Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, as I mentioned in a response to Liam the other day, we've been working on having org charts generated in a more automatic, scalable form. ... Thank you for that. On a meta-question that raises - there are a lot of direct reports to the area directors. 18 people seems like a lot per director, not in total headcount, but in direct reports. I'm less familiar with org structure building at foundations than commercial or government or academia, but the others tend to subdivide more. Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is the SWIFT media storage migration). There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Sounds like a good thought out, informed answer. Thanks. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] sad news
Very sad, I met him and he seemed to be a very good guy. Seems to be a bad week; a friend of mine from college passed on Sunday morning. Focus on big things and have fun while you're here. George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone On Mar 14, 2012, at 19:42, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Those of you who have been around for a few years may remember user:Tlogmer, aka Ben Yates -- co-author with Charles Matthews and I on How Wikipedia Works. I got an email from his mother this morning with the very sad news that Ben passed away yesterday. I do not know the details. He was in his 20s and lived in Michigan, USA. There will be a memorial service in Michigan on Friday; contact me if you want that information. His userpages are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tlogmer and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tlogmer For several years Ben wrote a blog about Wikipedia that was incisive and widely read. Older posts can be found here: http://wikip.blogspot.com/ He also designed the Wikimania logo with the two ws; originally designed for Wikimania 2006, we use it to this day: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_%28spacing%29.png Ben was a skilled artist and designer and was responsible for all of the figures in How Wikipedia Works. He also designed posters and graphic materials for Wikimania and proposed many other merchandise designs to promote Wikipedia. He was funny, smart, and shy; I never had a bad interaction with him. I worked with him intensively for many months but never got a chance to meet him in person, but I counted him as a friend long after we finished the book. He will be missed. If you have any comments that you would like to be given to his family or read at the service, please post them on Ben's talk page or send to me directly. Wikimedia was meaningful to Ben, and it would mean a lot to let his mom that people cared about her son as a colleague and friend. thanks, -- Phoebe ___ 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] Will Beback
I would almost like to simply +1 here, but... Without delving into the specifics here, or concluding either way as to the current case lacking actual evidence in front of me, it is a real and quite serious problem if we don't hold senior and longtime editors to account for abuses they may perpetuate on the Wiki. The hue and cry of But I contributed XZY! is true, but irrelevant. If one is abusive on the Wiki, one damages the community in deep and divisive ways. Everyone needs to understand that. If you start disrupting the community, no matter who you are or where you were, it needs to stop. -george On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 6:00 AM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: I must disagree with Risker that this is simply a local issue involving a single project or with a previous editor who feels that English Wikipedia can take care of itself. We have a serious lack of editors not only on English Wikipedia but within the project as a whole and this is getting worse rather than better. The foundation has been putting great efforts into attracting editors and Will's case touches on the issue of recruitment and retention of editors to the project as a whole and thus is directly relevant to the WMF. We have had issues with how some admins treat new editors to the movement and it seems we also have issues with how some of our long standing editors are dealt with specifically by Arbcom. If we base our decisions on isolated behavioral matters exclusively without taking into account content issues or the contribution histories of the editors in question this institution will make bad decisions for the project and the movement as a whole. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian ___ Are you suggesting that the WMF, or the Wikimedia community, should impose or agitate for a policy on the English Wikipedia of immunizing prolific contributors from conduct policies? I'm not sure that would have your intended effect on retention. It has been as commonly argued, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, that we are already too lax on vested contributors when it comes to conduct policy... and that this veterans' privilege contributes to a sometimes poisonous atmosphere that damages new editor recruitment and retention. What might be more useful is the development of better tools to support editors in difficult and important subject areas, better community engagement in those areas, and a mechanism to intervene before the battleground ethos overtakes otherwise sterling contributors. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Fred Bauder writes: I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just one example, but there are other similar situations. This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem at all like climate-change deniers. If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author -- that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source -- then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss his article. I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a presentation on the policy thicket at Wikimania almost five years ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it. --Mike Let me make an observation - The post-facto probability of 1.0 that the researcher was in fact professional, credible, and by all accounts right does not mean that a priori he should automatically have been treated that way before the situation was clarified. By far the majority of people who come up and buck the system or challenge established knowledge in this manner are, in fact, kooks or people with an agenda. This started - as others have pointed out - with a few fields where this is narrowly but clearly established, but has been successfully generalized. Let us acknowledge some obvious truths here, that we had bad info in an article, that we had a scholar unfamiliar with WP process whose first attempt to correct it went somewhat (but not horrifically) wrong, that the engagement of a number of WP editors/administrators failed to identify the credibility of the scholar and wrongness of the info. To simply toss UNDUE in response seems a mistake. UNDUE is, every day, actively helping us fight off crap trying to fling itself into WP. Valid questions, to me, seem to include whether the editors simply failed to notice they were arguing with a subject matter expert history professor and asking for a shrubbery rather than assisting the guy through the rats nest of WP policy, whether the editors had any preexisting biases that may have slanted their engagement here, whether the editors had histories of inappropriate responses to less experienced editors. I think the answers to the last two are no; I don't know about one. If the answer to one is yes, then These things happen is an explanation but not an excuse, and should be a prompt to help us all get better at detecting that. These things do happen, but should not. These things do happen, but we should expect better on the average. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:48 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: If the answer to one is yes, then These things happen is an explanation but not an excuse, and should be a prompt to help us all get better at detecting that. These things do happen, but should not. These things do happen, but we should expect better on the average. Apart from the question of whether this particular article -- on the Haymarket bombing -- has been hurt by editors' ill-considered application of UNDUE, there's the larger question of what it means for our credibility when a very respected journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, features an op-ed that outlines, in very convincing detail, what happens when a subject-matter expert attempts to play the rules and is still slapped down. If I thought this author's experience is rare, I wouldn't be troubled by it. But as someone who frequently fielded complaints from folks who were not tendentious kooks, my impression is that it is not rare, and that the language of UNDUE -- as it exists today -- ends up being leveraged in a way that hurts Wikipedia both informationally and reputationally. Any policy - or policy change - we can think of will have unforseen consequences. It will somewhere between partly and largely be interpreted, on the fly, often alone, by editors who are tired or not paying 100% attention when they apply it. Some of the applying editors will have a lack of long-term Wikipedia history and knowledge to draw on, a lack of insight into the policy implications, etc. Some will have personal agendas or biases. I am not you, and neither have worked for the Foundation nor been quite as intimately involved in the higher level public policy around internet information and academia as you have for the 20-plus years ... That said, I have somewhat of a grounding in these issues and am comfortable with calling for help or wider attention if I reach my comfort zone on individual issues; I've been on OTRS (and technically still are, though I'm inactive at the moment), and a number of on-and-off wiki contacts of some sort. Is it possible that you being Mike Godwin is leading to a selection bias, where a large fraction of the actual experts with actual problems with process who did anything about it came to or through you on their way to solving or reporting the problem? I believe that we're seeing legitimate experts driven away. Perhaps its as often as daily. I know is that I see something (that usually gets eventually resolved constructively) about once a month, a few of which (annually?) get big press of some sort. On a roughly daily basis, when I'm active on-wiki, I run into people in the less qualified to outright kook realm who are attempting to impersonate a legitimate expert. It seems that there are a large surplus of the latter, and only a few of the former, statistically. Assuming that's accurate, that should inform the policy discussion. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: I should add a response on this point: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: The post-facto probability of 1.0 that the researcher was in fact professional, credible, and by all accounts right does not mean that a priori he should automatically have been treated that way before the situation was clarified. Should we declare that Assume Good Faith is now a dead letter? No. But in day-to-day operations, AGF has fallen somewhat in prominence for the simple reason that a lot of the time someone brings it up, it's after credible evidence is already in hand of bad faith actions. AGF is not a suicide pact; we cannot insist that each and every kook or fringeist gets to waste a man-days worth of Wikipedian senior volunteer time every day that they're active. There simply aren't enough senior volunteers to go around to do that. The policy - as implemented, if not as written - has to acknowledge that reasonable provisions for defending the encyclopedia, that work and are sustainable over months, years, and heading into decades are a necessary function of the encyclopedia. If you unbalance the defense of the encyclopedia attempting to right another wrong, we all lose. By far the majority of people who come up and buck the system or challenge established knowledge in this manner are, in fact, kooks or people with an agenda. To me the interesting thing is that this author did not buck the system. It seems clear he attempted to learn the system and abide by the system's rules. If someone goes to the trouble he went to, getting an article published in a peer-reviewed journal, then citing it in his editing of the Wikipedia article, what else could he have done, precisely? If we pass over this and classify it as an anomaly, then I think the very best thing that can be said is that this is a missed opportunity to review UNDUE specifically, and, more generally, the problem of policy ambiguity and complexity as a barrier to entry for new, knowledgeable, good-faith editors. I don't think this is an anomaly, in terms of being rare (I think it happens dozens of times a year at least, perhaps daily-ish) or unusual. I think it is an anomaly, in the sense that 3,000 senior editors dealt with 10,000 problems that day, and got one (all things considered) slightly horribly wrong. Again, it's balance. If we just twist the knob the other way, we start to let crap in. Some of the crap in - such as the Seigenthaler fabrications - is as much or more of a problem than good or fixes kept out. You can say Just turn the response quality level up, which is all fine and good, but it's a volunteer organization, done again by people with free time (or after work, on breaks, etc; and often tired, or working fast). Realistically, either we turn the knob on number of problems reviewed, or on the threshold for handling something; either of those lets more crap in. Again, this is not an excuse for someone having gotten it wrong here. But real life activities accept error rates. Some journalists in war zones step in front of friendly fire bullets; police in the US shoot innocent people at a non-zero rate. Surgeons make mistakes and kill people. Journalists make errors of fact or citation. Scientists make data collection, logical, or other errors. We need to be aware going into a deeper discussion of what tradeoffs are involved. That should not lead to paralysis. The discussion is useful and change may be beneficial. The problem you're calling out is real. But it should be informed discussion and change. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Feedback tab on the English Wikipedia
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: As said above...it is being moved ;p Where / on which lists were the location experiments discussed prior to implementation? Both with regards to the locations to be tested and to the pages to test on? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:18 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: Hi George, The push came about after the IRC office hours. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-01-12 After ongoing review of the IRC thread, on-wiki threads, mailing lists etc... I think the key failure seems to have happened during the IRC office hours, and has no single party at fault. Sue repeatedly stated that her and the Foundation intention was to encourage but not drive the community to a decision. The analogy to the Quaker meetings So, is this what we're agreed to? was made, mechanics of community consensus discussed, etc. I think that this was entirely appropriate for Sue to take as a stance, for the Foundation to take as a stance, etc. What seems to have failed is the feedback mechanisms. Let me restate here my opinion that 3-4 days over a weekend is not nearly enough time to frame a question adequately to the total en.wikipedia community, hold a community RFC / discussion / whatever, review and judge the emergent consensus, and proceed. There were a number of people within the en.wp community in the IRC chat who have been around the track a number of times, have (I believe) previously publicly agreed with me on this opinion, and failed to feed that back. There was also a disturbing undercurrent of whether people were or were not being criticized for opposing taking action; The Oh, no, it's fine to oppose was stated repeatedly, but more than one nasty exchange ensued which I can only attribute to that. It seems like the outcome of that discussion was that there was rough working majority that doing something was a good idea, and that everyone still standing at the end of it agreed that it was reasonable and practical to do something in the remaining 4 days. The former appears reasonable and accurate and was born out by the eventual short-time RFC on-wiki. The latter... seems to have been an accidental groupthink rather than a reasoned conclusion. It's repeatedly stated for example on-wiki on noticeboards and in Arbcom cases and the like that IRC is not Wikipedia. In this case, the key inertia for on-wiki action was swung out of this with a presumption on reasonableness of timing that doesn't stand up. The questions of whether it was morally or organizationally right to oppose SOPA were fought over a bit (on IRC and on-wiki) but generally consensus is that it's ok, and that a clear overwhelming majority of the community opposes SOPA. The question of whether enough time existed at the time of the conversation to act was asked - and missed, deflected, mis-answered by people who were outside the community, mis-answered by people within the community. It was not well posed, either on IRC or in the following on-wiki discussions, and was got wrong. My message coming out of this - to the Foundation (staff and Board) - is that you cannot and should not trust anyone (and by this I mean ANYONE) who tries to tell you or argue that reasonable, stable, long-term non-divisive en.wikipedia consensus can be got in anything less than about two weeks, and longer is better. Barring emergencies, it would be best for the Foundation to structurally avoid attempting any action without something on the order of that much lead time or longer when community consultation or involvement is required. You run a rather bad risk of source bias, if the right key people happen to be proponents of one particular position, that they will then unintentionally slant the discussion in such a way that makes rushing things seem more reasonable than it really is. This is not good decisionmaking process. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close. No, there was informal discussion going back into December. The discussion - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth. People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion. That having happened is why anyone reasonable here should be starting from the point that the sense of the community was correctly identified through all this, which I don't dispute. But bare sense of the community is mob rule. Wikipedia is not a majority-rules, snap decisions mob, despite occasional resemblance thereof. It is not well served when community leaders treat it as such, or the Foundation acts in a manner to encourage that behavior. That way lies even more madness and despair, and a break with a lot of currently very carefully (if badly) balanced precedent and informal process. I don't believe the decision was *wrong* - But a poorly made decision that's right can set a behavioral and decisionmaking precedent that is in its own way far worse than having made a wrong decision. There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool (the readers / userbase), to rapidity of decisionmaking, to aspects of the community majority bullying those who for some reason opposed the change. Again - the decision wasn't *wrong*. I certainly oppose SOPA, understand why other organizations blacked out and WMF and the community sought to do so here. SOPA is wrong on more political, policy, and technical levels than I can conveniently count in one email. But it can be wrong, and WMF could potentially be wrong to engage in the advocacy action. It can be wrong, and the community can damage itself significantly in making snap decisions on objecting to SOPA. It can be wrong enough, apparently, to convince its opponents that opposing it is enough to justify bulldozing the usual Wikipedia community process. If people wanted this badly to do it, the actual solid RFC should have been going in late December or first week of January. Eventually, procrastinating precludes reasonable responsible action. It does not appear to have prevented effective or community supported action, in the end, but the reasonableness and responsibleness of the process is the issue. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:02 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 4:24 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 3:39 PM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: It's worth pointing out the discussion was open from 15 December to 16 January before any close. No, there was informal discussion going back into December. The discussion - the concrete, date-attached specific policy and implementation proposals and so forth - was about 3 days worth. People talking about it and bandying informal ideas around for a month doesn't make it a formal consensus discussion. That is very true. But it is also true that we would not have gotten to the formal vote stage in the first place, and certainly not a quick vote, if there hadn't been quite substantial support shown for the idea of a protest all the way along in discussion. I don't think that anyone can say consensus was trending one way and then a quick weekend vote overturned it and went a totally different way; I think that weekend vote confirmed what was already becoming quite clear, and the multiple questions helped iron out the details. I think it's more ambiguous than that - less concrete on what the weekend usefully did - but I do agree that the sense of the community was known ahead of time and represented accurately in the outcome, etc. The community no doubt could have kept discussing for another week or month. But to push out a decision we did have to, well, decide. As it was there was only barely enough time to get things working technically (and there are still substantial bugs). I can only congratulate our amazing staff and volunteer community for working under immense pressure, over a long weekend and all night, to make it happen. So why, you may reasonably ask, was a short deadline set? Well, politics. Initially we thought that there was going to be a serious hearing on SOPA on the 18th, so several sites called for a boycott that day. Then that hearing was postponed at the last moment, but it was unclear to when or for how long. And PIPA is *still* up for a vote next week. Time is *short*, by any measure, and it's not always clear when the best moment to do things on the hill. In 20/20 hindsight I'd argue today was actually a fantastic day to do it -- the congress is just back, it's kind of a slow news day otherwise, and we appear to have hit both bills in a time when people are still making up their minds and gauging support. And the effect of coordinating with other sites shouldn't be underestimated -- I've heard this referred to as black Wednesday, one of the largest acts of online activism ever. We made a difference, all speaking as internet citizens, and it does take time -- and a set date -- to coordinate with other sites. We helped lead that effort. It was worth it. I agree with you -- more time is better, and a few days is not enough to come to full community-wide consensus. While there will always be people missing from the table, for one reason or another, we should work hard to minimize that effect whenever possible. But I *do* think a few days is enough time to make sure that you have a *reasonable* consensus, especially when you've got 1800 people participating and a very clear trend; and I think with all these other factors considered we did a pretty good job of balancing the timing issues. Someone needed to move for an RfC if we were going to make any decision happen in a reasonable time frame; the WMF likely wouldn't have gotten involved at all if we didn't need that buffer time to, well, turn the site off (and no one wanted to spend a whole lot of extra tech staff and communications staff time on the protest if it wasn't wanted). I realize that I speak from a privileged position here, of having been heavily involved and paying close attention to SOPA discussions for weeks, and that may be one of the problems -- it is easy to forget, when you have had something very much on your mind, that not everyone has paid such attention to it. In future certainly even fast actions should be better communicated through all our channels, and we should spend more time on the !votes if we have it. (general agrees) But I am also pleased that when it comes right down to it -- this community can still be bold. We've all been around for a while. In my opinion, the success rate of community boldness is less than the success rate of community well-consideredness. In several cases tragically so. There's a certain disagreement on specific issues of the wisdom or lack thereof of some hard-to-find-consensus issues remaining open ones, but we've seen great wrongs done via snap decisions. There are a whole raft of nuanced issues that were bulldozed in all of this, ranging from the wisdom of WMF / Wikipedia taking political stands organizationally, to lack of sufficient consideration for the invisible third leg of the stool
[Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown
I would normally start by floating this on wikien-L or on-wiki at the usual places, but the time for that has passed and thus I am going to drop this on the Foundation, who I believe are responsible for the particular problem here. On the English language Wikipedia, there has been a longstanding discussion / dispute / evolving consensus on how long is appropriately long for major site policy discussions. For varying areas, there are no limits to discussion period, a week or longer, 3 days, 2 days, 24 hrs, and so forth. It's generally held - in my opinion - that major events or changes should be on the order of a week or longer. I bring this up because I left town on the 10th aware of various SOPA discussions but unaware of an organized intention to blackout on the 18th, and returned to editing today to find that it's tomorrow and that it's all decided now, thank you very much, your opinion no longer desired. It appears that this was done to match the other organizations' pre-announced Jan 18th blackouts. It also appears that this was instigated on or around the 13th by Foundation staff. In the intervening days, someone appears to have decided without seeking consensus that 3 days was enough time to discuss and decide, announced such, had the discussion, called a consensus (with, admittedly, most of the active editing community participating) and started implementation. It's not clear from reading stuff who decided that 3 days was enough time for the final formatted discussion and consensus to be valid. It is clear that the timing that led up to it was discussions the Foundation initiated in detail, with specified date etc, less than a week from the proposed date. I do not see in any of that which came before an awareness of length-of-policy-discussion issues or preferences, a meta-discussion about how long to discuss, etc. It appears and seems likely (much less, assumptions of good faith) that this was simply overlooked. That said, this is a Big Deal, and it appears that the Foundation collectively blew it on that aspect. Elements of the community also blew it. The community has been trending downwards in acceptance of shorter discussions on things. To a degree this is useful - we need the ability to make timely decisions. To a degree this is harmful - lack of ability for all involved to see and participate due to timings; lack of depth of discussion and reflection. It's a dynamic and evolving standard. But it's a standard, and should not be casually ignored. I would like to bring this point to the Foundation - staff and board - and ask that you understand that on the occasion that you want to push for a content or onwiki policy change and ask for community consensus on things, that you need to make proper allowances for time for discussion. Ideally, it should be enough time to frame a discussion, have a discussion within the framework amounting to a week or more, and then find consensus and implement. This would normally amount to something approximating 2 weeks of lead time or longer. This was not a policy or operational emergency, justifying either fix-first-then-discuss or a much shortened discussion. Everyone knew back in December that people at other sites were planning or discussing the 18th. If the Foundation had any inkling it was going to intervene and drive this, it should have been planning ahead of time. Thank you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia's secret wikis
On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: I see following wikis hold secred information: http://internal.wikimedia.org http://office.wikimedia.org http://board.wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can NOT freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. I don't want the whole world with the bank account info of the foundation accounts, the colo access information for the datacenters, the root passwords on things, the names and addresses of people who have verified IDs to the foundation in the course of business or in the course of abuse or content complaints. Ask any open source project (be it code or information) to publicly announce the equivalent information and see how far you get... The existence of the foundation is necessary to buffer the encyclopedia (and related projects) from the real world, forming a minimum necessary barrier and supporting structure. The existing situation isn't perfect - the community, board, foundation staff are all wrestling with what degrees of openness work in which sectors, when we have time to discuss it and work on it. But it's closed to the degree necessary to function in its job and role. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Loriot: Please read carefully what I wrote
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.com wrote: This case has to be discussed IN THE PUBLIC. As https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Philippe_%28WMF%29#File:DPAG_2011_55_Herren_im_Bad.jpg gives not sufficient reasons for the decisions and no sufficient background there is NO need that I privately contact WMF's counsel. It's not my duty to contact him but his duty to explain a case with EMINENT implications for the German community. Klaus Graf With all due respect - OFFICE is used for actions that for some reason are private or particularly sensitive. It's not used blindly, without explanation, to cover stuff up. Please make the effort to contact the WMF and see if they can talk to you about it, and if so, what they have to say. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
I am seeing a lot of lack of support from WMF for these smaller projects but not being a smaller projects editor I don't know what specific issues there are. Can someone up on the situation send out more specifics? Thank you. On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:13 PM, M. Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer similar levels of inactivity. English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous. English Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead. There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else *should* care about them. Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much potential and just as much educational value as our flagship site. Of course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her? I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource; Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of our support. 2011/9/12 M. Williamson node...@gmail.com I do believe it means exactly that. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page: - 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1 edit/day) - 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days - 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days (super active): Brian McNeil and Pi zero I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost useless for people who want to stay informed about current events. 2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin kirill.loks...@gmail.com On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.stra...@verizon.net wrote: At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several others (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are active remaining Wikinews contributors. Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here? Kirill ___ 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 -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:16 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 August 2011 13:47, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 August 2011 13:37, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: My point is that making it easy to fork does not create good competitors. Good competitors come from elsewhere. And they will come, if we do not deploy WISIWIG, not lower the entrance barrier for novices, not make it harder to troll out respectable users, and not find a way to make connections to academia or otherwise considerably improve the quality. Oh, absolutely. The other thing they'd need is an actual sizable editing community, big enough to take on the task. Citizendium failed to achieve this, for example, and ended up deleting most of the articles they'd forked from Wikipedia. That assumes it's actually worth editing wikipedia on any scale at this point. For most normal applications of encyclopedias it probably isn't. We still have wide gaps in knowledge coverage. Not in the most common areas, but in many specialized areas, where they're not heavily geek-populated. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Nominating Committee
On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote: Hi Having had the honor of being one of the first outside appointed board member to the Wikimedia Board I do want to add that one of the main reasons for having appointed members is to get an outsiders perspective. This is generally considered good practice. Basically the idea behind this is that by having as a diverse a board as possible with regards to knowledge, perspective and background that board will be able to perform its governance role better. Jan-Bart I think what Jan-Bart is saying here brings up an interesting point. Something that might have been lost in the other thread (Seats and Donations) was that part of the worry around Matt's appointment was due to him being an outsider -- it is important to remember that without some outside perspective we'll become too insular. But at the same time, shouldn't we also have the goal of eliminating the concept of outsiders to a top-10 website? Ignoring the age-gap with technology for the sake of simplicity, it would seem unusual for a board candidate similar to Matt to be unfamiliar with most non-technical aspects of Facebook, at least on a cursory level. However, tying in with our usability and newbie-friendly concerns, I would be very surprised to find those same candidates being familiar with contributing content on Wikipedia. Realistically speaking, I doubt many of them have over 1000 edits, participated significantly on meta, hold any advanced rights/flags, are familiar with our policies and guidelines in adequate detail, etc. Surely some will acquire that knowledge in the board vetting process, but my point is that for a website of our stature and positioning, the concept of having outsiders in the first place is itself a problem. In other words, the fact that our reader to editor ratio is contributing towards keeping a divide on the board between the insiders and the outsiders. That's not to suggest we shouldn't have subject matter experts in a particular field (technical, operations, community, business/finance, legal, etc.) on the board, but from a cultural standpoint I'd rather that EVERYONE be an insider when it comes to How does Wikimedia work? There are degrees of insiderness. What is Wikipedia? - everyone who's net-aware should be able to answer this, as well as anyone who we'd consider putting on the board, outsider or not. How do I manage the political factions on ANI or an Arbcom case on english language Wikipedia to deal with this policy / behavior problem is something that very few *insiders* can do well... The general observation that we should be easier for everyone to edit is reasonable, and that doing that and more outreach would help the rest of the world contribute more effectively. Domain experts in law, privacy, information theory, internet business, free culture, etc. (and others) all can bring value to the board via their different expertise and viewpoints. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It Is not Us
Actually, Facebook's losing members this year, not gaining, in the US / North American market. Not that this is relevant to the WMF. The great thing about the web writ large is that everyone can participate in the things they chose to. Facebook's popularity is orthogonal to WMF participation / Wikipedia usage and editage. On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 7:13 AM, Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-vs-the-rest-of-the-web-2011-6 So some guy has proved that Facebook is growing faster than the web - at least, in the USA, why would anyone care about anywhere else? - so long as you ignore the bits of the web that are growing like mobile and video. Profound insight this isn't. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Amicus Brief Filed in Golan v. Holder: Fighting for the Public Domain
I would like to personally thank the WMF staff and board for having pursued this. Good luck. On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Geoff Brigham gbrig...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed an amicus (friends of the court) brief in Golan v. Holder, a case of great importance before the Supreme Court that will affect our understanding of the public domain for years to come. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder. The EFF is representing the Wikimedia Foundation in addition to the American Association of Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the University of Michigan Dean of Libraries, and the Internet Archive. This case raises critical issues as to whether Congress may withdraw works from the public domain and throw them back under a copyright regime. In 1994, in response to the U.S. joining of the Berne Convention, Congress granted copyright protection to a large body of foreign works that the Copyright Act had previously placed in the public domain. Affected cultural goods probably number in the millions, including, for example, Metropolis (1927), The Third Man (1949), Prokofiev's Peter in the Wolf, music by Stravinsky, paintings by Picasso, drawings by M.C. Escher, films by Fellini, Hitchcock, and Renoir, and writings by George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The petitioners are orchestra conductors, educators, performers, film archivists, and motion picture distributors who depend upon the public domain for their livelihood. They filed suit in 2001, pointing out that Congress exceeded its power under the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They eventually won at the district court level, but that decision was overturned on appeal in the Tenth Circuit. The U.S. Supreme Court - which rarely grants review - did so here. Petitioners filed their brief last week, and you can find it here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6684. We are expecting a number of parties to file friends of the court briefs. The EFF's brief can be found here: http://www.eff.org/cases/golan-v-holder . The Wikimedia Foundation joined the EFF brief in light of the tremendously important role that the public domain plays in our mission to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. We host millions of works in the public domain and are dependent on thousands of volunteers to search out and archive these works. Wikimedia Commons alone boasts approximately 3 million items in these cultural commons. To put it bluntly, Congress cannot be permitted the power to remove such works from the public domain whenever it finds it suitable to do so. It is not right - legally or morally. The Copyright Clause expressly requires limits on copyright terms. The First Amendment disallows theft from the creative commons. Such works belong to our global knowledge. For this reason, we join with the EFF and many others to encourage the Court to overturn a law that so threatens our public domain - not only with respect to the particular works at issue but also with respect to the bad precedent such a law would set for the future. We anticipate the Court will reach a decision sometime before July 2012. -- Geoff Brigham General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 3:00 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 8:30 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 June 2011 15:42, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I think it's a fairly dangerous precedent to have the Wikimedia Foundation involved in making individual decisions about who can and can't edit. They certainly can determine who can and can't use the servers they are custodians of. Frankly, it's not just a question of who has the power to press the BANNED button; who at the WMF do you think should or has time to sit around and review the actions of every cross-project problematic user in every language and decide? We do need to have some sort of clear mechanism to make and review complaints, and there's simply not those processes (yet) on a global level. As both a community member and someone who needs to worry about WMF resources, I want to see a distributed and scalable process for this sort of thing, one that involves, serves, and is transparent to the community. If having WMF office actions to do global (b)locks is helpful or necessary, especially for these few totally bad actors, fine; but I don't personally see that as the starting point for a sustainable system. Do you? However, as Sue stated earlier in this thread, the WMF is concerned about this issue, wants to help, and I think further ideas about the areas in which the WMF could help would be super, especially in conjunction with community efforts. -- phoebe These are all good questions, and I think that it's healthy to be careful about this. With that said, we ban (block) people by the unfortunate hundreds a day on en.wikipedia, ban (community ban) them once every few weeks, ban (arbcom ban) once every few months. We ban (BANNINATE- Poetlister grade) less than once a year. I would be appalled if anyone tried to escalate any of the normal bans we do to the Foundation for global action. But in the very rare special cases... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Neil Harris n...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: On 03/06/11 00:44, Mark Wagner wrote: On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 16:11, Neil Harrisn...