Re: [Foundation-l] Making wikimediafoundation.org more open to contributions

[Noein]

On 30/01/2011 13:10, koteche mcintosh wrote:
> People choose to donate just like before. But on a regular basis. everyone
> can see the fund. Everyone is part of the story. this GALVANIZES
> support. Shoes governments the POWER of public opinion. Creates a virtual
> community striving for information in a world where information is
> key..

Except for the ads, it's an excellent idea. Transparent, online access
to accounts and a permanently donating community.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[Noein]

On 21/01/2011 03:36, whothis wrote:
> Thanks for introducing yourself Achal after so many years on the Advisory
> Board. Dare I suggest, you add part of that introduction to your Advisory
> Board page on one of the wikis. About the 5 year plan, dare I suggest you
> get around to reading that one of these days, you're on the Advisory Board
> after all.
> 
> Let me clarify something, the page thats being linked to by Erik Moeller is
> a grant page, you are appointed as a fellow. I might be wrong on this but
> none of the other fellows had to apply for grants or the majority of them
> did not. Even the existence of such a process was unknown to most. The grant
> in question, I have no issue with, you are more than welcome to pursue any
> research you want, its your position as the fellow that I am concerned
> about. You can't be on an advisory board and tell a non-profit organization
> what to do as a pro-bono advisor to the board and then get paid by the said
> foundation as a fellow a few years into your tenure, serving both positions
> at the same time. This I believe, wreaks of impropriety, none of the other
> Advisory Board members ever had or will have the same privilege I assume,
> which is why I replied to this thread in the first place.
> 
> This is something that the Foundation should have checked and announced
> before your appointment. In my opinion, you can have one or the other, you
> can either be a paid staff member/researcher for as long as the foundation
> employs you or you can be on the board as an advisor.
> 
> Also, from your and Erik's admission above, the scope of your involvement
> seems to be far larger than I previously thought, encompassing the board,
> chapters and "other kinds of affiliation that might usefully exist within
> our world", this only heightens my concerns even more.
> 
> I hope others reading this realize the implication of your appointment. I
> had no idea who you were before this, and still don't, its nothing personal
> against you. Its the foundation I am bringing this up to, which I hope
> realizes, is for their own benefit.
> 
> 
> E. Forrester

Welcome Achal!

Well, it seems you were already there for longer than I was, so
"welcome" feels strange to say. But anyway, it's good to have someone
important coming out of the shadow to receive a well deserved grant.
Speaking of which, I feel merrier when I know why I'm applauding, so
don't be modest and tell us in full detail about your merits!


To the people who are "wary": come on my friends, it's only power and
money. Assume good faith from the people who are handling it and go back
to a quiet mode as usual. Keep positive vibes like edits and donations
coming, though.

Achal even tossed a solution to your *emotional* problems: "half an hour
of Pranayama every morning: it makes one feel calm and loving." That was
very considered from his part, given how busy he is. You can also try
some pills.

Cheers.




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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Noein]

On 19/01/2011 06:04, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
> 
> I remember
> still how in the middle of tough but slowly progressing discussion on
> global admins on Meta within a day several hundred en.wp users apparently
> unhappy with the fact that somebody may be rolling back their edits came,
> voted no, and the proposal was dead. Most of them never participated in the
> discussion and have never been seen on meta. 

Have you a link?

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Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Noein]

I'd like to precise because of my bad english that I don't how to handle
"polite" questioning without looking condescending or angry. I am
uttering my words with the most profound respect to Erik even if I
dissent about some topics with him.


Erik wrote:
>> I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it
>> substantially harder to access the information that people were coming

Erik, why would people be complaining specifically about them if it's
not about their disturbance?

Of course you're entitled to have your personal opinion about the
banners' effects on YOURSELF (though I think you mentioned your 'pain
points increasing too but not that much' earlier, I don't remember the
exact wording).
Of course you are. However speaking in vague and general terms right
after testimonials and complaints could look like denial of OTHERS'
feelings. Those reports could be genuine and even right. The facts could
be that the 'banners' (aren't they self-published ads really?)  ARE
annoying (even worrying for some) and that the discussion should be
allowed instead of denied.

My 2p.

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Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Noein]

Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship
with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if
the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the
lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and
mission?
I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.



On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
> Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut
> something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not
> try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should
> start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get
> hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino

[Noein]

On 20/12/2010 15:31, David Gerard wrote:
> On 20 December 2010 17:15, MZMcBride  wrote:
>> Marc Riddell wrote:
> On 19/12/2010 23:07, Fred Bauder wrote:
> 
 There can be no viable alternative to Wikipedia.
> 
>>> This is the type of thinking that sets you up to being blindsided.
> 
>> In this case, that sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> 
> 
> Specifically, that the only way Wikipedia will get itself any sort of
> viable competitor is by allowing itself to be blindsided.
> 
> Fortunately, a proper blindsiding requires something that addresses
> structural defects of Wikipedia in such a way that others can use
> them.
> 
> (One idea that was mooted on the Citizendium forums: a general,
> neutral encyclopedia that is heavy on the data, using SMW or similar.
> Some of the dreams of Wikidata would cover this - "infoboxes on
> steroids" at a minimum. Have we made any progress on a coherent
> wishlist for Wikidata?)
> 
> [And has someone trademarked Wikidata yet, or a suitable similar
> concept if we're too late?]

Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal.
 Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of
chapters?
I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is
good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of
positions about this?


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Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino

[Noein]

On 19/12/2010 23:07, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> There can be no viable
> alternative to Wikipedia.
> 
> Fred
> 
> User:Fred Bauder


What?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki[p/m]edia

[Noein]

On 09/12/2010 21:20, Philippe Beaudette wrote:
> [...]thinking that we could manage to raise the yield slightly by 
> deliberately attempting to clarify (not to confuse) for people that
> the Wikimedia Foundation was directly affiliated with Wikipedia.
You are saying that it was intentional.

> When we get letters saying things like "I'd donate, but only to 
> Wikipedia, not to Wikimedia", it spells out for us that it's
> possible we could attract more people with the institution of
> Wikipedia than the institution of Wikimedia.
If those people are only willing to donate to Wikipedia, they have the
right to know that their money will instead go to or through the WMF.
Pretending to be Wikipedia is not your right, and certainly not with the
excuse of helping people to clarify their mind.
If you want them to donate to the WMF and they don't do it because you
think they don't know what it is, then inform them fairly and ask for
their donation.
This is a very borderline action, even if well-intended. A few seconds
of ethical considerations would have prevented it. Why were they not
taken? The goal of obtaining money cannot be an excuse for toying with
the trust of donors.
Once again it makes me wonder what the staff think Wikipedia, Wikimania
and their community are. Shouldn't the uttermost respect be naturally
expected?

My intend is not to accuse anybody. I'm assuming good faith but poor
understanding of the nature of the wiki[p|m]edia communities.



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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

[Noein]

You don't receive your own mails. We got two copies of your previous
mail. You can check on the pipermail. [1]


[1]: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/

On 09/12/2010 19:39, Huib Laurens wrote:
> Am I placed on moderation? all my previous emails seem to fail?
> 
> 
> 2010/12/9 Austin Hair 
> 
>> 2010/12/9 KIZU Naoko :
>>> I don't support this word choice: on twitter.com Japanese speaking
>>> reader mistook it as "one of English Wikipedia admins" "someone who
>>> writes articles" etc.
>>>
>>> Not only "smaller" projects but also on the Wikipedia, this factual
>>> error is better to correct I think. I heard it placed only on enwiki
>>> (in a downtime I haven't confirmed yet), but English is no mother
>>> tongue of every reader of the English Wikipedia. Factual error and
>>> language barriers may spread false information.
>>
>> Not to mention cultural barriers.  In Wikipedia communities with (to
>> me, uncomfortably) structured hierarchies―"Senior Editor," "Editor
>> Second Class," "Senior Chief Petty Editor"―this is bound to confuse
>> the heck out of people.  As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we
>> have enough problems trying to differentiate between Wikileaks and
>> Wikimedia; having to revisit Wikimedia vs. Wikipedia is understandably
>> frustrating to those of us who've spent years explaining the
>> difference.
>>
>> It's easy to point fingers at an almost exclusively North American
>> staff and cry "cultural ignorance," but I'm not―I know that plenty of
>> people on staff have years of experience working across cultures, even
>> if it's talking to foreigners on IRC.
>>
>> I wonder, though, who on staff can name the editor ranks on zhwiki?
>>
>> Austin
>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:55 AM, John Vandenberg 
>> wrote:
 On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Philippe Beaudette
  wrote:
> FWIW
>
> The word Wikipedia wasn't supposed to make it to sister sites, and
>> that's being fixed right now, so pardon my quick note... I'll write a bit
>> more later about the term as being used on Wikipedia, but the error in
>> pushing it out to sister sites is being corrected right now, so I wanted to
>> acknowledge that...

 Wikipedia does not have an Executive Director, or anything of the
 sort.  That title suggests that Sue has the final say over content.  I
 don't think it should be used anywhere.

 But, thanks for at least removing it from the 'smaller' projects.

 --
 John Vandenberg

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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
>>> member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会
>> http://kansai.wikimedia.jp
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>>
>> ___
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> 
> 
> 


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Re: [Foundation-l] Ethics (was: Corporate Social Responsibility)

[Noein]

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What I thought was a simple question has generated a volley of strong
answers, even some hostility. This was not the original topic. So I will
wrap my intervention and be gone for a while.

==Representation==
As far as I know, there is no survey of the wikimedians on what they
think about the transparency of the Foundation and about the salaries of
the employees. From my side, I always ask people what they think. In my
life I listened to people of all ethnics and social classes from any
country.
So I'm doing an educated guess, based on my eclectic experiences and
relationships, about the Foundation (and possibly the Chapters) not
representing the consensus of the community (*). But don't throw your
stones yet, and answer to yourself three questions:
Do you care about what the community thinks?
Do you have information about what it thinks?
Is your circle of relationships and culture a good sample of the people
concerned by the wikipedia project?

Apparently, most of the people in this mailing list are living in one of
the most expensive microcosmos of the world, with the highest standards
of life. In contrast, the drama about having microwaved food and an old
car is incomprehensible to 6 billions of people. I do understand it,
though, but your views need to be challenged.

Instead of explaining how normal, justified and even lowly paid is your
way of life, did anyone put things in a bigger perspective? 150 000$ a
year puts someone in the 0.33% top of the world [1]. Even 5000$ a month
puts you in the 0.91% top. I'm not aiming at any individual in
particular but showing the economical elitism of the Foundation in the
worldwide context.
And by the way, as a contrasting sidenote to the declarations made on
this list about the price of legal advising, some associations do it for
free [2]. All I'm asking here, is whether this approach was ever
considered and tried?


==Ethics==
The dozens of thousands of dedicated volunteers prove that the mission
of Wikipedia is of an ethical essence. It is thus mandatory for the
representatives and leaders to recognize it and share it. Despising or
denying the ethical considerations is a mistake which can only end with
the disavowing of an informed community.

I've been wondering for a while how the dedicated volunteers were
keeping faith in their abnegation when some people were getting paid for
the same work, or worse, for transforming the volunteer work into money
- - which I find discouraging and disturbing. It seems that opacity is one
of the answers. Things are done discreetly [3][4] and confidentially [5].

Unless the Foundation aims to transform the Wikipedia into a
rich-countries-centered money-making-machine, (and the doubling of the
paid staff for a doubling of the fundraising is quite ambiguous to
interpret), compliance with legal requirements will not suffice: I don't
see other path than ethical consciousness to authentically reach all
mankind.

I've been asked to suggest concrete proposals. This would be useless as
long as there is a majoritary denial. We can't discuss solutions while
there is no awareness of the problem. And this lack of perception should
be the first problem to be addressed.


Having said that, I will retire from the discussion for a while. I need
some perspective too. Once again, bear in mind that I mean no offense.


(*): and remember that some - or in fact, most - communities are absent,
as the current thread about american-africans shows.

[1]: http://www.globalrichlist.com/
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Law_Center
[3]: What's hidden in this page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book
[4]: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thanks_Virgin_Unite
[5]:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-October/69.html
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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 20/11/2010 23:26, David Gerard wrote:
> On 21 November 2010 01:27, Noein  wrote:
> 
>> I hope that you don't feel threatened by novelty. Please don't close
>> your mind to my ideas just because you've never heard of them. The
>> Wikipedia idea begins by "Imagine".
> 
> 
> You seem to have been presenting your disagreements as if you believed
> yourself to be making complaints you reasonably expected to be acted
> upon in this world, rather than presenting a perfect spherical charity
> of uniform density in a vacuum at absolute zero as you now seem to be
> saying you have been.

I was used to more respectful manners from you, David.

The changes are possible. I'm humbly checking why they're not already
happening in Wikipedia.
The capitalist and corporatist mentalities I'm discovering in the
oligarchy of the Foundation (without any pejorative meaning in it) are
not representative, in my opinion, of a general consensus from the
community.
- From there I see three paths:
- - ask for more opinions in the hope I'm wrong
- - help the Foundation to understand other ways of thinking and to engage
in higher ethics.
- - alert the community

Since I have better things to do for 2011 than activism, I'd rather try
the civilized ways of talking and listening.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 20/11/2010 09:37, Craig Franklin wrote:
> I don't know any of these people personally, but $128k a year for a legal
> expert of Mike Godwin's stature and experience sounds like a bargain, not an
> unreasonable expense.  Given that WMF needs competent legal representation,
> and given that the WMF is not exactly flush with cash, we should be thanking
> Mike for essentially taking a pay cut compared to what he could probably
> have made in the for-profit sector.
> 
>>> Also, at page 7, three major compensations are described:
>>> Sue Gardner was compensated 175050$ (equivalent to a monthly 14587$
>> income)
>>> Veronique Kessler was compensated 121859$ (equivalent to a monthly 
>>> 10155$ income) Mike Godwin was compensated 128139$ (equivalent to a 
>>> monthly 10678$ income).


Thank you everybody for explaining your views.
Most of the US inhabitants who answered me seem to be living and
believing in a hierarchical and competitive world where the highest
ranked ones- who are praised as gods - take from the lowest ones - who
are just good enough to give their money and effort. As a matter of
fact, their society seems organized to maximize money and it is echoed
in their opinion about how to manage this huge collaborative effort
about knowledge called Wikipedia.

This conditioned acceptance - conditioned in the sense that it seems
natural and the only imaginable solution - reflects a strong, current,
ubiquitous, western, capitalist, materialist and proprietary cultural bias.

The alternatives are infinite, though. I would like to know what you
think of complementarity, creativity, liberty, conviviality, sharing,
and optimizing (instead of maximizing) for example. Are they completely
out of your scope, out of your hopes and wishes?

My understanding of the Social Contract of Debian that Milos mentioned
[1] is not as a legal policies but as ethical policies. I don't feel it
has been properly discussed yet.

[1]: http://www.debian.org/social_contract


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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 20/11/2010 02:40, Nathan wrote:

> I've never heard of a major charity in the world without at least some paid
> employees.
Hello Nathan.

I hope that you don't feel threatened by novelty. Please don't close
your mind to my ideas just because you've never heard of them. The
Wikipedia idea begins by "Imagine".

Being paid and receiving very high salaries are two different things. It
seems you're talking about the first. I'm talking about the second.


> Some of the largest charities, like the Red Cross, have thousands
> of employees including highly compensated executives.
"Red Cross" and "Corruption" yield more than a million pages on google.
Here's a sample (from 2005)[1]:
"Despite landing in trouble for soliciting more donations than they need
and squirreling the rest away, the Red Cross continues to operate this
way. [...] Last year alone, the Red Cross spent $111 million in fund
raising, and their CEO Marsha Evans made just under $652,000. It seems
the the main value they offer is the free help of their volunteer force."

Your comparison with the Red Cross is indeed insightful about what kind
of profit can be done with a non-profit organization and how unethical
behaviors can be found in ethical causes.


> The type of work the
> Foundation does requires full time staff with considerable talent and
> experience.
> It's unrealistic to expect the Foundation to acquire these
> resources without fair compensation.
You think that nobody amidst the hundred of thousands of motivated
volunteers would have the skills while accepting to work for a decent
and humble salary. I'd like to prove you wrong, if there were a
authentic will from the Foundation to have a try.

> [some stuff reducing the problem to my person]
I think that shifting the debate to my insignificant person is pointless
and uninteresting. If you're really interested about my person, which I
doubt, we can talk on another channel.


