of which the current satellite office will be re-merged into the new HQ. We're hoping to sublet the Stillman space, once we've covered up the entrance to our secret underground lair of doom and despair, and removed all artifacts of alien technology. Godommit, Fronk, you were only meant to reveal that on WR, where people might believe it! Now people will think you're just joking, and that I am too. How are we supposed to get a good price to benefit Wikia *now*? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm guessing this means our inside guys at the DOJ and DOD have done their jobs and can be disposed of now? I'll be on the next plane to Bangkok to meet with our friend about the thing. -Chad ___ 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 Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Anthonywikim...@inbox.org wrote: By the way, the rest of your quotes were misquotes, as I followed up my other Huhs with a comment. But in this case, I felt it was more courteous to ask Erik to clarify his comment rather than for me to try to guess what he meant by it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Yes, as noted in our 09-10 plan, we are relocating to a new space, as a consequence of which the current satellite office will be re-merged into the new HQ. We're hoping to sublet the Stillman space... This part was serious (I think). ...once we've covered up the entrance to our secret underground lair of doom and despair, and removed all artifacts of alien technology. This part was a joke (I think). Specifically, he was joking about some people's tendencies to find conspiracy theories when none exist. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Akahele: Omidyar venturing out
On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, I started reading I'm sorry, did you have something to say that *wasn't* a waste of time? I did read it, and unlike your e-mail it provides a useful perspective in a large and complicated issue. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I started reading Gerard's e-mail and then find that I should not have bothered. In all seriousness, allow me to echo Brian on this. It may not be your opinion on the matter, but Gregory is certainly allowed to share his and doesn't need to suffer a berating on foundation-l for expressing it. -Chad ___ 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 Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Huib!abi...@forgotten-beauty.com wrote: Hello, Some people are more active than other people on this list, but I don't see a problem with the both names you mention. Cheers, Huib -- Http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:Abigor ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm going to second Huib on this one. Thomas and Anthony certainly are active posters, but they haven't done anything out of line that requires moderation. Depending on the thread, you can easily see other people seem to dominate. This is natural as some things are more interesting than others. There's times when I am one of the active posters; just not recently :) This list has really high traffic (depending on season, it fluctuates a bit) and it can be a bit overwhelming at times. Moderation isn't the answer though. The signal to noise ratio here remains fairly decent, so we wouldn't really gain anything through moderation (except some very tired mods!) -Chad ___ 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 Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Anthonywikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: I would put money on a significant majority of reverts being reverts of vandalism rather than BRD reverts, it may not be an overwhelming majority, though. I don't know about that, though I won't take the other end of the bet. Have you done much editing while not logged in? If so, I think you have to admit that it's quite common to find yourself reverted for things which are not properly classified as vandalism. Just going through recent changes looking for rv (which is not the only thing detected by Robert's software, and is probably the most likely to be actual vandalism)... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Smallpoxcurid=16829895diff=310413006oldid=310405829 (content dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=View_Askewniversecurid=2163851diff=310412615oldid=310412247 (blanking vandalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barbecuecurid=37135diff=310412401oldid=310410035 (spelling dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sino-American_relationscurid=277880diff=310412381oldid=310329859 (revert of POV edits, I guess that counts as vandalism by Robert's definition) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Secessioncurid=144732diff=310412005oldid=310406662 (I have no idea, I guess this one qualifies) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Underdog_Projectcurid=1436277diff=310412002oldid=308833810 (test edit, qualifies) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Visual_communicationcurid=669120diff=310411952oldid=310411398 (I'm going to call this a content dispute though you may disagree) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_communicationcurid=1219401diff=310411937oldid=310410621 (ditto) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Caroline_Ahernecurid=514223diff=310411860oldid=310328710 (removal of POV, qualifies) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mario_Kart_Wiicurid=12205924diff=310411680oldid=310401913 (vandalism, I think) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hephaestuscurid=14388diff=310411384oldid=310396007 (vandalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_pop_punk_bandscurid=4770362diff=310410857oldid=310410740 (looks like a content dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Korn's_ninth_studio_albumcurid=21855821diff=310410677oldid=310381982 (content dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kinetic_energycurid=17327diff=310410573oldid=310391734 (vandalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_gamescurid=21469202diff=310410431oldid=310395902 (seems to be reversion of a legitimate edit) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Teleological_argumentcurid=30731diff=310410174oldid=310399980 (content dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nick_Swardsoncurid=3630190diff=310410089oldid=310410013 (vandalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jose_Cansecocurid=175552diff=310409931oldid=310408069 (vandalism, I guess) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ola_Moumcurid=8083232diff=310409846oldid=310396138 (content dispute) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kareli,_Georgiacurid=18661674diff=310409393oldid=310348062 (vandalism, I think) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Victoria_Justicecurid=2662543diff=310412751oldid=310411603 (I guess it's technically a BLP violation, so qualifies) 13/21=62% actual vandalism, though I'm sure 80 people will now proceed to dispute my categorizations. Robert, let's get a random sample of the actual reverts your program found... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l /rvv?|revert(ing)?[ ]*(vandal(ism)?)?/ Might give you a slightly wider sample. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Kohsthekoh...