Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books
did you use print encyclopedias as a kid? Oh yes. I especially loved #6 of Lithuanian Soviet Encyclopedia http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaizdas:Lietuviskoji_tarybine_enciklopedija_resize.jpg - L* had airplanes and M* had automobiles ;) B* had whales (hence my obsession with Exploding Whale article nowadays ;-) Scanning the volumes and looking for interesting articles was sure one of activities :) I had a dream of buying a Britannica set once I have my own home. Unfortunately, getting my new home somehow also aligned with me finding Wikipedia, and on a very first glance I knew I had to work on this thing, in one way or another. And indeed, any other book back in the day that would satisfy the curiosity was eagerly consumed, but nowadays online world gives us way more opportunities. Paper encyclopedias were the easiest to reach back in the day (Wikipedia is easiest to reach online source now, right? :) Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia domains, SOPA, Godaddy and MarkMonitor
Hi! I hereby congratulate Wikimedia Foundation switching domains from pro-SOPA Godaddy to MarkMonitor. Not that many people know, but MarkMonitor is ahead of the industry in anti-piracy fight: * They have systems to do real-time content filtering for ISPs, that stop peer-to-peer piracy. * They provide evidence for largest media and entertainment copyright holders, that is accepted in civil and criminal courts. * They have state of the art systems to monitor millions of titles on peer to peer networks and send Cease and Desist letters. There're way more anti-piracy activities that MarkMonitor does, and I'm happy that WMF and MM are joining their forces. I hope it will lead to better Creative Commons license enforcing, as well as detecting illegal use of content on WMF sites too, some day. BR, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] just wondering, are we going to take down en.wikipedia.org?
Hi! we recently did some practice on italian wikipedia, are we going to protest IP legislation in US by taking down English Wikipedia? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-%E2%80%93-and-it%E2%80%99s-worse-ever Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is random article truly random
Short answer: no Long answer: we have uneven chances for different pages to show up. It is based on the idea that every page gets inserted into discreetly random position in a certain linear space, so you end up with [[Poisson distribution]], which from a distance seems to return stuff randomly enough, but one page can have 1000x higher chance to be returned than other. Well, frankly, we have some pages that have infinitely larger chance to be returned than others (there are over 1000 pages with random collisions, yay [[Birthday paradox]]), as others don't have any chance at all, some of values we save with precision of 12 decimals, others with 18 ;-) So, largest gap is 0.0001 whereas smallest (collisions aside) is 0.1, so even with non-collision articles, the 'chance gap' can be of a billion times ;-) So, if we put these numbers into buckets, we see that there're 1259 articles that have 10x higher chance than 3.6M, which have 10x higher chance than other 4.49M which have 10x higher chance than a poor set of 700k pages, which still have 10x higher chance than 71k pages, which still have 10x higher chance than 7k, which still have higher chance than 700, which still have infinitely larger chance than remaining 1000 which will never show up on Special:Random. I won't even go into discussions how this all gets distorted by all the feature requests like 'give me random page from a category X'. ;-) Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
Regardless, what's done is done, for the moment. Except that WMF as steward of the open information can roll any of that blackout crap back. Primary mission is spreading the knowledge, and now it.wikipedia obviously fails at it. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
The only thing we truly could do is restore read access. But if the it.wikipedia community really wants to strike, there's very little we can do to stop them. :) I sure agree with that. There're plenty of ways to inflict pain without terminating the service entirely. Editor strike means not editing, it doesn't mean full service downtime. Full-page banners or whatever else may work, of course. When writers guild went on strike, we could still watch old stuff, right, it wasn't pulled ;-) If doctors go on strike, people are still allowed to live, retroactive disease correction is not done... How do we deal with an editor who starts deleting his contributions out of spite? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
Hi! Here's the conclusion I've come to though. We need to get the software good enough, and simple enough, that it is firmly in the background. OK! Mediawiki is like an old DOS computer that constantly drags you into programing mode, particularly if you fork. Yes, especially if you actually are running it, all you do is sit in some black and white text screens, that definitely sucks. We need the equivalent of a Macintosh that almost anyone can use effortlessly. The emphasis needs to be on content, not on trying to figure out extensions and templates. Yup, we need dragdrop forking support. With clouds nowadays that should be easy - you enter cloud account information (it may auto-detect password), and drag the website you want to fork onto a drag here target. We should definitely work on this kind of functionality. Then you click on it, and it runs, in a cloud! Emphasis needs to be on content and DRM, so that people don't copy articles without leaving 30% of their revenue to your fork. ArticleStore is going to be core essence of all content distribution, after it has been previewed on the website, of course, seamlessly integrated with reading devices, like computers. It is easy to resolve templates and extensions iOS-development way, charge community for being able to write them, that will make the remaining ones truly useful, because someone was motivated to do that. Of course, you need an approval process, but it is nothing technical, you can approve that stuff solely on moon phase or peyote effects :) Anyway, we should definitely build something like that, just don't pay attention to suicide rate. Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] en.wp HACKED?
What was it that lasted only a minute, Chris? Vandalism, probably. I've read an article that vandalism lasts about a minute! Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election results?
Hi! I'm told volunteers are capable of editing wiki pages and posting to mailing lists. I haven't been able to independently verify this, though. I'm told that some volunteers can be extremely obnoxious too. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
priority task being to get the site working again. Maybe at some time in the future, we will have enough 24/7 sysadmin manpower that we can respond to any unplanned downtime in the way you suggest. But we don't have that capability just yet. In future we will have five nines availability and no downtimes will happen. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
As you can see it refers to some unknown error. In this case the maintentance was known and* pre-planned* for several days. technically this was unknown problem :) A lot of people were confused by the outage and the error page was unhelpful to them. This could have been mitigated simply by editing that page temporarily to say Our servers are undergoing scheduled maintenance, which has resulted in some downtime. This should be concluded by 14:00 UTC, please be patient whilst the maintenance progesses. We did not really know when we will fix it :) And this is the extent of my suggestion to improve our communication with readers. IMO we're discussing completely wrong things here. Site was down, doesn't really matter in what way ;-) I'm sure we'd look much more professional if our downtime message would always say planned maintenance in process! ;-) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
Hi! Huh? The downtime was expected during 13:00 and 14:00 UTC, or at least there was an email warning of such things the day before... hardly unplanned or unknown. there's a bit of a difference between maintenance window and expected downtime during it. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
Hi! The maintenance was planned, downtime was noted as possible. An error message that reflects that seems, frankly, a good idea. There're lots of great ideas around the world, feeding the hungry and curing the cancer among them. The response to what I thought to be a helpful suggestion in improving communication with readership has been... incredibly disappointing. Well, you were complaining about confusion at first, probably we indeed should not show any technical details about anything. Site is down, bye! might be better choice, I guess. I wish I hadn't bothered. :( I was just passing on comments from people who came to IRC and basically said oh, well why didn't the site just say that then. If we knew what would fail to put an appropriate error message there, we'd probably fix the problem beforehand. :-) Of course; if we are ignoring our readers' concerns now, then fine. Nobody is ignoring any concerns, they are carefully weighted, hehehe, unlike your negativism. Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
Hi! That's... completely missing the point. Yes the specific errors faced were unexpected or unforseen, BUT they were a* direct result* of the maintenance between 13:00 and 14:00. I am simply passing on the feeling of our readership; which was that the situation was badly communicated to them. As majority of our users are anons, who visit us once a day or two, we should probably have started a communication campaign at least two months before the maintenance. We practice a lot during fundraisers :-) OTOH, if there's no downtime, maybe we're causing quite some frustration with superfluous communication? :-) I am trying to share my experience here as a sysadmin and website operator; Oh, finally we got some sysadmins and website operators here. As a sysadmin you sure understand that in larger distributed systems which are not all built on a set of SPOFs there can be various failure modes, happening at various layers and various fuzziness. As a website operator you sure know that it is lots of effort to prepare boilerplates for every possible situation :-) users hate downtime/maintenance, and will complain about it endlessly. You have some annoying users, our users are awesome and don't complain endlessly! Improving our communication of planned maintenance is definitely a good idea. So is curing cancer. Marcus Buck wrote: Domas, what are you trying to achieve with your comments on Tom's suggestions? Put some clue in? The sensible reaction (from a person who is involved in the maintenance) would be: I know nobody likes this, but sensible reaction is to work on good operation rather than standing in front of a mirror and trying five hundred different I'm sorry phrases. You look too much from that single position, that communication is good, without weighting costs or other options. Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
Wikipedia going down without a temporary explanation page is roughly of the same scale as apple.com going down with no explanation, google.com going down with no explanation, microsoft.com going down with no explanation, and so on. WHOAH THERE IS QUITE SOME SELF ENTITLEMENT THERE. Microsoft revenue: $62B (though you should look at their internet division losses) Google revenue: $29B Apple revenue: $62B Wikimedia revenue: ??? Tech staffing and such is somewhat proportional :) Oh, by the way, I don't know where you look, but I somewhat missed communication about maintenance events ongoing in Google or Microsoft or Apple - you think they have none? Did you get lots of clarification why your gmail was unreachable? Did you get explanation/information why search index was outdated? Do they use site-wide sitenotices for that or what? Top 5 website means we have that kind of use, perception, stature -- and a similar scale of response within the general public if it suddenly doesn't work. Most members of the public do not have the insight you or I would. *shrug*, would be interesting if anyone would actually explain policies of other website incident handling. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24
Hi! Domas, why so defensive? I'm contrarian in this case :) unfeasible because of the work involved, but you can probably say that without all the combative snark. Well, as with every downtime, there are way more issues* that end up uncovered and have to be looked at, and yet largest email threads are about nicer error messages :-) This will be my constructive contribution to the thread: FAIL WHALE! W W W WW W W '. W .--._ \ \.--| / -..__) .-' | _ / \'-.__, .__.,' `''._\--' V Domas * buggy forcedeth behavior, european DNS server was hanging before maintenance started, loadbalancer likes to throw errors on first slave failure and doesn't go to others, no auto-fallback to read-only mode, too long connect timeouts, etc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects ...