> In any case, the law presents both an obligation to report certain facts and
> an obligation to keep other facts confidential. The Foundation discloses
> what it needs to, and even were the WMF a for-profit corporation and you an
> actual shareholder you would be entitled to no more detail than that.
That's the US centric, legal aspect. But what about the ethical aspect
and the big picture?
Here's an article from 2003 [2], well worth the reading, that shows some
dangers of nonprofits.
An excerpt:
"In recent years AIP has seen nonprofits increasingly attempt to silence
their employees. We believe that nonprofit groups should discontinue
employee contracts or severance agreements that contractually disallow
employees or former employees to speak to outsiders about serious
organizational problems. This serves to stop most employees or potential
whistleblowers, who could warn the public of mismanagement or serious
ethical breaches that charity executives may be attempting to cover up."


[1]: http://www.damninteresting.com/can-we-trust-the-red-cross
[2]:
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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 19/11/2010 21:31, Risker wrote:
> The last one is for the fiscal year ending June 2009, and was filed on 29
> April 2010. Link:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/5/54/WMF_2008_2009_Form_990.pdf
> 
> The section on salaries begins on Page 7.

Thank you for the links. I'm consulting the 990 form for 2008-2009 right
now [1]. Sadly, I already have questions:

Item 15 of page 1 says:
Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits:
Current year (2008-2009): 2,073,313 dollars.
(By the way, the annual report states another number: 2,257,621$. Why?)
With 26 employees declared at that time, it gives a mean salary of 6645$
a month for each employee. Isn't it morally a little high for a
non-profit organization and unfair towards the current 80 000 volunteers?

Also, at page 7, three major compensations are described:
Sue Gardner was compensated 175050$ (equivalent to a monthly 14587$ income)
Veronique Kessler was compensated 121859$ (equivalent to a monthly
10155$ income)
Mike Godwin was compensated 128139$ (equivalent to a monthly 10678$ income).

I don't live in the USA, but I'm surprised about these numbers. Frank
Bauer estimates that they "don't have the money to begin to pay for such
services at market rate".

The fact that this is legal or traditional is beside my point.
Though I'm willing to listen and understand the Foundation's way of
thinking, I'd like to express that for the cultural and ethical grounds
from where I come, it is unacceptable for someone to profit from
volunteers' efforts and from donations aimed at a cause. I'm not saying
this is the case, but I would gladly receive insightful answers because
I'm currently at loss about what to think of the Foundation.




[1]:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/5/54/WMF_2008_2009_Form_990.pdf
[2]:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/FINAL_08_09From_KPMG.pdf

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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 19/11/2010 19:22, Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> Noein, personally, I would think that a "duty of transparency about money"  
> and publicizing information about a private employee's salary, benefits, or 
> severance packages are two wildly different things.  There is a certain point 
> where things become a matter of personal privacy, after all.
It could be that we come from different horizons of thinking.
For me it is natural that any non-profit organization, which owes its
existence to the community it represents, should inform transparently
what it is doing with the resources it is centralizing.
For you it seems natural that people in charge have their private
secrets about their managing of the public assets.
Apparently we don't put the line between the right for privacy and the
duty of transparency at the same level. I am naturally more demanding
about a Foundation in charge of 80 000 volunteers. Is this attitude
unfounded?

> You say you have no clue about how you should understand a decision to
"hide facts".  Does that mean we should publicize his medical records too?
I think only pertinent facts about the WM mission, and the way WMF
handles the mission, should be demanded. We're clearly not talking about
a personal fact here, but about a Foundation fact.

As for the medical records: people should be fit to do their jobs, so if
there were a serious doubt about it, the question about disclosing the
health state should legitimately arise.


> How transparent would we need to be? Should we put his salary history for 
> every job he's worked in his life on his article?
I think the transparency must be enough to generate trust. Once again,
if serious doubts were arising about the past of a person, they should
be cleared not by censorship nor denial but by openness, honesty and
sincerity.
I admit I may be too naive. But I'd like to be refuted by solid
arguments, though.


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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 19/11/2010 18:48, Fred Bauder wrote:
> I suspect it is more to avoid embarrassing him by disclosing he worked
> for so little than to hide Wikimedia business.
By "I suspect" do you mean that you are speculating? I think we should
stick to facts, since speculations about confidential deals could
quickly lead to unwanted controversies.



> The terms of hiring
> professional help are usually kept confidential as are personnel issues.
But the Foundation's money and resources are not, are they? Isn't the
WMF linked to the WM community as if each editor was a moral
shareholder, with a moral right to know, a moral right to have a say and
a moral right to decide? Sorry if my question seems naive, but shouldn't
it be that way?



> We're in a bad place; only a highly skilled and well-experienced person
> could do such work and we don't have the money to begin to pay for such
> services at market rate.
Though I understand your reasoning which is a valid one, I'd like to
pinpoint that it doesn't flow in the same direction than the volunteer
spirit which has been the main engine of the wikimedian projects. Payed
persons should be the exception because we couldn't find a volunteer to
do it as well.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that orienting the Foundation model
towards money-based jobs, more paid jobs, better paid jobs and more
fundraising would shift the current universal goals of WM towards
monetary and possibly less universal concerns.

> It will be helpful in hiring replacements if we don't trash the
> professionals who work for us.
I didn't suggest trashing anyone, so I don't know where this comes from.

>Anyone who works for us should depart with
> our good wishes, not a barrage of criticism.
I'm sorry that you read my words as bad-willed criticism. All my good
wishes go to Mike Godwin, to the Foundation and to the WM mission. I
thank everybody, Mike included, for all the good work they've done and
will keep doing.

My inquiry is not about a person or another, though. It's about the way
things are done. I want to learn, understand and be informed.
I'd just like to know if some extra money or reward were given (or
promised), in this current case to Mike Godwin. It's healthy to know
what the Foundation is doing with our donations and volunteering
efforts, because it creates trust.

The phrasing of Sue Gardner about the severance [1] agreement were vague
and left doubts about what it may be.


[1]: "The Wikimedia Foundation and Mike have figured out severance that
> we all hope will protect Mike and give him time to think about what he
> wants to do next. "
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Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[Noein]

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On 19/11/2010 11:42, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 14:46, David Gerard  wrote:
>>> On 19 November 2010 13:41, Abbas Mahmoud  wrote:
>>>
 Does Wikimedia Foundation engage in Corporate Social Responsibility?
>>>
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility
>>>
>>> It appears to be something for for-profit corporations to do to appear
>>> less rapacious.
>>>
>>> It's not clear what its applicability is to a 501(c)3 charity, given
>>> that you only get 501(c)3 by being of social benefit in the first
>>> place.
>>
>> Yes, but it would be good if we would have "Social Contract", like
>> Debian has: http://www.debian.org/social_contract
>>
> 
> We are not short of similar firmly held policies, such as neutral point
> of view. They are mostly written out in our policy pages. What would you
> add or emphasize?

I would add policies for the WMF like a duty of transparency about
money. I still don't understand how the WMF can state for example:

"The Wikimedia Foundation and Mike have figured out severance that
we all hope will protect Mike and give him time to think about what he
wants to do next. The terms of the severance are confidential: we
won’t talk about them now, or in the future. But you can rest assured
that the Wikimedia Foundation wants to see Mike continue working to
advance people’s online freedoms: everybody would like to see him
continue making an important contribution." [1]


As I understand, and please correct me if I'm wrong, this is public
money. There should be no "confidential" secret about where it ends, and
how much, and why.

I don't want to stir a polemic, but I really have no clue about how I
should understand such decision to hide facts.


[1]: I couldn't find the original mail by Sue Gardner but here's a link
to an immediate answer quoting it entirely:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061693.html


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Re: [Foundation-l] naming of things in kosovo

[Noein]

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I'm very naive on this subject, but from what I understood there are two
ethnic groups (independent or not, it doesn't change this cultural
fact). And one of this group has two official languages.

So, regardless of the political agendas, why don't we let each ethnical
group have its own wikipedia project, and in case of several languages,
allow a secondary fork?
This would concretely gives three distinct projects:
- - WP:Serbia
- - Wp:Kosovo_serbian
- - WP:Kosovo_albanian

This way, everybody is entitled to edit in the WP they are agreeing
without disrupting the other choices.


On 15/11/2010 10:56, Mike Dupont wrote:
> I have done a write up of the current issues with the naming and
> invite you to please read and comment.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mdupont#Naming_and_status_of_Kosovo_pages
> 
> I suggest some things and would like to find agreement, we need to
> figure out the right way forward on this issue so we can improve the
> quality of the articles.
> 
> Even if we don't change the names of the articles, we have to make
> sure that the articles are usable for people if they only know the
> albanian or serbian name. We need to also clean up the entire Parallel
> article structure for the Districts of Kosovo, Districts of Kosovo
> (serbia) and Municipalities of Kosovo.  The district scheme is totally
> outdated and confusing. It reduces the quality of the Wikipedia to
> have POV Forks.
> thanks
> mike
> 
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 9:08 AM, M. Williamson  wrote:
>> Yes, sure, but a lot of smaller villages and towns in many countries
>> do not have well-established English names. Besides, what constitutes
>> the "English name" is a matter of debate - according to law, the
>> official name of Kolkata in English is "Kolkata"... but then, couldn't
>> Germany pass a law saying that their name in English was
>> "Bundesrepublik Deustchland", and would we have to consider that just
>> as English as "Kolkata" or "Thiruvananthapuram" (formerly Calcutta and
>> Trivandrum)?
>>
>> Anyhow, referring to things by their conventional English name is the
>> reason we call it Kosovo and not Kosovë or Kosova, the Albanian names;
>> however in cases such as village and town names, names of mountains
>> and bridges, etc. which may have been referred to both ways in English
>> literature or barely mentioned or not mentioned at all in English
>> sources, it's less clear-cut.
>>
>>
>>
>> 2010/11/11 geni :
>>> On 11 November 2010 14:26, Mike  Dupont  
>>> wrote:
  Ideally we would use the albanian
 names and encourage the locals to edit.
>>>
>>> No ideally we would use the English names. As we have established with
>>> say "Germany" and "Norway" what the locals happen to call something is
>>> of secondary significance.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> geni
>>>
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>>
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> 
> 
> 

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Re: [Foundation-l] wikimedia fundraiser

[Noein]

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Did they add a button "Read Now" on the donation campaign banner or did
I miss it earlier?
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Re: [Foundation-l] wikimedia fundraiser

[Noein]

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Did they add a button "Read Now" on the donation campaign banner or did
I miss it earlier?
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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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On 13/11/2010 19:14, phoebe ayers wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:51 PM, SlimVirgin  wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 13:59, Ting Chen  wrote:
>>> I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always
>>> are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that
>>> we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares
>>> the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that
>>> service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it
>>> can explain a little what my personal opinion is.
>>
>> I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your
>> thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but
>> I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of
>> Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number
>> of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of
>> free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision,
>> with every edit I make, there is a "create book" button, where a
>> private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels
>> discouraging.
> 
> Every edit you make is also mirrored by answers.com, which quite
> openly makes money off of our work as well. This particular line of
> reasoning has not historically served as a discouragement to most of
> our editor base.
I didn't know that. How can a site be only a motor of search of our
pages and at the same time charge for it? Aren't we already doing the
same? We can even do it better since we're at the source of this
service. With google ranking us high, we are an "answer.com" too,
naturally. We don't need a professional counterpart, they have no
plus-value to add to us that we can't add ourselves. Knowledge is not
for elitists, knowledge is for everybody, and thus, as free of charges
as possible.

> 
> The crux of the question seems to me to rather be who and how we
> directly partner with, and what services do we offer to readers (and
> contributors) by such partners through the site itself. In the case of
> PediaPress, it's fairly low-key; what you see in the sidebar is
> actually a link to the "book creator" tool, which is extension code to
> make a collection of pages that can then be generated as a pdf. It is
> only after you click through and do this that you are offered a link
> to "Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partner" and a link to
> PediaPress appears. 
You mean "Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partnerS" and
several links of several partners, among them PediaPress in alphabetical
order to be exact, I presume. All of those partners should be
non-profit, of course.



>People are quite free to create a pdf collection
> and never send it to PediaPress, which wouldn't generate a dime for
> them, and my instinct is that this accounts for the majority of the
> tool's use.
Then the service would be "pdf creator", not "book creator", right?


> 
> I don't mean to be dismissive, though; asking about partnerships is a
> totally valid question, and we should at the very least keep any such
> partnerships open so that we can always consider if there are other
> and better services, extensions, etc. available to offer in addition
> to or in place of existing ones.
Yes. And discussing about their moral interest could our first
discussion, actually.




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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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On 13/11/2010 18:10, Michael Snow wrote:
> Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy 
> PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is 
> associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did 
> this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is 
> released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with 
> Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our 
> competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print 
> publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no 
> idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot 
> would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the 
> context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the 
> current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people 
> who order printed books?

Maybe I'm not entitled to give my opinion, but here's my vision of what
could be a correct behavior towards the knowledge that we are spreading:
it's as free as we can make it, because we want everyone to have access
to it, and nobody should have a special power nor ownership on it.

So making books and selling them at the price of the cost is okay, the
extreme limit: the sustainable limit. Selling them with profit is not.

Spreading through healthy, citizen, public or free NGO or associations
is "promising". Dealing with for-profit, governmental, financial or
private organisms or corporations is "worsening".

Etc.


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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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On 13/11/2010 17:51, SlimVirgin wrote:
> I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your
> thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but
> I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of
> Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number
> of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of
> free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision,
> with every edit I make, there is a "create book" button, where a
> private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels
> discouraging.

Indeed.

There seems to be a significant divergence in the interpretation of the
Wikipedia mission between the Foundation and the community. Added to
lots of other hints, it makes me wonder how much the WMF is
representative of the general community. Is this gap real? Am I badly
informed?

In any way, shouldn't the WMF be subordinate to the community's will? I
have the current understanding that this is not at all the case. Could
someone take a little of his or her time to explains to me the general
idea of what the relationship between the WMF and the community should be?
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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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On 13/11/2010 17:25, Robert S. Horning wrote:
> Much of what I was trying to get started was covered on this very 
> mailing list.  If you go into the archives and look up Wikijunior to see 
> some of the efforts that were made, including some initial publications 
> that were made through Lulu (that were also removed from Lulu at the 
> request of the WMF).  The organizing efforts were being done on 
> Wikibooks as much as could be done, and that was pretty much where it 
> ended too.
Why was Lulu removed?
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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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On 13/11/2010 16:59, Ting Chen wrote:
> I searched a little on meta and the oldest thing I found related to this 
> is from the Foundation Report of January 2008 [1]. So I cannot tell you 
> how the contract came into being. As you know, the Foundation moved in 
> the spring of 2008 from Florida to San Francisco and rebuilt itself 
> afterwards. Before the move the organisational maturity is still quite 
> weak. I am sure that today such contract would be handled in other ways 
> and the board would surely be informed.

Maybe a scan of the contract would help clear things?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

[Noein]

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On 12/11/2010 07:40, Magnus Manske wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:56 AM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> On 12 November 2010 07:56, geni  wrote:
>>
>>> We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a
>>> period of 1 (one) year offering a level of support equivalent to our
>>> smaller projects. After one year the citizendium community/Editorial
>>> Council is expected to have sorted themselves out to the point where
>>> they can arrange their own hosting. At which point we lock the
>>> database and provide them with the dumps
>>
>>
>> I strongly support this.
> 
> +1

It seems a very good and healthy idea.

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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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I'm forwarding this message from "Cyrano".
- 

On 12/11/2010 02:06, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > A bit of general background:
> >
> > The Collection/"Book creator" feature allows managing, organizing and
> > exporting content in PDF and in OpenDocument (the latter is still very
> > buggy). We're planning to work with PediaPress to add OpenZIM support
> > (useful for offline readers like Kiwix); EPUB is a possibility. The
> > feature supports pulling specific article revisions, or the current
> > revision, and it has some nice features like automatic suggestion of
> > articles, easy addition of articles to collections while browsing,
> > etc.
> >
> > Although PediaPress are the developers behind the feature, it's
> > completely separate from their services (providing printed books).
The code of this feature is open-source and has been reviewed by
developers from the community, I assume.

It seems that PediaPress was entirely created (their site is from 2006)
for the edition of wikipedia books: I couldn't find a single book not
written "by Wikipedians". So again, what were the so interesting profile
of this society... Were other alternatives like
http://www.lulu.com/en/about/index.php considered?

PediaPress says that "A portion of the proceeds of each book will be
donated to the Wikimedia Foundation to support their mission."
[http://pediapress.com/]. How much exactly?