@gmail.com wrote: The data of the Wikivoices interviews were never lost. It was not given to Gregory on his request. It will be either published publicly or not published at all. This has been said before and it is now said again. Thanks, GerardM Gerard, do you know the reason why the recording would be not published at all? What is the fear of posting the raw audio file? What is being hidden? Which person or persons are in possession of the raw audio file? I said a few things that brought the Foundation into a light of disrepute. Is that the problem? With no other data or logic to support any theory here, I have to only assume that the Foundation is involved in this suppression of the recording. I do note that nobody OFFICIALLY from the Foundation board or staff has publicly assured us that no board or staff member has acted to suppress publication of Episode # 45. At least when Jimmy Wales was accused by Danny Wool of some questionable Muscovite receipts, Sue Gardner got on CNET video news to assure us that Jimmy has never done anything wrong. We have no similar assurances regarding Wikivoices Episode # 45. All we have are the e-mails which I hold that support a strong degree of fishy business going on behind the scenes. This hasn't been said before, but I'll be happy to say it again, if repetition will help it sink into any particularly thick skulls. Greg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm pretty sure the reason it hasn't been released has nothing to do with malice or officially suppressing the record. I think it has more to do with laziness (or lack of time) on part of those who do possess the recording. Unprofessional? Sure. Would I want them to handle an election debate again? Nope. Do I think they're purposefully suppressing release of this? Probably not. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Gregory Kohsthekoh...@gmail.com wrote: Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation +++ Ah, yes... the other shoe drops. This is similar to the time when Amazon invested $10 million in Wikia, Inc., but they insisted on installing Jeffrey Blackburn from Amazon ( http://www.muckety.com/Query?SearchResult=30740SearchResult=97356graph=MucketyMap?_r=2D) onto the Wikia board of directors. You don't want to throw $10 million at something without having someone on the inside to pull a few strings. Thus, we see why Halprin now sits on the WMF board. It's to keep an eye on the $2 million. And all transparently announced on the very same day! Bonus that Halprin also probably oversees the part of the $4 million that Omidyar invested in Wikia, whose co-founder (Jimmy Wales) might be sitting next to Halprin at the next board meeting, or whose OTHER co-founder (Angela Beesley) might be found advising the WMF board from the position of chair of the WMF Advisory Board. If you're having trouble envisioning a Venn diagram of this arrangement, let me try to help you. Imagine a few grains of rice (Jimbo and the WMF board). Then imagine the color white (Halprin). Imagine some tasty flavored sauce (Beesley). Then visualize a guy lining up the yummy rice on his fork (Omidyar Network). -- Gregory Kohs ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Wow. Justwow. Wikimedia, this really really doesn't look good. Regardless of how it's intended, it REALLY doesn't look good. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Andrew Turveyandrewrtur...@googlemail.com wrote: First, if the conclusion is that no procedure exists, a notice should be put on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects stating this so that peoples' expectations are appropriately managed. Second, is that correct? Looking at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Herero_Wikipedia it seems that there certainly was a procedure in the past where articles were shifted back into the Incubator. Most importantly, should there be a procedure? Keeping projects open is a drain on resources, such as removing vandalism. There is a level of activity below which the positive benefits of the project are outweighed by the drain, although it's clearly not worth closing a project if the effort to do this is not a worthwhile investment. Do you need particular user rights to action such requests? - Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: From: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, 20 August, 2009 19:01:39 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects Hoi, There is no procedure because what comes closest to a consensus amount to a lot of work. Work that does not forward our mission one iota. The fact that people vote and comment is not that special, people do ... if they vote that I will wear a tutu at Wikimania and a consensus says that I should, I still have to volunteer to wear that tutu. It is the same as voting for a bug in bugzilla. The votes are not considered so why bother ? As to the language committee, it does only consider new requests for projects ... if it were to expand its services it would be in indicating what issues exist that deal with language support that would make a difference to the usability of our software. It would not be drinking from the poisoned chalice that is closing projects. The closest we came to expressing an opinion is that we would prefer the content of a to be closed project to be imported into the Incubator. This is a not good for Incubator because they get dead wood loaded into their project So all in all in my opinion it is best to leave these things as is and ignore requests for closure. Thanks, GerardM 2009/8/20 Huib! abi...@forgotten-beauty.com Hello, I noticed that there are still a lot of open request for closure on Meta so I decided to contact a LangCom member (Robin) asking him about how and when the projects will be closed or when the requests will be closed, but I recieved a answer I didn't expected. Robin told me there was no policy ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_WMF_projects ) about the closure of projects so the request can stay open for always. I think its kind of strange that we people can make a request, that there are people who are voting and spending there time commenting on the request or even worse have stress because there project could be closed but the request will never be closed. Is there a way to change this with a new policy, or with a different com for the closure, because this seems to me a waste of time for a lot of people, people can stop editting projects just because the think the project will be closed. At this moment there are 27 request for projects to be closed, ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects ) I think 50% is a easy closure for keep or close. The oldest project is from 2007 that would mean its still open after 2 years :/ -- *Huib Laurens* Web: Forgotten-beauty.com http://www.forgotten-beauty.com.com/ Email: abi...@forgotten-beauty.com mailto:abi...@forgotten-beauty.com ___ 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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l The only user requirement for this is that a shell user has to perform the actual decision. The community makes the decisions about opening/closing new projects, and the sysadmins carry out the actual task. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/24 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com: The only user requirement for this is that a shell user has to perform the actual decision. The community makes the decisions about opening/closing new projects, and the sysadmins carry out the actual task. But what is the community (the community of the project being closed? the meta community? the Wikimedia community as a whole? the Wikimedia community minus the community of the project being closed? etc.) and what is required for something to be considered a decision (majority? supermajority? consensus? unanimity?)? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I don't know. I don't follow those discussions. I was just clarifying the question as to what user roles play into this? Right now, that only includes the sysadmins. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Lars Aronssonl...@aronsson.se wrote: David Gerard wrote: Yes, completely. Do other Wikipedias show the same S-curve of growth? I don't think it's an S-curve. I think we are seeing linear growth, with a few exceptions in the very early days (years). But hey, that's growth in the number of articles. We shouldn't focus on the number of articles, but on the overall usefulness. Day 1: Create article Apple is a fruit. Day 2: Create article Pear is a fruit. Day 3: Extend article about apples. Add photos. Cite sources. Day 3: Zero growth in the number of articles. Panic!!! -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Which is why the article count means nothing. Tim pointed out some time ago (I can't find the quote offhand, pardon my paraphrasing) about the article counter being terribly inaccurate over the years--counter drift I believe was his exact phrasing. A re-run of the full count would probably result in a very different number than what we think. I'm not talking to the tune of hundreds of thousands of articles, but probably at least a few thousands lower than what we've got now. Of course, nobody wants that number to go down--article milestones are great PR. We've just celebrated 3mil, and it would be rough for the community to see 2.8mil tomorrow :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Lars Aronssonl...@aronsson.se wrote: Marcus Buck wrote: What I want to say: please everybody get away from calling projects failure, worse, weak or whatever. It's all subjective. And it's entirely meaningless, I disagree, it's neither subjective nor meaningless. Wikipedia has a mission to disseminate free knowledge. It's an important mission and a powerful project. The general public and mainstream media have a geniune interest in knowing how we are doing. The 3 millionth article in the English Wikipedia was a global news item, as was the PARC research that showed Wikipedia might not be growing so fast anymore. The problem is that both reports are based on article counts, as if all articles were equal, and they aren't. For Wikipedia's future growth, we learned early on to use a wishlist, a list of red links to not yet existing articles. But the items on that list are not equally important. And the improvement of some existing articles can be more important than the addition of any new article. We need better tools to help us understand which improvements are needed. And we need to know how much we improved Wikipedia, even if no new articles were created. This is meaningful. We might have to go out to the people in Nigeria (or New York) and ask them what knowledge they need, and what tools are best suited. Perhaps it's the English Wikipedia that is best for them. Then we might conclude that the Yoruba Wikipedia was a failed attempt, that never even reached 10,000 articles, and instead of 270 languages we should only have 269 (or 41) languages of Wikipedia. Or on the other hand, we might discover some basic mistake that we did with the Yoruba Wikipedia, and once we fix that mistake its size and usefulness will start to grow faster. If 988 people had no interest in looking up Michael Jackson, then that's okay. We still served the 12 who had. Sure, but it's not likely that the interest for Michael Jackson is far lower in Denmark than in neighboring Sweden and Germany. I still think the Danish Wikipedia has some trivial flaw that can be fixed. I just don't know what it is. -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I agree wholeheartedly. We need to get away from this idea that more projects in more languages is better. It's not. It's lead to the issue we see now: dead projects lying around until somebody bothers to clean it up or close it. We tout the Wikipedia in 270 languages statistic quite often, and it's something that is seen as an accomplishment. I would rather see how many Wikipedias we have that are successes--measured in terms of growth and a supportive community (of both readers and writers). What good is a Revised-Lower-Eastern-Phoenician Wikipedia if nobody uses it? -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing audio of WMF Board candidates
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Gregory Kohsthekoh...@gmail.com wrote: At some time into the WMF Board candidates campaigning season, the Wikivoices project undertook a sort of candidates debate, where a Skype conference served as a central meeting point for at least eight of the candidates to orally respond to questions posed them. This debate transpired about two hours of time, and I found it very informative of the critical issues facing the Wikimedia Foundation. I was a bit concerned with several things: (1) That the role of campaign debate was filtered into one available time slot -- if you were not able to participate, you had no voice. (2) That the English Wikipedia service (and not Meta, or Foundation) was the proprietor of the content. (3) That the Foundation itself had no representative helping to coordinate and assure professionalism in the volunteer execution of this effort. On that last concern, my worry seems to have come true. On July 26th, we were promised that an audio file of the Skype cast would be posted soon, as episode # 45: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikivoicesdiff=nextoldid=304340380 On August 5th, I made a worried complaint that the audio still had not been posted. Through the close of the election period (August 10th), I communicated via private e-mails about what had happened. Now, August 17th, we are even past congratulating the winners of this election (where 67% of the available seats are represented by candidates who offer no changes over the status quo -- huzzah!), and there is STILL NO AUDIO FILE POSTED. Along with others sharing my view, I find this to be disgraceful. It is an insult to the participants in the debate, and it reflects on just how little the Foundation actually cares about who gets seated on the Board, so long as they are a community rubber-stamp of the editors who hold sway over the English Wikipedia project, which is really most of what this represents. I apologize for sounding bitter, but the delay seems to have been in one audio editor abdicating his responsibility and dumping it in the lap of an unsuspecting back-up, then trying to edit the audio so that it was fair to those who had had communications problems during taping. I say, at some point, it would have been far better to simply post the unedited audio, so that voters still making decisions could have listened for themselves, before it was too late. As it stands, the audio is practically worthless now, and the Foundation should be ashamed that they let this happen under their noses, without so much as a public apology. Good luck to the new Board member and the returned two Board members to their warm seats. Will you be making use of the familiar rubber stamps, or will something actually be learned from this recent disgrace? P.S. Five days after the election results were announced, we are also still waiting for the requested data feed of the anonymized votes: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Votes Greg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l The only thing in this thread actually relevant is the data dumps. A private podcast produced by individual volunteers is under zero obligations to meet any sort of deadlines. I don't see what you expect the Foundation or the Election Committee to do about a privately produced podcast. Now, is it ideal? Of course not...it'd be like one of the news networks deciding to not air the debates until after the elections. However, they certainly have the right to do so. -Chad ___ 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 Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Cox, Seritaserita@bridgespan.org wrote: Google's new search engine, Caffeine, is supposedly kicking Wikipedia entries further down results page. Thoughts? Comments? http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39484015,00.htm Thank, Serita ___NOTICE This electronic mail transmission, including any attachments, contains confidential information of Bain Company, Inc. (Bain) and/or its clients. It is intended only for the person(s) named, and the information in such e-mail shall only be used by the person(s) named for the purpose intended and for no other purpose. Any use, distribution, copying or disclosure by any other persons, or by the person(s) named but for purposes other than the intended purpose, is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and then destroy this e-mail. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of Bain shall be understood to be neither given nor endorsed by Bain. When addressed to Bain clients, any information contained in this e-mail shall be subject to the terms and conditions in the applicable client contract. ___ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l As long as all sites are getting treated equally, it's fine in my book. I only take issue when results are skewed because Google bumps results up/down arbitrarily. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Ray Saintongesainto...@telus.net wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Tim Starling wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is the key to avoidance in the future!) It was my fault, and it was pretty much identical to the error I made in 2007, where certain kinds of edits were double-counted and so the effective edit count threshold was lower than it should have been. Thanks Tim. It sounded like what happened in the past. I apologize for not doing my part and catching it this time. :( To err is human... nice to know that at least some of us aren't bots. ;) May all future errors be as correctable! It's also refreshing to see people who accept their share of responsibility when something has gone. Kudos to both of you for such rare kind of behaviour. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Maybe we need to clone Tim too? :p -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the candidates ranked as follows: Final ranking 1 Ting Chen (Wing) 2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage) 3 Samuel Klein (Sj) 4 Gerard Meijssen (GerardM) 5 Domas Mituzas (Midom) 6 Thomas Braun (Redlinux) 7 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro) 8 Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist) 9 Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester) 10 José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora) 11 Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd) 12 Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse) 13 Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone) 14 Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice) 15 Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering) 16 Gregory Kohs (Thekohser) 17 Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe) 18 Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman) A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly. These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has moved to seat the top three candidates. The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as candidates. It was a broad and diverse field this year. We also wish to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process. The committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them For the committee, Philippe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Congrats to the winners! -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.wall...@gmail.com 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? If I'm not alone, perhaps any official announcement about the elections (i.e. on the Wikimedia blog and in press releases) should address this, even if only tacitly. Steven Walling On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the candidates ranked as follows: Final ranking 1 Ting Chen (Wing) 2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage) 3 Samuel Klein (Sj) 4 Gerard Meijssen (GerardM) 5 Domas Mituzas (Midom) 6 Thomas Braun (Redlinux) 7 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro) 8 Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist) 9 Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester) 10 José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora) 11 Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd) 12 Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse) 13 Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone) 14 Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice) 15 Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering) 16 Gregory Kohs (Thekohser) 17 Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe) 18 Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman) A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly. These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has moved to seat the top three candidates. The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as candidates. It was a broad and diverse field this year. We also wish to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process. The committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them For the committee, Philippe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Congrats to the winners! -Chad ___ 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 Similar to how we have Senators in office for 20+ years...because they continue to run and people continue to elect them. We certainly had a wide cross-section of Wikimedians this year. But nobody voted for them. -Chad ___ 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 Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:47 PM, George Herbertgeorge.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote: 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. One addition that popped up in my head overnight. You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role. CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards. CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and outwards facing environments. Large websites sometimes have CTO for outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense. I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference in who you can find and how they approach the role. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l This is a very true point. To people not in the industry, there seems to be little distinction between the two titles. And a lot of companies only have a CIO or CTO, further leading people to believe there is no difference. There is certainly more tech involved in a CTO. Clever of them to put the word in there :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Pavlo Shevelopavlo.shev...@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think so. Your English is better than my whatever
language. is a honest response.
Thank you, Milos, I appreciate your input.
I meant another... aspect - like
Rough eligibility can be derived from edit histories. This is a bit
harder to calculate, though anyone with a toolserver account could do
this.
... meaning that:
* I do believe that election comity should (if not have to / must)
share statistic data which is in their possession
as well as
* I don't have (and never had) toolserver account
etc.
So
{{Sofixit}}
looks like more the friendliness to newcomers issue (for this
mailing list and beyond) which is so popular in _discussions_ here
last time.