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: Tape is -- still -- your friend here. Flip the write-protect after writing, have two sets of off-site tapes, one copy of each in each of two secure and widely separated off-site locations run by two different organizations, and you're sorted. The mechanics of the backup are largely irrelevant. What matters are the *policies*: what data do you back up, when do you back it up, how often do you test your backups, and so on. Once you've got that sorted out, it doesn't really matter whether you're storing the backups on tape, remote servers, or magic pixie dust. Not quite. You're right about procedures, but you can't begin defining procedures until you have something concrete to aim at. Tape is the One True Way for large scale backup, even today (ask Google), and I thought it might be useful to give an illustration of just how cheap it would be to use. Tape is a great simplifier, and eliminates a lot of the fanciness and feature-bloat associated with more sophisticated systems -- more sophisticated is not necessarily better. I have done large enterprise scale backup (not Google-scale, but there really isn't anyone else at Google's scale...) entirely without tape, just using nearline disk. These days it's in fact not unreasonable to do it that way. Offsiting the backups via networks versus physical tape moves are pretty much equivalent here. That is neither here nor there to the policy question, however. I think this is an area that I, as a technical domain expert, wish I knew more about the WMF operations staff detailed implementation and plans here; but the staff are competent folks and I don't know of any actual gaps from reasonable industry practice. If the community is sufficiently concerned that there may be a gap, then the board should perhaps either request staff to be more open, or get an independent consultant in to review if operational details are thought to be sensitive. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Kirill Lokshin kirill.loks...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 3, 2011, at 8:29 AM, Scott MacDonald wrote: Imagine if poetlister now engages in identity theft and deception at Wikiversity. How precisely does one engage in identity theft in a project that does not require the submission of identifying information? By voluntarily submitting stolen information, of course. The fact that Wikipedia (or Wikiversity) does not require that I provide my real name to participate would not make it any more acceptable if I were to claim that I was Dan Rosenthal and put pictures of you on my user page to prove it. (You'd be correct if the project actually prohibited the submission of identifying information, rather than merely not requiring it; but that's not the case here.) Right. Merely staying pseudonymous or anonymous is supported, but taking on some other real life person's identity on English Language Wikipedia is clearly prohibited now, and should be. It's bad for all the same reasons that real life identity theft is bad. From: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:USERNAME#Real_names Do not register a username that includes the name of an identifiable living person unless it is your real name. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 June 2011 18:48, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote: In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of work. This sort of scenario is why some of us have a thing about the backups :-) (Is there a good image backup of Commons and of the larger wikis, and - and this one may be trickier - has anyone ever downloaded said backups?) - d. I've floated this to Erik a couple of times, but if the Foundation would like an IT disaster response / business continuity audit, I can do those. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] OTRS
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: The privacy policy does not preclude releasing private emails, and even writes in specific exceptions. When raised on en.wiki in relation to releasing CheckUser information (in that case linking an IP to an account) I thought the response there said it best; that not linking IP's to accounts was accepted convention, but nothing precluded a CheckUser using good judgement with the data. With that said I think a stricter view is taken over OTRS mails. Huib's complaints should not be dismissed at all; Beria has a point (though I would not have addressed it they way he has done so :S) in that this is best dealt with privately. Contacting the right person to deal with this is key, though. I have dug through the OTRS pages at Meta and nothing leaps out as a place to raise issues. Tom On 2 June 2011 21:50, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Its a fact that this is the second time this happens, when you take it up to the admins nothing will happen. Because I think this is not something that should go away I take my loss and make this a public descussion. Otherwhise nothing will happen again. Its also a fact freakyfries a user with OTRS access says he told SilverSpoon about it, and I guess that there is a log with everybody that read the ticket. -- Kind regards, Huib Laurens WickedWay.nl Webhosting the wicked way. An appropriate solution is for any of the OTRS people on this list to take it up on the OTRS mailing list. I am a mostly inactive OTRS member, but I have (or had) tool access and am on the mailing list. I will raise the question on the mailing list. The OTRS internal mailing list is members-only, but I will forward specific complaints or comments related to this incident to that list if requested. Please email them directly to me and make sure it's clear that you're asking for it to go to the ORTS list for discussion / followup there. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stalking on Wikipedia
I would like to request that Dror be moderated on Foundation-L. This is not an appropriate use of Foundation-L, Dror has one of the more extensive sockpuppetry histories of any Wikipedia abuse case ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Drork/Archive ) and is using identical phrasing in comments here as the IP editor who is now IP range blocked, which aligns with prior comments he has historically made. He has in private email responded to my question as to whether he is the IP editor by demanding to know what connection I have with Supreme Deliciousness. On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Dror Kamir dqa...@bezeqint.net wrote: I am not going to act as if this is a trial against me. If this is a trial, then I have every right to know who accuses me and on what ground. Currently what we have here is a WP user who says he has private information about me and about other users, allegedly proving we are the same person (this might mean that I'm Superman, but I won't put this assumption into test...). This claim of his indicate that he has been stalking me and other users. This is a serious issue. Dror K בתאריך 22/05/11 08:08, ציטוט George Herbert: On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Dror Kamirdqa...@bezeqint.net wrote: Hello, I found an email today from someone who still cares to keep me updated about what happens on the English Wikipedia's corridors. Since my name is mentioned in the discussion, he thought I'd be interested in this. There is a user on the English language Wikipedia who calls himself Supreme Deliciousness. He was blocked and warned on and off because of his highly political edits and constant war edits. Now he started stalking people, apparently I included. Admins fully cooperate with him. I wouldn't have brought this issue to the attention of this mailing list, unless I had serious suspicions that illegal or highly unethical actions are going on. Many people here don't like my attitude toward Wikipedia. I am not here to argue about that. I will have plenty of time to discuss it with anyone who'd like to on other occasions. I think my service to Wikimedia and its projects, even when I had profound disagreements about the policy of the organization, was good enough to give me some credit. Now we are talking about unethical, or possibly illegal actions that are talking against me and people who, for some unknown reason, are associated with me. Here is the link to the discussion on en-wp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Drork The user Supreme Deliciousness says: I have private information that I can send to admin through mail that links Drork to these IPs. I want to receive all such private information about me, so I could see whether I should file complaints to my Internet Service Provider or even a higher instance, as there is clearly a breach of my privacy. I think further checks should be made against Supreme Deliciousness to see whether he stalks other users. I also want to know why admins take this issue so lightly. If people dislike me - so be it, but I, and other people involved, are entitled to some protection against stalkers. Thank you, Dror K Nobody is hacking your accounts, Dror. You used exactly the same phrases in complaining about this as the IP did complaining about it. Do you assert that you are not that IP editor? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 4:15 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: I am preparing document for Wikimania. Presently, I am in process of analyzing data (SIL [1], Ethnologue [2], Wikimedia projects). I am using Ethnologue data for population estimates. Before I started this task, I thought that the situation is not so bad (or good, if it is about possibility for development). I thought that we are around the end of languages with more than 1M of speakers. However, this is far from being true. There are no Wikipedias in 243 languages with more than 1M of speakers. Of those, 27 have more than 10M of speakers. The biggest language without any Wikimedia project is Jin Chinese, with 45 millions of speakers. Around 1 billion of people belong to the group of big languages without Wikipedia (or any Wikimedia project) in their language. Of those, 480 millions have test projects, but 550 millions don't have even test project; including: * Jin Chinese, 45M, China * Haryanvi, 38M, India, incubator * Xiang Chinese, 36, China, incubator * Maithili, 34M, India, incubator * Nigerian Pidgin, 30M, Nigeria, incubator * Filipino, 25M, Philippines, incubator * Chhattisgarhi, 17.5M, India, incubator * Rangpuri, 15M, Bangladesh * Seraiki, 13.8M, Pakistan, incubator * Madura, 13.6M, Indonesia, incubator * Haryanvi, 13M, India * Deccan, 12.8M, India * Malvi, 10.4M, India * Min Bei Chinese, 10.3M, China, incubator * Sylheti, 10.3M, Bangladesh Around 300 millions of people are using languages with less than 1M of speakers which don't have Wikipedia editions. Note that for all languages in the world Ethnologue gives the number of 6.15 billion, which is pretty accurate, counting that current estimate (according to Wikipedia [3]) is 6.92 billion and that counting speakers is very different from counting official population statistics. Those are preliminary results. We have two chapters (and strategic focus) in countries of the list above. Inside of the longer list, which should be verified, we have more chapters. I noted that there are even two languages of Germany without Wikipedia, but with more than million of speakers: Mainfränkisch and Upper Saxon (the later one without test Wikipedia). The list of countries with languages with more than 1M of speakers and without Wikipedia is: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, China, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, India, Indonesia (Java and Bali), Indonesia (Kalimantan), Indonesia (Nusa Tenggara), Indonesia (Sulawesi), Indonesia (Sumatra), Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia (Peninsular), Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey (Asia), Uganda, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Good work generally, but regarding this last list... Afghanistan has many languages in use (Pashto, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek); Algeria uses Arabic, Berber, and French; Jordan's official language is Arabic (though the spoken one is a dialect); and generally so forth. Can you break this out by which languages we are missing, not just by country, as country isn't specific enough? Thank you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 5:30 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: (excellent long form work) Thank you, Milos. Very informative. Out of curiosity - I assume those are the native speakers counts for that language. Do we have exclusive speakers counts as well? I don't know for sure what the right answer is to this, but one could assert and consider that we may want to preferentially support those who don't speak a more common national language that already has content. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stalking on Wikipedia
On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Dror Kamir dqa...@bezeqint.net wrote: Hello, I found an email today from someone who still cares to keep me updated about what happens on the English Wikipedia's corridors. Since my name is mentioned in the discussion, he thought I'd be interested in this. There is a user on the English language Wikipedia who calls himself Supreme Deliciousness. He was blocked and warned on and off because of his highly political edits and constant war edits. Now he started stalking people, apparently I included. Admins fully cooperate with him. I wouldn't have brought this issue to the attention of this mailing list, unless I had serious suspicions that illegal or highly unethical actions are going on. Many people here don't like my attitude toward Wikipedia. I am not here to argue about that. I will have plenty of time to discuss it with anyone who'd like to on other occasions. I think my service to Wikimedia and its projects, even when I had profound disagreements about the policy of the organization, was good enough to give me some credit. Now we are talking about unethical, or possibly illegal actions that are talking against me and people who, for some unknown reason, are associated with me. Here is the link to the discussion on en-wp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Drork The user Supreme Deliciousness says: I have private information that I can send to admin through mail that links Drork to these IPs. I want to receive all such private information about me, so I could see whether I should file complaints to my Internet Service Provider or even a higher instance, as there is clearly a breach of my privacy. I think further checks should be made against Supreme Deliciousness to see whether he stalks other users. I also want to know why admins take this issue so lightly. If people dislike me - so be it, but I, and other people involved, are entitled to some protection against stalkers. Thank you, Dror K Nobody is hacking your accounts, Dror. You used exactly the same phrases in complaining about this as the IP did complaining about it. Do you assert that you are not that IP editor? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 8:22 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: David Gerard wrote: On 5 April 2011 03:02, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Another example might be an UploadWizard that is focused on ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Multimedia grant requirements rather than actually being fully developed and ready for use by Wikimedia Commons. These examples are off the top of my head, but anyone paying attention can see the trend fairly clearly, I think. What I see is grants supplying money to get initiatives that have been long-wanted happening. The near-impossibility of getting even quite simple things through a bureaucratic kudzu-choked community process has been noted on this list *many* times. This is far from ideal, as you note. But in practical terms, I submit it's better than this stuff never happening at all, which is what would occur without it. It goes back to nothing in life being free, I think. The money for (most of) these grants has been restricted. These projects are generally worthwhile, but with grant money, they immediately become top priority due to grant deadlines and the specifications for these products must be tailored to the demands of the grant. That isn't to say that the code can't be expandable/extensible/etc., but the primary goal of these tools is to fulfill the needs of the grant, not to fulfill the needs of the community. As with any volunteer project, the efforts volunteered by grant-writers are not optimal for the long-term evolution of the encyclopedia (not that I think we know / agree on what that path necessarily is, but for the sake of argument...). All types of volunteer project are a brownian random walk in the generally agreed upon direction. I think it's fair to say that the Foundation should reject grants that don't push in the generally agreed upon direction. But I don't think they should reject generally agreed upon direction grants that the donor puts a scope limit on, because they don't completely fulfil the community desires in particular areas. Donors have finite resources and are balancing wider concerns, too. We can always come back and add additional features or function where a grant didn't give us everything we want. Lacking a large endowment, we have to take what we can get. If I've correctly ascertained your essential point: you appear broadly to think the WMF is becoming a self-sustaining creature *at the expense* of the community; and you think it's getting bloated and complacent. I think both of these are quite incorrect. Something thereabouts. It's easy enough to find people who agree with this view, though it's easy enough to find people who agree with any view on the Internet There is a curve in the evolution of volunteer groups into charities; it happens because differently sized organizations have different organizational requirements and structures and imperatives. It's not a straight line; some organizations at a given size are more responsive and closer to their original constituents than others. Some of those goals include the We have a long term goal, and therefore the organization must survive long-term, which then drives one towards more PR and organized giving and donor development etc. Those things are not in any way directly relevant to the Encyclopedia (and other projects). But having a Foundation is key to the Encyclopedia (and other projects) long term successes; we long passed the point that volunteer labor would keep the lights on, servers up and sufficient for the load, and software development running at acceptable pace. The tradeoff, that a fair amount of what the Foundation does is then necessary because it's a Foundation, was explicit in its founding. It frustrates people a lot at times, but we need to acknowledge that tradeoff, that we made it, that we needed to make it, and move on. Whether the Foundation's board, execs, and staff are as focused on supporting the community that work on the projects as is ideal is unquestionably no. That's part of a dynamic trade between the concerns of the ongoing organization and the concerns of its final end product (the projects). We'll never on the community side be entirely happy with that. What we can ask is whether the board, execs, and staff support the goal and work diligently on it. And as a rule, I have been satisfied with the answers on that one. They generally get it right; when they get it wrong, they talk about it and are open to input. When it's not clear what right and wrong are they let people know there's an unanswered question. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dario Taraborelli joins Wikimedia Foundation