Look at that:
PediaPress was founded in July 2007 as a spin-off from brainbot
technologies AG and is located in Mainz, Germany.
[http://pediapress.com/about/]

And brainbot is:
This cooperation enables brainbot technologies to rapidly transform
state of the art research results into marketable products.
[http://brainbot.com/home_en/]

Can you see the big picture, the plan? Wikimedians and internauts build
the info, and Brainbot/PediaPress/DFKI
[http://www.dfki.de/web/welcome?set_language=en&cl=en] profit on it!

Great plan. I'm sure the wikimedians would love to have a say, though.


If
> > PediaPress were to disappear tomorrow, we'd continue providing the
> > remaining functionality. In fact, at this point in time, uses of the
> > feature for digital offline distributions are more interesting to us
> > from a strategic point of view than print distribution. Because images
> > and other media quickly inflate any offline export, content selections
> > may often be the more viable method to create digital offline
> > distributions of WP content. The 1,400 selections already compiled
> > using the Collection extension provide a great starting point for
> > this. It's also conceivable to work with "validation partners" to
> > create trusted selections of content for schools etc.
> >
> > We have a non-exclusive business partnership with PediaPress (a small
> > for-profit company) with regard to their provision of print services,
> > which is commission-based. From a mission standpoint, it's nice for
> > both our audience and our contributors to have the print options
> > available, which is supported by demand (about 2,000 per quarter --
> > we'll soon have a WikiStats report on book sales) and user feedback.
> > It can also be great outreach tool.
> >
> > In fact, as Tim pointed out, the idea of printed selections is a very
> > old idea that very many Wikipedians have worked on over the years. The
> > goal of the relationship with PediaPress was to have an open toolset
> > that any and all efforts towards print or other export formats could
> > build upon. PediaPress has been a model partner -- they're
> > super-responsive, and interact directly with the community to service
> > all aspects of the technology.
> >
> > I'm personally very pleased that the hardcover and color options are
> > now available. There are so many fantastic photos and illustrations in
> > Wikimedia projects that the black/white books really didn't do them
> > justice. It's certainly not for everyone, but for those of us who like
> > to show our family and friends what this whole Wikipedia thing we
> > spend so much time on is all about, it can be pretty awesome. Kindle
> > or not, a printed book gives a very tangible reality to our efforts.
I am certain that this conversation is not about the cover. Our concerns
are real.

On 12/11/2010 03:32, Tim Starling wrote:
> > On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote:
>> >> They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of
>> >> companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth
most-visited
>> >> website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the
>> >> English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a
completely
>> >> separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection
extension.
>> >> That's worth a percentage of the book sales?
> >
> > Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just
> > revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's
> > mission, as is open so

Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Noein]

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> I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I
> still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a
> for-profit company. I think there's a large distinction between the
> Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit
> company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a
> custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute
> free content.
> 
> MZMcBride
> 
> [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikis_Go_Printable


I agree with you. It's funny how this topic echoes the way the recent
thread about "advertising on wikipedia" ended:

On 08/11/2010 22:04, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> An interesting idea would be a standalone static copy of
>> wikipedia that really tried their utmost to make the product
>> visually appealing, and used the generated money from the
>> advertisements purely to fund ever more timely database dumps
>>
>> It would be interesting to see how frequent database dumping could be
>> financed by advertisement on such a
>> site; the synergy should be obvious -- the more money they generate
>> from adverts, the more resources they can devote to making ever more
>> frequent dumps, so the more timely is the content, which will again
>> make therir product more attractive, and so on
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>>
>
> Whether this is great idea or not I don't know, but this is the kind of
> out of the box thinking that is potentially productive. We could produce
> periodic "polished" editions.
>
> Fred
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Re: [Foundation-l] Funding Sources of Medical Research, was Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing...

[Noein]

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On 09/11/2010 01:33, Fred Bauder wrote:

>> Everything that is done incorrectly because of funding is also done by
>> those who have an intellectual  or emotional stake in the outcome

> Yes, and that's where we fall down. Many of us are editors with purpose.
> They many be noble purposes, but often we ourselves have an agenda, of
> some sort, even if only to highlight neglected truths.

I'm trying to understand precisely what you mean here. Could you elaborate ?
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Re: [Foundation-l] No, even a couple of Google ads on each page would be a fatally bad idea

[Noein]

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On 08/11/2010 18:45, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> An interesting idea would be a standalone static copy of
> wikipedia that really tried their utmost to make the product
> visually appealing, and used the generated money from the
> advertisements purely to fund ever more timely database dumps
> 
> It would be interesting to see how frequent database dumping could be
> financed by advertisement on such a
> site; the synergy should be obvious -- the more money they generate
> from adverts, the more resources they can devote to making ever more
> frequent dumps, so the more timely is the content, which will again
> make therir product more attractive, and so on

This is clever. But let me expose the flaw with wikinews:
wikinews would thus get a financing for a printable version with ads.
Huge success! We then recruit an editorial team of 30 paid people to
keep with the production, formatting, checking.

But then the we discover that if the news are not to the liking of our
advertisers, they punish us. On the contrary, they could reward us. Our
editorial team start fearing for their job. They have a wife and two
kids to feed. They got used to having a job. They are dependent on
money, and now money will start deciding what should be the news. After
all, what is the value of a fact? 0. The value of displeasing our
sponsors? A big, significant lump of money.

So, I think that if there is money to be made, it should be without
intermediaries. If we need financing it must be coming directly from the
community and controlled and used directly by it. Anything else is
injecting corruption.
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Re: [Foundation-l] the annual advertisement discussion

[Noein]

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On 05/11/2010 19:44, Fred Bauder wrote:
> How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the
> table each year?

Please don't take this as any personal attack, but did we reach such a
philosophical and wise government in the foundation that we now wish to
talk about opening the dams of money?
The day that the community at large (that is, a massive consensus, not
representatives) agrees completely about a very specific project with
crystal-clear intentions and critical-trusted [*] agents, THEN and only
then should we start talking about founding *directly*, not through
intermediate organizations.


[*]: once again, critical trust is the kind of trust one obtains after
having access to all the necessary data to make a judgment in complete
liberty of thought.

On 08/11/2010 18:10, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Another hard word.. cupidity: "avarice: extreme greed for material wealth".
> 
> I appreciate the sentiment. However, the material gain from advertisements
> is not going to make us personally rich.
Since I was born I have only found a handful of saints who handle
millions of dollar without getting rich themselves. Let's say that my
lack of luck has put a sense of rightful distrust towards projects of
power and money. I'd like a complete understanding of who would be doing
what with Wikipedia if it were to become a source of income, because
we're talking about an incredible sum of good willed efforts, of people
who believed in an ideal, versus an incredible source of corruption.
I'd like to be sure that the monstrous altar we're building since 2001
will not end as a making money machine. Id' like to be doing the right
choice about this.

I would require such conditions to vote with a full awareness of the topic:
First show me the need for this money.
Then show me a huge consensus about this need.
Then I would accept, and I think I'm speaking the community's mind, to
discuss about how we want the financing done.

> It will enable us to do more and
> different things. 
Of course it will. Money can do everything, the best and the worst. But
it won't be our money, it will the money of advertisers, who will
threaten and reward us endlessly with their coins according to THEIR
goals, until the first cedes. It's letting the wolf into the sheep pen,
says a french saying. [*]

[*]: "enfermer le loup dans la bergerie".



> Things that are currently outside of our reach. When we
> use such monies frugally, the benefits will be enormous and, this is quite
> the opposite of your sentiment.
This ideal outcome is beautiful, really. But it won't happen the ways
things are currently.
That's precisely because I believe in Wikipedia's vision that I must
advocate for financial freedom from third parties and reject your proposal.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Funding Sources of Medical Research, was Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing...

[Noein]

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There are strong economic interests to cheat about medical research, so
we should be extremely fair, transparent and informative about those
articles.

Mentioning the funding source of any research is the building base of
critical trust.[1]

[1]: critical trust is the kind of trust one obtains after having access
to all the necessary data to make a judgment in complete liberty of thought.


On 08/11/2010 02:54, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Funding Sources of Medical Research, was 
>> Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing...
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" 
>> Date: Monday, 8 November, 2010, 0:22
>> On 7 November 2010 12:26, David
>> Gerard 
>> wrote:
>>> That naming funding sources is in fact *standard in
>> the field* is,
>>> however, something that strongly suggests we should
>> not deliberately
>>> withhold such information from the reader.
>>
>> Err we don't. They are free to consult the source.
>>
>> However the field in question has long established
>> standards when it
>> comes to citation.
>>
>> So for example when "Anti-HIV-1 activity of salivary MUC5B
>> and MUC7
>> mucins from HIV patients with different CD4 counts" cites
>> "Interaction
>> of HIV-1 and human salivary mucin" they do so in the form
>> of:
>>
>> "Bergey EJ, Cho MI, Blumberg BM, Hammarskjold ML, Rekosh D,
>> Epstein
>> LG, Levine MJ. Interaction of HIV-1 and human salivary
>> mucins. J
>> Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 1994;7:995–1002."
>>
>> And do not mention it's funding source
>>
>> (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2967540/).
> 
> 
> This is a valid argument.
> 
> However, mentioning the funding source is not unheard of in medical 
> citations. See the first example given here:
> 
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=citmed&part=A32352#A32755
> 
> Funding is consistently included on abstract pages. Examples:
> 
> http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013614
> http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010548
> 
> Here, funding is included along with the publication data. It is a standard 
> format.
> 
> Where references are hyperlinked, as in your counterexample, professionals 
> can view the article. Our readers cannot, unless they have access to the
> relevant academic database.
> 
> A.
> 
> 
>   
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] the annual advertisement discussion

[Noein]

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On 08/11/2010 17:37, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>  I care more about realising our ambitions, I
> care about getting our message out. 


Personally, I care also about the means. I wouldn't like cupidity as the
core of wikipedia. Money, thus, should not become the fuel we use.



In my opinion we can improve our
> messaging a lot. When people say that the WMF is transparent, they are
> right. We fail however in having our message heard. When we hire new people,
> people like Alolita for instance, we hire someone who we should be proud
> of.  Proud that she wants to work with us.
> 
> Many great activities are happening in our chapters. Learning about these
> activities is inspiring. When we know what fun can be had, we can learn from
> each other and reduce the amount of overhead and concentrate on where we
> make a difference.
> 
> Another aspect that is missing in annual advertisement discussion is what we
> should do with the money.. Assuming that we make a huge amount of money, I
> have blogged about that as well.
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
> 
> http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/11/effect-of-100m-in-advertisement-money.html
> 
> On 6 November 2010 22:20, Fred Bauder  wrote:
> 
>>> Hoi,
>>> As the "A" word has been mentioned again as is tradition,  I want us to
>>> talk
>>> instead about how we can advertise / market our strategy, I want us to
>>> discuss how this helps us to reach out. How we can realise the goals that
>>> we
>>> so beautifully formulated in our strategy..
>>>
>>> To start it off, I have blogged some of my sentiments.
>>> Thanks,
>>>  GerardM
>>>
>>>
>> http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/11/annual-wikipedia-argument-about.html
>>
>> Nice sentiments, but you don't address the question of why someone else
>> needs the potential advertising revenue more than we do. Google does many
>> good things, including providing substantial support to Wikipedia, but
>> what good does money in the pockets of their shareholders do us?
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>
>>
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[Foundation-l] message from Cyrano

[Noein]

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I was sent this. I don't know what to do of it.

 *  *   *

"Due to a large amount of spam, emails from non-members of this list
are now automatically rejected. If you have a valuable contribution to
the list but would rather not subscribe to it, please send an email to
foundation-l-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org and we will forward your post
to the list. Please be aware that all messages to this list are
archived and viewable for the public. If you have a confidential
communication to make, please rather email i...@wikimedia.org

Thank you."


Please forward my message to the public.

Cyrano, back earlier

Message follows:

> However we could encourage donations by having a static page that is
> > part of the UI of each project that prominently lists everyone who has
> > donated to WMF. e.g.
> >
> > --
> > John Vandenberg
> >
> > ___
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> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Forgive me if I enter this conversation without reading the last
hundreds of mails, but I see we are talking about 'sponsorship, yes or
no ?' here.

A recurrent question my good sirs. Who is pushing it this time? Who is
expecting a lot of money from it? Because there is a lot of money to
make from the 6th site of the world. Did the foundation explained it to
you? Do we have a problem with the current fund raising model and campaign.
Do we have big sudden urgent monetary need?

I thought we didn't.

I thought that Wikipedia and Wikimedia were non-profit projects. So why
are we even discussing sponsorship? Have we any financial problem?
Do we want to allow rich organizations to start casting their monetary
vote into what we should do? Shouldn't we remain stoically independent
by receiving only voluntary donations and voluntary efforts from good
wills guided by universal principles?

Is there a consensus from the Foundation about this? I'd like a quick
and honest answer from each of the member. Is it acceptable to accept
money from organizations like Virgins which pursues lucre before "free
knowledge for anybody"?

I firmly vote no until I have a full understanding of the financial need
of risking the financial autonomy of wikimedian projects.

And I'm quite alarmed to be discussing this.


Cyrano, back from the moon.
- 

PD:
Will the next step be signing contracts where we allow Virgins to say
"buy the last cd of [insert star name here] and support Wikipedia!"
"Yes! Virgin supports Wikipedia! Virgin loves knowledge. Virgins thinks,
with a tear in the eyes, that any kid should have the right to
education, damn it!. Virgin is your friend, see? So each time you buy a
CD, Virgins "Unite" (we though at first Virgins IsYourFriend but we
we're told we were too obvious) gives one cent to the big encyclopedia
online that everybody shares! See? Look at our logo on their site! LOOK
AT IT MY SWEET CHILD, AND BUY MY PRODUCTS!

Oh boy, I can't wait too see it in its full splendor now that we catched
the tail of the devil.






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Re: [Foundation-l] Liu Xiaobo

[Noein]

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I think it is not fair to censor Peter and then still talk about him and
what he said. One or the other can be justified (and should be), but not
both at the same time.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Noein]

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On 05/10/2010 19:48, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
> What is the main point of wikipedia to edit it, or to read it?
Could it be both or do we get to choose only one?

> NOTE: when reading an article or a book one rarely looks at the 
> references. They are, in the main, a distraction.
This is not my case nor my perception about it. Besides, they are not
just notes, but references. References are important to build traceable
knowledge layer after layer.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Noein]

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On 04/10/2010 17:54, Peter Damian wrote:
> - Original Message - 
> From: "Noein" 
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" 
> Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 4:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
> 
> 
> 
>> I am sincerely asking you, without insinuation: how do you know you're
>> not one of them? What's the difference between the one who knows he
>> knows and the one who doesn't know he doesn't know if it's only about
>> self-perception (or social perception)?
>> Where is the universality of knowledge in this conception if it boils
>> down to intimate convictions ?
> 
> There are well-established mechanisms for determining this.  I have had many 
> papers published, I am currently working collaboratively with another 
> academic on a book on medieval philosophy. I have no problem working with 
> people who understand the rules, I am told the quality of my work is good. 

This social acceptance (or credentials if you prefer) has a weak
epistemological value.[1] It's only convincing for the people of your
own circle - whether they're right or wrong is of no relevance -. For
people outside your circle, with whom you can't discuss or don't want
to, the arguments for your views are reduced to the authority: authority
of the number of believers, prestige and ranks of the apostles,
influence and mediatisation of the message, power and fearsomeness of
the church you belong to, if you allow me to use an analogy.
This unilateral way of handling down knowledge to the rest of mankind is
a fertile ground for domination about the rights to talk, the ways to
think, about the decisions that are to be taken.
I'm not saying it's currently happening in your circle. I'm saying that
it's an obsolete model for the sharing, free, collaborative, massive
project that is wikipedia, and that you won't be able to force it on
most individuals. Many editors, I believe, claim some sort of
independence of thought, though many don't have the required knowledge
to back it up, and I think this is the correct model from which a
universal knowledge can be build, despite its current limits (giving the
same powers to the ignorant than to the savant). Teach a mind to be
critical and it can learn everything. Teach a mind what you believe and
you just shaped a sheep.

If it's about choosing between expert knowledge and independence of
mind, I personally prefer the latter, because it will slowly but
ultimately lead to the first, while the reciprocal is not guaranteed.
Dealing with humans is much more annoying than with flocks, but that's
the only way forward I can envision.


That's why I believe that Wikipedia is right demanding sources and
objective (not social ones) arguments.

Although there is still some indecision if an article should be about
what people said (a historical and literal approach), what they thought
(a more comprehensive and philosophical one) or what the denoted reality
is (a more scientific and objective one).

Note, Peter, that I am not rejecting the value of your knowledge, your
critics about quality of articles or your proposals. I only disagree
about your model of communication of knowledge for wikipedia.