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Pavlo Shevelopavlo.shev...@gmail.com
wrote:
{{You're laughing on me }}
:(
I don't think so. Your English is better than my whatever
language. is a honest response.
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Well, the raw data is certainly available, but more involved
statistics will take someone with time and a computer to
do the number crunching. That was Greg's original point,
that anyone can use the data if they'd like, for whatever
statistical analysis suits your needs.
-Chad
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Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote: * ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly Personally, I'm just waiting for Mediawiki to become self-aware and start coding itself :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia Policy Interlingual Coordinationn - WP:NOT
Then ask him/her about it off list. This has nothing to do with foundation-l. -Chad On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:54 AM, mizusumashimizusuma...@coda.ocn.ne.jp wrote: Hello, Huib. O.K. I promise to stop this if Jade would declare her/his edit history or other activity - I think it's very very easy -. Huib! wrote: Hello, Could you discuss this outside the list? I don't see why it would be important for this list. Best regards, Huib [[w:ja:User:mizusumashi]] ___ 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
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime due to network maintenance, Friday July 31st 12:00 UTC
Fowarding to Foundation-l, just so more people are in the loop and don't swarm #wikimedia-tech with ZOMG SITE BROKEN! :) -Chad -- Forwarded message -- From: Mark Bergsma m...@wikimedia.org Date: Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:35 PM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Downtime due to network maintenance, Friday July 31st 12:00 UTC To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org Hello, Due to a problem in one of our core routers in our Tampa cluster we need to perform some network maintenance tomorrow, Friday July 31st around 12:00 UTC. We will be performing a software upgrade and reboot of the router. This should not take more than a few minutes if everything goes well. Unfortunately this means that practically all sites and services will be down during that time. For those interested: one of the line cards in the router failed earlier this week. A replacement has arrived, but does not boot up correctly after hot plugging. Because we want to upgrade the firmware anyway, we will reboot the entire box. Cheers, -- Mark Bergsma m...@wikimedia.org System Network Administrator, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikitech-l mailing list wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dispute resolution mailing list
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 2:58 PM, stevertigostv...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Geoffrey Plourdegeo.p...@yahoo.com wrote: Well, if the list is for general dispute resolution technique, it could be valuable to all projects. Its a very simple idea, and one which sort of fills a role that wikien-l played for years, and for which there are several disjointed on-wiki portals for doing certain things. For a long time I myself stated that handling things on-list was inferior to doing things on-wiki, and thus I agree with this proposals critics to some degree. But in fact on-wiki dispute resolution is scattered, disjointed, and in need of upgrades that integrate its disjointed and constituent components into a better working machine. The only thing controversial about it is that I am the one proposing it, and I don't really even understand why that in and of itself should be particularly problematic, if people can simply deal with the concept without basing their objection in privately made criticisms and characterizations. -Steven ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I don't care who's proposing it, to be honest. My issue is that this thread does not belong on foundation-l, which others seem to agree since I first said so some 14 posts ago. Take it back to wikien-l, /please/. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dispute resolution mailing list
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 3:24 PM, stevertigostv...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Chadinnocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: I don't care who's proposing it, to be honest. My issue is that this thread does not belong on foundation-l, which others seem to agree since I first said so some 14 posts ago. Take it back to wikien-l, /please/. If you could offer some actual substantive points - as I have in point-by-point form - for why this belongs elsewhere, I might just do exactly that. Though crossposting is also an option, if one likes integrating things as I do. -Steven ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Pedro pretty much outlined my views already. I was going to write a point-by-point rebuttal as to why this doesn't belong on foundation-l, but I decided not to. Honestly, I thought it was pretty damn obvious that this doesn't belong on foundation-l. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dispute resolution mailing list
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 3:48 PM, stevertigostv...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: What do you not understand ? That is not for you to say. It has been explained to you that the en approach is not compatible with what happens elsewhere. What does this even mean? Nothing has been explained. Terse and useless go away's do not suffice as explanations. This list is explicitly NOT about the en policies. Dispute resolution is not particular to en.wiki. Others can benefit from en.wiki's policies and likewise en.wiki can benefit from understanding how others handle their issues. You have been politely asked to go away.. This is actually a contradiction of terms, though you state the concept quite nicely. Now what does it take for you to move on with this nonsense ? Are you speaking in an official capacity? -Steven ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm speaking as a volunteer: go away, and take your thread with you. It is /not/ appropriate for foundation-l, period. It is obvious to everyone that this thread exists for solely one reason: for you to bitch and moan when you didn't get what you wanted on your timetable. This is also not appropriate for foundation-l, period. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dispute resolution mailing list
On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/7/23 stevertigo stv...@gmail.com: That actually wasn't my proposal to resolve disputes there. On the other hand, if a report to ANI or RFC receives attention that solves certain problems, then does that mean you would object to the usage of ANI or RFC to resolve disputes? ANI and RFC *are* part of our dispute resolution processes... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Not sure what this has to do with foundation-l, can this go back to wikien-l? -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Harald Krichelharald.kric...@googlemail.com wrote: Peter Gervai schrieb: On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 01:32, John at Darkstarvac...@jeb.no wrote: Minimum attribution of «Terms of Use» from Wikimdia Foundations site would be http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/; That is 96 chars, with spaces, of 140 bytes available in a SMS. For some languages the attribution will take more than one message. Ooops... Tinyurl and like? It's, well, tiny. Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. eg.: http://wp.cx/3tT5u7Z redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=302589573 http://wp.cx/c redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License Harald ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l That's actually not a bad idea :) A dedicated wmf domain for short urls would be amazingly helpful for a lot of things. Just make it so the script only accepts WMF-owned domains and you've got yourself a great tool. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:14 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/7/17 Harald Krichel harald.kric...@googlemail.com: Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. I know of: http://enwp.org/ http://enwn.net/ - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Does anyone know the guy who owns enwp.org? That being said, enwp.org/?oldid=1234 does work :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Grayandrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/7/17 Harald Krichel harald.kric...@googlemail.com: Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. eg.: http://wp.cx/3tT5u7Z redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=302589573 I discovered yesterday that: enwp.org/Article redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article Sadly, it doesn't work with revision IDs, but it's a start! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Yes it does, enwp.org/?oldid=60372135 should redirect you to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=60372135 which is a 2006 revision of [[Old-Timers' Day]] (thanks Special:Random). -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Jul 17, 2009, at 8:25 AM, Chad wrote: Does anyone know the guy who owns enwp.org? That being said, enwp.org/?oldid=1234 does work :) -Chad (Asked whois.pir.org:43 about enwp.org) Domain ID: D148943548-LROR Domain Name: ENWP.ORG Created On: 23-Aug-2007 14: 33: 18 UTC Last Updated On: 21-Sep-2008 00: 28: 40 UTC Expiration Date: 23-Aug-2009 14: 33: 18 UTC Sponsoring Registrar: ASCIO Technologies Inc. - Denmark (R76-LROR) Status: OK Registrant ID: AT9622172-051 Registrant Name: Thomas Kjoerberg Registrant Street1: Groennevollen 14 Registrant Street2: Registrant Street3: Registrant City: Bergen Registrant State/Province: -- Registrant Postal Code: 5016 Registrant Country: NO Registrant Phone: 47.99298989 Registrant Phone Ext.: Registrant FAX: Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant Email: tl-lo...@hotmail.com Admin ID: AT4607819-051 Admin Name: Hostmaster Funktionen Admin Organization: One.com A/S Admin Street1: Kalvebod Brygge 45 Admin Street2: Admin Street3: Admin City: Copenhagen V Admin State/Province: Admin Postal Code: 1560 Admin Country: DK Admin Phone: 45.46907100 Admin Phone Ext.: Admin FAX: 45.70205872 Admin FAX Ext.: Admin Email: hostmas...@b-one.nu Tech ID: AT9622194-051 Tech Name: Hostmaster Funktionen Tech Organization: One.com A/S Tech Street1: Kalvebod Brygge 45 Tech Street2: Tech Street3: Tech City: Copenhagen V Tech State/Province: Tech Postal Code: 1560 Tech Country: DK Tech Phone: 45.46907100 Tech Phone Ext.: Tech FAX: 45.70205872 Tech FAX Ext.: Tech Email: hostmas...@b-one.nu Name Server: NS1.B-ONE.NU Name Server: NS2.B-ONE.NU Name Server: NS3.B-ONE.NU Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Philippe Beaudette Facilitator, Strategic Plan Wikimedia Foundation pbeaude...@wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I did the whois too, but I don't know him. I was asking if (in general) we know the guy who runs it :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Rest in Peace, Walter Cronkite
All, For those of you who have not read the news yet, Walter Cronkite, icon of the CBS Evening News, has passed away. We are the continuation of the media industry that he helped define in many ways. My thoughts are with his family. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A heads up
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Why should the term base be translated ? Is it not more important to be gained by getting all this material in the public domain ?? I do however agree with you. All the material that is about Indonesia should be translated to Indonesian. For them it is very much the opening up of material that is part of their cultural history. Translating it into English does not make it easier for Indonesians to find this material. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/15 John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no At least the term base should be translated. John Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, I have been in discussion with the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam about making their material available on Commons. The Tropenmuseum has an important collection on the colonial past of the Netherlands and contains a rich collection on Suriname and Indonesia. The initial talks are about 100.000 images. The annotations of this material is all in Dutch. It will come with unique identifiers back to the physical object in the Tropenmuseum and it will come with the termbase for the images; this termbase is as I understand it the equivalent of our categories. Some of the material has a partial translation in English and, this can be provided to us as well. The key issue I want to raise is that there are hundreds of museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname all using Dutch there are more museums in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein who speak German While we aim to improve our front end to allow for easy uploads, we do not provide language support. Language support will help people find pictures in their language and will help the matching of categories into other languages. Thanks, GerardM ___ 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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l There is certainly a value to having things in English. It aids translation into more languages. It's a lot harder to find people who speak Dutch and Spanish, French and Russian or Greek and Japanese. You're more likely to find people who speak English in addition to their native tongue, which allows them to translate it. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A heads up
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, How does it help to find material in Commons when you do not know English ?? Practically it is nice that we spend money on improving the upload facility of MediaWiki. In the end it makes no difference when you cannot find the images. Functionally Commons is useless as a consequence to all the people who do not speak English. When you reply PLEASE remember what the Wikimedia Foundation is there for.. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/15 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Why should the term base be translated ? Is it not more important to be gained by getting all this material in the public domain ?? I do however agree with you. All the material that is about Indonesia should be translated to Indonesian. For them it is very much the opening up of material that is part of their cultural history. Translating it into English does not make it easier for Indonesians to find this material. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/15 John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no At least the term base should be translated. John Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, I have been in discussion with the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam about making their material available on Commons. The Tropenmuseum has an important collection on the colonial past of the Netherlands and contains a rich collection on Suriname and Indonesia. The initial talks are about 100.000 images. The annotations of this material is all in Dutch. It will come with unique identifiers back to the physical object in the Tropenmuseum and it will come with the termbase for the images; this termbase is as I understand it the equivalent of our categories. Some of the material has a partial translation in English and, this can be provided to us as well. The key issue I want to raise is that there are hundreds of museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname all using Dutch there are more museums in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein who speak German While we aim to improve our front end to allow for easy uploads, we do not provide language support. Language support will help people find pictures in their language and will help the matching of categories into other languages. Thanks, GerardM ___ 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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l There is certainly a value to having things in English. It aids translation into more languages. It's a lot harder to find people who speak Dutch and Spanish, French and Russian or Greek and Japanese. You're more likely to find people who speak English in addition to their native tongue, which allows them to translate it. -Chad ___ 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 And when something is uploaded in Dutch, how do you expect this to help Spanish speakers? Or Japanese speakers? When you translate to English, you facilitate translation into other languages too. I'm not saying translate to English and let it be, I'm saying translate it to English to aid in retranslation. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] NIH and Wikimedia Foundation collaborate to improve online health information
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: This is a great first opportunity for a US Academy. It hits squarely home as a rebuttal to the (relatively) recent flush of articles criticizing the project for its medical articles. I hope the Academy will be documented in some way that other volunteers can draw on your experience working to educate professionals about Wikipedia. Steven On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: I will be there to assist, for one. -Dan On Jul 14, 2009, at 6:22 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: Hello Frank, This sounds very cool. Which Wikipedians will be there? Is it open to anyone at the NIH? Is there a public agenda? SJ On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Frank Schulenburg frank.schulenb...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Every day millions of people access health information online. We have recently seen some new hard evidence of Wikipedia's growing prominence as a health information resource. The rapid development and traffic on the English Wikipedia of an article on Influenza related articles demonstrates this trend: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hourly_page_requests_influenza_%28April_2009%29.png Today, I'm very happy to announce that the first Wikipedia Academy event in the United States will take place this Thursday, July 16th at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIH includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. On Thursday, a team of experienced volunteer Wikipedia editors will talk about Wikimedia's mission and orient the audience to Wikipedia's structures and community policies. Medical researchers and other staff members of the NIH will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia's content and engage with other Wikipedians to further increase Wikipedia's quality and credibility. We're incredibly excited about this opportunity for increasing the quality of health-related information on Wikipedia. I believe this partnership has a huge potential and we all are very excited about the upcoming event. See also our press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_first_WP_Academy_July_2009 Thanks, Frank ___ 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 ___ 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 Awesome. Only wish we had known about it sooner. I might've tried coming up to the DC area for this. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal for Wikimedia Weather
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Tris Thomast...@waterhay.co.uk wrote: Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has. I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else. Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it? Thanks! Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I can already see it now: It is bright and sunny today in XYZ town[citation needed] -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How do you fully consult the community consensus?
I of course cannot speak for the Foundation. I only write this in the view of a volunteer dev, like many others. That statement was written a long time ago when Mediawiki was simply the software that runs Wikipedia. It's now 2009, and Mediawiki is still the software that runs Wikipedia. That being said, our outside user base has grown massively in this time. A good number of our bug reports and patches come from outside users, not wikis within the WMF. That's all fine and dandy, but our number one goal is still (admittedly or not) to keep developing for Wikipedia. I of course support full consultation with the wikis when it is beneficial to do so. Simple bugfixes or enhancements don't need massive pre-announcement and input. It slows down the development lifecycle for everyone. Most devs don't want to be involved in massive enwiki debates over where to put a link: we just want your final consensus on what you want done (and that itself can be very time consuming). Larger impact things (like the retooling of wikitext) definitely need wider input than just wikitech-l. I believe that the WMF community and wider wiki community should be solicited for such wide-sweeping changes. Tangentally, I think we all as a wiki community need to standardize What is wikitext in a formal way, but that's another discussion. At this day and age, I would hope silly feature hacks for things only wanted by one wiki could be avoided. We've had quite a bit of feature-cruft over the years, and a lot of these things probably would've been better as extensions to begin with. In short: I as a developer welcome all input from the wiki community (both WMF and not), and I highly encourage those who share an interest in the direction of the software (not everyone does) to get involved. I'm not going to track you down and poll everyone around you, but I will certainly listen carefully to your ideas. Always, Chad On Jul 1, 2009 1:16 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Going forward, how does the Foundation plan to make large changes to the software in full consultation with the community consensus? Is the assumption that all of the members of the community who are knowledgeable and interested have already signed up to the relevant mailing lists and all that is needed is to send out a quick 'ping' and get their thoughts? What constitutes the community when it comes to the software? Or is this just a guideline that has been on Jimbo's user page for many years which is not really relevant since laymen should not really be involved in technical decisions? Is there anyone at the Foundation who currently takes this principle seriously? Honestly? What about the developers - are they aware of and actively engaged in implementing this principle? Does the Foundation feel that it doesn't actually need to consult the community? It can determine the technically best solution for the projects and then implement it without soliciting feedback from as many people as possible? What would constitute due diligence in contacting the community? For example, suppose that the Foundation had determined that there were 5 really good solutions to a problem in the software and that they take full consultation seriously. Could you then present those 5 solutions to the community en masse using a survey, analyze the results and choose a winner (or have a runoff?). How large of a change to the software requires full consultation? After consulting the community, does the Foundation feel it is within its power to then choose something different? Does the Foundation take the requirement that all changes to the software must be gradual and reversible seriously, or not? What does that mean to you? Thanks, Brian ___ 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] Wikizine at foundaiton-l?