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Dear all, it is my pleasure to announce that Dario Taraborelli (User:DarTar) is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Senior Research Analyst, Strategy, reporting to me. As of this week, Dario is based in San Francisco, having relocated from the UK. Dario joins Howie Fung and me as part of the Wikimedia Foundation Strategy Team. Our job is to advance Wikimedia's strategic thinking on an ongoing basis, and to help organize relevant research and analytics. Dario most recently was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey in the UK. Previously he was Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University College London. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France, an MSc in Cognitive Science, and an MA in Philosophy of Science. He has taught at various universities, including Sciences Po in Paris, Université Paris 7, and École Normale Supérieure. He has served as advisor and editor for numerous scientific publications, organizations and conferences. Notably, Dario has participated in wiki-related research and development since 2004. He is lead developer of WikkaWiki, an open source wiki engine; developer of WikiTracer, a prototype toolkit for wiki analytics; and founder and developer of ReaderMeter, a mashup visualizing readership of scholarly publications. He has led or participated in many other projects relevant to wikis and social media. See http://nitens.org/taraborelli/research for a list of his research projects and publications. Dario has supported the Wikimedia Foundation as a contractor since December 2010. Since then he has worked on a number of projects for us, including: - Analysis of data from the pilot of the Article Feedback Tool. You can see his initial findings here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/February_2011 - Organizing meetings and priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee - With Daniel Mietchen and Giota Alevizou (members of RCom), organizing a survey of expert participation in Wikipedia projects. See: http://survey.nitens.org/?sid=21693 - In collaboration with Moritz Stefaner and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, an analysis and visualization of AfD discussions in the English Wikipedia: http://notabilia.net I'm very excited to have Dario on our team. He and his family are still settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dario's official start date is April 18. Please join me in welcoming him! All best, Erik Excellent to see the foundation continuing to expand its horizons. Welcome, Dario! -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 8:45 PM, The Mono m...@mono.x10.bz wrote: The problem is simple. Our top contributors leave. Because the way things work makes it simply intolerable. *25%* of all respondents [in a survey of contributors] said they stopped contributing because *Some editors made Wikipedia a difficult place to work* * * *(http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results)* It's somewhat more complex than that. Some respondents were banned or encouraged to go do something else. Some were working on good stuff, and were driven away in frustration by things that should not have happened. The former we want gone. They may be editing content, but they're doing harm to the rest of the community as well. The latter, we do not want gone, and to the extent the situation is driving them away (and driving away new editors who might start editing actively) we're in trouble. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.orgwrote: On 3/28/11 5:20 PM, MZMcBride wrote: There's a theory that doing something like editing a free online encyclopedia is a niche activity, with a finite amount of people who will ever be willing to participate. If we accept this theory, it makes the very strong focus on increased participation look rather silly. Maybe it would include better articles on...hip-hop... I'm not a fan of either, but our coverage of hip-hop is strikingly more evolved than American country music. Which says something about that part of our userbase... We certainly have some significant gaps. For something started by internet geeks, our coverage of computer science is really quite weak (ok for end users, but very spotty elsewhere). Our coverage of other engineering fields is often atrocious. There's a lot more content to get to. The community behavior problems in the way of getting to content annoy me a lot of days. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation has been prosecution in HK / 維基媒體基金會在香港被起訴
On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt there is any way the court in question can enforce its ruling, which is probably why the WMF didn't bother responding. subscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I am sort of curious as to what the substance of the defamation claim was. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:18 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2011/3/15 SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com: Speaking of the CREDO accounts, several people have asked that their accounts be reassigned, but they don't know how to do it. Could Erik advise? See here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts#I_gave_up_my_account_in_June As per my earlier message, Credo is willing to give away up to 400 additional accounts, so we really shouldn't be too worried about reassigning the existing ones until we've handed these out. Here's what I wrote in September: There are a few ex-Wikipedians on the current list. Not sure how you want to address that. I'm also going to go to the talk page, but... I object to the GA/FA/etc requirement. There are a lot of content editors out there who won't go near the FA mafia. I use that term carefully, and hopefully without inciting a great backlash. The people involved in the GA/FA etc process are welcome as far as I am concerned to keep doing what they're doing, but I don't want membership in that community to be a gatekeeper requirement for other participation. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
As I stated on the talk page - I agree with the idea of some standard for reference-useful content contribution, and that FA/GA work would be one aspect of that. But I'd like that to be a category with one option of satisfying it being GA/FA work, rather than that being the only way to fulfil it. On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 6:08 PM, David Goodman dgge...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with that about FA/GA, possibly because I avoid that place myself, but for negotiating with publishers it would help to have a standard of some sort, in addition to a maximum number, so they would know they're not opening it up to the world in general, which is a matter of some concern to most of them. On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:10 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:18 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2011/3/15 SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com: Speaking of the CREDO accounts, several people have asked that their accounts be reassigned, but they don't know how to do it. Could Erik advise? See here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts#I_gave_up_my_account_in_June As per my earlier message, Credo is willing to give away up to 400 additional accounts, so we really shouldn't be too worried about reassigning the existing ones until we've handed these out. Here's what I wrote in September: There are a few ex-Wikipedians on the current list. Not sure how you want to address that. I'm also going to go to the talk page, but... I object to the GA/FA/etc requirement. There are a lot of content editors out there who won't go near the FA mafia. I use that term carefully, and hopefully without inciting a great backlash. The people involved in the GA/FA etc process are welcome as far as I am concerned to keep doing what they're doing, but I don't want membership in that community to be a gatekeeper requirement for other participation. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart
On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 14 March 2011 09:53, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: [...] David, I strongly object to your continued twisting of my words, and your personal crusade to turn the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee into a personal attacks police force. That was never the intended scope of the committee, and it remains outside of its scope. We're currently working through a desysop process in which one of the elements in evidence is the administrator's alleged incivility: I'm not seeing a huge groundswell of support from you or any other former arbitrators for the Arbitration Committee having tackled this issue, and I don't see any historical evidence of committees prior to 2009 having addressed this issue either, including the time that you were on the committee. There isn't really a good community venue for thanking the Arbitration Committee for picking up a case, particularly sensitive ones, particularly involving administrators. It's hard to comment on the Arbcom talk pages; it's hard to comment like that on case pages, as it's not really germane to cases, etc. With that said - Let me, as an interested party and community member, say this - THIS community member is extremely grateful that Arbcom has picked up that case, and attempted to handle it with discretion, though the user did not ultimately wish to avail themselves of that. Please do not mistake the general public silence on this matter as disapproval. I read a lot of people's concern in their posts on events leading up to the initial action, and I believe that had Arbcom not acted the community would have had to in not too distant future, and that would have been undoubtedly a messier situation. Thank you, all of you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart
This is getting kind of stuck on the specifics of BLPs being separated (or not). Can we step back and address the generic idea again. A restatement of the intended benefits and advantages of splitting the project would be appreciated. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 March 2011 00:23, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: Lead Architect for the next generation MediaWiki platform I'd really like to hear more about that. Did I miss something or is this a new project? :-) I'm quite interested in what that concept entails myself! Danese talkes about mediawiki.next in the announcement blogpost, and Brion also goes into a bit of detail about the new parser plans in his own blog: http://leuksman.com/log/2011/03/07/hotel-mediawiki-you-can-check-out-but-you-can-never-leave/Does the next generation mediawiki platform have any relationship to the concept of the “Strategic Product Department” that was mentioned in passing in the recent monthly engineering report (under review system http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/)? The general concept of a NG has been under discussion on the WMF / Mediawiki technical lists for some years. The general approach that Brion listed has been discussed repeatedly for some years, without having enough key support / inertia to get actually going - establish a sane and properly specified subset of the current document structure, especially around the use of templates; use automatic tools to identify in-use pages and templates that don't meet that subset, for people to go to work on fixing by hand; then start rebuilding tools to take advantage of the specified subset That the WMF both got Brion back and specifically to do this task is an excellent step forwards. It may be a moderately painful year or two to come, but five years from now we'll all appreciate it. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:32 PM, THURNER rupert rupert.thur...@wikimedia.ch wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 21:50, Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de wrote: Am 08.03.11 21:36, schrieb Andrea Zanni: AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). That's right if you would negotiate with the publishers to have all wikipedians take part in the the such a scheme, but access to academic literature can only be offered to those authors who contribute regularly and who are long-time part of a WikiProject or a Portal. Otherwise you would have the effects you've described. there might be another effect, which is imo more critical: one might argue that paying somebody to do the opposite of openining up the knowledge under a free license is completely against the basic mission of wmf, and the whole free knowledge movement. my personal guess is that quite a high number of people / donators do not like this. rupert. We should have no illusion that the WMF or open content movement will zero out the production of copyrighted and not-freely-licensed content - most authors of books, most movie studios, most musicians depend on revenue streams currently mostly unavailable under open content licensing for their day to day income. Lacking a total replacement financial structure for the arts we cannot hope to affect complete change. The situation with regards to scientific journals varies somewhat, but we can't imagine that all the content will just open up immediately. Especially the legacy content. Our encyclopedia (and other project) user community - the readers, not the editors - derive significant value from citing sources and quoting references which are the best available sources and references, regardless of their copyright status and open content availability. They would also gain from full access to the underlying journals and citations and references, yes, but their primary benefit is that we're reviewing and creating quality overview articles from the references. We should encourage open content in every way. But not dealing with non-open content isn't a good choice. Most contributors (financial and volunteer) understand this, I hope. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com wrote: On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 07:59, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: What about hurricanes? ; ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_hurricane_%28pre-1900%29_tracks.jpg Maybe that's why the new Datacenter is being built in Virginia [1]? The reality is that no where is safe from natural disasters. Everywhere you go, there is going to be some new and creative way for nature to level your datacenter (Hence replication). -Jon [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Center_Virginia A particularly nasty hurricane could level Florida and continue on to do damage to Virginia as well, but Virginia is more structural damage resistant (peak winds drop rapidly inland). However, odds are low. As someone who does DR and IT dependability professionally, you get the level of redundancy you can reasonably pay for. Nothing can be 100% sure not to have failures. You're more likely to have outages and lose data due to people than anything else. Software failures less than that, Hardware failures less than that. Environment is statistically the least, below 10%. Very complex environments with multiple sites and failover generally don't have single-cause attributable outages, though in rare cases engineering and design missed something and a single point of failure remains and fails. Everything only being in Florida was a major risk factor, but we're long past that. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay
On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 5:00 PM, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 7:17 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 18 February 2011 23:24, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: Heather Ford, a former Wikimedia advisory board member and researcher/writer in South Africa has written an essay, The Missing Wikipedians about systematic bias on English Wikipedia (especially) against new users and topics pertinent to Africa and other diverse places/people. As an example, she cites the English Wikipedia article [[Makmende]] and the deletion request made, biting the newbie. http://hblog.org/2011/02/16/the-missing-wikipedians/ Please read and discuss. Author appears to be living in 2006 (deletionists vs inclusionists) and apparently this represents a clash between the two groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Makmende Where in practice it's a pretty standard if rather one sided AFD. That was after the article was speedy deleted three times and the fourth time. They finally recreate the article with the edit summary Introduction of this superhero character -- this is not vandalism Then, Ethan Zuckerman blogged about this and chimed in on the article's talk page, surely drawing attention and support in the AFD. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/24/makmendes-so-huge-he-cant-fit-in-wikipedia/ What might we do to help make Wikipedia a more welcoming place for newbies Since they seem to be determined to read the listing on AFD process as deletion not much we can do. Some changes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Article_for_deletion/dated perhaps but keeping it within the current length could be tricky. and for such diverse topics? Drop a prompt to add sources into the article creation process and make adding sources easy. Before speedy deleting, how about tagging the article for needing sources, leave the author a note on their talk page, and not be so quick to delete? This is to some degree a question of balance in approach. Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page patrollers find (most) of those, and they go kerpoof. It would largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them citation needed talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of contributing legitimately to an online information resource / encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their friend/school/work/favorite whatever. We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it. Every day, a few legitimate new articles (and every few days, one about something Really Important, but that has not yet arrived at worldwide consciousness) get swept up in that. And we lose valuable new information, contributors, etc. If we just turn the knob too abruptly, it makes newpage patrollers' jobs too hard, and we start getting more leakers in the article-as-vandalism category. Which is bad enough when it's nonsense, but terrible when it's a BLP violation against some teacher, principal, junior high school student whose rival is now claiming falsely that they're gay and having sex with a teacher, etc. This particular phenomenon appears to have hit an uncomfortable corner of our verifiable information space - where it becomes notable outside the western-oriented internet users usual comfortable horizon, and appears in ways we can look up primarily in blogs and so forth, which are generally not reliable sources. We can turn that knob down some, but we've had plenty of vicious vandals do things with disinformation campaigns by creating multiple fake blogs and websites and then trying to get Wikipedia articles changed to libel someone or do horrible BLP violations and so forth. There are reasons why we have reliability filters on sources. So - It's not just a matter of turning knobs. Our principles are colliding, in a way that squeezes new phenomena and users associated with them out of the encyclopedia. It's not appropriate either to turn the knobs and just allow these things in blind to the side effects that will have. It's also not appropriate to ignore that those policies are making us insular. As with the women-in-Wikipedia problem, it's complicated. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New two-part schedule for 1.17 deployment
Thank you for this. Will ops staff be monitoring wikitech-l for email reports of observed problems from those of us who are IRC-impaired? Is there an another preferred non-IRC channel for reports? Thanks. On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi everyone, In case you missed it on the techblog, here's an update on the revised deployment plan for 1.17, part 1 of which starts in 7 hours: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/1-17deployment-attempt2/ Also copied below. Rob -- As covered on this blog this week, we had a few problems with our initial deployment of 1.17 to the Wikimedia cluster of servers. We’ve investigated the problems, and believe we have fixed many of the issues. Some of the unsolved issues are complicated enough that the only timely and reasonable way to investigate them is to deploy and react, so we’ve come up with a plan that lets us do it in a safe way by deploying on just a few wikis at a time (as opposed to all at once, as we tried earlier). We’re scheduling two deployment windows: First window – This wave will be deployed between Friday, February 11, 6:00 UTC – 12:00 UTC (10pm PST Thursday, February 10 in San Francisco). This first wave will be to a limited set of wikis (see below). Second window – Wednesday February 16 (between 6:00 UTC – 12:00 UTC) – full deployment (tentative) Repeating what is new about 1.17: There are many, many little fixes and improvements (see the draft release notes for an exhaustive list), as well as one larger improvement: Resource Loader. Read more in the previous 1.17 deployment announcement. First window This first deployment window will be to a limited set of wikis: http://simple.wikipedia.org/ (simplewiki) http://simple.wiktionary.org/ (simplewiktionary) http://usability.wikimedia.org/ (usabilitywiki) http://strategy.wikimedia.org/ (strategywiki) http://meta.wikimedia.org/ (metawiki) http://eo.wikipedia.org/ (eowiki) http://en.wikiquote.org/ (enwikiquote) http://en.wikinews.org/ (enwikinews) http://en.wikibooks.org/ (enwikibooks) http://beta.wikiversity.org (betawikiversity) http://nl.wikipedia.org (nlwiki) Note that the point of this first round of wikis being switched over is to be able to observe the problem or problems without overloading the site and bringing it down. This deployment should be small enough in scope that even if there are moderate performance problems, no one should notice without watching our monitoring tools. We may not roll out to every wiki listed above during the first wave, but we plan to roll out to enough of them that we can gather enough debugging information to make the second wave (full deployment) go smoothly. Second window We will continue to roll this out to the rest of the wikis during this window. Depending on our confidence level, we may deploy to the remaining wikis, or we may decide to deploy to a portion of the remaining wikis. If necessary, we will schedule another window to finish the deployment. Technical details Here’s some more technical detail: one problem with the original Tuesday deploy was that the cache miss rate went up quite substantially. We believe the problem was a problem with the configuration of the $wgCacheEpoch variable, which caused more aggressive culling of our cache than the servers could handle. We have made adjustments, and so this shouldn’t be a problem during our next deployment attempt. The $wgCacheEpoch problem explains some of the problems we had, but not all of them. Since we don’t have a clear explanation for all of the problems, we plan to modify the way we deploy this software so that we aren’t rolling this out to every wiki simultaneously. As our software is currently built, this isn’t easy to do in a general way, but it turns out this release is suited to an incremental deployment. (Note: we also plan to develop a more general capacity to roll out incrementally for future releases). Thank you for your patience! We hope that this time around we can deploy this in a way that you won’t notice anything other than the improvements. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Since Egypt has shutdown internet, should we too?