[1]: following popperian criteria.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Noein]

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Thank you, your answers reveal quite clearly your vision. (I disagree,
though, but that's not important).
A few comments below...


On 04/10/2010 15:58, Peter Damian wrote:
> How is the problem of making a difficult subject clear different in the case 
> of editors than readers?  That's an interesting one.  Good teaching and 
> communication is about getting the maximum number of interested people to 
> get the intended idea across.  This is very difficult.  Even in the best 
> case, I estimate only about 20% of people will understand in any way what 
> you are saying.  A simple proof of this is exam results. In any exam (an 
> exam being a method of test which aims to assess how well some one has 
> understood the teaching) there is a neat dispersion of results.

> There is always a bottom 10 percentile of those who sadly don't get it, and 
> frankly probably ever aren't going to get it.
I disagree about the "never". I think it depends greatly about the
methods and means to reach them.

>  I'm a realist. 
Your realism seems strongly context-dependent, with a narrow set of
contexts considered. Your conclusions are probably valid for it, but
you're not talking about the world at large, in my point of view. IMHO
you're talking, maybe without realizing the range of your ideas, about a
specific occurrence of knowledge communication (university teaching
between 1980 and 2010, say) and I don't think this is all there is to
understand about it.

If this discussion was about the contexts of teaching and communicating
instead of the statistical results in already known environments, I
wonder if you would still bear a fatalist (elitist?) point of view about
mankind's intellectual capacity.

Personnaly I think there is only a bottom 10 percentile of those who are
born mentally limited, whatever the education and communication they
receive, they're doomed. The difference with your stats shows what we
CAN do something about.



> Now most of 
> those bottom 10% realise this, and will go away to study something more 
> congenial.  Most of them. There is a tiny tiny fraction of those who don't 
> get it, who believe they are fundamentally right, and that the teachers are 
> wrong, and that they have been done some injustice, and the world owes them 
> something.
> 
> Now the problem: in the old days that bottom percentile fraction would 
> self-publish some rant or other, or would just go away.  But now there is 
> this thing called Wikipedia which is practically inviting them to edit.  It 
> says "anyone can edit".

It seems that you think that Wikipedia is behaving as a magnet for
obtuse people, for one hand.
On the other hand, you seem to think that what the wiki system does
about the heterogeneity of the editors is filtering out the quality.

This may well be true in some cases. But I think that the opposite can
also happen, and that changes everything. I have the belief that on the
long term, open people and high quality have a higher potential on
Wikipedia, if we aim to set the conditions for their thriving.

Let's go back to your example: "I estimate only about 20% of people will
understand in any way what you are saying."
Somewhere, sometime, there is certainly someone that can make 21% of
people understand a specific topic. It's not necessarily an expert,
though he should be able to understand them. So imagine we find him and
make an article out of his "teaching". Then we have gain 1% of audience
and consensus of understanding (you may disagree but you understand and
respect what is said).
With this reductio ad minimum I just want to show that levelling up
quality is possible: thus putting the failure on the idiots is not
giving our best shot.


> I had an experience with such an editor in late 2006.  He fundamentally 
> wrecked the Philosophy article 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philosophy&offset=20061228033655&action=history,
>  
> drove away a fine bunch of editors, and the article has never really 
> recovered since (a group of us act as caretakers but on the principle of 
> preventing any change, not improving it. I quote again from Mel Etitis (who 
> himself was a casualty of this incident)
> 
> "Philosophy: I'm a philosopher; why don't I edit the article on my subject? 
> Because it's hopeless. I've tried at various times, and each time have given 
> up in depressed disgust. Philosophy seems to attract aggressive zealots who 
> know a little (often a very little), who lack understanding of key concepts, 
> terms, etc., and who attempt to take over the article (and its Talk page) 
> with rambling, ground-shifting, often barely comprehensible rants against 
> those who disagree with them. Life's too short. I just tell my students and 
> anyone else I know not to read the Wikipedia article except for a laugh. 
> It's one of those areas where the ochlocratic nature of Wikipedia really 
> comes a cropper".

I've read this text like 3 or 4 times in 

Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Noein]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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I still have 80 mails to read to be up-to-date about the current
polemic, but I would like to ask a question to you Peter.

You said that experts can bring knowledge to readers, but that some
editors are aggressive idiots with whom there is no possible discussion.
This attitude towards expert knowledge is certainly also present amidst
readers - it is simply not detected because of a lack of interaction
with them.

So, Peter, how is this communication failure [1] (and I think the mails
I attached are a good sample of it, without judging who is right in
calling the other an idiot) towards idiot editors is different from
towards idiot readers?

Apologies if my wording is bad, but as you would said, it's just a
formal question, the knowledge is the same. :)




[1]: according to this goal: "Imagine a world in which every single
person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge."


On 02/10/2010 19:21, Peter Damian wrote:
> - Original Message - 
> From: 
> To: 
> Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 6:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
> 
> You can't spell, you can't write, you shift ground constantly, you fail to 
> understand even the most basic point.  Your understanding of the subject is 
> in inverse proportion to you arrogance and hostility.  Wikipedia is full of 
> people like you.
> 
> This of course will be used as proof that specialists do not understand 
> Wikipedia and are therefore unwelcome. 
> 
> 
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On 02/10/2010 19:17, Peter Damian wrote:
> - Original Message -
> From: 
> To: 
> Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 6:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
>
>
>> Haven't you ever read Atlas Shrugged!
>
> OK you're a nutcase. Sorry.  This is exactly the problem I have with
> Wikipedia. End of conversation.
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Noein]

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On 19/09/2010 19:47, Peter Damian wrote:
> To the other 
> Wikipedians here: is there a problem with academics 'talking down'?  Do they 
> have a problem explaining their ideas in articles?  Are they 'too rarified' 
> to be included in Wikipedia?  If so, can Wikipedia do without them? If not, 
> how could they be encouraged to contribute better? 


I think the wikipedia project is about an universal access to knowledge,
not an elitist one. Experts are respected because they have studied
deeply, but they *must* be able to transmit this knowledge to have a
place in wikipedia, in my opinion. This transmission is about plain and
clear explanations of the arguments, of the proofs and of the clusters
of hints leading to an interpretation or a conclusion. It's about
extracting from dozens of years of experience the main reasoning and
sources to be considered. It's about being critical and analytical
towards one's own knowledge.

I believe there is no knowledge without understanding and being able to
check the sources, and thus there is no universality of knowledge if one
needs to pertain to a certain clique to understand something, or if one
needs as much experience in the domain as an expert.
Any article written by an expert should be understandable to a motivated
but first-time reader profane. And I mean understanding in the strong
meaning of the word, which knowing why the article is declaring this or
that given the references and the arguments.

As for the "expert training" that Peter Damian mention several times, I
think it is not convincing per se because a training can as well teach
to think critically (i.e., questioning permanently what you know and why
you believe it) as to think according to a set of doctrines. So instead
of believing experts (or anybody) "because they say so", everyone should
document, reference, argument and construct the knowledge put into articles.

Finally, what distinguishes the obscurantism from science is the demand
to be open to criticism: any idea is just a proposal (an hypothesis) and
its believers must accept discussing it on a epistemological level.


In consequence, the top-down approach cannot be acceptable on wikipedia,
at least not as a winning argument. Not out of disrespect, but because
universal knowledge cannot follow an initiatic model (i.e., you only
understand if you think as dictated by a hierarchy).

These considerations are not limited to the interactions between experts
and profanes. Long time editors who feel at home with their pet articles
tend to be closed-minded towards newbies and new approaches, in my
observations.


Having said that, I think there is a problem with the quality of some
articles, even some about hard science, which I interpret, amidst other
causes, as due to a lack of rigor with citing primary sources. Without
them, the controversies have no tangible common grounds - which is an
unsolvable problem -.
I think a huge effort should be put in motion to clarify, inspect and
distinguish the quality, authenticity and primarity of the sources.

Any new science starts by compiling lists and nomenclatures of its
items, which are pieces of knowledge represented by articles in the case
of an encyclopaedia.
Then it refines its epistemology to build further. Too much
undiscriminated information (about a same topic) is just noise.
And how to discriminate intelligently other by checking the link of the
premises to reality (their veracity and primarity) and the validity of
the reasonings?




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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Community vs. centralized development

[Noein]

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I couldn't have said it as well. I agree with the concerns of Jamie and
their importance.


On 13/09/2010 22:14, emijrp wrote:
> Hi all;
> 
> I think that Jamie has started an important topic. I don't think that WMF is
> going to usurp Wikipedia and the sister projects now or in the future, but
> it is statistically possible. If we want to protect us, the human knowledge
> and our work of this hypothetical scenario, we need complete full dumps
> frequently. But this scenario is a malicious one, and I think that there are
> many more dangerous posibilities, and unfortunately, they are common.
> 
> For example, small or massive lost of data due to natural disasters,
> crackers attacks, stolen passwords, hardware and software bugs, sudden crazy
> sysops, and _human errors_. Is WMF ready for that?
> 
> Long time ago I searched info about that, but I only found these
> links[1][2]. Recently, I have been concerned about this again. Most of the
> Wiki[mp]edia projects are small, and their full backups are updated every
> week[3] and they can be stored everywhere, but the largest ones like English
> Wikipedia gets outdated soon[4] (now, it is +200 days old).
> 
> I don't know so much about the infrastructure and how WMF servers are
> allocated around the world, so, I want to ask a simple question:
> 
> In the case of a complete disaster in the "main" servers, will WMF be able
> to restore all the Wiki[mp]edia contain using backups?
> 
> We got a terrible fright when 3000 images were deleted accidentally in
> 2008[5] and I think that not all were recovered.
> 
> When people ask about images dump the most common reply is: "Are you going
> to store 7 TB (Commons)?" I can't store that at home of course, but, I'm
> sure that a few universities or entities around the world can, not only for
> backup purposes, for researching too (in full resolution or thumbs).
> 
> Also, I think that we need to start mirroring Wiki[mp]edia dumps to other
> servers around the globe, as the common GNU/Linux ISOs mirrors do. Also,
> Library of Congress said some time ago that they are going to save a copy of
> all the tweets sent to Twitter.[6] When are they going to save a copy of
> Wiki[mp]edia? I hope we have learnt a bit since Library of Alexandria was
> destroyed.
> 
> I don't want that an error moves us back to January 15, 2001.
> 
> Regards,
> emijrp
> 
> [1] http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Disaster_Recovery
> [2] http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Offsite_Backups
> [3] http://download.wikimedia.org/
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/Wikipedia_Archive
> [5]
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-September/039265.html
> [6] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/loc-google-twitter/
> 
> 2010/9/8 Jamie Morken 
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was involved in an open source project that was usurped by one of the
>> main developers for the sole reason of making money, and that project
>> continues now to take advantage of the community to increase the profit of
>> that developer.  I never would have thought such a thing was possible until
>> I saw that happen.  If that developer wasn't acting greedy, there would now
>> be open source hardware for radio transceivers of all types, but instead
>> there is only open source software for radio of all types.  I find it a
>> shame, and when I was working on that project I could *feel* it being
>> usurped!  I unfortunately may be paranoid as I feel the same thing here with
>> the wikimedia foundation usurping wikipedia.  If you don't believe me, just
>> consider that it is a very gradual process, like getting people used to not
>> being able to download image dumps anymore, and ignoring ALL requests to
>> restore this functionality.  Also failing to provide full history backups of
>> the flagship wiki.  These two facts allow the wikimedia foundation to
>> maintain the control of intellectual property that wasn't created by the
>> people.  If you want the wikimedia foundation to respect you as volunteers,
>> you will have to DEMAND respect by making sure that they never usurp the
>> project.  I think the best way to do this is to make sure we can all
>> download up to date full history with images wikipedia's so a fork at any
>> time is possible.  Sure it may be paranoid, but trust me it is worth it to
>> be paranoid regarding a project as important as wikipedia.  I have been in
>> situations like this before, I wish I had acted before even if I was wrong!
>> I wouldn't even be speaking now except for reading the heart-felt words of
>> volunteers in this thread that are unhappy with how the wikimedia foundation
>> is running.  We need to organize to get wikimedia foundation to release
>> images tarballs, they are only ignoring multiple requests to do so, so far.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Jamie
>>
>>
>> ___
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>> wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/ma

Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Chapter Development Director job posting

[Noein]

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If I understand correctly the situation, the USA community currently
interact with Wikipedia through the Foundation or the en. chapter, which
are not necessarily representative of their interests. The point of view
that a chapter should represent the USA community depends strongly of
what is a chapter. I still don't know if it is a geopolitical, a
cultural, a social or a linguistic entity...
Anyway, there's the concern that a community deprived of proper identity
and voice is easily ignored.

As for the Foundation, I'm still not sure what role people are expecting
from it. Some comments now and then make me believe that a significant
share think of it as a leading, decision-making, representing and
executing role.
Other think the foundation should only play a pragmatic, executive
auxiliary role, implementing the will and decisions of the communities,
USA community included. I believe the separation of powers to be healthy.



As for the global and international concerns...

Cultural centrism or insularism cannot be at the core of the big goal of
an universal access to knowledge: they're a certain path to failure.

The latest conflicts about censorship and NPOV have shown, IMHO, that
they cannot be solved without distinguishing the few principles aimed to
the sharing and collective building of knowledge from the cultural
values - the western ones included.

Yet, the en.wikipedia is much more developed than the others and seems
to be progressing faster. Like a sun with a few satellites orbiting.
The "motor" doesn't distribute its energy to everybody, it mainly
benefits itself because it is not decentralized. Thus, it creates a
cultural inequality and domination. I wonder if this tendency can be
smoothed.

I wonder also how this is perceived by the rest of the world. The
english and american imperialisms are strongly present in their minds.
Wikipedia should avoid to look like yet another tool of cultural domination.

Thus, to favor the emergent chapters the USA community should have its
own chapter. It should have no more power of decision than the others
and certainly not a privileged relationship with the Foundation.

The Foundation should aim to be less insular and a clear separation from
the national concerns would help.




On 23/08/2010 12:55, theo10011 wrote:
> I do agree with some of what Mr. Meijssen said in the last email but not all
> of it. Yes, there might be a bias with some of the new projects being
> undertaken in the US specifically, but outside of Europe there are very few
> chapters who would be in a position to take on university collaborated
> projects without some sort of experience and help from the foundation.
> 
> The Idea that it is expensive to undertake projects in the US compared to
> the rest of the world in illusory, the costs incurred in lets say the UK or
> Germany might be higher than the US, simply because of the foundation is
> located across the Atlantic, their would be much higher travel cost and more
> paperwork involved when dealing with large institutions, not to mention a
> language barrier which might be prohibitive in the rest of the EU.
> 
> With that said I do agree with Mr. Meijssen that the foundation might mix
> national and international priorities at some occasions. A wider
> representation using one of the EU chapters could easily be achieved
> especially in the case of the recent university projects.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Salmaan
> 
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Gerard Meijssen > wrote:
> 
>> Hoi,
>> The USA is a sizeable country. But it is not unique in that. Russia is
>> certainly bigger and India is certainly more populous. Both Russia and
>> India
>> have one chapter.
>>
>> When the Wikimedia Foundation runs a project, it should be obvious that
>> such
>> a project can be easily understood from its perspective. For me the WMF is
>> a
>> worldwide organisation and consequently its actions should be acceptable
>> from that perspective. When the WMF runs a "pilot" project like the current
>> public policy project, it should therefore conform with its global
>> perspective. Given that it is about SUBJECT MATTER whose appreciation
>> differs from country to country it is weird that no "foreign" universities
>> are part of this project. It is also easy to argue that from a cost point
>> of
>> view, this project requires less funding when it is run in many other
>> countries. The fact that it is run only in the USA also has NPOV
>> implications.
>>
>> The issue is that when there is an USA chapter and this project was run by
>> the chapter, such reservations would not be as potent. Mixing national and
>> international priorities is not appropriate.
>> Thanks,
>>   GerardM
>>
>> On 23 August 2010 08:56, Keegan Peterzell  wrote:
>>
>>> I have to chime in to echo that the size of the USA and the fact that it
>> is
>>> populated throughout is an issue for a general USA chapter.  I attended a
>>> meetup in Nashvi

Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia France Wikimania Scholarships (was Re: Money, politics and corruption)

[Noein]

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On 21/07/2010 01:57, Florence Devouard wrote:
> This decision was approved on the 24th of may and was advertised in 
> various (french speaking) venues. The scholarship only proposed two 
> different types of packages: 250 euros or 500 euros.
> There was no requirement of nationality or location, though we would 
> probably have focused on French participants. A commission was receiving 
> the scholarship requests and approving them.
> Scholars had two main obligations :
> - actually being at the conference :)
> - report after the conference
> 
> 
> In spite of sufficient time, not all scholarships were distributed, 
> which is quite unfortunate. However, the number of French participants 
> had never been as high in a Wikimania.