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 5:54 PM, Walter Vermeirwal...@wikipedia.be wrote: Bence Damokos schreef: It's a magnificent idea in my opinion, as well. Just make sure, please, that you include a prominent unsubscribe link in the first couple of issues, so those who are subscribers of this list as well as Wikizine can unsubscribe the duplicate copy. Best, Bence All postings to Foundation-l include by default unsubscribe information in the footer to unsubscribe from Foundation-l. So does the Wikizine mailing lists postings to unsubscribe from those. General RE; Anyone who has problems to unsubscribe can also ask by means of the admin email address / feedback channels that are provided. Please do not to that on the list itself. To what you subscribe is your own choice of course. But it can be useful to stay subscribed to EN Wikizine directly. It depends what your reader profile is. In any case if EN Wikizine can be posted on Foundation-l it increases the exposure to it. What will result, I strongly hope, in deeper penetration in the non-English language projects and feedback increase in general. Greetings, Walter -- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Magnificent idea! I would encourage other cross-project user-driven initiatives such as this to consider similar postings (Podcasts too! A copy of the summary with a link to the episode would do nicely :). As long as they're cross-project they would fit the scope of foundation-l well. IMO, everyone benefits! -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Some reflections about the governance of Commons
On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 2:25 AM, Geoffrey Plourdegeo.p...@yahoo.com wrote: What if there were two image spaces? Veering slightly OT, but this is easier said than done. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reuse policy
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 3:05 PM, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/6/15 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: The WMF hosted version is considered a stable copy - it's safe to link to and you have every reasonable assumption that it will continue to exist. The project as a whole to an extent. Individual articles not really.Their habit of being moved merged deleted or otherwise messed with means that they can hardly be considered stable. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Very true! Plain and simple: URLs on the internet are horribly unstable and make for terribly inaccurate attribution. Cool URLs may not change[1], but I think the majority of the internet missed the memo and are content using non-cool URLs :) -Chad [1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're shooting straight from the gut. On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles. http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple languages in order to bootstrap their automated system. This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse. We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA licensed. Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in the next fifty years. -- אמיר אלישע אהרוני heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ 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 For what it's worth, Google's language tools have drastically improved over the years. They're getting really good, honestly. That all being said, they're not perfect and a machine translation is still no substitute for a human translator. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: Probably, some of you already saw that Google made something for which I think that it will be the new form of the mainstream Internet perception. You may read Slashdot article [1], a good description at the blog Google Operating System [2] (not officially connected with Google) and, of course, you may see the official site with more than one hour of presentation [3]. I expected such kind of tool (a client connected with others via P2P XML-based protocol; with servers for identification). However, I didn't expect that i will come so soon, that it will be done by one large corporation and that it will be done at the right way: open protocol, free software referent implementation. At the official site they said that it will start to work during this year. As one large corporation is behind the project, as well as free and open source community is able to participate, I have no doubts that it will be implemented all over the Internet (and not just Internet) very quickly. Probably, in two years the basic component of one modern operating system will not be a Web browser, but a Wave client. Probably, Web will become a storage system, while all of the interaction will be done via Waves. This development of Internet is very strongly related to the Wikimedia projects: * I want to be able to edit Wikipedia through the Wave client. * I want to add my own notes to articles, history of articles etc. * I want to have collection of my knowledge at one place, including Wikipedia articles and my notes. * I want to be able to make a program which would analyze articles on Wikipedia and to give program and/or analysis to my friends. * I want many more things to be browsable or editable or whatever from a Wave client... All of those my (but, in one year, not just my) wishes may be fulfilled just through work on MediaWiki and Pywikipediabot. So, I am calling all of you who are willing to think about it or who are at the position to think about it -- to start with thinking :) [1] - http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/1912226/Googles-Wave-Blurs-Chat-Email-Collaboration-Software [2] - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html [3] - http://wave.google.com/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Very cool. Not sure if I buy into the this is the future of the internet, but very very cool indeed. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 10:02 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Adding people to a conversation already in progress is cool. The rest of it...I dunno...what's the point? Basically, moving the Internet usage from the client-server model to the peer-to-peer model with auxiliary role of servers. In other words, decentralization and personalization of Internet; the process very different from the centralization and unification [of look and feel] processes of last ~10 years. While P2P networks still exist, they are still 'Internet underground. If Google would be pushing Wave protocol, P2P will become mainstream. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l It's still not really P2P. The server still acts as the intermediary and is where the data is stored. It's just really fast client-server. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