Hi! Domas your responses are not helpful at all. You are simply stirring the pot to no point. Please stop. You forgot to tell if all of my responses or just some, and if there's really no point at all, or there might be some. Anyway, thanks for this helpful contribution! Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation has been prosecution in HK / ç¶åºåªé«åºéæå¨é¦æ¸¯è¢«èµ·è¨´
For all we know we have servers in Hong Kong. not that I'm aware of :) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
if this is true, then we should implement a better solution for foundation-level discussions in other major language families. I nominate SJ to translate all emails. I saw him do that before, he's good! Brion would suggest Esperanto though. You two will have to fight it out. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
Hi! I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it substantially harder to access the information that people were coming try reading text when you got subversively blinking banner at the top of it. :-) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
Erik, happy new year to you and to everyone! :-) Thanks for greetings, and even more thanks for such an effort in trying to address the concerns. Asking a reader to make a donation is by definition a distraction from what they came to do. Well, there's a single maybe he will consider once distraction and there's let's not allow to read the text distraction. They are different. The question has always been, and continues to be, how we want to balance this distraction away from the utility that We have been balancing it forever. It worked, right? We did not need blinking banners for years, and now that organization is under way less stress than ever before it starts pushing boundaries way beyond what we were doing before. Thats not cool. I don't see anything wrong at all with messages that signal increased urgency as the fundraiser draws to a close. Well, then you did not open the site with banners that were there. Nor do I see a mildly animated banner in the last 48 hours of the year (and the fundraiser) which reminds people about tax-deductible donations and seeks to energize a final push for the remaining funds towards the goal, as a violation of the contract between us and our readers. Well, of course, it wasn't dancing monkeys, so adblock wasn't used or browser window was not closed immediately. It was way more subversive, designed to distract you from what you're doing on the site again and again. I don't know how your mind works, but I prefer to concentrate. Now, the fact that you do not see it as problematic with regards to our service means that you are failing to think in terms of service and think only in terms of a revenue source, which is very sad. Indeed, the size and graphical visibility of the banners this year have certainly pushed my own pain points as to what I consider an acceptable balance. That is a bit different from what you said above. At the same time, I've had countless conversations in past years with people who didn't even notice that we were fundraising. Those people need dancing monkeys, I guess. And full screen ads. Go ahead. To a certain extent, touching those pain points is necessary to even register with people who have both the ability and desire to support us. We can take down the site to extort more money, take this as another fundraising suggestion. Then people will notice, heck, we may even get newspaper coverage. The fundraising team has continually applied judgment regarding this balance. Their judgment was definitely lacking experience in using websites. To be sure, this year's campaign has certainly pushed the envelope to meet its ambitious goal. Try using a message we have ambitious goals and need your money for them as a message, you can measure its effectiveness. Prior to this year, we didn't really have a good sense exactly what the ceiling of the fundraiser would be, because we'd never pushed it as hard was we could before we reached our goal. Fundraising team definitely didn't run out of all options. I'm sure it is possible to raise more. With all that said, I've seen organizations like public broadcasters go down a road of increasingly aggressive fundraising, to the detriment of the actual experience of the product. There is a reason we're doing this on the internet and not in traditional medias. It is much more efficient to do comprehensive encyclopedias on internet than on radio or TV or print. There's a reason you're not buying out TV time to teach how to edit Wikipedia. You shouldn't judge anything Wikipedia does by the standards of public broadcasters, nor you should be applying their practice too much (oh wait). We're different generation, so let's have our own quality benchmarks. So I am in favor of drawing a line as to what we consider acceptable and unacceptable fundraising practices. Perhaps that's a conversation that we can have with the Board, as an extension of the first set of principles articulated here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_principles Though extending those principles would work nice, it is shame that how to run a website needs micromanagement from board level. According to your own stats as processed by ErikZ, pageviews increased from 8.9B to 13.7B from March 2008 to November 2010. Perhaps not staggering relative growth as in the early years, but fairly dramatic in absolute terms when you consider how many millions of additional people served it represents. Thats +50% over two and half years. As I told, the relative share on the internet didn't change much . As for dramatic increase of people served - our anons get served by cheap cache layer, our editors (and counts didn't grow much) are much more expensive to maintain :) So, we are serving more users than ever Yup, +50% over two and half years, now check how much more fundraising we're doing :) We have a greater
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
Hi! I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. Or rather, certain parts of WMF depends on certain amounts of money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? It is not obvious how much money is urgent, more urgent than the need to read the article. It is not obvious how much money is so urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking. It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate. I want to build Wikipedia so that people can read it. I for one don't want to build Wikipedia so that it could be used as vehicle of WMF growth - I thought that was supposed to be opposite (I guess my priorities are different from ones declared by strategy project :). If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. Which isn't entirely bad. In lots of places, if you don't have money, you become more efficient at what you do or do less. Having unlimited funding (which is brought by largest advertisement space on the internet) can spoil too early. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. They already do, don't they? In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Exactly, that was how the things were when we were actually growing - when we had to grow our environment to be able to sustain new users. Now pageviews don't really grow much (the percentage of reach/pageviews is quite flat), we don't have more edits, number of active users is flat. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. The major premise of the campaign is keeping it free - but it is much larger than previous campaign and involves lots of organization growth. This campaign target was big enough so fundraising team had to resort to annoying tactics - that also bred countless internet memes - I'm sure there will be Wikipedia article about them. I don't care about the mess up of titles like Wikipedia Director or whatever. I care that we make the actual service to our users suck, and that ends up our priority, as other departments apparently have no say over what fundraising team does. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual
I think that's the only possible error response that you can deliver from a Squid ACL. But a deny_info could be useful. Maybe Domas didn't get up to the deny_info section in the manual ;) Would make a good joke, eh?! :) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual
Like you say, though, it's definitely a technical issue to be taken up elsewhere. Where you will be told that this is 'working as intended'. amp; is usually sent in URLs by broken clients, so we block them as early as possible. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
On Dec 8, 2010, at 6:21 PM, Mike Dupont wrote: Sounds like we need to have a notable search engine that includes only approved and allowed sources, that would be nice to have. Sounds like a great community project, Wiki Search! Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] the only site in the top X sites that doesn't sell you anything
Hi! Much less people notice that among the most popular Wikipedia is the only one that doesn't sell them anything We don't sell, we just hold reference material at ransom. Don't be too ecstatic, it comes with a cost. As for Alexa, it has the list polluted by multiple mega-company properties (e.g. count multiples of Google) - so it doesn't really have a list of companies. And I'm sure that list has entities with less revenue. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Shopping-enabled Wikipedia pages
Hi! Personally, I think that this is a good opportunity to get money from payed ads. It is not even on Wikimedia servers. I don't think that any ads-supported 1:1 content mirror (I don't see much added value atm, we have some kind of book source support already) is any good opportunity to get money, sorry. Why would users want to see stale ads supported version, when there's no-ads version with fresh one. The amount of how much we show our fundraising banners is just thing of organizational efficiency and ambitions. If WMF wanted to spend less money, the fundraiser would have much lower profile, right? :) I somehow want us to think about our users and service as primary objective, not just organizational issues. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Shopping-enabled Wikipedia pages
Hi! But, should we care at all if Amazon hosts 1:1 content mirror and gives to us some money? Maybe. It is probably first time our content is dumped into internet by internet property that has high(er?) search engine rankings, so users may be sent to different experience than one we try to create. Starting with technology issues - they don't have cache cluster in Europe, so it may be slower (though they did some CSS/JS optimization work, or rather didn't have to introduce all the dynamism that we do have). Also, there is no edit button, no article history, content is stale, no discussion and no fundraising banner. There are no links to other languages, there is no search, there is no main page leading to sister projects, there are no editorial notices in articles (okok, that may be a bonus ;-), there are no pointers to Wikimedia Commons, no categories. So, even though oh yay money is good, that money is controversial, as it means our users are robbed of best experience we can provide. I'd be much happier if they actually improved or innovated on things and gave no money rather than give us money for whatever they're doing here. Oh well, unless it is... ONE BILLION DOLLARS, MWAHAHAHA. Cheers, Domas ___ 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?