Out of curiosity, would contacting the french-speaking registered users
of en. and fr. wikipedia have been a good advertisement strategy?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption

[Noein]

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Corruption is a deep concern because it's a transformative and invasive
force/process. It's not just a stain, it's rather like an oil spill:
growing bigger, with consequences on every level. The more a community
let the corruption in, the more the community is out of its own business.
I understand the worries of Milos, though I have no clue about the
specifics. In its current allusive form, only a few in-the-know can
understand the alarm signal of Milos and judge if the danger is real. I
hope they will have a deep thought about it.

Enucleation, parasiting and phagocyting are known processes in the
biological world. The same happens with institutions, ideas and social
processes. Except that because we are part of those processes, we
usually realize what is happening to us once it is too late.

I don't think that the wikimedian community is so special that
corruption won't occur, therefore justifying a lack of worry or effort
against it.
I don't think that corruption is unavoidable either.


Mankind has never before been able to communicate and think massively
about its common problems. We're living a new era.
No solution is out of reach until someone tries to find if it is. No
human had the opportunity before to share with 1 000 000 of his/her
peers so we don't know anymore what we cannot do about *any* problem.

If auditing is found to be a good solution, then maybe we can obtain
help from the side of AVINA[1], an latino-american organization,
originally founded in 1994 by Stephan Schmidheiny[2], that has
experience and knowledge about trust, self-evaluation and corruption.
They also have an impressive list of hundreds of independent of
organizations capable of auditing.



[1]:
http://www.avina.net/web/siteavina.nsf/page?openform&Sistema=1&idioma=eng
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_Schmidheiny



On 14/07/2010 14:06, oliver keyes wrote:
> 
> The problem with general accusations that hit nobody in particular is that 
> it's rather hard to follow up on them. I'm sure there is probably at least 
> one corrupt or biased employee of the foundation or chapter somewhere in the 
> world - it's a human weakness. Nothing can really be done about it unless, as 
> gerard says, it hits the fan. 
> 
>> From: gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
>> Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:28:33 +0200
>> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption
>>
>> Hoi,
>> Our community is not perfect. That is good. There are people who spend an
>> inordinate amount of time on Wiki related subjects; I am one of them. There
>> are people who go to Wikimania, I have been to all of them. There are people
>> with a large amount of influence; when you heared Jimmy speak I am one of
>> them. I am not perfect.
>>
>> There are many people with loads of influence and as I have been there from
>> quite early it was relatively easy for me to cut out a niche. I am not on
>> influential-l or secret-l or cabal-l.
>>
>> Like yourself I have heard of incompetence, money grabbing, power plays. I
>> have seen some. However for me it does not matter.  Many of these people
>> have their own agenda and if it the time of the items of such an agenda are
>> in the here and now, they shape our world. Many of the items of my agenda
>> are in the agenda and I could not be more happy about that. I also know that
>> it upsets others.
>>
>> The problem with behaviour that is not good / acceptable is that at some
>> stage it will be recognised and it will kill off the people in a similar way
>> as to Essjay. The best indication that such things can happen is the upset
>> of our capable, competent and upright former chair. I was convinced that he
>> would be re-elected and I would have welcomed his re-election.
>>
>> When there is substance to "officials" with problematic credentials, it is
>> certain that this will be noticed. When the system gets manipulated to keep
>> them where they are, it will get noticed. When they are chapter officials
>> and they damage the chapter it will be the members of the Foundation that
>> have the possibility to force the issue.
>>
>> From my perspective, I hate it when there are half formulated accusations. I
>> am sure that I will work well with Milos in our little committee and like
>> pinky and the brain, we will conquer the world.  we even have a
>> mandate to do so in our strategy plan 
>> Thanks,
>>GerardM
>>
>> On 14 July 2010 00:30, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>>
>>> Besides having a great time on Wikimania, I've heard a number of
>>> complains which put a shadow on a really great event. At some point of
>>> time I was even a bit depressed.
>>>
>>> I was thinking a lot about should I raise this issue or not; and if
>>> yes, then how. After the first issue I thought not to talk about it at
>>> all. After the second, I thought that it is better not to talk. After
>>> the third, I thought that I should contact some people privately.
>>> A

Re: [Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to FoundationWebsite

[Noein]

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If something of similar consequences as the kill switch [1] were
triggered against the WMF in USA, would it still be accessible for the
rest of the world?


[1]:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/obama-internet-kill-switch-proposed-20100618-yln6.html

On 03/07/2010 18:54, David Gerard wrote:
> On 3 July 2010 17:35, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Birgitte SB  wrote:
>> David Gerard writes:
> 
>>> http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
>>> Can we reasonably say that everything else on the list there is a
>>> solved problem we don't have to worry about?
> 
>> I wonder how robustly the user database is backed up / whether it's in
>> multiple data centers.
> 
> 
> Talking to Danese yesterday, she is keenly aware of this stuff and how
> the Tampa data centre is one hurricane away from disappearing! Hence
> plans for a redundant data centre in Virginia, etc.
> 
> 
>>  You're right that our role as
>> identity-verifier for our millions of users is important.
> 
> 
> That's getting into more esoteric threat models, e.g. protecting
> reusers from an insane contributor, or protecting contributors from a
> malicious reuser. But the data we hold but don't put into the public
> dumps is really very important stuff.
> 
> 
> - d.
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia"

[Noein]

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Just my 2c thoughts exploring the idea.

I don't know if wikipedia should have a chapter specific to children
because it would be culturally biased by our views about education.
I think it would be better to aim for a specific psychological profile
and skills, ie:
- - for the non-semantic persons (who don't rely much on words), more
direct images (or photos) and animations (or videos). For example
explaining the size of the sun and of planets showing their relative
size works better than sheer numbers for most of people, or at least is
a necessary intermediate step for understanding the numbers.
- - for people not fluent with vocabulary, use only the 500 (200? 1000?)
most common english words (a bot could signal rare words)
- - for people with few abstracting skills, use concrete objects and
familiar analogies to explain (like explaining the curve of 3d space
with a sheet of paper)
- - replace complex equations with qualitative explanations
- - Etc.

Also, for illiterate persons, it would be great to include a "play"
button that would automatically read the article out loud. It should be
included so that illiterate persons don't have to install their own
text-to-speech software.

What would really be interesting would be to study people with internet
access who *don't* use wikipedia because they feel uneasy or find it
unadapted or too difficult. Find the main psychological categories of
these people and understand how to interact with them and transmit them
information, and define the kind of chapter that they'd need.
Eventually, check if several of those special chapter could be merged
(for example, visual.wikipedia with analogous.wikipedia).

Then check if there are voluntaries for this work and the sum of work
required.


On 28/06/2010 20:40, Ting Chen wrote:
> Hello Ziko,
> 
> speaking for myself. I am for such an approach. But I would also like to 
> see such a project, because it is so important, to be prepared 
> carefully. The suggestions is not made the first time, and last time 
> when the suggetion was on meta, it was discussed until no one can give 
> it a chance anymore.
> 
> I also don't see such a project really as a compititor to the "adult" 
> Wikipedia. I think both projects can benefit from each other alot.
> 
> Now one step back. Encyclopedia for kids is not new. A lot of classic 
> encyclopedia has their kid version. This shows that a kid encyclopedia 
> is not just an encyclopedia in "dumn" language. Contrarily, I think a 
> kid encyclopedia is far more challenging to write, because you need more 
> pedagogic skills. And building up such skills by our contributors can 
> again benefit Wikipedia. There are also other online kid encyclopedia 
> from which we can learn from their experiences. I definitively would 
> like to see what Robert would find out in this respect and how his 
> research can encourage us or help us in this new endeavor.
> 
> Greetings
> Ting
> 
> Ziko van Dijk wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> It seems to me doubtless that there is a substantial number of active
>> Wikimedians who see the need in a simple or children-encyclopedia and
>> would like to invest some of their own sweat, blood and tears. Others,
>> who disagree, may stand on the side line and comment if they like.
>>
>> There are a lot of single questions when defining the exact scope
>> etc., but the main question remains: Would WMF accept such a project,
>> or would it reject it for being just another Wikipedia in already
>> existing languages. So, how different the new project must be from
>> Wikipedia. The original fear is that a linguistic group is split into
>> two communities whereas the forces usually should be concentrated in
>> one Wikipedia. A Wikipedia in "simple English", we were told, is
>> essentially a Wikipedia in English.
>>
>> But if a project, for example, directs itself to a relativeley limited
>> group of readers (children), with consequences for the content
>> (limited length of articles, no explicit images), usage of language
>> (no hard words), wouldn't it be different enough from a "usual"
>> Wikipedia?
>>
>> Kind regards
>> Ziko
>>
>>
>>
>> 2010/6/27 Ting Chen :
>>   
>>> Hello Milos,
>>>
>>> reading your mail below I am wondering why your reaction on my first
>>> mail was so aggressive. It looks to me as if your consideration is not
>>> that far away from mine. Especially I wrote in my suggestion that first
>>> of all the project must have a very clearly defined scope and audiance,
>>> second that it should have a more rigid editorial and anti-vandal
>>> mechanism and third that we need more research.
>>>
>>> Greetings
>>> Ting
>>>
>>> Milos Rancic wrote:
>>> 
 On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 2:09 AM, Mark Williamson  wrote:

   
> The difference was that Wikipedia was not made for young people.
>
> If I run a social group for adults and there are issues with children
> who visit, I can blame it on their parents a

Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again

[Noein]

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Oh, this function is very interesting. If it were coupled with a
function to get synonyms and metonyms (ie, equidae, mount) as a proposal
to enlarge or explore a concept, then a semantic map would be created to
navigate Commons in all languages.
Maybe context-related or frequently-associated keywords would be useful too.


On 23/06/2010 05:51, John Doe wrote:
> the basic translation matrix is in place, here is how you say horse in as
> many languages as you can:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:%CE%94/Sandbox&oldid=40748125
> 
> John
> 
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 7:56 PM, John Doe  wrote:
> 
>> Since I'm a fairly active programmer, I have some code sitting around. If I
>> can get some support on commons with regards to templates (something that
>> gives me nightmares) I could probably get a translation matrix program up
>> and running within 24-48 hours. I would just need to figure out a good
>> method for tracking what needs translated, what has been machine translated
>> and needs review, and what has already been translated.
>>
>> John
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
>>
> If we consider
> that current English native speakers mostly already have internet and
>>> those
> without internet are likelier than not to be non-English speakers I
>>> would
> be
> careful to advocate the unilateral use of English.


 As would I, though I don't think you mean what you said.
>>>
>>> Why not? To me, it means that we're widening the digital divide by
>>> making it so that people who don't have the internet would have little
>>> use for it anyways if it's all written in a language they don't
>>> understand.
>>>
>>> m.
>>>
>>> ___
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>>
>>
> ___
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Re: [Foundation-l] Donation of Encyclopedic Entries on Famous Poems

[Noein]

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Oh Kubla Khan! Jorge Luis Borges was fond of the palace's story and the
poem. Thank you for your hard work.

On 22/06/2010 02:05, Jeffrey Peters wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> My name is Jeffrey Peters, a professional researcher who is currently
> working on my dissertation (dealing with Romantic poetry) and in addition
> Masters in Classical Lit. I am writing to you today to announce the donation
> of two fully written pages on two important poems of the English language:
> Wordsworth's *Ode: Intimations of Immortality* and Coleridge's *Kubla Khan*.
> Their current pages are almost stub level and contain many errors and
> problems. Both rewrites/expansions can be found on Simple Wikipedia, a
> project that is noble and deserves more involvement by the community as a
> whole:
> 
> http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ottava_Rima/Ode:_Intimations_of_Immortality
> 
> http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ottava_Rima/Kubla_Khan
> 
> The above are works of love, and I dedicated dozens of hours at multiple DC
> university libraries compiling research that, as far as I can tell, cannot
> be found elsewhere in such a complete and concise form in print or on the
> internet. I have provided my time and abilities to produce the page for the
> betterment of the WMF and Wikipedia as a whole. I do so because of four
> individuals who have inspired me over the last year: Jimbo Wales (for his
> dedication to the idea of a free and complete encyclopedia), Samuel Klein
> (for his dedication to the projects and valiant effort to ensure high
> quality), Cary Bass (for the massive amount of time he puts in ensuring that
> volunteers are able to succeed), and Philippe Beaudette (for striving to
> make the WMF more academic friendly).
> 
> Previously, I donated the material for Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
> but I did not compile one whole page with every aspect but included material
> in a piecemeal fashion. This did not work as well as I hoped, so I put in
> the additional effort to ensure that the pages can be considered "complete",
> though they may need additional minor copyedits to remove any final errors.
> 
> I hope that my donation today will aid Wikipedia's continuing quest to
> provide a free and educational encyclopedia, and I hope that the level of
> effort and critical eye, to an extent that appears unrivaled in any current
> poetry page (even in my previous works), will attract more people to
> Wikipedia who shall do the same.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Jeffrey Peters
> aka Ottava Rima
> ___
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Re: [Foundation-l] Encouraging participation

[Noein]

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On 20/06/2010 23:23, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
> If you're never read it, you'd probably enjoy this article from the Journal
> of American History penned by the late, great Dr. Roy Rosenzweig from June
> 2006:
> 
> 

Lot of useful information, thank you. I'd like to pinpoint a few
arguments from it:

Among other things, the "no original research" policy limiting expert
implication... I was always bothered by Wikipedia being a repository of
traditional knowledge but not novel, challenging, trying ideas. Why not
add a tab for each article, called "hypothesis" where original research
is tolerated, though all the other wp rules still apply? People who
don't want speculation or dubious content would read the main tab,
people who want to know possible interpretations and hypothesis would
also read the secondary tab.

Also, it seems that experts and academicians don't like being challenged
by profanes. (I think they need to learn to be)

"The Internet would now grind to a halt without such free and
open-source resources as the operating system Linux, the Web server
software Apache, the database MySql, and the programming language php."
If someone can backup this affirmation with studies and sources, I would
be grateful. I think there is a direct link between free software and
free knowledge and culture. The transformation of solutions and ideas
into proprietary goods with monetary value is a dead end, I think, and
the major obstacle to progress and freedom. But it's extremely difficult
to prove or disprove this theory because of the magnitude and complexity
of its scope.
However, it is essential to try to understand what is happening and what
may happen with knowledge, both with the traditional systems and the
"free" ones like wp. If we manage to have a clear idea and model of it,
we can build better our philosophy, explain it better, and possibly
achieve a bigger consensus.


Back on the subject of encouraging participation, a general consideration:
Practical solutions are immediate and efficient, but usually lead to
unwanted deviations from the principles. So one should always ask
himself or herself, "what are the consequences of this practical
solution? How strong is the change of perspective it introduces?
Is this change desirable, mergeable with our main goals, or at least
reversible? Or will we corrupt our direction for too long (or forever)
if we implement this working approach?

This questioning is notable with the recent questions of attracting more
users, of censorship and of attracting experts.
Should we retain our policies and stall our development or should we
introduce change to keep growing?
My point is to judge the impact of the change comparing it to our
long-term direction. We cannot trade a short-term benefit for a
long-term goal (expressed in our policies) if the modifications cannot
be changed later.
If we cede to censorship, can we regain our loss of independance? If we
invite frivolous minds, can we educate them? If we give privileges to
experts, can we teach them to rescind them later?




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Re: [Foundation-l] Encouraging participation

[Noein]

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On 20/06/2010 03:25, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
> But now it's standard for any site to have well-structured "facepages"
> (profiles) to provide for academic the mean to:
> * properly introduce himself/herself;
> * get the idea about who is some other contributor/peer;
> * communicate with other people in well-structured way (structured by
> groups with particular interests etc.) with modern means to express
> support of one's opinion etc.
It seems founded.



> So my point is not increase of distraction from content (as main
> object of contributor care, intended care I would stress) but the
> opposite - significant decrease of such distraction by eliminating the
> need of DIY self-care (which is not intended at all).
I think it would be interesting to develop this idea.


>
> The last but far not least: if we really would like to attract more
> academics we have to change socialization policies and/or traditions
> as academics (most of them) don't like/appreciate blind (anonymous)
> peer cooperation.
We could make a "expert" class of users, widely known, with admin powers
on pages of their domain of expertise, with the possibility to lock
articles temporarily from normal editors during edit wars. But they
should be expected to give fair attention to alternatives, and respect
the NPOV. They would still respond to admins and superadmins. Or would
it be too conflicting with the wikimedians principles? I'm always
dubious about compromises, because they generally achieve no other goal
that artificial consensus at the cost of the conflicting goals.