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:51 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 January 2011 12:47, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: 2011/1/28 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: The idea of getting samizdat copies of Wikipedia into Egypt appeals. Airlift in current-article dumps of ar:wp and en:wp on SD cards by the thousand? Don't forget arz.wikipedia. It's small, but shouldn't be ignored. The more the better! I expect we don't actually have the money on hand to do this, it's mostly just a pleasant thought :-) Though if someone just happens to have thousands of SD cards and something to make HTML versions of article dumps ... - d. I appreciate the sentiments, but in the week that it would take to do anything significant, this will be over one way or another. Geopolitics is a nasty game; civil insurrection even nastier, as the geneva conventions don't get applied. The guns are out (Egyptian army deployed to back up the overwhelmed police); either they restore order (by simply being there, a bit more teargas, or shooting people in whatever quantities are needed to restore order) or there's going to be a new government in Cairo shortly. Situations don't teeter this close to the edge for long. The worst thing the Foundation can do is attempt to intervene in a way that gets other authoritarian regimes more likely to censor us, IMHO. This is not a value judgement on supporting democracy in Egypt - it's a realpolitik issue with the rest of the world we will continue to have to deal with for the next few decades. That we wouldn't censor coverage or information on an uprising or oppressive behavior doesn't mean we should organizationally take a stand on an uprising or attempt to get involved. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.com wrote: Split permissions have been a perennial issue for en.wikipedia for a while. It's proposed every couple months, has vocal support and a handful of even more vocal opponents, and fillibustered into oblivion to resurface a few months later. Rinse, lather, repeat. The only partial success was with rollback, which actually got broken into it's own permission, but it hasn't happened elsewhere. Yes, ok, I get that, but... Where are those particular discussions happening? Again - I follow policy stuff on-wiki and the mailing lists, but it's impractical to follow all of it and still have a functional Life. What venues was this up in, etc. Thanks. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege
On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: 2011/1/16 Joseph Seddon seddonw...@gmail.com I am going to be quite frank and say that it is pointless to have this discussion on this list. Only a fraction of the english wikipedia community are on it. If you are genuinely serious about this then propose it on the english wikipedia. This is not a foundation level issue nor will it ever become one so put it to the community. That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because RFA is broken discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning communities of about 50 regular writers or more. And in Wikipedias in small regional languages, which have only a handful of writers i often see very confused discussions about adminship which show that they misunderstand the concept - they think that an admin is supposed to administrate, or that they shouldn't write articles until the Foundation appoints an admin, or that they must draft a detailed voting process document to appoint admins - but can't really vote until they have a quorum, etc. (This doesn't mean that i know a lot of languages. These discussions are often held in Russian or English.) I believe that this confusion is caused by the heavy word administrator. Eliminating it and calling the permissions by their actual names - blocker, deleter, protector, reviewer - will likely eliminate this confusion. One could impose a new groups / permissions structure from on high, across all the Wikis, or (probably) ask the developers to add new groups to a specific Wiki on a one-off. It would probably be harmless to enable the more specific groups globally, with local per-wiki decisions as to if or when to allow users to gain access to them, and under what conditions. It would probably be easier to test them out on one project rather than try doing the global step first, to avoid the knee-jerk opposition whenever the Foundation choses to change anything, but I could be wrong. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for assistance
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Virgilio A. P. Machado v...@fct.unl.pt wrote: Is this supposed to be funny? Time to address this matter to the list moderators. Sincerely, Virgilio A. P. Machado Neither of these was funny; both were backhanded insults to you. That said - I am not sure what role you think foundation-l should be playing in your being banned from meta.wikimedia.org. You're claiming the snide responses are off topic and inappropriate. The original request was off topic and inappropriate as well, though not snide. I am completely not up on the politics on Meta, or the other Wikis you've been banned or long term blocked on, but as a general rule people who are being blocked or banned across multiple wikis are behaving in a way that causes the blocks, even if there are aspects of some of the blocks which are imperfect admin response. There seem to be a number of people on Meta who thought you were behaving inappropriately. Even if the blocks were abusive and inappropriate, foundation-l isn't a block appeal channel. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:43 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.com wrote: Not only is the current markup a barrier to participation, it's a barrier to development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup that can be syntacticly validated, preferably one that is XML based would reap huge rewards in the safety and effectiveness of automated tools - authors of tools like AWB have just as much trouble making software handle the corner cases in wikitext markup as new editors have understanding it. In every discussion so far, throwing out wikitext and replacing it with something that isn't a crawling horror has been considered a non-starter, given ten years and terabytes of legacy wikitext. If you think you can swing throwing out wikitext and barring the actual code from human editing - XML is not safely human editable in any circumstances - then good luck to you, but I don't like your chances. That is true - We can't do away with Wikitext always been the intermediate conclusion (in between My god, we need to do something about this problem and This is hopeless, we give up again). Perhaps it's time to start some exercises in noneuclidian Wiki development, and just assume the opposite and see what happens. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ring of Gyges
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Ryan Lomonaco wiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 6:26 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: For added self-referentiality, you can't read this article unless you identify yourself to the NYT. I was able to read the article without registering - it's worth noting that the NY Times has a rather interesting version of a paywall, where only a handful of people who visit the article are required to register or log in. So it leads to confusion when you send a link to 100 people, and, say, 15 people can't read it. (list-unrelated) It's really just a porous IDwall - It's only a paywall in the sense that I get targeted ads aimed at my identity there (sometimes amusingly - the full-page-header Livescribe pen ads, when I had worked there and was given a free pre-prod version of the advertised product to field test as I left the company...). Google, as far as I can tell, does no worse or better on that point. I use Gmail and other related services and am ok with that info being floated around for ad targeting. NYTimes can have it, too. It's well worth it for the access, IMHO. (list-related) Responding to Mike Peel's comment about applicability to Wikipedia; we have two variations on the anonymity theme. One, true IP anons often feel little connection to our core goals of building an encyclopedia and supporting a constructive community to accomplish that. Not so much that I advocate shutting off anon editing at all, but it's an observation that's easy to make. Two, nearly all WP users use pseudonymity rather than real names, and for most people not having their real name attached anywhere gives them a sense of anonymous empowerment similar to the truly anonymous trolls seen elsewhere. We see a lot of behavioral problems that are, to anyone who studies interpersonal communications online, extremely common. People don't inherently humanize other pseudonyms; they don't feel that they'll necessarily be held accountable in the same way they would in real life for behavior, etc. Coupled with the inherent degraded emotional communications in text-based communications, we have a lot of the same behavior even with persistent pseudonyms. And you can see a lot of that, where a pseudonym account gets sufficiently bad community karma on WP and they go and sockpuppet off and create another one, not caring about the underlying issue their behavior raised. That sort of thing is not unheard of in the real world, but it's generally felt to be the domain of scam artists and private investigators and the like; at the very least, socially dubious. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/11/17 wjhon...@aol.com: Obama is exactly half-black and half-white. Funny how he is African American but of course he is equally Caucasian American Which shows only hot dangerous political correctness can get. I wonder if in 2050, when the white population will no longer be be in majority, such a person will be called an European-American... This is rapidly going off topic, but... Hispanic-American is European-American, too - just from Spain (and some Portugal) rather than England. Except where the native american population intermixed with the Spanish (and Portugese), which was pretty much everywhere. Actual lesson - It's easy to get hung up on people's skin color or other arbitrary and fuzzy labels. What matters more is that we're not as attractive a project to volunteer in for various social, economic, and (the preceding sentence notwithstanding) racial groups. Regardless of how we label them, we need to attract participation from internet-savvy members of all the populations we don't represent well, over time. Our international flavor helps with that, in that overall as a Foundation and wider project we do have widespread inclusionism of disparate peoples. But introspection into underserved communities within big countries (the US particularly) and into underserved nations would be wise. The latter is open to new communities but not actively attracting them; the former, a US chapter with teeth could go after. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians
Ah, bueno. I was unaware of the Kartika version; excellent that the Foundation's already figured it out and was working on it. Thanks, Philippe and MzMcBride. Good job to whoever thought it up earlier and did the test run. On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: We tested Kartika earlier this week, and it did very very well. So we're putting together a campaign based around editor appeals, and many of the folks we have are not ... well, people who look like me. So I'm very happy about that. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing, was Re: Ban and...
On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:38 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: There's a place for applied engineer hubris[1]. With due caution. - d. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/engineers%20and%20woo (grump) While generally true, there's a lack of regard there for engineering-oriented polymaths. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Paid editing, was Re: Ban and moderate
On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Robert S. Horning robert_horn...@netzero.net wrote: On 10/23/2010 03:42 PM, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: If at any moment it can be stood on its head then the information contained in the articles can never be authoritative. Suppose I have a calculator that every once in a while, and quite randomly, adds up two numbers wrongly, such a calculator wouldn't be authoritative in its results, even when it added the numbers correctly. For some things, like who played who in 'West Wing', it is of little importance. For medical issues the accuracy is highly important, and if one can't guarantee that each page load contains the accurate information then one shouldn't be pretending that it is in any way authoritative. I would hope that somebody from NASA trying to plot spaceship trajectories around the Solar System isn't going to be using data from Wikipedia for those calculations either... or an engineer doing some structural load calculations using information about material strengths from a Wikipedia article. I don't see medical issues as being anything of a unique case or something that needs to be especially pointed out other than it is foolish to use information from Wikipedia or for that matter any encyclopedia as authoritative without at the very least checking the sources used to obtain that information. Wikipedia isn't a replacement for the CRC Handbook, nor the Physician's Desk Reference. It shouldn't be either although both are excellent sources of information for factual data that can be used in a Wikipedia article. General agree. I do back of the envelope spacecraft mission planning with Wikipedia sources when on the road and away from my professional tools, and back of the envelope structural design with Wikipedia materials properties when similarly away from professional sources, but I know what I'm getting there and always go look up proper values if the BOTE work proceeds anywhere. In some cases, I put the structural and astrodynamics data into Wikipedia in the first place, looking at the CRC, astronomical handbooks, and engineering data from manufacturers. The risk here is that amateurs don't do spacecraft navigation or structural design much. They do - as a rule - take mediations and have medical conditions. In that sense, Wikipedia medical information is much more of an attractive nuisance to the uninformed... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing, was Re: Ban and...
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 3:38 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 16:26, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 15:59, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: And where there is a body of scholarly research, the peer-reviewed scholarly literature is the most authoritative literature around. Can you address the issue of vested interests? If a drug company has financed all or most of the peer-reviewed work, your argument is that we should nevertheless reply on those studies exclusively, and not allow high-quality mainstream media who may be pointing to problems before anyone else does. Why would you place so much trust in the companies who benefit financially, and why do you feel that it would not be an NPOV violation? There is no other area of Wikipedia where we allow the people who sell things to be our exclusive sources on whether those things are good. Sarah Conflict of interest plays a role in determining reliability of sources. It ought to, but as a matter of fact we don't note in articles who has financed the scientific research we rely on. We would not allow the people who make Coca Cola to be our sole sources on whether it's safe, or on whether we all ought to be drinking it. But when it comes to drugs and scientists, we lose sight of the fact that there is often a very strong conflict of interest. Sarah There's a societal problem there; we don't independently pay for many scientific grade studies on medications. There are some - but the bulk of them are done by the drug companies in the course of getting drugs studied and approved, and then as ongoing due dilligence as they're used. The problem here is in the world - with lack of independent studies, and lack of government regulator interest in promoting them. If we start accepting ancedotal or non-controlled studies, we start introducing noise. Nose like ibuprofin cured my brain cancer! as well as my daughter's vaccine killed her!. Neither type of noise is much help to the public. Without significant investigation and research, cauation and correlation are confused all the time in medical ancedotal reports. Even most doctors aren't any good at the serious analysis and pathology needed to try and understand the actual source of a problem (as opposed to, Patient X started using drug Q, and had lymphoma six months later - this is an actual correlated side effect of some medication my wife is on, but there seems to be decent evidence that the underlying condition is the causation rather than the drug; my wife is a statistically sophisticated medically trained individual who understands the difference and takes the drug willingly, aware of the potential risk). I don't want the noise, particularly in articles on medical issues. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ban and moderate
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: Has either of these persons, Greg or Peter, been destructive of the substance of the Project: the body of the Encyclopedia? Yes, in my opinion. Both were banned from English language Wikipedia and (I believe) other projects, for content and behavioral reasons. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Expertise and Wikipedia redux
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Peter Damian peter.dam...@btinternet.com wrote: ... In summary, Wikipedia is hardly making a dent. Where it is making a dent, it is by cheapening the product. No win all round. Broadening, not cheapening. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
NPOV is good as far as it goes, but the issues of wiki naming and language are necessarily one where positions need to be taken on some very touchy real-world issues. The naming of mo.wikipedia and its use of Cyrillic were particularly unfortunate, as the Moldovan standard alphabet is Roman, the Transnistrian is Cyrillic, the Moldovan TLD / name code is MD not MO, and we have no Transnistrian wiki that I am aware of. Essentially - we landed in a configuration that simultaneously is as wrong as possible, on every account, offending nearly all people on both sides of the defacto border. This is highly inappropriate, even from a We're NPOV and not here to make political statements standpoint. The particular campaign of emails is ... at best unfortunate. But we really should do something about this eventually. Whether that's deleting mo.wikipedia, renaming it to tr.wikipedia (or deleting and creating a new one there), or what, I don't know. But we're Very Wrong right now. We can neutrally get to Somewhat Right. I understand (at a high level) the technical issues and staff priority issues, etc. But there's a difference between low on the priority order and We shouldn't fix this. -george On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Your approach is the wrong one. Our aim is to bring information to all people of this world. When people leave for political reasons, they are welcome to leave. Their point of view is clearly not the Neutral Point Of View that is also expected of them in their contributions. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2010 03:50, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.10.2010 22:24, hett M. Williamson schreven: 2010/10/5 Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com: Hoi, Technically it is easier to transliterate from Cyrillic. So when transliteration works in a round robin fashion, it does not really matter in what script people edit. It will only be stored in one script. The choice for a script can be based on a user setting or on the method access to the information was sought. Thanks, Gerard, I am aware of all this, however in the proposals of Marcus there is constant mention of a read-only Cyrillic portal rather than a round robin transliteration program which enables editors to create content in Cyrillic which is saved to the database in Latin. -m. I'm trying to promote a solution that _works_. If you want a solution where Cyrillic users can participate on par with Latin users you need the support of the Latin users. I'm sure you won't get that support. You can critizise ro.wp for being unwilling to give that support but that won't change anything about it. If you try to impose something on them that can break the ro.wp community. If just 2% of all active ro.wp Wikipedians leave the project in disagreement about the issue that's twice as worse as if the 1% Romanian speakers of Transnistria are unable to participate. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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 -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
Yes, I am not proposing that we have to have a new Moldovan-Romanian language Wiki (we don't have a United States-english Wiki, a Canadian-english Wiki, a Great Britain-english Wiki, an Australian-english Wiki, etc...). (oh, ouch, there's a contingent from New Zealand chasing me now!) I am saying, mo.wikipedia in Cyrillic? Insults all sides, and is Wrong. -george On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 2:16 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, We will never have a Romanian or a Moldovan Wikipedia. What we have is a Romanian language Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2010 04:11, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: NPOV is good as far as it goes, but the issues of wiki naming and language are necessarily one where positions need to be taken on some very touchy real-world issues. The naming of mo.wikipedia and its use of Cyrillic were particularly unfortunate, as the Moldovan standard alphabet is Roman, the Transnistrian is Cyrillic, the Moldovan TLD / name code is MD not MO, and we have no Transnistrian wiki that I am aware of. Essentially - we landed in a configuration that simultaneously is as wrong as possible, on every account, offending nearly all people on both sides of the defacto border. This is highly inappropriate, even from a We're NPOV and not here to make political statements standpoint. The particular campaign of emails is ... at best unfortunate. But we really should do something about this eventually. Whether that's deleting mo.wikipedia, renaming it to tr.wikipedia (or deleting and creating a new one there), or what, I don't know. But we're Very Wrong right now. We can neutrally get to Somewhat Right. I understand (at a high level) the technical issues and staff priority issues, etc. But there's a difference between low on the priority order and We shouldn't fix this. -george On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Your approach is the wrong one. Our aim is to bring information to all people of this world. When people leave for political reasons, they are welcome to leave. Their point of view is clearly not the Neutral Point Of View that is also expected of them in their contributions. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2010 03:50, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.10.2010 22:24, hett M. Williamson schreven: 2010/10/5 Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com: Hoi, Technically it is easier to transliterate from Cyrillic. So when transliteration works in a round robin fashion, it does not really matter in what script people edit. It will only be stored in one script. The choice for a script can be based on a user setting or on the method access to the information was sought. Thanks, Gerard, I am aware of all this, however in the proposals of Marcus there is constant mention of a read-only Cyrillic portal rather than a round robin transliteration program which enables editors to create content in Cyrillic which is saved to the database in Latin. -m. I'm trying to promote a solution that _works_. If you want a solution where Cyrillic users can participate on par with Latin users you need the support of the Latin users. I'm sure you won't get that support. You can critizise ro.wp for being unwilling to give that support but that won't change anything about it. If you try to impose something on them that can break the ro.wp community. If just 2% of all active ro.wp Wikipedians leave the project in disagreement about the issue that's twice as worse as if the 1% Romanian speakers of Transnistria are unable to participate. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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 -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 9/28/10, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: From: Risker risker...