Hi! Each web server, of which the WMF has a few, collects details on the behaviour of IPs, in logs. Those logs can be and probably have been requested by certain government officials, most likely for the purpose of tracking down who is behind a certain Bad posting to a BLP. We log edits, not page views. These are not 'web server' logs, these are mediawiki logs. Domas ___ 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?
Hi! There aren't any raw logs? Closest to raw log we may have is 1/1000 sample, that we keep sometimes for noticing obvious things like DDoS or software feature gone mad. Domas ___ 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?
Humans are not citable sources, per our policy. This isn't Wikipedia, this is Wikimedia. You can cite me, if you want. Domas ___ 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?
Hi! Go on record, then I'll cite you. An email list is not a citable source, per our policy. Why would I care about your policy? Which policy is 'our' policy? Why does it apply to anything here? However a page on the server is citable. So put your reputation up for view, then you'll be citable :) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-November/062730.html Domas ___ 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?
Hi! It's isn't my policy, it's our policy. Who is 'we', whom do you represent? :-) If you don't know to what I refer, then perhaps you can read up on it. You didn't tell what you represent and what policy you talk about, I don't know where to read about it. As far as citing the archives of an email list, that is also not a citable source. Thats very sad. I'm used to my mailing list posts being cited ;-) If Foundation staff and supporters themselves, are *not prepared* to go on the record with their claims, then why should anyone trust anything they say on an email list? I cannot speak for Foundation at the moment, so I don't know why they don't go on the record. I don't go on the record because I don't see any purpose, I already wrote in email what I thought I wanted to write. That is the very nature of *false authority*, the bane of our project. What do you call 'our project'? I don't understand your affiliation. I must say, I'm quite surprised that some people here don't grasp this concept yet, after the projects being in existence for so many years now, almost a decade right? It is a fundamental principle, that we should be citing actual authorities, not false claims to authority. I'm quite surprised you think I should care about whatever you want me to care because you want me to care about it. Cheers, Domas ___ 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?
Those with the passwords do whatever they feel like and are accountable to no one? yup! Domas ___ 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?
Hello, should not web server logs (of requests) be published? which intelligence service are you representing? there are hourly page view statistics somewhere out there, so most of data is already out, drilling in more would mean violating privacy. and no, I don't see this as a per-project negotiable issue. Domas ___ 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?
Hi! you have mentioned that provider can give logs to government, probably also wikipedia must give its logs to government, if requested, is not it? Wikipedia cannot give logs to government, as it has none. users cannot request in provider's official web forum to make dynamic ip or nat? probably you mean that they cannot require/demand/claim/request(?) that as their right that is written in law. No IP is anonymous - based on various usage patterns one can determine who is behind it :) i am not from intelligence service :) . you mean something like spy? I meant someone who has some sarcasm detection skills. not, i am not. as i said, i ask this because i think that tatar people should be managers/adminstrators/controllers of texts they wrote, and that texts are read mostly by tatar people. if logs are not published, that mean that they can be read by wikipedia owners, by us government, but not by tatar people. Logs cannot be read by wikipedia owners or us government because they don't exist. You're free to suggest aggregations of interest to you - now we provide hourly pageview counters for each article. Wikipedia does not track its readers, last time I checked. i have not seen that of wikipedia. publishing full/raw logs also is not much violence of privacy, i think. I really really would like to avoid going into any ad hominem attacks, but you're not capable to see much, then. and wikipedia could say if you do not want to publish your ip, then do not use this but take in account that there is no problem with hiding ip and referer. and so there is no problem with anonymous reading. Wikipedia will not say do not use this, because its primary goal is to spread knowledge, and that includes spreading knowledge to people who value their privacy. anonymous writing is already generally blocked by wikipedia itself. You can edit under a pseudonym. That is already good enough. IPs identify real people way more than pseudonyms may do. and users who are tracked also will know that their browsing is published. Sorry, disregard word 'intelligence' used before in any forms. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] on fundraiser :)
Hello, I did an analysis of advertisement space used on Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. I measured banners first - Wikipedia had 250k pixels (okok, my screen is large :), Google had 60k pixels, Facebook had 40k. I applied a multiplier of 2 for Wikipedia image, because it's ability to scan your soul is epic (facebook got 1.5 multiplier for toned down logo images in their ads). Also, Wikipedia got 2x multiplier for central placement. I tried to come up with good number of how many times those ads get shown, but it is somewhat complicated - so I will assume that Facebook and Google always show, and Wikipedia does show only 10% of the year. I will not involve ethics or relevance argument, as I don't support 100% of WMF direction either :-) End result - Wikipedia got score of 100, while Google and Facebook, both ads-funded companies, got 60 each. Thats why I donated, Wikipedia obviously needs money. Cheers, Domas ___ 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?
We did that with Uncyclopedia. Wikimedia hosted it until Wikia was formed. what? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings
Hi! The privacy policy is clear. Your number of edits is public. And it can be published in aggregated forms by other uses. And if you edit Wikipedia, you accept the Privacy Policy. Also, on the top of the Privacy Policy page you can read: Foundation privacy policy is what kind of information foundation releases. In this case foundation has already released the data, and publishing it may or may not be the scope of project, but it is not 'privacy policy' anymore, but inclusion policy. The very same information can be hosted at many other places, including google spreadsheets or any random paste bin. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings
The issue is when someone aggregates the data and associates with an individual, and then makes publishes it. Or uses that data to make public statements about a user. we don't associate data with individual, we associate data with pseudonym. otoh, whatever people talk here about aggregation seems to be uneducated blabber by people who don't know Special:Contributions exists (that also groups/aggregates data by user). Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings
Hi, wiki-list! No ethics here then. Excuse me, what is your complaint? I don't really get the point you are trying to make. There are few simple things, but apparently you have problems to grasp them :) 1. Your readership data is not revealed to third parties. Your point if a UK ISP published a list of all its users site visits. is complete bullshit and does not apply at all in this discussion. 2. As an editor, you are participating in a collaborative process, which has quite a lot of meritocracy, so your contribution to the project matters. The crap you are suggesting is let's make every contribution fully anonymous so nobody would be able to track anything. I'm not sure your suggestion would work well in Wikipedias. 3. Pseudonyms are not associated with individuals, unless those individuals want those pseudonyms to be associated with them. 4. Editors are exposed to edit trails all the time, via RecentChanges, Special:Contributors, Watchlists, article histories, etc. Such information _is_ public. 5. Germans are more sensitive to privacy issues, and they have probably strictest privacy laws in the world. OTOH, look at (2). 6. You seem to demand banning underage editing, which is quite important Wikipedian demographic :) 7. We have ethics of open collaborative project that is providing knowledge to the world. This is not tinfoil hat association. GTFO, if you want to imply that we don't have ethics here, just because it doesn't fit your paranoid POV. Domas ___ 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
Hi! Only wanted to notify you that the Acehnese Wikipedia have plans about boycotting Wikipedia Thats ACE! Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website
I welcome many members of the Wikimedia staff joining us in Gdansk but PLEASE do not hide in a VIP environment like happened on previous Wikimanias. I hereby find this grossly insulting. Not spending time with Gerard does not mean that someone is hiding from everyone else. I found staff always available and roaming in general areas in previous wikimanias, and we're not here to judge how they should spend their evenings and nights. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website
Hi! I hope you mean Vox rather than Fox. I don't think Fox currently has any connection to Deus. Tell that to Rupert Murdoch Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Did you say usability ?