> Or we can look at that in such way: if we are
> talking about credibility of content we have to talk about credibility
> of contributors as peers in teamwork first.
Maybe convincing internationally recognized experts to contribute
articles as wp users (like Hawking on Astrophysics) would start the
desire among experts to have a say among their peers? So wp could become
a little more a place of exchange of expert knowledge.


> That's why we will need as much of real&exact info on "facepages" as
> possible plus as much de-"virtualization" by mean of meetups as
> possible. Look on experience of de:WP.
Why not create Wikipedians clubs in localities and schools that try to
maintain a few pages about specific information dear to the members, yet
still of encyclopedic value, like the local history or cultural
highlights or natural wonders or a local artist or project, or just a
shared dream, a story, a feeling, a song, etc.

Why not propose to schools to publish the adventurous projects of each
classes in a special section of the WMF foundation ?




> Sincerely,
>
> Pavlo
>
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 2:16 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>> To attract academics this is and must be viewed as a serious endeavor.
>>  Yes some aspects such as reverting vandalism could have a fun twist
>> applied to them but the creation of content must remain simple and
>> serious.  Wikipedia already has a problem with its image regarding
>> credibility.  Things that would affect Wikipedia's image must be
>> carefully considered.  I personally do not need further distraction
>> while I edit.  Medpedia http://www.medpedia.com/ has more of a
>> facebook appearance to it and for that among other reasons I will not
>> contribute their.  We need to keep our goal of writing an encyclopedia
>> first and foremost.
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
>>
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>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Encouraging participation

[Noein]

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On 20/06/2010 01:49, Milos Rancic wrote:
> * At another faculty we have a teaching assistant among Wikimedians.
> After two projects, we've concluded cooperation because students
> didn't quite understand work on Wikipedia and started with
> confrontation.

That information is key. Why people from the teaching establishment
don't understand Wikipedia? Why don't they see, for example, that it's
one of the best ideas about protecting and sharing information? Why do
they judge it so mediocre when they can participate to make it
brilliant? Why people in the education doesn't see or understand this?
What are their arguments and their inner barriers? Do they have good
counter arguments, is it a prejudice, an incompatibility of personality,
or ignorance?

Where are the explanations? What IS Wikipedia? What are the structures
and consequences of this meme, this slogan: "imagine a world where each
human being has access to the entire human knowledge"? Where are they
theorized, wordized, schematized?
Do the members of this mailing list even agree? Do we know what wp is?

Where are the wikimedian efforts converging to? What kind of world are
they creating? Have we got tendency towards democracy, consensus,
participation, sharing, unanimity, respect, liberty, freedom of
expression and of choice, listening, dialoguing, or have we not?


Why people, values, projects and actions of betterment (to our eyes) of
the world are not listened to, trusted, voted, seconded, motioned,
consensually applied, critically applauded, desired, rewarded and
understood?

I think that we need to make people think by themselves about Wikipedia.
Make them see the whole big picture. We should collaborate to express
this idea, to make it happen in others' mind, so that people can think
clearly about it. What it aims to be.

Maybe if you don't know and value citizenship (I mean feeling that
you're part of your environment and society), freedom, responsibility
and other similar concepts, you can't even think about what wp is doing.
Maybe they should be permanently discussed, thought and taught with
criticism in the wikimedian community. What about making a film about
the role of Wikipedia in possible futuristic societies? Or writing
anticipation novels?
Or interviews of founders and of historical super admins, points of view
of Trustees and Board Members, biographies and current interviews of
"Jimbo". Debates, interactivity.
One of the possible aims should be to show that something is happening
with wp, in the same way that back in the "hippie/young/peace and love
movement of the 60-70's, "something was happening".

I think something is happening right now with Wikipedia and the
wikimedian concepts. Not a democracy, not an ochlocracy, it's something
new that is a shared governance about a theme or a resource or an
interest. Freedom of the knowledge. Of expression. Of access to
information.

The traditional model about knowledge rewards better the knowledge
holders, it seems? Their position, title, revenue, prestige, respect,
dignity, power of decision, authority, all come from the commoditization
of the knowledge.

Maybe we have to think what the new model has to offer to the ancient
roles.

Also, there is an obvious convergence of visions with TED, at least
partially. Wikipedia is an idea worth spreading and a mean of spreading
ideas.
TED has a lot of success, apparently, to present ideas as an enormously
profitable "market", proving that ideas can change the world. That's the
power of knowledge and culture. Wikipedia wants to give this power to
everybody downright to the single individual.
I think some people here, Board Members, Trustees, Admins and other
wikimedians should have a try at the 18 minutes speeches. There is
something behind the Wikimedia ideas: a future. There is something
between most of the TED ideas. Maybe each one deserves a wikipedian page?


> Any idea how to improve their motivation?
(yes I'm still answering your letter)
I think I already mentioned a technique in other situations to raise
awareness and understanding: roleplaying games. Put them in decisional
situations with dilemmas about freedom, knowledge, etc. Make it so that
each one represents a point of view, one they agree with. What are their
political discourse? Are they for or against Wikipedia? Is it a
fantastic adventure to better our world or is is just boring. Does
knowledge and reflection passionate them or not ?
Also, I'm encountering more an more fatalism among educated people. They
don't seem to believe that change is possible. Yesterday I just watched
"Taking Woodstock", it's an excellent counter-example.


Also, is the Serbian chapter complete enough? Do you have at least all
the links translated so that you can dive into knowledge, chasing the
fleeting tails of elusive concepts, learning about whole new paradigms
through dozens of embedded links, glimpsing into what we like, and
knowing more about it?



S

Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Noein]

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On 20/06/2010 04:33, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
> Attracting consumers is a much more complicated issue than attracting
> editors.  Editors seem to find their niche or go away.
> 
> Attracting readers takes a constant vigilance over how Wikimedia projects
> are portrayed in media, pop culture, and casual conversations.  There is a
> fine balance there.  The readers part dabbles with the interaction of
> editors.  We want readers to fix typos, clean up things, and monkey about.
> To make them into editors, they have to have A) the interest B) a positive
> experience and C) the desire.  Desire is different from interest, because
> that is the compulsion to stick around and I consider this to be the most
> important part.
> 
> However, if we can gain at least interest, that is half of the battle even
> though there are three parts.  It is important that we, as the ones with
> desire, foster the environment to invite the casual reader into at least
> understanding what we're doing.  We all know about the popular
> misconceptions are about Wikimedia projects, and we are bound to educate and
> relate to the reader if we want to cause the tipping point of creating an
> environment that is open, welcoming, but also importantly goal-oriented.
> This ties into the congruant thread, but I'm avoiding cross-posting.
Thank you for these deep thoughts.


> In other words, editors find their own interests and where they fit in.  If
> we are going to encourage *reader* participation, that requires active
> encouragement from the community to develop a sense of trust.  It's true
> that you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia.
Oh, by the way, I see how that weakness can be a strength: you are
allowed to doubt and thus, correct.
"It's true that you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. It's
true that you can correct the mistakes."
"It's true that Politicians and Religious have manipulated their own
articles.
It's true that they ultimately failed."
"It's true that we know less than the paper Encyclopaedia, it's true
that we're learning faster."
Etc.



Also, I think there is a kind of academicians that could help us:
epistemologists? What are they saying about the Wikipedian knowledge? I
think they would be interested to study the way knowledge is collected,
built, organized, checked, debated, trusted. This is currently mostly
popular culture but maybe the same mechanisms could be applied to
science. Anyway, I think I have a way to reach Mario Bunge [1] and ask
him for his opinion. Would it be worth the effort?

One question that seems important to me: how can wp can help the science
and can the epistemology help wp?


[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bunge


On 20/06/2010 01:18, Milos Rancic wrote:
> As well as dopamine works during the work, not when the prize has been
> get: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s
>
> But, it is just about money and goods, as well as that part of
> psychology is at the very beginning. Social rewards are much more
> powerful. (Note that there are many social stigmas because people
> won't do something for money or goods.) I believe that we would have
> an editor boom just with "like" button for edits, talk comments and
> comments [on Wikinews].

Insightful links. "If/then rewards narrow our focus".
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Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Noein]

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Wikipedia should be kept a neutral repository of knowledge, not a social
ground for games. Once you take the path of creating a futile community,
there is no way to talk about the long term goals of the WMF, the
vision, the ethics, the humanity, the knowledge. You just have people
who are here to have fun and to socialize. It would add noise, not signal.

Moreover, I think attracting readers is very different from attracting
editors. I don't see how it would be positive to convince people to edit
articles with superficial reasons in mind.

However external sites could use the content for games or comments (like
Facebook does). This way, the site originating the "fun attitude" would
be distinct from the site about knowledge. Wikipedia would get attention
without being invaded.


On 19/06/2010 23:58, Sydney Poore wrote:
> English Wikipedia has numerous contests during the year. Some people
> regularly participate in them and enjoy them.
> 
> Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Contest is an example of one that is
> ongoing.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MILCON
> 
> Picture of the year is popular with some people on Commons.
> 
> While everyone does not want to be involved in contests, they appeal to some
> people and I see no problem with us introducing more of them in WMF projects
> to see if they will draw people into the movement.
> 
> I feel the same way about encouraging new ways to get different groups of
> people involved with WMF projects.
> 
> If gaming can be used to promote an interest in WMF then that is goodness.
> Puzzles, board games, and even more complex fantasy games using content
> might be a draw for some people. If someone wants to develop them I would
> not stand in there way.
> 
> Combining community service and socializing is very common in community
> organizations, and is appealing to many people. By adding more social
> components to WMF projects, we will most likely draw in people that
> otherwise would not volunteer. I see this as an important tool and one that
> should not be dismissed if we are going to broaden the base of our
> volunteers.
> 
> Sydney Poore
> (FloNight)
> 
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Marc Riddell 
> wrote:
> 
>> on 6/19/10 4:58 PM, Keegan Peterzell at keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> .
>>>
>>> There was a great TED speech that I need to look up but don't have the
>> time
>>> for at the moment.  The premise of the presentation is that studies have
>>> shown time and time again that things like games, prizes, awards and
>> other
>>> measures of gratitude are only temporary measures to increase motivation.
>>> The folks that work for you that are the truly motivated ones and
>> believers
>>> in the process do not ask for these rewards.  A pat on the back and a
>> "good
>>> job, thanks for your work because I value it very much" occasionally is
>> the
>>> only true recognition that is needed.  The other fluff only inspires
>>> distraction from the goal because it's creating other little goals which,
>> in
>>> turn, become more important than the end result.
>>
>> Yes! Prizes denote direct competition as in sports or, more subtly, with
>> the
>> science & arts awards.
>>
>> Person-to-person affirmation goes a very long way; and is what
>> collaboration
>> & community should be based upon. Give them the climate, and they will give
>> you the culture.
>>
>> Marc Riddell
>>
>>
>>
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Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Noein]

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On 19/06/2010 19:53, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
> My jaw just dropped.  While I know these are ideas intended to help increase
> the socialization, this is turning Wikipedia into youtube.  The day that
> happens I'm resigning all my permissions and packing my bags.  Softening
> notability?  Fantasy articles?  Games?  Live comments?  No thanks.
> 
> I don't think the idea of encouraging women to participate needs these
> things.  I have a fierce dislike for what I consider to be the mind-numbing
> distraction that social networking sites provide.  I'd rather use Wikimedia
> projects to stimulate my mind, not kill time.

Then I made my point. I think futilizing wikipedia is the worst thing we
can do.

On 19/06/2010 07:30, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>  Saturday 19 June 2010 05:58:31 Milos Rancic ??:
>> That means that we need games for women. While I think that we should
>> build full social network, just a basic one would help.
>
> Or perhaps we don't even have to build one, but just use the existing
ones.
> [People are always against making Wikipedia a social network.] Have
RSS feeds
> of articles you created/pictures you uploaded. These could then be
connected
> to Facebook or wherever for your friends to see what are you working on.
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Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[Noein]

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Some ideas to increase the social aspect of Wikipedia:
- - insert a small chat with channels for each chapter (for example where
the interwiki links were ;) )
- - make a tab for personal comments for articles, where people can
express their feelings
- - show the last 10 comments on the right side of the article
- - soften the notability criterion
- - make a reward system for spell correction (automatically attributed by
bot unless reverted), for adding references (must be validated by
moderator or voted by users)
- - associate galleries of sounds and/or photos that you can expand or
browse with one click
- - create challenges or games for wikipedia: charades pointing to an
article to be discovered, collections to be completed (find ten articles
with x or y characteristics), create fantasy articles only useful for
the game with a warning that it's only RPG, etc.
- - allow a friend system and allow to import them from facebook
- - develop the homepage of wikipedia and wikinews so that they combine
major news with the major updates of the pages we are watching, and more
information about your friends
- - allow a button "recommend this article to a friend" with feedback from
the friend, like a karma count, a thank you count, or the likes
etc.

On 19/06/2010 08:37, Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 7:40 AM, Nikola Smolenski  wrote:
>> Дана Saturday 19 June 2010 07:37:18 Milos Rancic написа:
>>> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 7:30 AM, Nikola Smolenski  wrote:
 Or perhaps we don't even have to build one, but just use the existing
 ones. [People are always against making Wikipedia a social network.] Have
 RSS feeds of articles you created/pictures you uploaded. These could then
 be connected to Facebook or wherever for your friends to see what are you
 working on.
>>>
>>> Then you are using Facebook, not Wikimedia. And Flickr is much better
>>> for private photos than Wikimedia.
>>
>> Then your Facebook friends will see that you are doing interesting things on
>> Wikipedia projects and will want to do them too.
> 
> I don't think that it is particularly interesting to see someone's
> edits. If you are not a passionate Wikimedian, of course.
> 
> Besides that, contemporary term for "site" is "social network". There
> are just more and less successful social networks. Wikimedia is
> successful social network for a very specific type of demographics:
> young middle class males. Actually, not so young anymore. I think that
> we are loosing males from younger generations, too.
> 
> That means that we have to work on diversification of our editor
> demographics. And one edit in ten days is better than no edits at all.
> We need cleverly created concepts which would make editing easy, fun,
> causal. With a lot of interesting content around; probably, based on
> existing Wikimedia content, but not necessary.
> 
> The time when wiki concept was new and interesting passed a few years
> ago. And even Microsoft has better sense for new technologies than us.
> 
> For example, our goal is not to make a possibility to read Wikipedia
> from iPhone. Apple did that. The goal is to have easy access to
> editing from iPhone.
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Noein]

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On 09/06/2010 12:01, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> You are as always, as pellucid as a brick of coal, and totally
> off topic to boot. Please feel welcome to not post comments
> like that again.

The fact that you don't understand, don't agree with, or don't like
someone doesn't justify to be rude. I think this kind of remark has no
way to be constructive. Not only it cannot help reaching a consensus,
but it could be offending and start a dispute.

Something is happening in Wikipedia that is new and rare in the history
of mankind: community decisions through global consensus at a huge
scale. We have the responsibility to make this model work, because I
think it is seen, and will be seen more and more in this 21st century,
as a proof-experiment of whether humans can govern themselves without
the traditional authoritarian leadership, at least under certain
conditions.

Our discussions in this mailing-list must be succesful, and this means
keeping the tolerance and patience high and the agressivity low. For the
same reason, it is my opinion that we must be bold about keeping the
power of decisions in the hands of the community. Our goal is one of the
noblest I have ever felt with my mind: let's forget the anger and other
futile acts of our egos, and keep focused on what is at stake.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases

[Noein]

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On 09/06/2010 03:28, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

> I recall reading that IBM improved its
> participation in the Linux kernel community by getting rid of all
> internal communications among its kernel developers, meaning they had
> to use the public project lists to bounce ideas off anyone.

I think this idea is key.
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Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Noein]

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On 07/06/2010 20:32, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 12:14 PM, Mark Williamson  wrote:
>> Aryeh, I was under the (apparently mistaken?) impression that at
>> Wikipedia, the community makes the decisions
> 
> Not exactly.  If the community actually made decisions, Wikipedia
> would be a direct democracy, and it's not.  The community does have a
> large say in decisions, but it doesn't make them, in the end.
> Particularly not on technical issues, which have always been
> controlled by a much smaller group.

Ah! That's exactly what I was wondering from the beginning. Thank you
for clarifying this point.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Noein]

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Thank you for your opinions. I'd like to clarify my criticism. What Mike
has done and is doing is honorable; he's dedicating efforts and patience
to the community. He has nothing to do with my questioning.