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tuesday, September 28, 2010, 5:22 PM On 28 September 2010 18:10, Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: Without having formed in opinion either way to what has come out of the trial or the straw polls, I don't understand why there is such importance placed on *technically* disabling the feature. If en.WP doesn't want to use it, why don't they not just move all the articles back to semi-protection? Empty out the pending changes from the on-wiki interface. This would likely have to be done *before* disabling it anyways. Just because the extension is installed doesn't mean it has to be used. I can see no reason why Erik or Danese should be being asked to determine consensus. Nobody was asking Erik or Danese to determine consensus. They were asked to give their word that our consensus would be respected after the polling of the community following a second trial. Consensus doesn't mean majority rule, as has always been very clear on this project. It's now on record that any further trials are moot, and that the tool is going to be left in place with absolutely no intention of disabling it regardless of the wishes of the project. And how should they know what the consensus is which they should promise to respect without determining it? They can't very well just turn off an extension while it is use on hundreds of articles. If the consensus is so clear (that Danese and Erik would not be required to make a judgment call) that en.WP doesn't want to use Pending Changes, then why are en.WP users *still using it*? I get that this is an important political issue for various people. I don't get why the devs are being focused on. Please let the devs out of the argument. I can't imagine why any of them would want to touch that button with a ten-foot pole until you have clearly decided. Especially as it isn't really necessary for them to be involved in achieving a negative result. The developers were being focused on because they have been the face of this project from Day One, and all communication with the community has been through them. And since it has worked so very well, you think it best continue with that pattern? Seriously, do whatever you want to about Pending Changes on en.WP. You are complaining about WMF not respecting en.WP decisions. You don't need some formal announcement of respect. Just make your own decisions without asking WMF to approve. That is what real respect is. Is something you give to yourself by having confidence enough in your decisions to move forward with them. Asking others to promise to approve of your decisions undermines respect. There is a giant gap between not interfering with a decision and endorsing it. And respect is only about the former. WMF doesn't need and shouldn't have to go around endorsing decisions made on each of the wikis. In this aspect, en.WP has failed to mature to the level of most of the other wikis for far to long. Self-governing means doing it yourself. I don't think you realize how absolutely disrespectful tone of the entire en.WP wants to trial run an implementation of Flagged Revisions has come across to me as someone who is associated with other WMF wikis. From the very beginning and still continuing with your recent posts; and I even edit en.WP significantly. Do you realize the development man-hours that have been put into adapting the extension to the very specific set of requirements that en.WP demanded on having before you all were even willing to even talk about whether you might permanently use it? And the entire time you all constantly complained about what was taking the devs so long to fulfill your detailed demands? (It was at some phases comparatively quick or at the very worst normal) I frankly hope you all decide to stop using Pending Changes and to forget about ever further testing it. Maybe then some developer will find some time to work on Lilypond. Or *any* somewhat functional way to do musical notation. I am not picky at all, because what there is now is NOTHING. And that is Bug 189; as in it was the one-hundred and eighty ninth bug placed on Bugzilla back in 2004. And even if not Bug 189, there may more be time for one of the numerous other development issues which is not even a blip on en.WP's political radar. Just hopefully, at the very least, it will be something that can possibly be used somewhere else in WMF land *in addition* to en.WP. Birgitte SB Here is a challenge for anyone else on the list who is as turned-off as I am about how many
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia mirrors
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 12:58 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: John Vandenberg, 16/09/2010 03:00: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugeuse, Swedish and Chinese Wikipedia all appear to have some mirrors, but are any of them reliable enough to be used for disaster recovery? Obviously not, at least Italian ones. The smaller projects are easier to backup, as they are smaller. I am sure that with a little effort and coordination, chapters, universities and similar organisations would be willing to routinely backup a subset of projects, and combined we would have multiple current backups of all projects. I agree. Now we have only this: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/21606/ Kudos to Milos Wikimedia Serbia!! How many TB are needed? I don't know what's the average, but e.g. right now my university should have about 50 TB of free disk space (which is not so much, after all). The key would be to allow the mirrors to delete their mirror when they need to use their excess storage capability. If they let us know in advance that they are reclaiming the space, another organisation with excess storage capability can take over. I appreciate all the enthusiasm in thread, but (speaking for myself as an individual, and IT consultant who does things like business continuity and disaster recovery planning consulting among other infrastructure work) this is a core operational competency role that the Foundation needs to ensure is handled in house as part of the routine IT operations. And, as I understand it now, it is, though I have only had high level discussions with some of the Foundation staff about this and not seen the server configs myself so I can't personally attest to the status. Database and file backups need to be in (at least) 2 locations, and my understanding is that there are complete redundant copies at the Amsterdam datacenter now, and that the new main datacenter in Virginia will continue this. If a third location is needed, the current HQ in San Francisco is plenty far enough away from the other 2 locations to provide excellent DR capability. If there's need for a datacenter / fast net access redundant copy in SF or the Bay Area, a rack or few U of a shared rack would be enough for a fileserver, and that's available at multiple excellently connected locations in the Bay Area. Disaster Recovery is not something the Foundation should attempt to crowdsource. I recommend it be left to professionals whose job it is and who have prior experience in the field. If you haven't watched major services drop, datacenters burn down, software environments melt down, and spent years working to ensure that those don't happen again, you really don't have a good feel for the type and magnitude of the risks and the sorts of tools to employ to try and mitigate them. If there's interest in an offline discussion on IT disasters and disaster recovery and reliability engineering, I can do that, but it should be offline from Foundation-L... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Peter Damian peter.dam...@btinternet.com wrote: Risker In 2005, the English Wikipedia had less than half the number of articles it has now. Hs anyone made a serious study of what these articles actually contain? Yes. But not across all articles. Anyone can pick and chose subsets or specific articles which aren't improving much if at all. I have two responses: 1. SOFIXIT - if you have IDed problems, fix them, or flag them for more attention (this thread was a form of that, but not terribly efficient). 2. If your opinion is firmly and irrevocably set that there isn't a continual improvement over time on the average, vote with your feet and pocketbook and find projects that you think are improving over time. My personal opinion is that, specific examples notwithstanding, there's a clear trend towards bigger better more accurate articles in nearly all topic areas. Your mileage may vary. If you have something like a longer list of backsliding articles please make it available for others to review; if you have serious statistical evidence of a problem please post that. Specific examples one at a time isn't in a project sense helpful. If there's a real problem it can be demonstrated with real evidence across sets of articles. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 5:03 AM, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/9/7, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: Presumably this conspiracy would have to extend beyond the WMF to PediaPress and Purodha Blissenbach, the developers of Collection and mobile.wikipedia.org respectively. The absence of a history tab in the mobile format is in my view an exact measurement of the temperature of the warmth of the relations between the WMF and its contributors. Let's not call this a conspiracy. Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu would call it an unconcious strategy (1). Developping software costs money and time. Maybe especially time. Developping both feature A and feature B is too expensive when most people will care only for feature A. Feature B is dropped because people who had feature B in mind feel that they will not be rewarded for it and they stop insisting for it and it finally fails from being included in the specification. And yes the outcome is that people did a great job developping feature A. (1) [His] theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu Teofilo - Unless you can provide a concise reason why this is a Foundation-related issue, I strongly urge you to go back to the French language Wikipedia and resolve it locally there. If you can get consensus there that it should be disabled, I am sure that the sysadmins will follow your local request and disable the feature with the config option for your wiki. If you are coming here to attempt to go around a consensus there that it was OK, then you are abusing the Foundation and the mailing list here, and you should stop doing so. If that's what you have done, then it's a sign of disrespect for your compatriots on fr.wikipedia and for those of us here that you attempted to do this in this manner. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive
On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Here's the Archive's on-demand service: http://archive-it.org That would be the most reliable way to set up the partnership emijrp proposes. And it's certainly a good idea. Figuring out how to make it work for almost all editors and make it spam-proof may be interesting. SJ On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: David Gerard wrote: On 24 August 2010 14:57, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: I want to make a proposal about external links preservation. Many times, when you check an external link or a link reference, the website is dead or offline. This websites are important, because they are the sources for the facts showed in the articles. Internet Archive searches for interesting websites to save in their hard disks, so, we can send them our external links sql tables (all projects and languages of course). They improve their database and we always have a copy of the sources text to check when needed. I think that this can be a cool partnership. +1 Are people who clean up dead links taking the time to check Internet Archive to se if the page in question is there? Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I actually proposed some form of Wikimedia / IArchive link collaboration some years ago to a friend who worked there at the time; however, they left shortly afterwards. I like SJ's particular idea. Who has current contacts with Brewster Kahle or someone else over there? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announcing my departure from the Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org wrote: It is with deep regret that I tell you I will be leaving the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation at the end of December. I'm leaving the staff, but I will continue to be involved with the Wikimedia movement as a volunteer, both as a contributor and in the organization of the annual Wikimania conference. Much of my work with Wikimedia will continue, except now I will be doing it as a volunteer rather than as a paid staff person. The Wikimedia Foundation is not planning to hire another volunteer coordinator to look after the specific range of work I've been doing, so if you are unsure about who will handle things I have been responsible for, please feel free to ask me, and we'll work it out over the next several months. I have decided to continue my education and have begun the process of enrolling in post-graduate studies to pursue a theological path that I've been considering for many years. I have very much enjoyed my time with the Wikimedia Foundation, and I look forward to continuing to work alongside you all, as a Wikimedia volunteer. I enjoy working with each and every one of you. Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation Ack! But, congratulations, and best wishes on your future education and path. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion Questions for Potentially-Objectionable Content
Meta-question - Is there in fact sufficient evidence that this is a topic that the Foundation must, or should, engage in actively at this time? I know why the Foundation has an inclination to get involved - people ask about it, and some very uncomfortable stuff finds its way into Commons and the Encyclopedias at times and in places, and it's inconvenient to have Fox News making a big deal about false claims of pedophiles or child porn on Wikipedia when we're trying to be taken seriously as a responsible charitable organization, and so forth. But that does not mean that it's necessarily something the Foundation should involve itself in at this point. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Announcing new Chief Global DevelopmentOfficer and new Chief Community Officer
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:37 AM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Terrified. For that reason, I actually did not unveil my country-of-origin to the Board until a few weeks ago. That is one of Canadians' special skills: we can walk amongst Americans, and they are completely unaware :-) That's not true, many Americans know the correct code words to determine if you're from up north, eh. How do you pronounce Toronto? 8-) -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard writes: Hoi, When I read: Wikisource content in the French language targets the French public, and therefore, under French conflict of laws principles, the copyright law of France applies to this content. I do read the French public. Wikisource does not target the French public per se. I agree with you about this. Unfortunately, that turns out to be an inadequate argument when it comes to justifying noncompliance with a takedown notice. We consulted with French counsel on the question of compliance, and neither they nor we believed there was a strong probability that French court would invalidate the takedown notice on the grounds that Wikisource does not target the French public in particular. The appropriate response to this might be a Quebec Wikisource project (or, pick another French-speaking location, with a very non-French copyright policy which is more friendly to us in this circumstance). -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office action
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.com wrote: For me there is no reason to believe that Mr. Godwin is a good lawyer. If he receives a formal (blah-blah) correct take-down-notice he will take OFFICE ACTION. It was clearly un-lawful to take down the TU Munich logo which isn't protectable according German copyright law but WMF has done so. It is a shame that WMF hasn't a policy of TRANSPARENCY regarding office actions. The right of the community to get all information cannot be overruled by Mr. Godwin's personal opinions about secret things. If WMF or it's god-like counsel (who wasn't able to accept critics since I am reading this list) has taken office action - there is no way to appeal. Roma locuta causa finita ... Klaus Graf Could you restate this in a way which was not personally insulting to Mike, and by implication to the Foundation as an organization? Mike has been at the forefront of liberalizing open access to information and the open content movement for at least 23 years that I've known him. Despite that, it's his job to see that the Foundation finds an acceptable balance point between freeing all information we can, and not being sued into oblivion by someone whose legitimate copyright we infringe. The Wikipedia project can't practically survive without a Foundation to take some legal responsibility and help keep the lights on / servers running. We are not Wikileaks - and even they have found some limits on what they can get away with, though those are fortunately loosening over time. I can believe Mike might under some circumstances make a mistake, but assuming he's acting unreasonably or without regard for open content is assuming bad faith in the worst way. It's not called for and not helpful. Asking what happened, or trying to promote discussion on something that happened, are fine and reasonable. Just outright assaulting the Foundation and Mike is not. Please don't do that here. Criticism can be done constructively and in good faith. Thank you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Funny news from Poland
2010/5/13 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2010/5/13 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com: As you maybe now, after the sudden death of Lech Kaczynski (jn airjet crash in Smolens) we have now fast presidential election. One of the most serious candidates Bronisław Komorowski was cached with printed copy of Wikipedia article about Rada Bezpieczeństwa Narodowego http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rada_Bezpiecze%C5%84stwa_Narodowego a presidential advisory board for national security :-) Journalist from Poland just started commenting if we really need a president who's main source of knowledge about national security comes form Wikipedia :-). http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2169210,11,wikipedia_nowym_doradca_komorowskiego,item.html -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html Given the simply staggering coverage of millitry issues on various wikimedia projects I can think of worse places to start. Yes, but, from a professional point of view, our coverage of geopolitical and national security and military issues *sucks*. Sorry to be blunt, but it's terrible. The WikiProject Military people are great at military history and hardware; contemporary issues and strategy and tactics and capabilities coverage, the sorts of things needed by current leaders, are not good. Our geopolitics issues are largely captured by special interest subgroups of people, ... It's not bad as a high school level intro, perhaps; not entirely neutral, but not bad at that level. It would not survive exposure to grad school level challenges or actual real world issue handling, by and large. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: [...] However, I also see the issue from another frame that is not part of Tim's spectrum. Sexual photographs, especially those of easily recognized people, have the potential to exploit or embarrass the people in them. I place a high value on not doing harm to the models pictured. This is essentially a consent issue. If the model is a well-known porn star and wants to be shown nude to the world, then there is no problem. However, many of the sexual images we receive depict non-notable individuals who appear to be engaged in private conduct. If the uploader is being honest and responsible, then this may be fine too. However, if the uploader is malicious, then the subject may have no idea how their image is being used. Even if the person pictured consented to having the photographs made, they may still be horrified at the idea that their image would be used in an encyclopedia seen by millions. At present, our controls regarding the publication of a person image are often very lax. With regards to self-made images, we often take a lot of things on faith, and personally I see that as irresponsible. In a sense, this way of looking at things is very similar to the issue of biographies of living persons. For a long time we treated those articles more or less the same as all other articles. However, eventually we came to accept that the potential to do harm to living persons was a special concern which warranted special safeguards, especially in the case of negative or private information. I would say that publishing photos of living persons in potentially embarrassing or exploitative situations should be another area where we should show special concern for the potential harm, and require a stronger justification for inclusion and use than typical content. (Sexual images are an easy example of a place where harm might be done, but I'd say using identifiable photos of non-notable people should be done cautiously in any situation where there is potential for embarrassment or other harm.) Obviously, from this point of view, I consider recent photos of living people to be rather different from illustrations or artwork, which would require no special treatment. Much of the discussion has focused on the potential to harm (or at least offend) the viewer of an image, but I think we should not forget the potential to harm the people in the images. I would like to second this particular point, though I am largely inclusionist in the larger debate here. I handled an OTRS case in which exactly this happened; a ex-boyfriend stole a camera which a female college student had taken private nude pictures, posted them to Flickr, then someone copied them to Wikipedia to illustrate one of our sex-related articles (for which, the specific picture was reasonably educational/on topic/appropriate). The student was extremely upset and angry about each of these abuses of her privacy and property. This is probably the exception rather than the rule, but it is worth keeping in mind. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Filtering ourselves is pointless