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: What would you think about an automobile repair shop, when you discover after you try the car again that you can no longer remove the key and stop the engine ? that perpetuum mobile exists, I'd be grateful for it. there're some better ways to report problems though, like http://bugs.wikimedia.org/ Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Did you say usability ?
Hi! Yes. So the topic for a talk on the foundation list would be : should Wikipedia stop to support older computers or older web browsers like Internet Explorer 6 ? Older web browsers - maybe, if the cost to maintain becomes too high. In many cases definite answers are quite difficult, as thresholds involved are way too dynamic. I may complain, that my entry level nokia web browser cannot handle that large simple HTMLs either and ask community to reduce page sizes - but it is probably beyond the threshold you'd see as sane. Forcing people like me to get rid of their older computer and spend money to buy a new one, with a larger screen, and better web browsers. Well, there're no incentives for keeping old cars, as they emit more CO2, are noisier, etc. Old computers are similar - less energy efficiency, stall the progress, bla bla. If it creates more work, at some point in time a threshold is crossed when supporting it (at least in default configuration) does not make too much sense. Is that bug worth spending time on it ? Are users like me (how many are they? one or two? less than 100? less than 1000? less than 1? more? ) worth paying attention ? Maybe, maybe not. We would probably need better figures :) The meaning of usability in the Wiki-m/p-edia vocabulary generally means moving forward with smart new software implying less support and less usability for older computers doesn't it ? Does it? Wikipedia has... what ? Wikipedia has Nostalgia skin!!! :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia?useskin=nostalgia or modern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia?useskin=modern or chick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia?useskin=chick or actually, monobook: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia?useskin=monobook ;-) Do we need more prominent placement for these more efficient skins? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Did you say usability ?
Hi! What a pity they are not similar to old sewing machines, old vacuum cleaners, old electric ovens, or old tables or old chairs. I'm sorry that I have to say that (I really feel sorry!), but you sir are an idiot, and that explains your old PC problem too, a bit, in a way. I'm sorry if you are offended, but I couldn't do anything about it. Keep whining. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Top posting
kthx On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, An important thread has been derailed by an off topic comment. For your information, and for the somanyth time, top posting comes easy when you use a modern tool like GMAIL. It automatically hides whatever came before. This whole notion has no relevance to me as a consequence. I get hundreds of mails and the notion that one should be answered differently then others is not easy to consider. I answer to the content to a mail and that is not related to who will receive it. Given that for people who use software that is not as helpful as mine, the experience rates as a nuisance as I appreciate it. It is similar to the use of words or acronyms that are likely not to be understood. For me KTHX is one such, the top rated result makes it a radio station and it took me some time to find that it is likely to mean Ok, thanks. The point is not that such words or acronyms should not be used, it is just to indicate that nuisances come in many forms and are a fact of life. 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
Re: [Foundation-l] Announcement - Public Policy Initiative Team joins WMF
Why is the team chosen to target specifically the US? I am not sure I am comfortable with this choice. Because in Russia team targets you :) Oh wait, this isn't slashdot. Let's hope this is like usability project, where US-based operations are being expanded onto other cultures/nations/countries. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Great news! Google gives Wikimedia USD 2 million
Hello, The question is, how do we thank the company that has everything? We can thank them by providing better content to everyone. That is both what they and us want. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] At school
Hey Philippe, That's pretty snarky, Domas. There was a legitimate question there. :-) Did community strategy members come up with this conclusion, or you had to involve external consultants?! Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] At school
William, Domas, I am disappointed with the frequent disrespect with which you treat colleagues, as exemplified by your responses here to Tyler and Philippe. I respect Philippe - we had lots of great time and discussions in the past - and I hope he remembers that (including all my thoughts about the work he is doing), and doesn't think I'm in any way disrespectful! I'm sorry, if it is seen otherwise, it was supposed to be just oh, I am snarky indeed :) Tyler? He deliberately separated himself from your foundation, so I cannot call him a colleague yet! Sometimes I have to work very hard to see past that to the value of your technical contributions. And from time to time I wonder to what extent that value is counterbalanced by potential contributors that you drive off. Indeed, that may be the case. I constantly feel that I'm blocking someone's wishes to make Wikipedia better :-( I may have driven away quite a few people in the past, and I really miss them (Jeff, where are you!). If you are not sure how to demonstrate respect or interact politely in on-line forums and would like to change that, let me (or somebody) know. Sir, I think the problem I have is that I'm not sure when to demonstrate respect and interact politely, not how. :( It was something a lot of us -- me certainly included -- had to learn consciously at one point or another, so I'm sure a lot of people could help. I don't feel entirely doomed now, that I get community support. I will be better, I promise! Domas P.S. Maybe I really shouldn't send emails when severely jetlagged? ;-D ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] At school
Hello, Kids at my school are criticizing the heck out of your Foundation Good to know you have plenty of people you can talk to. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Mediawiki to C++ , here we go
Hi, This is exactly what I was working on : Where can we read more about your work? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Jimmy on CNN
Hello dear people, there's something very very very special about the video at http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/01/19/ctw.connector.jimmy.wales.cnn You can definitely see that organization just had a critical shift. :-) Domas P.S. You look great! :) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Boing Boing applauds stats.grok.se!
On Jan 8, 2010, at 7:02 PM, David Gerard wrote: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/07/wikibumps.html Currently we're in talks with WM-DE, so they will provision some storage for long-term archives of raw data, and we will probably add image view statistics then. Good stuff, right? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Hi!!! 1. Php is very hard to optimize. No, PHP is much easier to optimize (read - performance oriented refactoring). 3. Even python is easier to optimize than php. Python's main design idea is readability. What is readable, is easier to refactor too, right? :) 4. The other questions are, does it make sense to have such a centralized client server architecture? We have been talking about using a distributed vcs for mediawiki. Lunatics without any idea of stuff being done inside the engine talk about distribution. Let them! 5. Well, now even if the mediawiki is fully distributed, it will cost CPU, but that will be distributed. Each edit that has to be copied will cause work to be done. In a distributed system even more work in total. Indeed, distribution raises costs. 6. Now, I have been wondering anyway who is the benefactor of all these millions spend on bandwidth, where do they go to anyway? What about making a wikipedia network and have the people who want to access it pay instead of having us pay to give it away? With these millions you can buy a lot of routers and cables. LOL. There's quite some competition in network department, and it has become economy of scale (or of serving youtube) long ago. 7. Now, back to the optimization. Lets say you were able to optimize the program. We would identify the major cpu burners and optimize them out. That does not solve the problem. Because I would think that the php program is only a small part of the entire issue. The fact that the data is flowing in a certain wasteful way is the cause of the waste, not the program itself. Even if it would be much more efficient and moving around data that is not needed, the data is not needed. We can have new kind of Wikipedia. The one where we serve blank pages, and people imagine content in it. We\ve done that with moderate success quite often. So if you have 10 people collaborating on a topic, only the results of that work will be checked into the central server. the decentralized communication would be between fewer parties and reduce the resources used. Except that you still need tracker to handle all that, and resolve conflicts, as still, there're no good methods of resolving conflicts with small number of untrusted entities. see also : http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:A_MediaWiki_Parser_in_C How much would that save? Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Dude, I need that strong stuff you're having. Let me sum this up, The basic optimization is this : You don't need to transfer that new article in every revision to all users at all times. There's not much difference between transferring every revision and just some 'good' revisions. The central server could just say : this is the last revision that has been released by the editors responsible for it, there are 100 edits in process and you can get involved by going to this page here (hosted on a server someplace else). Editing is miniscule part of our workload. There is no need to transfer those 100 edits to all the users on the web and they are not interesting to everyone. Well, we may not transfer them, in case of flagged revisions, we can transfer in case of pure wiki. Point is, someone has to transfer. Lets take a look at what the engine does, it allows editing of text. That includes conflict resolution, cross-indexing, history tracking, abuse filtering, full text indexing, etc. It renders the text. It means building the output out of many individual assets (templates, anyone?), embed media, transform based on user options, etc. It serves the text. And not only text - it serves complex aggregate views like 'last related changes', 'watchlist', 'contributions by new users', etc. The wiki from ward cunningham is a perl script of the most basic form. That is probably one of reasons why we're not using wiki from Ward Cunningham anymore, and have something else, called Mediawiki. There is not much magic involved. Not much use at multi-million article wiki with hundreds of millions of revisions. Of course you need search tools, version histories and such. There are places for optimizing all of those processes. And we've done that with MediaWiki ;-) It is not lunacy, it is a fact that such work can be done, and is done without a central server in many places. Name me a single website with distributed-over-internet backend. Just look at for example how people edit code in an open source software project using git. It is distributed, and it works. Git is limited and expensive for way too many of our operations. Also, you have to have whole copy of GIT, it doesn't have on-demand-remote-pulls nor any caching layer attached to that. I appreciate your will of cloning Wikipedia. It works if you want expensive accesses, of course. We're talking about serving a website here, not a case which is very nicely depicted at: http://xkcd.com/303/ There are already wikis based on git available. Anyone tried putting Wikipedia content on them, and try simulating our workload? :) I understand that Git's semantics are usable for Wikipedia's basic revision storage, but it's data would still have to be replicated to other types of storages, that would allow various cross-indexing and cross-reporting. How well does Git handle parallelism internally? How can it be parallelized over multiple machines? etc ;-) It lacks engineering. Basic stuff is nice, but it isn't what we need. There are other peer to peer networks such as TOR or freenet that would be possible to use. How? These are just transports. If you were to split up the editing of wikipedia articles into a network of git servers across the globe and the rendering and distribution of the resulting data would be the job of the WMF. And how would that save any money? By adding much more complexity to most of processes, and by having major cost item untouched? Now the issue of resolving conflicts is pretty simple in the issue of git, everyone has a copy and can do what they want with it. If you like the version from someone else, you pull it. Who's revision does Wikimedia merge? In terms of wikipedia as having only one viewpoint, the NPOV that is reflected by the current revision at any one point in time, that version would be one pushed from its editors repositories. It is imaginable that you would have one senior editor for each topic who has their own repository of of pages who pull in versions from many people. Go to Citizendium, k, thx. Please lets be serious here! I am talking about the fact that not all people need all the centralised services at all times. You have absolute misunderstanding on what our technology platform is doing. You're wasting your time, you're wasting my time, you're wasting time of everyone who has to read your or my emails. A tracker to manage what server is used for what group of editors can be pretty efficient. Essentially it is a form of DNS. A tracker need only show you the current repositories that are registered for a certain topic. Seriously, need that stuff you're on. Have you ever been involved in building anything remotely similar? The entire community does not get involved in all the conflicts. There are only a certain number of people that are deeply involved in any one section of the wikipedia at any given
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Hi! In cold countries, energy can have two lives : a first life making calculations in a computer, or transforming matter (ore into metal, trees into books), and a second life heating homes. One needs to build-out quite static-energy-output datacenters (e.g. deploy 10MW at once, and don't grow) for that. Not our business. But the best is to use no energy at all : see the OLPC project in Afghanistan (A computer with pedals, like the sewing machines of our great-great-great-grand-mothers) (1) Do you realize that in terms of carbon footprint that is much much less efficient? Look at the title of the thread. Domas ___ 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
Cool; what's the best way to observe the high water mark, and how the systems are holding up? it isn't 2007 or 2006 ;-) http://wiki.wikked.net/wiki/Wikimedia_statistics/Yearly Domas ___ 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
Hello, Given the fact that no candidate for the board seems to have campaigned prominently for this issue in this year's elec- tion and it does not even seem to have been mentioned in the two before, I do not see why the board should have decided otherwise. You poor souls, always willing to see just black. Board has raised the topic of dumps multiple times, and I personally as a board member, not as a volunteer, discussed this issue with people responsible in the staff, still, I see promoting dumps technology as somewhat way too low level for board candidacy platform. Anyway, back then it didn't need board member campaigning - whole board knew it is important task, it needed executive level decision, that we need someone dedicated to this task, and once such discussion was made, dumps started rolling. I don't remember anyone in the board who wouldn't treat this as a priority issue. There wasn't anyone in tech team who wouldn't think it is an important issue. There wasn't anyone in organization who'd think it wasn't an important issue. And yes, it was matter of overall priorities execution, which got resolved somehow, right? Thomas wrote: The tech team prioritised other things over the dumps, had the community had the final say they may have done otherwise Or not done anything \o/ You seem to fail to understand, that for years tech team was also a volunteer body - though of course, eventually more and more people got on the paycheck. Well, even after getting the paycheck, extreme-skill people are motivated way more when they believe in what they are doing, and just having the community have a final say won't help with it. Frankly, the major input about the dumps that the tech team got from the community was you suck where are our dumps kind of input - with lots of whining and no rationalization :-) Well, thats the impression probably caused by few people on few people :) Cheers, Domas P.S. And community doesn't want direct technology expertise at the board level anyway, mwaha ;-) ___ 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
Hi! Right...where can I go to download the full history English Wikipedia dump? It is being done! Still doesn't work. And yes, it needs an executive level decision, and it needs a kick in the ass from the board to get the executive level to make that decision. That work is being done at the moment, I'd think that it is being handled properly. On the other hand, I'm no longer in position of judging that from above, and can enjoy fully not caring ;-) How many millions of dollars were left unspent by the tech team a couple years ago? How many? It's not resolved. And even if it got resolved today, that'd still be three years too late. We're how many years late with WYSIWYG? :) And whose fault is that? The fault of the CTO, which is in turn the fault of the board. Why are you looking for faults? CTO had to operate under constraints set by financial management, financial management was done based on conservative non-profit operation model. No rationalization? I can't say I understand what you're asking for. The dumps will be fixed when *one person* is put in charge of fixing them, and when that person has at least several hours a week to dedicate to the task. Is that something I don't know? Thats exactly what I was telling to anyone interested. Thanks for repeating what I said :) The dumps aren't like encyclopedia articles. Thats lots and lots of encyclopedia articles! You can't have a bunch of people adding little things here and there and expect a working product, and it's unrealistic to expect someone to take charge of this sort of thing for free, especially in the current economy. You seem to have entirely failing understanding of motivation technology volunteers can have. We have amazing project work done on search by Robert, toolserver operation by River, do note, how much work on CDN infrastructure that was done by Mark, or simply all the work done before by Brion and Tim. Whole our technology infrastructure is built by people who have insane amount of project-derived motivation. You seem not to notice it. Pity. On the other hand, it isn't someone to take charge ... for free, it is just some work that motivates too much, and Tomasz does great job at it, even though he doesn't entirely forfeit his social life to have this move faster :) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Security holes in Mediawiki
Hello Gregory, I was sort of surprised to learn today that Mediawiki software has had 37 security holes identified: Why would you be surprised? It is web software, that allows _most_ flexibility for its users, you can expect most problems because of that, especially in XSS area. On the other hand, most of those identified vulnerabilities are ones published about _after_ they get fixed and releases delivered. You should probably ask about actual vulnerabilities in other mailing lists, but it would be even better, if you did some basic research first. Posting walls of text to your blog and redirecting people there isn't constructive. And by the way, our site security is getting better and better, once upon a time anyone could edit. Domas ___ 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