What I see is that WMF doesn't always publish the problems they're
addressing, not in time, not entirely and not in a defined and known
place. It seems that the WMF feels it is the correct way to communicate
their actions once they're done, synthesizing briefly why to a selected
(or random?) sample of the community.
Some answers here even suggest that secrecy is necessary, that informing
the community about what and why the Board is doing is not feasible or
desirable as a norm and as a duty, and that communicating about the
situation, intentions and actions of the WMF should be exceptional and
under the community pressure, pressure that should be channeled and
controlled through trusted community members.

I'm not trying to accuse but to put in relief a certain vision of WMF:
an enterprise that must survive legally and economically, like any other
enterprise. The community is some sort of public, clients and users that
one must manage through public relations at best or indifference. In
summary, this seems a vision of little accountability towards the community.

In contrast, I think the community has other expectations. They feel
they own the projects because they made them, they're making them, they
will make them. They're not consumers. They're the engine. They identify
with the project. They share (more or less) a vision and they search for
an ethic together. I think that in their minds, though they owe a lot to
the founders, they now are the main part of this adventure. The WMF is
paid by them to address what they will tell them to address. According
to this vision, the accountability towards the community is total.

My words are not good and my vision short. I beg someone with better
eloquence and diplomatic skills, with more experience and insight to
develop the idea.

What I propose is to create a public space where the WMF would announce
immediately the claims and pressures they receive, and how they will
respond. (just a copy/paste of mails for example).
People who want to follow, comment or act upon these kind of news would
subscribe to a RSS feed, maybe with a filter for chapters.

Correctly set up, this channel between the WMF and the community could
be synergetic. It could avoid triggering anger, edit wars and
demissions. It could be used as a brain tank to collect data and ideas
about the problems that the WMF is facing, even when the WMF is doomed
to act on short terms. If the WMF accepts to feed the community with its
problems and intentions and listens to the corresponding feedback, most
of the communication problems would be defused, in my opinion.

I think it is worth an experimental try at least. If it yields
positively constructive results, then maybe there should be such a page
for each big category of problems that the WMF usually deals with.

Oh well, just a (badly expressed) idea.




On 05/06/2010 11:29, Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:04 PM, Mike Godwin  wrote:
> 
>> I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns...
> 
> Going back to the original issue regarding communication, the
> appearance of Mike on this thread shows me that this mailing list is
> one good way to get the Board's attention.
> 
> If Mike hadn't been able to deal with an issue and he felt it was
> important he would just walk across to or email someone who is better
> placed to respond.
> 
> On that basis I would say there isn't a communication issue. It might
> be hard for a newbie to know where to go, but in a way that protects
> the staff from being overwhelmed by the many millions who visit the
> site and have a query. I actually think it's a good thing to have
> barriers to communicating with WMF staff. In that way, we the
> community become sort of receptionists for them; we can either deal
> with a complaint or question ourselves or, if it so warrants, bump it
> up here or directly email the WMF.
> 
> User:Bodnotbod
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Communication

[Noein]

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Thank you Phoebe, you've been of a great help. I'll ponder your answers
for a while.

On 03/06/2010 07:21, phoebe ayers wrote:
> Hi Noein,
> 
> With no comment on the issue you were interested in, you raise good
> questions about internal communication, which has indeed been chaotic
> for as long as I've been around, but is -- if you can imagine --
> better than it used to be!
> 
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Noein  wrote:
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list
>> for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad
>> communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
>>
>>  I'm still ignorant of many aspects of the internal mechanisms and
>> interactions of the WMF, its projects, chapters, communities, sites,
>> tools, pages, agendas and mailing lists and to be honest I think it's a
>> maze.
>> One has to invest months, maybe years of investigation to really know
>> where he should be communicating, searching or waiting for certain kind
>> of information. Maybe these very considerations should be put instead on
>> the meta, on the strategic, on the village pump, on another mailing
>> list, or on several lists, or directed to the WMF, globally or to
>> certain dedicated persons only?
> 
> There should be a how-to-communicate-internally guide, no doubt. The
> problems are a) there are no easy answers (a lot of where to ask
> questions is contextual, it depends on the question); b) often there
> is no single point of contact -- to raise a discussion or ask a
> question of the community means putting it out there for whoever has
> time and inclination to answer. This is the way that many, many
> aspects of the projects work, which can be frustrating.
> 
>> So let me ask some genuinely ignorant questions:
>> - - are there somewhere an organizational map and schematics of the
>> overall components of the Wikimedia institutions, projects, foundations,
>> chapters and communities, their governance, roles, duties and
>> interactions, synthesized in one main page instead of dozens, each one
>> in a different part?
> 
> Not that I'm aware of, though there has been recent talk of trying to
> define this and there are probably attempts somewhere. The Meta-wiki
> is where such things would be found if they existed. Again, there is
> an issue in that these relations are not static, fixed, or typically
> well defined. In general:
> 
> * everything having to do with project (e.g. wikipedia, wikiversity,
> etc) content & policies is defined by the editor communities on those
> projects, that is, the people who show up and do stuff on the wiki
> over the long-term. Very, very little is done by the Foundation etc.
> in this regard, nor has the Foundation ever historically had this
> role.
> 
> * The Wikimedia Foundation, specifically meaning the 30-odd people
> employed in San Francisco, have historically run the servers that host
> the projects, issued press releases, done fundraising, managed legal
> threats (against the WMF itself), and a few other administrative
> tasks. This is slowly changing as the WMF gets more in the business of
> supporting outreach and editor activity, but in general it is still
> true that the projects are autonomous and editors have little to do
> with the WMF itself as far as day-to-day interaction.
> 
> * The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation provide guidance
> to the WMF, generally concerning themselves with big-picture issues.
> 
> * The Chapters are organizations in their respective geographic
> locations that do outreach, events, etc as independent charitable
> organizations. They are hooked to the WMF through name and mission,
> and a few shared activities, but stand apart in their day-to-day
> activities.
> 
> It's important to realize that there are large volunteer communities
> surrounding *all* of these institutions, including technical
> development, and community members do a lot of work in all areas. This
> work is not necessarily (in fact usually is not) directly managed by
> the WMF or another formal group.
> 
> So you can see that defining precise relationships is hard.
> 
> 
>> - - is there one main page instead of dozens for announcements and news,
>> with a RSS feed system, with selectable categories to choose what kind
>> of information one wants to follow ?
> 
> Nope. That's a fantastic idea though. It's related to the idea that
> was recently re-raised on the English Wikipedia Signpost talkpage
> abou

[Foundation-l] Communication

[Noein]

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I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list
for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad
communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.

 I'm still ignorant of many aspects of the internal mechanisms and
interactions of the WMF, its projects, chapters, communities, sites,
tools, pages, agendas and mailing lists and to be honest I think it's a
maze.
One has to invest months, maybe years of investigation to really know
where he should be communicating, searching or waiting for certain kind
of information. Maybe these very considerations should be put instead on
the meta, on the strategic, on the village pump, on another mailing
list, or on several lists, or directed to the WMF, globally or to
certain dedicated persons only?


So let me ask some genuinely ignorant questions:
- - are there somewhere an organizational map and schematics of the
overall components of the Wikimedia institutions, projects, foundations,
chapters and communities, their governance, roles, duties and
interactions, synthesized in one main page instead of dozens, each one
in a different part?
- - is there one main page instead of dozens for announcements and news,
with a RSS feed system, with selectable categories to choose what kind
of information one wants to follow ?
- - why, simply, the activity of the WMF is not published each day or
week? For example why the Gallimard letter and negociations were not
made public? why the confidentiality instead of a transparency policy?
why the causes, debates and decisions of Jimmy and the board in the
recent censorship controversy were not published in time? I sincerely
don't understand.
- - how a newbie could understand the current activities and projects?
where to start? who to contact?
- - in case of emergency like the Fox News attack, is there a plan?
protocols? a priority channel? plannified meetings and groups of
reflexion/discussion? plannified ways of updating the situation, of
sharing official declarations and resources?
- - are there ways to delegate, federate, synthesize, communicate opinions
and information between each community, chapter, board members?

I don't mean to force a type of governance or another, but simply to
organize the information so it's easier for everybody to know what's
happening.

Everything seems so fuzzy and chaotic currently. It seems that it all
depends of the charism of hyperactive community members and the good
will of board trustees. Please enlighten me.


On 02/06/2010 23:49, Mike Godwin wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Nathan  wrote:
> 
>>
>> Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know
>> about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files
>> or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the
>> deletion log.
> 
> 
> But of course, the deletion log was not the only notice. And Yann Forget
> knew about the deletions at the time they occurred.
> 
> 
>>  If you
>> can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so
>> afterwards?
>>
> 
> Sometimes you can. I just did. But of course sometimes you can't, for
> reasons I've already outlined. (There's nothing magical about the passage of
> time that eliminates the disincentive effect of disclosing negotiations.)
> 
> 
>> There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary
>> advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions
>> about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of
>> applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a)
>> providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without
>> referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take.
> 
> 
> I'm not sure what advice you think it is even theoretically possible that
> the Foundation could have offered.  Are you suggesting that the Foundation
> is acting as the lawyer for everyone who posts content to Wikisource?  There
> are obvious reasons that is not a sustainable or feasible model.
> 
> You seem to have the impression that the Foundation staff directly deleted
> the content. Actually, I shared the list with Cary, who shared the list with
> community members who implemented the takedown. (I deleted no content
> myself.) So you can see why the whole notion that the takedown wasn't shared
> with the community seems flatly wrong to me.  We absolutely engaged
> community members in implementing the takedown. Yann seems to suggest that
> our actions have been some kind of big secret. The reality, however, is that
> we did nothing in secret, and that Yann in fact has known what we did for
> quite a while now.  We even made it trivially easy to contact Gallimard and
> complain about the takedown.  But I do understand that it is easier to
> complain about WMF than it is to pursue Gallimard directly, even though
> doing the latter might be a more effective choice.
> 
> I'll

Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Noein]

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When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds
of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning. Yet without an
easy, obvious access to the keyhole, you wouldn't drive at all.
My point? Frequency of click is not the ultimate criterium. Some links
are required to be easily and immediately available because of their
importance (they may even be a requisite) and order of use.

A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language
click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of
articles without changing the language again.
Since their first need may be to define the language, it should be
obviously available and just one click away.



On 02/06/2010 21:48, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:
>> Who cares if people click them a lot?  The space they formally
>> occupied is filled with nothing now.
> 
> Interface clutter is not psychologically free.  Empty space is better
> than space filled with mostly-useless controls.  Whether these
> particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general
> principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Participation of intellectual professions

[Noein]

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On 28/05/2010 22:42, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
> 
>> 3. High level physicists also stay away from it. (for example most of
>> the theoretical information about [[quasars]] comes from the 1960's.
>> Current information on the net is frequently only available through
>> pay-to-read sites.)
>>
> Well, I am a university professor in physics and a Wikipedia
> administrator.

There's a misunderstanding. Not surprising because I'm terrible with words.
I'm glad you're here and I'm sure there are a lot like you.

I'm expressing my surprise that there are so many reticences among the
intellectual professions, at least in France and Argentina where I made
my little personal investigation.
I would naively expect a massive participation from them, on the
supposition that they share a vocation for sharing knowledge and a
passion to learn from others. And indeed some do. I have the impression,
however, that they're a minority. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If it needs to be precised, I try to never communicate to impose
personal convictions but to ask questions and provoke thoughts in the
hope of deeper questions.
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[Foundation-l] Participation of intellectual professions

[Noein]

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The premises:
1. I just had a short chat with [[Erik Orsenna]], a member of the
[[Académie française]] who "loves to learn and pass along knowledge".
He's also interested in the adventure of knowledge and in the democratic
processes and appreciate being able to tap into the knowledge of the
five french Académies he has access to.
I asked him if he was aware of Wikipedia and of its participative
nature. He did.
I asked him why the Academicians didn't participate more and share their
knowledge on it.
He said that they have no time, that they're busy writing their books.

2. In parallel, I had several conversations with university Professors
showing their reticence, distrust or hostility about the free
encyclopedia. They discredit the articles when speaking to their students.

3. High level physicists also stay away from it. (for example most of
the theoretical information about [[quasars]] comes from the 1960's.
Current information on the net is frequently only available through
pay-to-read sites.)

The interpretation:
It seems that the traditional way of handling knowledge is treating it
as a good, that is, a resource with a monetary value and ownership.
One invests money, time and efforts to obtain it. People who made a
career out of it want to recover their costs and make benefits out of
it. Some like the prestige of their exclusive knowledge or the authority
it confers.

The consequences:
A. Some feel threatened by the wikipedia model. They don't want it to
succeed. They perceive it would question their role, their power and
their way of earning money.
B. An expert who has synthesized after 40 years of dedicated studies
most of the knowledge of his specific domain that is known to humanity
will transmit it to a few persons only each year: a few dozens of
students, a few dozens of other experts, and a few thousands of
passionate readers who buy the vulgarization book.
Thus, knowledge is controlled, reserved, limited, slowed down. It will
take decades or centuries before the best of what we know reach everybody.

The consequences if it were to change:
With wikipedia, any expert could reach and teach millions of persons. In
ten or twenty years, every literate person with internet access could
use an interdisciplinary, edge-cutting database of knowledge for their
diary reasoning.
The knowledge and understanding of mankind could make giant leaps.

Concluding:
I think it is important to think how many of the intellectual profession
don't collaborate and why. We should search if  mechanisms involving the
wikipedia and that would benefit their research are possible. We should
even think economical models about knowledge that allow the profession
to change, in the same way that it is happening with the free software,
copyleft, Creative Commons and other alternative models.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Noein]

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Some thoughts, not aiming at anybody in particular.

The pressure from Fox News, the childish founders' jealousies, the void
FBI threats, the "patriarch complex" of Mr. Wales, if they're real,
should be of no inflated importance. Our personal tastes about what
images we like and which we don't should be of little weigh compared to
what is at stake.
Wikipedia and its sister projects are making history. They're forging a
century-lasting [[Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity]]. For the first time in its existence, humanity has a tool to
break free from ignorance and manipulation.
These projects are giving freedom of choice for every human. (but ok, it
may take centuries)

We should remember the big picture from time to time.


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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Noein]

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On 13/05/2010 13:01, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> I don't know that reaching everybody was ever a stated goal. Being
> theoretically available to everybody is a different matter...
Ah, that's the part that is not clear to me. If you talk about the
intrinsic properties of the Big Project, I agree that the core must be
free, uncensored resources.

My concern, however, is about the interface with the real world, that
is, the way this project containing information, ideas and knowledge
(specifically set in the context of the 21st century, mostly english
language, mostly western, mostly rich users) interacts with mankind.

Allow me to explain:

My current vision is that there are several main obstacles to a free
interaction, for example:
- - illiteracy
- - no internet access
- - cultural rejection
- - political censorship

With this context, I wonder if being theoretically available is enough,
or if the Foundation and community should worry about solving or
circumventing the pragmatical obstacles.

I understand the debate of the last days as an example about what I call
a political censorship, in a very generic meaning: an arsenal of
cultural values and technological means that forbid some ideas to
circulate, thus governing the minds into certain authorized or tolerated
behaviours (and thoughts).

I think most of mankind feel some kind of taboos are necessary to
achieved a civilized society. This feeling leads to the need (and thus
acceptation) of laws, which can be viewed as a legitimized form of
censorship.

Because of this generalized feeling towards laws, it is impossible to
sum up all the knowledge of humanity without offending each of these
cultural laws, and thus incommoding their believers. Abiding to the
cultural laws of a community gives a sense of belonging, of identity, of
security... It's a strong, common urge.

Let's add to this fact that many of those laws are in the hands of
"tutors" who use them as a tool to shape their "protected ones". (It
doesn't matter if I agree with their values or not, I'm focused on the
mechanism.)

The result is that you have deciding people between the foundation
projects and their potential users, deciding people that have control of
the flow of information. If they lose this control they lose power and
their community (or child, for example) will lose faith in the official
values and may start differing. From their perspective, it's the
beginning of chaos.


So, back to Wikipedia an Commons. Allowing such conflicts (free
universal information versus locally controlled information) would
antagonize the leaders and "disturb" the society order (which may be
viewed as good or bad from our point of view, but is usually terrifying
from theirs).

The pragmatical approach seen in the debates is to compromise enough to
avoid the conflicts and keep reaching the censored masses, minimizing
the compromise of principles.

The idealistic approach seems to only care about the internal community.
For example:

> David (a real thought leader) Goodman wrote:
>> If there is a wish for a similar but censored
>> service, this can be best done  by forking ours; 

But the wish to censor is not internal (except for parent maybe), thus a
fork wouldn't be followed by users. It's not users who want the
censorship system, it's detractors who don't want any out of their
control, free access to information to begin with.