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:36 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 May 2010 22:32, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:31 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Can you point me to major media entities that have accepted the notion that Fox News was correct? I'm referring to the conclusion that one, in my assessment, would draw upon encountering Jimbo's remarks first-hand, with or without reading Fox's subsequent reports on the matter. Did you draw that conclusion? Your equivocation on this point is wearisome. Jimbo's actions were ridiculously damaging for *no gain whatsoever*. I saw this whole thing starting and took the weekend off to avoid stress. That said, now that it's fairly unavoidable - As far as I can tell, major mainstream media coverage of the original Fox stories was minimal. Followup in major mainstream media to Jimmy's actions has been limited at best - The BBC has a decent story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10104946.stm ...And the aforementioned Vanity Fair blog, and something on Huffington Post. There seems to be a widespread disbelief in the underlying child porn accusation, other than at Fox. In retrospect, attempting to some degree to read Jimmy's mind as of four days ago, I think we jumped to try and get ahead of negative press that did not develop. I think it was reasonably predictable that it wouldn't develop, but I understand why the mistake was made there. In response to the wider use/abuse of power issues; I think it's wise anytime a very bold action is taken, to consider beforehand whether the underlying issue is worth it - worth, if everything goes completely sideways in the ensuing event / discussion, the loss of the power or authority that was invoked to try and take the bold action. I can't help but think that this was a tremendously worthless underlying issue to go and melt the Founder Bit over. That bit has been extremely useful at times, used more carefully. It also has dragged down a number of people's perceptions (within the community) of the board and several individual members, again extremely useful things we had to work with and have now lost. One of the most important features and functions of a wider community input is to calibrate responses. Even if you do not change your underlying opinion on an issue, if others say consistently or loudly This isn't worth it, then perhaps it's not worth being bold about. It's not a function of leadership to ignore such input; it's sometimes a function of leadership to override such input. I think a bunch of people forgot the difference between override and ignore, in the leadup to the events of Friday/Saturday, and we're all much poorer for it. I would like to say thanks to those who maintained AGF and fought to seek and engage on community input throughout this. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 4:31 PM, robert_horn...@netzero.net robert_horn...@netzero.net wrote: -- Original Message -- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com No, it won't. People have been saying that for years and the fact remains that a screen full of a text with a few relevant images is a much better way to convey information than VR. I look at comments like this as somebody who is very closed minded and not willing to see more methods of instruction. A screen full of text certainly is a useful way to convey certain kinds of factual information, and I certainly see the analogy of a paper encyclopedia to be a useful way to compile and organize general knowledge about this universe we live in, but it isn't the only way and certainly isn't the best way to learn about all knowledge. I think I agree with others, that there's no evident future growth to VR as the access modality for the web / internet information resources writ large. One could posit a UI development of some sort which changed people's minds on that - but it's not sitting at the edge of credible technology / waiting for a userbase explosion. Let me pose this a different way, however. Take UI entirely out of the picture - the Wikimedia Foundation is all about supporting projects that gather and create information for the public good, presenting that to the public, and creating software to encourage that. As no proof-of-concept now exists for a shift to VR taking off and replacing the web as the dominant modality, the proposal is premature. It's a Computer Science UI problem right now, a topic for research. The foundation isn't a research foundation, it's a practical engineering and content foundation. We should not, in my opinion, spend a lot of effort attempting to pioneer new areas of CS research. If we hypothesize that such a new modality develops out in the research community, then we could move to support / adopt it in good time. Additionally, we can think about how we do our current primary goal, of gathering and creating information for the public good, and think about whether we'd do that differently if our UI modality was something other than the web. Such thinking might usefully inform next-generation wiki tool development, in terms of how information is managed within the WMF projects. I don't see any obvious changes there, but I haven't thought about it that much. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Essay
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: Your email is a bit too black and white: There are important articles in Humanities, not just in exact sciences, and a Bob Dylan album is arguably a touch more important than a South Park episode. But in general you make an important point. In the Hebrew Wikipedia several prominent editors adopted an attitude they call Wiki A / Wiki B, which they define more or less like this: * To Wiki A belong articles that are likely to be used by students to do homework. They should be as good as possible. * To Wiki B belong articles about articles about pop culture, video games and sportsmen. It's a waste of time and mental health to try to get Wiki B articles deleted, but it's also a waste of time to get them improved. Also, Wiki B-style articles rarely get to FA status in he.wp. On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 14:31, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: The primary function of the Wikipedias is to educate in the sciences, philosophy, technology and all that truly useful stuff. Nevertheless there's an argument for a Featured Article on South Park because it brings in new blood. Such an article can pique the interest of teens and twenties and get them involved. Discuss. I disagree with even going that far. It's possible and desirable to have encyclopedic coverage of popular culture topics, which have criticism and analysis and so forth. Relativity is not better than South Park; the universe would stop without one, but the other has more people who follow along and understand it. What any individual person chooses to focus on in working on Wikipedia depends on their own personal interests, and their personal judgment on what's worth their time in their own value system. I don't find any value in devaluing other people's priorities or value system. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chris Clayton
There's been an unusually aggressive set of these this spring; one of my accounts got hijacked for a week before I noticed it, and a friends' gmail account as well. Sigh. -george On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org wrote: Alex Mr.Z-man wrote: http://www roulette-casino-en-ligne.com/home.php If it hasn't been said yet... someone's email got a trojan. Don't click. -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: George Herbert wrote: On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: [...] And therefore if the Wikimedia logos are used with permission on Wikimedia-hosted projects, the earth will crack open, and dogs and cats will start living together openly. Please stop using this example. You're living in California again; recall that the earth does crack open here at regular intervals. If you keep saying it enough it will come true, and then you'll be Prophet Mike, and we'll all be doomed. You may be thinking about another Usenet legend,, you are talking to Mike Godwin, not James D. Nicoll of the Nicoll Event fame. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen Are you suggesting I don't remember my formative net years, Jussi? I'm far too young for Alzheimers, but old enough that the Morris Worm was a firsthand experience... I remember Mike from before the Law. Long before the Law. I know James Nicoll. I helped untangle Kent Paul Dolan's stunt with the speculative fiction newsgroups. .cabal and sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom were a couple of my pranks... Yes, I murdered B-news. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/3/30 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: That is the website UI, which is not content. They could say that the UI should also be completely free of copyrighted works. IMO that would be going overboard. If that is the case, while I understand and actually respect the decision not to use Wikimedia logos _to illustrate articles_ (although I don't agree with it), I find it extremely inconsequent and illogical to take away the logos that are in navigation templates and pointing to other material in other Wikimedia projects. As far as I'm concerned, these are part of the UI as much as the Wikipedia logo in the top left corner, and, more important, I find this decision actually harms our mission of distributing free content. If Wikimedia projects don't help themselves, I wonder who will. Anything that is rendered as page content will appear in the export dumps and needs to be considered by reusers, which includes those navigational templates. The logo at the upper left is different in that regard since it isn't part of the dumps. -Robert Rohde Keep in mind that navigational templates - which land at Wikipedia projects - count as the explicitly licensed links to our site usage of all our templates. Mike conveniently made that all OK for anyone to do without additional permission requests or complications anyways. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: [...] And therefore if the Wikimedia logos are used with permission on Wikimedia-hosted projects, the earth will crack open, and dogs and cats will start living together openly. Please stop using this example. You're living in California again; recall that the earth does crack open here at regular intervals. If you keep saying it enough it will come true, and then you'll be Prophet Mike, and we'll all be doomed. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wikihanni...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, After a long and tiring discussion on the Swedish Wikipedia Village Pump ( http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bybrunnen#Wikimedialoggor_i_artiklar), the logos of the Wikimedia Foundation projects have been deemed unfree (since they are copyrighted) and have since been removed from the article namespace, for example in links to the sister project, such as the template linking to Commons: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mall:Commons, but also the article about Wikipedia itself has no logo ( http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). I have been in contact with Mike Godwin, and got the response that the unfree logos can be used, as I had suspected. But a growing number of Swedish Wikipedians felt that the Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't follow any other rules than other organisations whose logos are copyrighted. The argument was that we shouldn't use images that any third-party user cannot use in the same fashion. The changes were implemented, although there was not a clear consensus to do so. I myself was opposed to this, citing from several emails from Mike Godwin. My viewpoint is that if we cannot even use our own logos in our own articles, something is very wrong. I also argued that we will not gain anything by removing these logos - as this is a non-issue for most ordinary users of Wikipedia. Anyways, I just wanted to hear if anybody else have had encountered this topic and how the matter was resolved. Is Swedish Wikipedia the first language version to not include the Wikimedia Foundation's logos? Do any of you find this discussion strange? Or are Swedish Wikipedia just ahead of the curve? Best wishes, Lennart This seems to me to be an extremely strange and unusual interpretation of the Foundation's policy on copyrighted images. I am not aware of anyone else having brought this up on other Wikis. That policy can be read by extremists to justify any practical policy between please write down a good reason to use this and remove them all using the policy as a pretext. It has been intentionally misinterpreted at both extremes. It was not intended to be used to justify unreasonable behavior. This seems like unreasonable behavior, though I have no ability to read Swedish so I can't comment on the particulars there. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Kwan Ting Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: Marcus Buck wrote: The Swedish Wikipedia decision is consequent and logical. Logos are copyrighted. Copyrighted material cannot be included. So no logos. It's plain and simple. The problem is not the reasonable decision of the Swedish Wikipedia, but the unreasonable decision of the Foundation to claim copyright for the logos. The foundation did that because they thought that would make it easier to defend the brand. But that's just intermingling trademarks and copyright. Trademark protection does everything we need. No need for additional copyright protection. The Coca Cola logo is PD-old (and in many jurisdictions also PD-ineligible) and they have no problem defending their brand. Why should Wikimedia logos be any different? Just release the logos under a free license and the problem will be gone. Or just use common sense that it's silly for a Wikimedia project to say it's not allowed to use a logo own by Wikimedia Foundation KTC If this was the English Wikipedia, the response would be somewhere between please do not be silly and Stop this or we will block you for disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point ( [[WP:DISRUPT]] ). I don't know Swedish Wikipedia's local standards and policy - but as Dave Gerard and Ting say, this is at the very least silly. We can't stop you from being silly, but it's not constructive in building an encyclopedia. If you want to play legal games or fight intellectual property law reform fights, this may not be the project for you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:03 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: George Herbert wrote: If this was the English Wikipedia, the response would be somewhere between please do not be silly and Stop this or we will block you for disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point ( [[WP:DISRUPT]] ). Read this thread before making such claims. The English Wikipedia did have this conversation and the outcome was nothing similar to what you've said. I don't know Swedish Wikipedia's local standards and policy - but as Dave Gerard and Ting say, this is at the very least silly. We can't stop you from being silly, but it's not constructive in building an encyclopedia. If you want to play legal games or fight intellectual property law reform fights, this may not be the project for you. Huh? There is a large subset of users on some Wikimedia wikis who do nothing more than play legal games or fight intellectual property law reform fights. To say it's incompatible with participation is ludicrous. MZMcBride I am aware of that. It's not necessary to tolerate it, as it's completely unrelated to our mission to build an encyclopedia, and often gets in the way of doing so. We have a tendency to let open content people go to town, as the project and foundation widely benefit from open content and we'd all like to encourage it. But that's not an open license for them to damage the encyclopedia. It's happened in the past. The last couple of instances on en.wp that I can recall got blocks. I don't think that was the wrong outcome, though your opinion may vary. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's authority (on global bans)
On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 12:49 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 25 March 2010 02:51, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Gregory Kohs wrote: Point of clarification... does Jimmy Wales have the authority to impose a global ban on a user? Yes, Jimmy has always had such rights, and he continues to enjoy broad community support. -- Tim Starling No he doesn't. However he didn't actually impose a global ban in this case but it is unlikely there are any significant wikimedia projects that would not block the individual in question on sight. Both the yes he does and no he doesn't sides are asserting and assuming rather than reporting a known quantity. There has been no organized or widespread attempt to either ask Jimmy to give it up or to take it away. I can name a number of individuals who assert that should happen, but there's no poll, no project, no policy proposal to do so. We simply don't know what the community actually feels about it, in part because Jimmy uses the power so sparingly that very very few people ever encounter it firsthand. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's authority (on global bans)
I qualified it with organized or widespread, and did so for a reason... There is currently one upset individual, and perhaps a few mild supporters of the effort, but there is no evidence of widespread support. Putting up a page on a wiki for an idea does not equal organization or widespread support... On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 4:33 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: There has been no organized or widespread attempt to either ask Jimmy to give it up or to take it away. I can name a number of individuals who assert that should happen, but there's no poll, no project, no policy proposal to do so. There is now: * http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag*http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Founder/Proposal_to_the_rights_removal ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Dan Rosenthal wrote: You've identified one of the criticisms of OCILLA/DMCA -- that it can be easily abused by copyright holder to keep stuff offline. (This is what the EFF is probably getting involved over). However, the proper response to that is for the alleged infringer to request sanctions against the copyright holder for misrepresentation. It's not the Foundation's place to get involved, nor the proper use of their resources to second and third-guess these decisions. They take the office action, remove whatever it is, and if the underlying legal battle gets fought, they can then go and reverse it. So no, there's no obligation to interject ourselves, but more importantly I think we DO have an obligation to respect the existing legal system as well as protect the entire project from litigation. This raises an interesting question. One of the criticisms of the whole system is that there is no practical system of even keeping track of how much the system is abused, since apparently only Google is open about what suspected infringing content it is removing. So there really is no one keeping the system honest. It is clear to me that antagonizing all those people who are making accusations that content on Wikipedia is of an infringing nature -- whether it is or is not -- may well not be a tactically wise to the world move. But it does give one pause. In an ideal world it would be cool to be completely transparent to folks like Chilling Effects. It's in some ways useful to see all of it - but that also could be considered to be abusing someone who innocently makes a legitimate takedown over legitimately actually copyrighted material which is hosted improperly. We need to be honest - we do have users upload a lot of copyrighted content improperly. Copyvio problems are a major issue on English Wikipedia, Commons, and elsewhere. Beating up on people who notify us about that is not appropriate. Perhaps I'm being too paranoid, but we do have flash mobs gather and go after people for less than completely legitimate reasons. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedic OCD
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Some books are very productive in that way, if you have time to add each interesting fact to the encyclopedia. TV is a bit awkward to reference, at least routinely. Fred Does anyone else suffer from this problem, whereby you listen to or watch any kind of programme and think I could add that to Wikipedia! For me, there's so many facts I encounter every day that having that thought becomes overwhelming. I just wonder if I'm alone. Last time I had a serious attack of that, with a Book, I spent a day doing diagrams and two days learning the math markup language stuff well enough to transcribe the formulas in accurately. It is somewhat self-correcting ;-P -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:28 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: The hand in hand with children wording seems to conflate physical space with cyberspace. Please see my relevant reply to George William Herbert. There's a known and ancedotally (but not known to be statistically) significant trend of pedophiles attracting victims online. Also, apparently, of them coordinating amongst themselves to pass tips about possible victims in specific areas. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 9:25 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: The hand in hand with children wording seems to conflate physical space with cyberspace. How about collaborating with children? That's accurate, but I'm not quibbling over terminology. As I explained to George, my point is that some measures commonly taken in physical space are ineffective in cyberspace. Wikipedia's strong culture of pseudonymity and anonymity makes protecting anyone, or detecting anyone, a nearly lost cause if they have any clue and sense of privacy. Unlike real life, we can't make guarantees with anything approaching a straight face. However - there's a difference between being unable to effectively screen people by real world standards, and not having a policy of acting when we do detect something. One is acknowledging cultural and technical reality - because of who and where we are, we couldn't possibly do better than random luck at finding these people. The other is disregarding any responsibility as a site and community to protect our younger members and our community from harm, if we find out via whatever means. Witch hunts looking for people don't seem helpful or productive to me. But if they out themselves somewhere else and are noticed here, then we're aware and on notice. The question is, entirely, what do we do then. Do we owe the underaged users a duty to protect them from known threats? Do we owe the project as a whole a duty to protect it from disgrace by association? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy
Without picking on anyone in particular, I urge everyone to go back and reread Brad's comment earlier. This conversation is following the path that public discussions on this have repeatedly before. It is not clear that anyone has raised any issues which are appropriate or necessary for the Foundation to deal with. The English language Wikipedia policy, slightly codified as it is, has been stated and explained. If you want to discuss that further I would recommend taking it to Wikien-L, or start a policy discussion on-Wiki. If you have a specific claim that the Foundation has to or should intervene please state that, simply and concisely. Otherwise, in my opinion, this is going far afield from appropriate on Foundation-l. I am not a list mod and have no pretense that I can make the conversation go away. But - please consider if you're holding a productive conversation, and please consider if it's even vaguely in the right place. Thanks. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Jake Wartenberg j...@jakewartenberg.com wrote: I am not talking about pedophilia activism, but instances where the individual in question is not disruptively editing. There are a wide variety of reasons to permanently block people who were elsewhere identified (more commonly, self-identified) as pedophiles but edit here apparently harmlessly, including bringing the project into disrepute (Jimbo's wording, I think), the latent threat to underage editors, that they'd have to be watched continuously to make sure they did not start advocating or preying on underage users. The Foundation and en.wp community policies are generally to be excessively tolerant of personal opinion and political and religious beliefs, etc. We do not want to let one countries' social mores, political restrictions, civil rights restrictions limit who can participate and how. However, there's no country in the world where pedophilia is legal. It's poorly enforced in some, but there are laws against it even there. What it comes down to - the very presence of an editor who is known to be a pedophile or pedophilia advocate is disruptive to the community, and quite possibly damaging to it, inherently to them being who they are and them being open about it. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pedophilia and the Non discrimination policy
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 3:57 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: This is the risk that we run when we begin banning editors because we dislike beliefs and behaviors unrelated to their participation in the wikis. We might avoid some negative attention that would accompany their involvement, but what sort of project are we left with? Certainly not the sort that I signed up for (and not one that will engender positive publicity as the open community that it's purported to be). We have one single class of editors who, as a class, for non-wiki-behavioral reasons, we ban. This class' participation is problematic both for our other users safety and for Wikipedia's reputation and integrity of content. There is no slippery slope. Nobody has seriously proposed expanding the list in any way. Nobody is in favor of banning Communists, Republicans, Gays, or Moslems. There is no question that other groups do not pose a risk, as a group, to our other users' safety or our reputation or integrity of content. Pedophiles have a near unity risk of reoffending. Even the ones who say they have never abused anyone and never intend to, according to surveys and psychologists, essentially always do. There is a reason they are, after conviction (in the US) not allowed anywhere near children in organized settings. Wikipedia is a large organized setting, with children present as editors. We owe them a duty to not let known pedophiles near them. We can't guarantee that unknown ones aren't out there - but if we do become aware, we must act. We also, to continue to be taken seriously by society at large, not allow ourselves to be a venue for their participation. Being known as pedophile-friendly leads to societal and press condemnation and governmental action, all of which would wreck the project. I understand that some do not agree. But the reasons for this policy are well founded. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted...