Hi! I'll believe it when I see it. ;-) AFAICT, the dumps still don't work, and you still haven't hired a new CTO. Dumps work better, and there's work done to get a new CTO. 1.7 How was that budgeted? Which year? Can you point me at that unspent software development budget number? The first step in fixing a problem is identifying the faults. Ones known already? The CTO came up with a budget. He submitted that budget. That budget was accepted. Then the money which was budgeted went unspent, while glaring problems which required spending remained. You know who'd do better job? I guess WMF would welcome referrals :) It's not a matter of motivation, it's a matter of reality. If you're going to limit your selection to people who are independently wealthy, you're not going to get as many qualified individuals for the task. Well, apparently there are people on payroll - so we're not limiting. On the other hand, can we afford proper .com-level salaries to qualified engineers? Even though there's recession, there's always need for good engineers. If there are people willing and able to fix the dumps for free, and you can find them and give them the tools they need to do it, fine. But that didn't happen, and *in this particular case*, it's probably unrealistic. Indeed, because this isn't project that is really attractive or rewarding technology-wise. For now we got lots of things done because stuff we did was interesting. Three years ago, before the economy went into the crapper, you probably could have found someone to do it. I probably would have even done it myself, if someone had given me access to the servers so I could do it. One doesn't really need access to servers to fix the code. Well, eventually one may need, but that is quite beyond the whole implementation. What I remember from the time is that the story was always this is being worked on, not we need someone to volunteer to redesign this. Depends whom you were talking to, or maybe they were mistaken about the project, or maybe they were mistaken about themselves committing to it :) Actually I was under the impression then that you didn't really want to fix the dumps - remember this was during the beginning of the oversight days. How is that any related? But today it's probably tougher finding qualified individuals willing and able to do it for free. I wouldn't be that sure. It was always tough to find anyone experienced enough. Whatever. Whether it's done for free or for a price isn't what's important. What's important is that it gets done. It gets done. It is being done. Have any of these people fixed the dumps? In a way, everyone did, just probably not enough for your absolute benchmark. Still, all these people volunteered to do great things, requiring more work than dumps. My point is that we can find volunteers for really challenging in- depth projects, it gets a bit more difficult if the project in question does not provide too much motivation. Maybe if the current system wasn't written in Python you could have found someone to do this, but as it was, it simply wasn't a task which anyone was motivated to do for free. LOL, replace 'Python' with pretty much any other language, and you can use it again. Let's just wait a few years and see if someone turns up isn't the answer to that problem. Let's spend a little of this 1.7 million we have sitting in a bank account doing nothing is. You are trolling and you're piggy-backing. We have dedicated resources for that, paid out of donations, yes. Is repeating yourself these things over and over something you're doing to try to support yourself as original author of these ideas? Cheers, Domas ___ 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
Gregory, Here are at least a dozen for you, Domas: http://www.google.com/search?hl=ensafe=offq=%22%241.7+million%22+technology+wikimedia+%22sue+gardner%22 Oh wow, I got my chance to read Valleywag, probably that should be the major point of insight for all the efficient non-profit governance, right, Gregory? Now, for those who fail at reading comprehension, let me point out to the report from ED to board: a desire to defer equipment purchases while various donations and sponsorship deals were under negotiation We had major sponsorship deals pending, which didn't happen because, dear oh dear, bad economy. Thats why we stretched a bit, and were doing hardware acquisitions next FY. If you think it wasn't worth getting to those talks and trying to get free hardware (or second datacenter, or multi-petabyte storage expansion, or ...), you seem to be one in the mood of wasting money. Oh well, we also did some optimization work (volunteers mostly ;-) that allowed us to grow a bit longer. Do note, our major capacity benchmark is September-October season, summer season allows us to restructure lots of stuff. Yes, we could've done hiring faster, and more aggressively I guess - which we discussed at the board level (especially at October 3-5 meeting in 2008). Yes, you certainly wouldn't want to click the first returned result: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Foundation_report_to_the_Board,_May_2008 Thats second to me, first is Valleywag. Cheers, Domas ___ 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
Hi! Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I can gather: Total spending was $1.7 million less than budgeted. Tech spending was $1.7 million less than budgeted. And $1.7 million was sitting in the bank accounts at the end of the fiscal year. We did not spend on hardware, because, well, I explained already in some other email. We did not reallocate the money to hire lots of developers because we didn't know how the hardware spending will look like. The solution to not being able to afford proper .com-level salaries is to offer people nothing? We're not competitive on the job market. So, if we don't get qualified engineers willing to work for less, what should we do - hire less qualified ones? I'll fix the dumps for minimum wage plus daycare for my two kids. ;-) Are you for these conditions for other projects too? I don't know about that. It's a pretty cool problem, it's just a difficult one to solve. Or maybe it's a cool problem because it's difficult to solve. I find it very boring problem myself. Probably thats because I'm spoiled by really cool problems at work, or maybe somewhat cooler problems at Wikimedia ;-) It would certainly help. The problem with the dumps is that they're so huge. They're small. :) And yes, I know what is the problem with dumps :-) Not being able to test solutions on a system just as huge is a serious constraint. Problems are known well enough to create quite some work. Resolve 10 what ifs and you're nearly done. Plus you have to remember that the WMF's particular installation is not the common one. Agreed. There's probably enough information out there to pretty much replicate it, but that's another serious constraint. I'm certainly not willing to deal with those unnecessary constraints. OK! It was the existence of the history dumps that enabled Judd and I to find the oversighted SlimVirgin edits. That encourages production of dumps, right? :) Once again, I've heard that for three years now, so forgive me for not believing it until I see it. OK! Domas ___ 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
Hello! And that has proven to be a huge misjudgment. Which didn't entirely depend on us. We're a young organization, we depend on lots of external influences. You going and pointing fingers, without trying to understand, that there were reasons to behave in that way, isn't constructive. Could be. But then, I'm probably interested in different types of problems than you. And I'm not sure you've considered this problem in the same way that I have (I'd like to modify the compressed files in place, though that short description doesn't really capture the solution). This is entirely off-topic, and could be continued in wikitech-l, if you're really eager to tell how you modify compressed files in place. ;-) Cheers, Domas ___ 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?
The move itself will be newsworthy and I'm sure there will be a press release about it, but it hasn't happened yet. As Wikimedia (or.. Wikipedia!) office address isn't publicly announced or published, the press release would be fantastic: Wikipedia is moving from undisclosed location office to new undisclosed location office :) Very useful. Domas ___ 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?
Gerard, Remember, the Signpost is an en.wp publication. It is not really the place to announce such things. it is up for Signpost editors if they want to include it or not. Not your business :) BR, Domas ___ 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
Hi! I have a question on this for the tech team: as a rule, do you have a high turnover of volunteers on the sysadmin ... turn-what? Jens is building a house or something, if that was your question. Domas ___ 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
A high turnover rate would indicate a lot of people joining and leaving, instead of long-term volunteers. ah! that! no, site is operated by same people as five years ago (with brilliant exception of search), few people left during that time, because of various reasons. some volunteers are not volunteers anymore though, being on foundation payroll. unfortunately, being 'sysadmin' of such site is more about running around with debugger, profiler and compiler, rather than conventional systems administration, and it is somewhat difficult to get people to volunteer to do that (and certain things as full automatization of cluster management are quite big projects, that require years of experience and attention to detail). Domas ___ 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
Hi! And I have to assume that's primarily due to your efforts. Thanks Brion. Excellent work. Yes, thank you Brion! :) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia article traffic statistics - copyright?