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:54 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/26/2009 3:39:23 AM Pacific Standard Time, valde...@gmail.com writes: The final solution is that only people who are already expert in the processes can impose their point of view and in fact en.wikipedia don't assure a neutral point of view but the point of view of expert users. Exactly the same point I've made a few times. Those who are expert in the use of the game rules, impose their view on those who are not expert. Which is why I've suggested the establishment of a group of advocates for the editor versus the administrators who are viewed as policemen. In a real society, the only classifications are not public and police. We also have checks and balances against the power of the police to force compliance. In Wikipedia we do not have those checks and balances. You assume that administrators are a monolithic and confrontational lot, neither of which is necessarily true, though both do happen at times. We have the Mediators, arbcom, and experienced non-admin editors around too. Anyone who thinks admins can run roughshod over users should watch ANI for a while. We aren't great about self-policing - but we do it. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Minors and sexual explicit stuff
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: As is often stated WMF is an ISP, and not a publisher. Stating it often doesn't make it true. The WMF is quite clearly a publisher. It even has admitted as much when it exercised the GFDL clause purporting to allow any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works to republish Wikipedia (et. al.) under CC-BY-SA. Anyone who says the WMF is not a publisher is just plain wrong. So state it as much as you want. The WMF is a publisher. Under Section 230 of the CDA it most likely won't be treated as a publisher, but that doesn't mean it isn't a publisher. The section 230 that would seem to matter here? The WMF has all sorts of roles, depending on who you are, how you look at it, and what your perspective is (and what day of the month it is, etc). Referring to legal issues, one has to remain domain specific when using specific terms in a legal sense. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Minors and sexual explicit stuff
There are a number of problems with these statements. One - the Foundation exists to host and legally protect the encyclopedia, not direct it in all matters. Most policy flows up rather than down. Things which would grossly embarrass or endanger the encyclopedia are an exception, but no good case has been made here for that. On en.wp this topic has been addressed repeatedly - there is (near) universal support for enforcing legal requirements and restrictions to the degree that they are felt or found to apply. Past that, there's at least an arguable consensus that WP:NOTCENSORED is the policy the community supports. Is it worse for a 15-year-old (or 17-year-old, or 13-year-old) to participate in discussions about or administrative actions regarding an image or article with mature content, compared to merely being able to view the image or article? The latter is widely felt to be a parental control issue. Why not the former? I believe that advocates of a change both are taking the wrong venue here, and not explaining how the level of access currently under debate is fundamentally different than basic access to view images or read articles. If there is an argument to be made that there's a qualitative difference or legal difference then that is an appropriate topic for policy discussions on en.wp. The burden of proof for justifying that there's the sort of policy issue that the Foundation must by nature intervene in is not met, nor being specifically argued. If you feel that it's true - you need to argue specifically to that point. -george On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: +1. Not sure what I can add to that, other than I agree completely. We have great nuance in our debates about copyright and take consummate care when concerns are raised on that front. But when concerns are raised in other areas (such as this one) we often tend towards extreme positions characterised by a refusal to engage in the issue and simplistic shutdowns. I have no answer or particular axe to grind in this topic but I do think it is worth consideration. Nathan's response has got to be the most well written thing I've seen on Foundatio.nl for a long time. -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: The Foundation, Commons and the English Wikipedia typically address problems associated with minors by refusing to engage as a group. Some individuals advise children not to put personally identifying information on their userpage, but that is advice haphazardly given and no effort is made to systematically identify situations where it would be useful. That one problem is a microcosm for the whole spectrum of children issues throughout Wikimedia - we encourage individual editors to advise other editors when they might be endangering themselves, but we don't allow (and often refuse even to discuss) more proactive solutions. Outstanding problems that have been identified in the past: * Access of minor readers to sexually explicit material * Involvement of minor participants / administrators in the administration of sexually explicit content * Sexually explicit imagery that features or may feature models under the age of 18 Our responses to these problems have never been more sophisticated than Wikimedia is not censored. Perhaps its assumed that by refusing to budge from this absolute position, we avoid a war by inches where we will ultimately be forced to cave to all cultural sensitivities. Instead of evaluating what our responsibilities should be, what action we ought to take, we limit ourselves only to what we *must* do by law. I think that's a mistake. I'm not sure we can do much about minor readers and participants, except perhaps putting certain types of content behind a warning wall that can be easily bypassed. The types of verification and consent models used in the web industry are formatted on limiting liability, they don't need to be (and consequently are not) very effective. Adopting one of these models may not make sense for Wikimedia, but it certainly makes sense to have a discussion about it. Geni and Andrew's comments strike me as an attempt to foreclose any discussion. On the other hand, we certainly can do more on policing the sexually explicit imagery on Commons against possible violations of child pornography and privacy laws. We may not *have* to do this, but we ought to. There is at least one large category of images, from a specific photographer, where it has long been suspected that some models are underage. The only verification effort we make now is on licensing, but I think we ought to require actual model releases on sexually explicit photographs. We will gain far more by protecting the safety and privacy of image subjects than we stand to lose in the volume of explicit photos. Nathan
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has failed
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: [...] Few to no Wikipedia articles point at Wikinews even when there is a Wikinews article. I believe that there's a policy determination that Wikinews is not a Wikipedia Reliable Source as defined in [[WP:RS]], so not having pointers from Wikipedia to Wikinews is to be expected. (I leave the rest of the case for others to debate). -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/10/8 Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com: Despite an overall three-star rating (out of four), WMF was only rated two stars for Organization Efficency. This is described by Charity Navigator as Meets or nearly meets industry standards but underperforms most charities in its Cause. The Charity Navigator site further states: The WMF is unique in being so massively volunteer driven. The WMF exists to run the servers and handle the admin, almost everything else is done by volunteers and doesn't appear on the income statement. It's inevitable that the WMF will spend a lot of its money on admin. If you include volunteer time on the income statement, even at a nominal rate of $1/hr or something, then we would be spending almost all our resources on programmes. The WMF is not entirely unique in that regard; many other charities are largely volunteer (cf Red Cross). However, the Foundation as professionally organized core around which a much larger volunteer activity rotates is fairly rare. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/10/8 George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com: Red Cross volunteers do a little bit of prep work, typically, and a little training each year. And then a disaster hits and they drop everything and respond. Are most Red Cross volunteers directly involved in disaster response? I would expect most of them to be doing fundraising, education and publicity, and long term projects. My experience - which may not be typical - is that they have a few people doing training instruction (first aid / first responder training, disaster training etc), a lot of people who are actual disaster responders (with much of the first group, and many more), and relatively few doing other stuff. I don't know what their statistics are, though, so I don't know if my experience is statistically valid across their volunteer set... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] CTO role (Was: Re: Priorities and opportunities)
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/9/16 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com: Putting aside the unnecessary bad faith and challenges to the foundation's integrity: I find this all exciting - planning for significant tech budget support, possible major sponsorships (I've always hoped we would one day find multiple sources for long-term in-kind support of servers and bandwidth), c. I would simply like to see more open discussion of what our perfect-world tech dreams are, and how to pursue what sorts of sponsorships. Thanks, Sam. I find the discussion of the last few days symptomatic of the problems we've begun to brainstorm about with regard to the signal/noise ratio, healthiness and openness of this particular forum. (And by openness I mean that a forum that is dominated by highly abrasive, high volume, low signal discussions is actually not very open.) I do want to revisit the post limit question as a possible answer, but let's do that separately. The thread did surface some topics which are worth talking about, both in general and specific terms, and I'm taking the liberty to start a new thread to isolate some of those topics. For one thing, I think it's always good to revisit and iterate processes for defining priorities, and for achieving the highest impact in those identified areas. Developing more sophisticated processes both for short-term and long-term planning has been precisely one of the key focus areas of the last year. Internally, we've begun experimenting with assessment spreadsheets and standardized project briefs, drawing from the expertise of project management experts as well as Sue's specific work in developing a very well thought-out prioritization system at the CBC. Publicly, we're engaged in the strategy planning process -- the associated Call for Proposals is a first attempt to conduct a large-scale assessment of potential priorities. (I hope that with future improvements to the ReaderFeedback extension we'll be able to generate more helpful reports based on that particular assessment.) Ideally, the internal and public processes will converge sooner rather than later. For example, I posted a project brief that I developed internally through the strategy CfP: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Toolkit I believe this one was submitted by Jennifer: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Management_practices_to_Expand_Participation And this one by Tim: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Directed_community_fundraising The next phase of the strategy planning process, the deep-dive task forces, will be an interesting experiment in serious community-driven planning work, complemented by the research conducted with the help of our partners at The Bridgespan Group. All of this will become part of the institutional memory of the Wikimedia movement, and hopefully we'll continue to raise the bar in our thinking, planning, and collaboration. - - - Of course separately from setting priorities, there's the critical need to improve our ability to execute upon those priorities. This includes the further development of project pipelines, more systematic volunteer engagement, additional internal HR support, additional hiring of staff to address key capacity gaps, etc. I'm thrilled by how far we've come, and to be able to have supported, and continue to support, an unprecedented large-scale initiative like the usability project. I'm well-aware that there continue to be key priorities that we aren't executing as effectively as we could. The first thing many partners, donors and friends say when they visit Wikimedia Foundation is how astonishing it is that an operation of this scale can function with so little funding and staff. The truth is that by any reasonable measure of efficiency and money-to-impact ratio, we're achieving wonderful things together, and that's easy to forget when looking at issues in isolation. (Yes, it would be wonderful to have the full-history dumps running ASAP. Hm, it would be nice to have the full-history dumps for some other top 50 content websites. Oh, right, they don't provide any.) But I don't measure our success compared to other organizations. The most important question to me is whether we are continually raising the bar in what we're doing and how we do it. The most recent Wikimania was the most thoughtful and self-aware one I've ever attended, with deep, constructive conversations and very serious efforts of everyone involved to re-ignite and strengthen our movement. There are elements of groupthink, but also very systematic attempts to break out of it. There are great opportunities today for anyone to become engaged in helping to shape the future of what we do, and to accomplish real change in the world as a result. Ultimately we all have to make a choice how we spend our time -- how we spend our
Re: [Foundation-l] Security holes in Mediawiki
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com wrote: I was sort of surprised to learn today that Mediawiki software has had 37 security holes identified: http://akahele.org/2009/09/false-sense-of-security/ Are most of these patched now, or are they still open? If still open, is the Foundation making site user security more of a priority in 2010? From the report: Multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the web-based installer (config/index.php) in MediaWiki 1.6 before 1.6.12, 1.12 before 1.12.4, and 1.13 before 1.13.4, when the installer is in active use, allow remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via unspecified vectors. MediaWiki's current stable version is 1.15.1, which has been out for 2 months now. En.wikipedia.org is running on 1.16alpha. There being security holes in software is a given. Them being there negligently is an issue. But them being there is not. Holes in software which is years old is not news - the newer versions have been patched, appropriately and responsibly. Are there issues with current MW? Sure. 26 open issues a la the raw report above? No. That's an accumulation of issues in older versions, which are either all or nearly all patched now. MediaWiki is not felt by the wider open source or security communities to be a particularly bad (or super strong) open source product. The programming team is, however, very responsive to security issues... as one has to be if one is running a top-10 internet site, because anyone who can hack it will just for the cred. This is not a nonissue - any open source dev team and any large website ops team have to be focused on this as one of many high priorities - but it's not a huge gotcha. It's not new, it's not big news, and it's not suprising. Security holes (regretfully and unfortunately) happen. Security is keeping up to date and fixing them when they are discovered. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
My two cents - The Board telegraphed this ahead of time, not the particulars (who/when) but the generalities. The process is not unusual for other charitable organizations. There are more community members (active or ex) on the Board than any other category. There still will be even if all the potential / authorized expert slots are filled. While there is always a theoretical potential for some sort of un-core-principles like covert coup from within, there is whether one invites external board members in or not and whether or not we accept money from people with strings. I see no sign that any of the staff or board are interested in any such thing. They seem to be doing a lot of Make the charity a serious, self-sustaining organization, in addition to just keeping the lights on for the servers. But that's the purpose of the Foundation. A pure volunteer pure individual donations organization can't accomplish the stability and help expand open access to information in the way we all would like to see. We (the community) wanted this growth and maturity. We hired people who can do this growth and mature the organization, and are moving down the track in the direction we asked them to go. The strings here are probably to our advantage - more competent people with wider experience and sharing our core values on the Board is a good thing, not a bad one. Bravo to the Board and Staff for this. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Gregory Kohsthekoh...@gmail.com wrote: *Jan-Bart de Vreede said: * the next year will be crucial for us as an organization in determining our long term strategy. But that process is shaped by YOU. The tremendous strategy project (details at http://strategy.wikimedia.org ) started a month ago is making good first steps. The Board of Trustees does not own any of the Wikimedia projects, you do. Participate on the strategy wiki (and encourage others to do so) to help determine the future direction of our organization, you will probably have more impace than any single board member ever will... I offered a proposal at the Wikimedia Strategy project, with supporting links to outside, independent documentation. Within about 40 minutes, the proposal was removed, and I was indefinitely blocked from that particular project, including IP address blocking. This, despite the fact that I almost single-handedly wrote the sampling design and fine-tuned literally all of the 2009 Foundation Development Survey for the WMF on the Meta project. But, I own the Wikimedia projects? I will have more impact by being blocked from the Wikimedia Strategy project than any single board member (including Jimmy Wales?) ever will? Your pithy inspirational motivations are ringing hollow for me, Mr. de Vreede. Stepping sideways from the poking at each other... As I'm not an administrator on the strategy project wiki, I can't see what got deleted there. Can you summarize it for us (or at least, for me, in private email, if you don't want to send to the foundation list)? Thank you. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote: I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel 24x7 ;-P ). The team seems to function well - servers seem decently stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is up to industry standards for large website operations. At some point tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and organizational knowledge. Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been increasing the ops staff this last year. One addition that popped up in my head overnight. You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role. CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards. CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and outwards facing environments. Large websites sometimes have CTO for outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense. I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference in who you can find and how they approach the role. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 8/7/09 3:39 PM, James Forrester wrote: 2009/8/7 Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org: On 8/7/09 3:06 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: It's not just about resumes, it's also about being taken seriously when communicating with others. A Head Software Architect will probably be taken more seriously than a Senior Software Architect, since the former shows you are the boss, that latter could be one of many. Having many folks at that level is be a condition dearly to be wished for! Well, in my experience it shows that the organisation's overall architecture is poorly thought-out, and with insufficient resource expenditure on correcting it (or, for that matter, stopping the rot getting even worse). But yes. :-) Well ideally it would be because we really do have that much work to do... ;) -- brion My eleven cents - My consulting company gets brought in a lot to deal with this type of growth in commercial companies (few have this big a web presence, but operations concepts are operations concepts). Titles are important to some people (above in senior leadership, at level where people are sensitive about their title, below where line staff sometimes behave differently depending on management titles). Some people not so much. Either way works, but it does matter to know your own staff, leadership, and candidates mindsets. Separating out development lead role (engineering) from operations lead role is an important step. Second, and not too far behind, is usually separating out internal IT from web-facing operations - two very different environments and sets of customer expectations, and usually best served by different people and team leads. A good CTO / operations candidate will be able to look at the way WMF is operating those teams now and try to suggest paths forwards for those two functional roles etc. I believe some internal staff are focusing on office IT now, and a lot of the website operations people are volunteer. I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel 24x7 ;-P ). The team seems to function well - servers seem decently stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is up to industry standards for large website operations. At some point tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and organizational knowledge. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