On Jun 30, 2009, at 3:13 AM, Aude wrote: Henrik's Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool does not indicate copyright or license status, so it's not clear if I can include a chart on a Wikipedia page. Does anyone know the license status for the charts? base data is in public domain (the one used by Henrik's, and other tools). not sure if Henrik has placed any limitations on charts themselves :-) Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2
Hi! Couldn't the stats job you want run on toolserver? Really, this isn't much of foundation-l issue - we have been collecting and providing detailed article viewership statistics for over a year. People are building various applications on top of that data, like http://wikirank.com/en/Jimmy_Wales - and we already handle the data processing task. *shrug*, if anyone wants better standards, better interfaces, etc - it all can be achieved, in one way or another, without sacrificing privacy of our users. As I've stated and will state again, we will err towards privacy, if we have to err. toolserver could be vehicle for some of data analysis and aggregation, but currently users on it are not supposed to get private data either, nor it is able to scale with overall content delivery infrastructure. I'd like everyone to understand, that 'who reads what' is 1000x more data (and hence more privacy issues) than 'who edits what'. Just those who come and read about whatever they want to read, do not have representation on this mailing list, so we have to have that in mind too. We're building service for much much larger group of people, and interests of few should not be sacrificing privacy of everyone else. BR, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2
Hi! Are the developers lawyers? IANAL. A developer claiming something has an unwanted privacy issue is very different from making claims about something being a legal issue on the behalf of Foundation. Simply don't do it. I failed to phrase what I wanted to write you in a way, that I wouldn't make me look like an arrogant prick, so I will not write it. Let me tell something else, instead. Anyway, WMF has always been standing for privacy of our users. I wholeheartedly approve the privacy stance, which means that we don't even consider exceptions when it comes to giving away private data. We just don't give it away. This is why we opt out of phorm, this is why we don't facilitate numerous researchers (or whomever hide behind those names), and we don't even keep most of private data ourselves. Someone on this thread said, that WMF keeps private data internally. We don't have readership data, there're no such thing as access logs in our farm, the closest one to the concept is one out of overall requests, which doesn't have long retention, and is used for short term operational purposes. Every other private data point is the one that is visible by checkusers, has both audit trail, and quite restricted access to information (at least there are verification procedures). So, we tend to understand data privacy policies internally quite well, that was incentive of written down privacy policy, and that has been part of constant internal dialogue how to handle overall privacy. We know that our reader privacy is quite good (especially if people use TOR and HTTPS :), we know that we have to balance our contributor privacy issues in order to be what we are. We err to the side of privacy, as that is where we would have highest damages. Anyway, I answered your question, IANAL, but I'm in one way or another part of organization that has one. We asked the lawyer to describe our intent and position, and he did. We're happy to enforce it. And, Brian, Volunteer admins cannot take user privacy into their own hands, under their own interpretation. That's just not how it works! You don't seen to have sufficient understanding how it works. :( Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2
Hi! I believe there was no such claim, if anything, it was pointed out that setting up the stats engine didn't give access to information that was not accessible before by the Checkusers (even if logged), and that most fears of data being handled by the wrong hands are mitigated by the facts that the data was handled by a CheckUser (and thus a) a person already with access to said data and b) a person identified to the WMF and trusted by the community*). checkusers don't have readership data. Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
Hello, If I were to compile a wishlist of stats things: 1. stats.grok.se data for non-Wikipedia projects the raw data is available, anyone can build anything like that, as long as they have resources. I've suggested Henrik to opensource his software, but probably it suffers from not nice enough to show yet. 3. Pageview stats at http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ in files based on projects. It would be a lot easier for people at the West Flemish Wikipedia to analyze statistics themselves if they didn't have to download tons of data they don't need. I'm considering some kind of API, but have to rethink the process (though some people want to have more data - like country tagging - instead of less data, hehe ;-), though apparently people who cry for stats most are also ones that are bashing my actions and attacking 'volunteer developers' , so... On the other hand, 'tons of data' is just 50MB an hour. :-) Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2
Hi! Assuming you're not taking this out of context, please explain the difference between how it works and my conception of how it works. Sorry, I misread your statement. I took Volunteer admins as Volunteer sysadmins - my greatest apology. BR, Domas ___ 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
Hi, On a different note, the first code to bring MediaWiki content in a Wave We should have fun-l@ for conversations like this. First of all, if any of you who are interested in wave-ization of teh internet, go join the wave community and push the standard towards lazy on-demand loading, and ability to roll changes backwards. Unless. of course, 5 waveops for single wavelet are not frightening you, and of course more participants will happily enjoy their every keystroke shown as waveop, ... Maybe google has invented javascript that doesn't use memory nor CPU cycles. Good then! Cheers, Domas ___ 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
Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. so, if you want to extend the specification, you're not protected by that? :) Cheers, Domas ___ 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
It's a great app, look at it the other way! finally someone implemented LiquidThreads! Cheers, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Congratulations to Gdansk!
Tomasz, To be able bring what captivates me on a daily basis back to the city I was born and grew up in makes happy as can be. Heeheee, :-) And I hereby declare my Green Wikimania, I'll carpool to get there! Cheers, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Green stuff.
Hi! The purpose of my question was to examine the carbon impact on our global environment by holding this meeting in Berlin Ha! Dude, you're coming to organization that runs 100kW datacenter (when other sites of similar popularity go for 10-100MW facilities), and talking about carbon footprint? Haha! I'll skip most of the nonsense about sheets (hotels don't actually change them daily nowadays, they are eco-friendly and suggest you put a card asking for sheet change.. ;-) and other stuff. I suspect it's part of the corporate culture to get the backwater taste of St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) out of everyone's mouth, to select all of these far-flung, non-English- speaking locales for a Board that consists mostly of North Americans who speak English, and who are funded mostly by U.S. dollars. Have you ever been outside US? With statements like this you end up just bringing up shame upon your nationals. English traffic is only half for us (and it includes overseas access too), so even if we'd be funded entirely by US, we'd have commitment to reach out to multiple parts of our world. than a green decision, but frankly, the two are often hand-in-hand outcomes. green is marketing cover/buzzword for downsizing the business. I also work for fortune-something company and have seen various limitations on various travel because of economy - and even if we have whole VP dedicated to green and ecology, nobody tried the silly excuse that not doing the work and not doing the outreach is better for environment. Organizations have their priorities and work to do. Is the Wikimedia Foundation very green in its governance practices? I know that Wikia, Inc. touts its dedication to Green, but what about the WMF? Well, we have compacted our computational tasks into very tiny datacenters, and yeah, we can slap green on top of that, simply because thats what we could afford being ran on donations - yay green. WMF staff takes public transit or walks to the work (and they can!) - yay green. And, oh well, if we compare, we have millions of users who don't need paper encyclopedias, we have hundreds of thousands of contributors, who don't come to meetings, etc. Here's a 100-gallon aquarium: *http://tinyurl.com/100-gallon-tank* Imagine it full of jet fuel, then setting a match to it, sucking oxygen out of the air, and replacing it with carbon-laden molecules. That's what each of the North American board members did to enable travel to Berlin to hold their meeting which seems to have exhausted most of the attendees. we're full of funny examples, aren't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rio_Madre_de_Dios,_Peru.JPG This is tropical rainforest, it produces oxygen. What people without knowledge do - they light a match and burn it, in one way or another. Burning consumes oxygen too, no forest - no oxygen production as well. And I have no idea why you put here 'exhausted' in a negative context. It was few very high bandwidth and very useful/productive days. I'm happy to be exhausted in that way :) Anyway, in our business - facilitating the knowledge exchange - we're extremely efficient. Yes, we have to go to meetings, because they provide high bandwidth communication channels. Yes, we have to fly somewhere, and you seem not to get that it was extremely efficient to fly _that_ group of people to Europe. Yes, we have to use airlines, and if you want to talk about jet fuel efficiency, you should talk to airlines, they can stare at your tank images and contemplate about oh, Gregory Kohs is attacking our practices, we should do something. Though, as much as you don't realize what we're doing, you probably won't realize too much of anything else, so... why bother. Go, better travel a bit outside US, then you'll either get some more reason yourself, or someone else will put that into you. Blind bigotry isn't welcome anywhere. -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people
Hi! Sorry for late answer - I visited the offline world (it had awesome mountains with snowcaps, sky-blue oceans and tulip fields ;-) So, the community is urged to do this work at the request of the Board, but the Board itself is going to do virtually nothing (other than this collection of words that urges the community to work harder) to strengthen the commitment to high-quality, accurate information. Do note, exercising any kind of authority over community is very strong step. Board does not rule the community, we work on facilitating the community. How many Board members were in attendance in Berlin, and what was the mean travel distance of the Board attendees for this excursion? I have difficulty seeing why this question is important, but can sure answer it, just let me clarify a bit. excursion |ɪkˈskəːʃ(ə)n| |ɛk-|noun 1 a short journey or trip, esp. one engaged in as a leisure activity I really cannot classify any of board meetings as 'leisure' - they're usually quite intense days (don't forget the jetlag our global commitments bring in :) In this particular trip the agenda was combined with chapters meeting agenda, tech team meetings, also meeting local communities. I cannot call it leisure, it is way more intense than my day job (oh, and vacation time is used ;-) By using such words you seem to be antagonizing the organization and the work that is being done, and therefore either you're a troll, or you just genuinely do not understand the work everyone around is doing, and see just your own agenda. Anyway, back to the Berlin meeting. Average travel distance for board members was (pardon the metric) ~5000km (for three members it was below 1000km) - and whole board was attending the meeting. Sometimes meetings involve meeting quite some staff, as their feedback is extremely valuable in certain topics too, so usually meetings happen in SF. In this case, as I mentioned above, nearly (over?) 100 community members were met overall - so if we'd include that, the mean travel distance would be way way lower - and the value of the meeting was extremely high. I hope this satisfies your curiosity, and also I hope next time you'll be more polite and careful picking your words. Thanks! :) BR, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people
Thomas, I believe there were about 50 chapters people about about 100 devs. I'm not sure why the mean travel distance would be lower if you include everyone - there were people from all around the world there, many having travelled further than the average board member. Actually, I'd be happy if you were right (and you probably are!) - it shows, that lots of people had the motivation to come to this excursion. Cheers, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Encarta is dead
Tomorrow is April 1st ... what is special about it? gmail birthday? -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] I'm a creative commoner!!!
Originally I wrote it somewhere on a blog ( http://dammit.lt/2009/03/28/im-a-creative-commoner/ ), so this is a bit long copy-paste into an email: Lately Creative Commons is becoming very dominant topic in my life. First of all, I see all the people in free culture world holding their breath and waiting for Wikipedia switch to CC license. I’m waiting for that too - and personally I really endorse it. Though usually people do not really notice licenses on web content, they really do once they see something they really want to reuse. Wikipedia ends up being isolated island, if it doesn’t go after sharing and exchanging information with other projects. It takes time to understand one is ‘creative commoner’. I do have a t- shirt with such caption, but it is much more comfortable once you start feeling real power of use and reuse of information. Few anecdotes… Dear Mr. Mituzas, Thank you for making your photographs available under a Creative Commons license. I am writing to inform you that the American Society of Civil Engineers has featured a silhouette of “Up we go” on the cover of its new book, “Constructability Concepts and Practice.” https://www.asce.org/bookstore/book.cfm?book=7742 Per the terms of the license, the following credit appears on page ii of the book: “Front cover photograph by Domas Mituzas used under a Creative Commons license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.” I will be happy to send a copy of the book to you if you will provide me your mailing address. I got this email back in summer, 2007. Did I just steal a job from professional photographer? Or would they just leave blank book cover? Will this lead to a better bridge in future? Did I join a civil cause? All I know now, is that I’m book cover photographer, albeit quite cheap one. Also, by using CC license I simply used lingua-franca of world I’m in - and now my content can evolve into shapes that I couldn’t expect, and that would be limited by non-portable licenses. Other anecdote is way more internal. I have cheap point-and-shoot camera (same one to shoot book cover pictures :) that I use during my travels. It fits well into my jeans pocket, it doesn’t provide me any self esteem in professional photography. Still, I get to places, I take pictures, I place them on my flickr photostream, and I license them under creative commons. And fascinating things happen - my pictures appear on top of Wikipedia articles (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings_in_the_world ), without any intervention of mine. People just use it, I can sit back, relax, and see how the contribution widens. Of course, there other different stories. My colleague (and manager) runs a wiki about his own town, Bielepedia, and he wants to exchange information with Wikipedia. Now he can’t, as well as quite a lot of other free content community projects. Though of course, some may believe license difference doesn’t mean much, in this case it means that we’re building borders we don’t need nor we have intent to maintain. I live and breathe Wikipedia technology, but I do not feel competent enough to go and push content itself around, and it just shows up there itself (oh, of course, there’s army of committed volunteers who help with that). So, I benefit the project just by being creative commoner, and I may benefit lots of other projects. We at Wikipedia technical team are very open in what we do, and try to spread our know- how in many directions. Documents I wrote about how we do things ended up downloaded hundred thousand times, and I really hope that some of that know-how will end up used and reused. I guess I’m taking this to extremes - I ended up talking to people in government of Lithuania, journalists and non-profit activists. Imagine a government, that would commit to open licensing for produced content. Well, no need to imagine - US federal institutions release information to public domain, but in Europe it is way more restricted. Still, what one has to realize - at government level it is not only a right to be given, it also has to be a right that has to be protected. Nowadays that means going to copyright powerhouses that serve large record labels and movie studios, and will charge for services, that government has to provide for free (and does in other areas, like looking for your stolen car). We have lots and lots of talks about knowledge-societies at government levels, but we never get to the point, that every individual is part of that, and first of all we have to teach those rights, and guard them. But of course, to prove, that our rights have to be guarded, we have to show how great our work is - and how powerful can our sharing be. To achieve that we have to build bridges between license islands, talk same languages, and of course, create. I’m a creative commoner. So should be you
Re: [Foundation-l] Abuse filter legal/privacy implications
John, There are a lot of other problems, but I think most of them are minor to this. Well, this looks like lawyer thing then, not overall privacy policy discussion. -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
Hi! I realise, and beg of people not to actually believe I buy into this, but when someone makes an accusation that someone is claiming to be a WMF employee and claims that there is a conspiracy, I tend to bring it up. I beg of people to not take me for an idiot. Thats what more thought of subject lines are for :-) If you tag the conversation with Cabal?, of course you will get answers with Cabal :) BR, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
Hello! Domas, that is an unfair characterization of my e-mails, which I do not believe you have read in full. Oh, I did read your emails :-) I think they are unfair characterization of our development work, which you definitely do not understand in full. But had you read my e-mails you would also know that I do not advocate enabling the extensions unmodified, but giving them proper consideration and refactoring the minimalist set of features that would be useful into something that is scalable. That was happening, that will happen in future, that is happening now, at one pace or another, depending on various other issues. That is, I want to discuss the how the process of adding new features to MediaWiki is broken, and how this has been a specific example. You seem to be living in the idea of process, we are a bit on other side here, more concentrated on productivity. Indeed, in development team if at least one person agrees with you, you usually have green light - we manage to trust people, and we do not want to build stupid obstacles to stop the progress of the project and the platform. Only very very bored people can be looking for formal processes to define formal specifications to find formal consensus. This community, which takes quite a bit of effort to communicate with, effort which I have not seen from the development team: [ Jimmy quote included ] You know, once upon a time, full community consultation was writing an email to wikipedia-l (thats where everyone subscribed :), and the three other guys would usually immediately agree with your modification and say Jimbo, that is a great idea! :) The general traffic is different, community is way bigger, developers are still same bunch of people, who have to accommodate everyone. Now it is a bit more complicated, with lots of different communities out there, the communities themselves partitioned in multiple subcommunities, people having way different interests, and different time investment. By telling you haven't seen any effort you are either blindly insulting people who are doing the work, or just prove the point, that whatever communication you're doing, you won't reach everyone (and certain people will come back later bitching - therefore, ultimate consensus is unachievable). By starting this discussion in foundation-l, rather than wikitech-l (where don't seem to be participating in too many discussions), indicates you didn't try too much of communications effort yourself (though, heh, finally I managed to match your face to the name ;-) Cheers, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
Hello Brian, thanks for all your insights, bashing and vocal support of your pet ideas. I understand, that SMW is academically interesting concept (though there're contradicting ideas in academia too, suggesting natural language processing as an alternative, and this seems where currently research tries to go too), and it provides usability in niche cases (academic data crunching). I fail to see why you associate SMW with general usability we're trying to think about? Is that something we simple mortals cannot understand, or are you simply out of touch from reality? See, our project is special. a) We have mass collaboration at large b) We end up having mass collaboration on individual articles and topics c) We have mega-mass readership d) We have massive scope and depth And, oh well, we have to run software development to facilitate all that. As you may notice, the above list puts quite some huge constraints on what we can do. All our features end up being incremental, and even though in theory they are easy to revert, it is the mass collaboration that picks it up and moves to a stage where it is not that easy (and that happens everywhere, where lots of work is being done). So, you are attacking templates, which have helped to deal with nearly everything we do (and are tiny, compared to overall content they facilitate), and were part of incremental development of the site and where editing community was going. Of course, there are ways to make some of our template management way better (template catalogues, more visual editing of parameters, less special characters for casual editors), but they generally are how we imagine and do information management. Now, if you want to come up with academic attitudes, and start telling how ontology is important, and all the semantic meanings have to be highlighted, sure, go on, talk to community, they can do it without software support too - by normalizing templates, using templates for tagging relations, then use various external tools to build information overlays on top of that. Make us believe stuff like that has to be deployed by showing initiative in the communities, not by showing initiative by external parties. Once it comes to actual software engineering, we have quite limited resources, and quite important mandate and cause. We have to make sure, that readers will be able to read, editors will be able to edit, and foundation will still be able to support the project. We may not always try to be exceptionally perfect (Tim does ;-), but that is because we do not want to be too stressed either. So, when it comes to reader community, software is doing work for them. Some of readers end up engineering software to make it better. When it comes to editing community, software does the work for them. Some of editors end up engineering software to make it better. Which community are you talking about? BR, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] frustration vs volunteerism
Somehow following phrase caught my eye today, Because myself and others have been frustrated by the lack of good stats on the number of active editors on the English Wikipedia, I have compiled some stats on the editing frequency on enwiki: Are we working on the project because we're frustrated, or because we want to? -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