My impressions from the last events is that people who believe in
Wikipedia and Commons projects don't wish major changes to the
censorship system that is satisfactorily self-managed by the users and
editors.

I think the people who feel strongly threatened by the lack of
censorship on Wikipedia and Commons are whether from an opposing side or
on a confused, testing phase. Because there is a war of influence, I
wonder if we are robust enough to ignore the "enemies" we're creating by
our very existence, given that they are influential. Fox News, Iran,
China are just symptoms: what's happening here is that we're beginning
to be a threat, imho, and that an escalation of hostility is to be
expected the more we are successful and they become aware of us.

Is it wise to ignore how the rest of the world reacts to the free access
of information? Can the community thrives only on the shoulders of the
people not offended by our current handling of information, or not?

I don't know the answer, but I think we should be attentive and
realistic enough to avoid a war, for example. That is not saying that we
should change or compromise just to please. But if we choose to
compromise, in this case allow some kind of censorship, forked or not,
we need to know what's at stake and the dangers.

Most of the libertarian communities that I know failed because they were
too disturbing / annoying for the surrounding powers. There should be a
constant acute perception of that. Maybe I've been too long in South
America to have blind faith in our enemies, but a n

Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Noein]

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Thank you for this deep analysis. While claiming that we should not
compromise any of the principles, you didn't address directly the
possibility that we won't reach everybody if we don't compromise.
Reaching every human is a (currently and apparently) conflicting
principle with free uncensored information. What is your vision about
that? Wait for better times? Do you think that with time, the inherent
virtues of our model will end convincing the reluctant or opposed people
of today?

On 12/05/2010 17:50, David Goodman wrote:
> Even more than what  Ray says:
> 
>  if we do not offer comprehensive free uncensored but reliable
> information, who will?  Other sites may feel they have to censor;
> other  uncensored sites may and mostly do have little standards of
> reliability. Some uncensored reliable sites are likely to require some
> form of payment, either directly or through advertising or government
> support.   If there is a audience for compromised sources of
> information, there are many organizations eager to provide it.
> 
> Other free uncensored reliable projects can be very important in their
> sphere, but we have an almost universal range. We're at present
> unique, which we owe  to the historical fact  of having been able to
> attract a large community, committed to free access in every sense,
> operating in a manner which requires no financial support beyond what
> can be obtained from voluntary contributions, and tied to no groups
> with pre-existing agendas--except the general agenda of free
> information.   That we alone have been able to get there is initially
> the courage and vision of the founders, their correct guess that the
> conventional wisdom that this would be unworkable was erroneous, the
> general world-wide attractiveness of the notion of free information,
> and, at this point , the Matthew effect, that we are of such size and
> importance that working here is likely to be more attractive and more
> effective than working elsewhere--and thus our continuing ability to
> attract very large numbers of volunteer workers of many cultural
> backgrounds.
> 
> We have everything to lose by compromising any of the principles. To
> the extent we ever become commercial, or censored , or unreliable, we
> will be submerged in the mass of better funded information providers.
> On the contrary, they have an interest in supporting what we do,
> because we provide  what they cannot and give the basis for
> specialized endeavors. If there is a wish for a similar but censored
> service, this can be best done  by forking ours; if there is a wish to
> abandon NPOV or permit commercialism, by expanding on our basis. We do
> not discourage these things; our licensing is in fact tailored to
> permitting them--but we should stay distinct from them. We have
> provided a general purpose feed and suitable metadata, and what the
> rest of the world does is up to them--our goal is not to monopolize
> the provision of information. We need not provide specialized
> hooks--just continue our goal for improved quality and organization of
> the content and the metadata.
> 
> That China has chosen to take parts of our model and develop
> independently in line with its government's policy, rather than
> forking us,  is possible because of the size of the government effort
> and, like us, the very large potential number of interested and
> willing highly literate and well-educated participants. All we can do
> in response is continue our own model, and hope that at some point
> their social values will change to see the virtues of it. If some
> other countries do similarly, we will at least have contributed the
> idea of a workable very large scale intent encyclopedia with user
> input. All information is good, though free information is better. If
> those in the Anglo-american sphere wish to censor, they know at least
> they have a potent uncensored competitor that it practice will also be
> available, which cannot but induce therm to a more liberal policy than
> if we did not have our standards.
> 
> I wish very much Citizendium had succeeded--the existence of
> intellectual coopetition is a good thing. Even as it is, I think they
> have been a strong force in causing us to improve our formerly
> inadequate standards of reliability--as well as demonstrating by their
> failure the need for a very large committed group to emulate what we
> have accomplished, and also demonstrating the unworkability of
> excessively rigid organization and an exclusively expert-bound
> approach to content. I'm glad Larry did what he did in founding
> it--had it achieved more ,so would we have also.
> 
> 
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>> Milos Rancic wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>>>
 Milos Rancic wrote:

> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:

Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Noein]

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On 11/05/2010 12:44, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> I would propose that the reason we are subject to such a _small_
> amount of complaint about our content is that much of the world
> understands that what Wikipedia does is —in a sense— deeply subversive
> and not at all compatible with "ideas which must be suppressed".  This
> fact gets a lot of names, some call it a "liberal bias" though I don't
> think that is quite accurate.  But there very much is a bias— a
> pro-flow-of-information bias.  We don't always realize we have it, but
> I don't think we deny it when we do.

And there is a general consensus here about those libertarian views?
I'm impressed. Sorry to repetitively check the ethical temperature of
the community, but I come from social horizons where it's not only not
natural, but generates hatred. I never could talk about libertarian
ideas outside of one or two family members and two or three friends.
Here, it seems the norm, and I simply can't believe it.
As I said before, Wikipedia acted like a magnet on me. I'm wondering if
it's uniting all the (internet connected) libertarian of the world. In
this case I'm surprised that it didn't receive more serious attacks from
the establishment.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Another board member statement

[Noein]

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Hello Kat, I'm not used to the level of finesse of your thoughts and
this time I chose to think aloud to help me. The result is this long
mail that other may find useful. Maybe. Please let me know if they're
not, or if I misunderstood you. As for the verbose mode, it is due to
your inspiring words! Be warned: random thoughts ahead. Don't read if
evolving, long chain of thoughts bother you.

On 11/05/2010 01:43, Kat Walsh wrote:

> I absolutely sign on to the board statement[1]. Commons should not be
> a host for media that has very little informational or educational
> value; works that are primarily intended to shock, arouse, or offend
> generally fall under this category. 

So you think that we can judge the intention itself through this common
sense that many pretend to be rare? You think that a qualitative,
subjective, honest, consensual, fair, libertarian, dialogable judgment
is possible? Well, I do too, though I'm not sure if general consensus
can be easily achieved on this basis.
We can detect persons that are trespassing their rights to act as they
wish: when they're playing with our feelings and disturb us without
respect, without waiting for our invitation. We should avoid that and I
think any admin and user can police that. In fact a rule can easily be
stated, published and understood, then applied, until it becomes a
common netiquette. The admins are probably already acting this way, I
suppose.

But are you saying that "works that are primarily intended to shock,
arouse, or offend" lose "informational or educational value" because we
judge they have this bad intent or are you saying that because of this
bad intent, "informational or educational values" are neglected?

Should we judge by the encyclopedic value and/or by the negative
emotions produced and/or intended?

In the later case, I'm not sure that arousal is a negative emotion. I'm
surprised that the common sense position "protect sensitive persons"
(ie, children) has been several time exposed here and no one gave a
voice to the common sense position "sex is good". Are we ashamed to
express it? Is it too delicate to say and should we talk with some
implicit values, never to be mentioned?

I think arousal is good, actually. (if chosen and wanted by the person).
And well, we should inform about all positive emotions by allowing them
to be felt, so that everybody can choose the kind of life he/she wants
to experience. Sexual pleasure, free libido, acceptation of the body,
free of guilt, they're important states of mind to be reached. I'm not
saying that we should impose them, but we shouldn't censor them, so that
everybody can realize itself in the ways of sex. Sorry for the prude
ears here. I hope we're adult enough to talk freely about pornography
(or more generally, what is obscene to someone because it is a forbidden
thing that is pleasant to experiment). Yes, pornography is good.
Pornography industry? Dubious, because there is too much prostitution
and lack of respect. But there is a sane erotic art and culture. Sane
because it respects humanity, not because it is legal or not, showing
hair or not, 2cm of skin or 5, etc. I'm not inciting anyone to do
anything illegal here, legal considerations must be considered, but they
should not determine our principles which must come from ourselves.
If we're going to judge intentions, then we'll recognize that what's
transmitting positive emotions like joy or arousal is not necessarily
bad or good. It depends on the presence of intentions and the effects
channeled to private interests - generally dominating ones. (ie, you can
idiotize a population with propaganda using positive emotions). If
that's the point of an image, to manipulate emotionally, I have serious
doubts about categorizing it as an unbiased, neutral, potential
illustration.
The problem is that finding intention where there's none is what humans
do best. Judging the intention is a heavy, usually subjective
responsibility to give to admins. Unless we find a very simple question
to ask in order to judge the intention of a image, we won't reach
unanimous consensus, which should be an ideal of the mission. We're far
from this ideal, I guess a century behind, but it's good to know where
to aim.
Judging not by the intent, but the actual emotional impact (ie,
empowering each user to be able to warn others, like a Stumbleupon
system), may lead to manipulation too. I could expand.


Back to the short term considerations: even a pornographic picture
deserves at least a trial. They have rights, you know :)
The model of discussing for deletion or undeletion seems to be an
excellent model, though we need to refine our communication (not
manipulation) techniques to reach greater consensus.
One of the current, apparent problems was that Mr. Wales didn't respect
this discursive-consensual approach. Now that this issue is past, or at
least independent of the censorship issue, we should ask ourselves if
t

Re: [Foundation-l] "Filtering" ourselves is pointless

[Noein]

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Is anyone here really concerned by Fox News actions? From the beginning
it seemed to me that what they were barking about were of no impact:
they would confirm the WMF's opponents in their opinions and obtain an
indifferent or amused shrug from the rest of the world. Am I wrong?
Should we really panic as the Board and Mr. Wales did? (ok, not panic,
but feel the gravity and urgency of the situation?)

On 10/05/2010 18:36, David Gerard wrote:
> On 10 May 2010 22:32, Mike Godwin  wrote:
>> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:31 PM, David Levy  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*.
> 
> 
> - d.
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Noein]

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On 10/05/2010 07:56, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote:
> 2010/5/10 Marcus Buck :
>> J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov hett schreven:
>>> I have a problem with basing it on IP addresses. As a non Muslim in a Muslim
>>> country, why should Wikimedia decide that *I* cannot see Muhammad pictures
>>> but that it is perfectly OK to show it to a Muslim in Germany / France
>>> wherever. I think the world has moved on a bit from the one country, one
>>> religion / set of values / morals.
>>>
>>
>> You are of course right. But what is the alternative? The only
>> alternative is not basing it on location so everybody sees the same.
>> That's like "one world, one set of values".
> 
> The alternative is to not censor, in any circumstance, to any kind of
> audience whatsoever. I must confess I find this particular alternative
> brilliant.
> 
> It is imperfect, as any other form of freedom of thought and
> expression. But other options are more imperfect, not less, in my
> opinion.
> 
> I think some projects (like the English Wikipedia) already reached
> consensus on this issue.
> 

I don't understand exactly your thoughts. What happens to someone who
wants to navigate Wikipedia or use Commons but doesn't want to reach
offending (according to his/her personal sensibility) pages? If this
person wants a protecting tool, what is your answer? You give me the
impression that you're saying: ignore him, let's let him be offended.
In this case even if you're think you're right theoretically, you're
alienating part of humanity from the big project that is reaching them
all. Creating negligently a strong feeling of rejection with a few month
of obliviousness to their culture can take dozen of years to repair. I
don't think the topic should be solved so lighly and bluntly. But maybe
I'm misunderstanding you.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Commons:Sexual content

[Noein]

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On 10/05/2010 05:51, Andre Engels wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Kim Bruning  wrote:
>> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:23:28AM +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
>>> Being educational should be just another word for being in scope, and
>>> in scope are, in my opinion, in the first place those files that are
>>> usable for the projects. That is the first thing that we should be
>>> judging things by.
>>
>> I've already emphasized that a bit already on the page, but more from
>> the WARNING angle.
> 
> That only says that pictures that are _used_ should not be deleted
> indiscriminately. Used and usable are not the same.
> 
>> Could you edit or comment on the page in a way that reflects what you
>> just stated? :-)
> 
> Hardly. The page as it is now seems to go from the point of view that
> we should not host any pornography, then restricts itself by trying to
> get a narrow definition of 'pornography'. For me, whether or not
> something is pornographic is at best a secondary issue.
> 

Then would the http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Censorship page be
more appropriate?
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Re: [Foundation-l] [OT] Am I the only one...

[Noein]

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On 09/05/2010 22:10, Ryan Lomonaco wrote:
> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:48 PM, Aphaia  wrote:
> 
>> Is there any option to tell them commons has its own mailing list
>> instead of adding it to the foundation-l?
>>
> 
> I think Austin touched upon this as well, but, yes, I would remind everyone
> that discussions are occurring now on Meta, Commons and the English
> Wikipedia, as well as their respective mailing lists.  Aspects of this
> discussion specific to certain projects are probably better suited to those
> projects.
> 

Could you link to these discussions? It would be interesting to learn
their views and ideas.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Noein]

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I put my impressions of the moment on this discussion page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Censorship#Some_reflexions_following_the_censorship_polemic_of_May_2010



On 09/05/2010 20:04, Sue Gardner wrote:
> Yeah, Pryzkuta, I know there are lots of debates happening everywhere; that's 
> a good thing --- obviously talking about all this stuff is good, and people 
> should use whatever mechanisms work for them. All the discussions are good, 
> and everybody is bringing useful stuff to the table.
> 
> Re Jimmy, my understanding is that he has voluntarily relinquished the 
> ability to act globally and unlilaterally, in an attempt to bring closure to 
> that thread of discussion, because he thinks it's a distraction from the main 
> conversation.  Which is, the projects contain, and have contained, material 
> which many people (different groups, for different reasons) find 
> objectionable. The main question at hand is: what, if anything, should be 
> done about the inclusion in the projects of potentially objectionable 
> material.  Should we provide warnings about potentially objectionable 
> material, should we make it easy for people to have a "safe" view if they 
> want it, should we make a "safe" view a default view, and so forth.
> 
> My view is that Jimmy and others have brought closure to the "scope of 
> Jimmy's authority" question. In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the 
> importance of that question -- I realize that many people are angry about 
> what's happened over the past week, and it will take time for them to be less 
> angry.   But I think Jimmy's goal --which I support-- is to enable people to 
> now move on to have the more important conversation, about how to resolve the 
> question of objectionable material.
> 
> To recap: it's a big conversation, and it's happening in lots of places. That 
> may need to happen for a while. I would like to see us move into a synthesis 
> phase, where we start talking in a focused way, in a few places, about what 
> we should do to resolve the question of objectionable material.  I think the 
> thread by Derk-Jan is a step towards that.  But it may be that we're not 
> ready to move into a synthesis phase yet: people may still need to vent and 
> brainstorm and so forth, for a while.
> 
> Thanks,
> Sue
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl
> Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 00:16:02 
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l]
>   Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the d
>   iscussion ishappening
> 
> 
>> 1) There has been a very active strand about Jimmy's actions over the
>> past week and his scope of authority, which I think is now resolving.
>> That's mostly happened here and on meta.
>>
> Sue - everywhere - mailing lists, IRC channels, village pumps... 
> 
> We need to talk as Wikimedia Community. There is no authority without 
> communication - face to face(s); keyboard to keyboard. The biggest fire (RfC 
> flame) is here: 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag
> 
> 400 votes - 400 users 
> 
> Maybe the best way will be to start special IRC debate - about past, present 
> and future. (and again, and again, and again - yeah)
> 
> Yes... We have bigger problems, but... maybe not. This is real trouble.
> 
> przykuta
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

[Noein]

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On 09/05/2010 10:24, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
> This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this 
> potential approach
> ---
> 
> Dear reader at FOSI,
> 
> As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the 
> software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
> Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and 
> omnipresent. This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a 
> largely uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world that is 
> largely censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to 
> provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are 
> presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information 
> that is not "child-safe". They have several options in that case, either 
> blocking completely or using context aware filtering software that may make 
> mistakes, that can cost some of these institutions their funding.
> 
> Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the 
> world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe 
> for instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman 
> square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has 
> been concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the 
> world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects 
> because so many people are not able to access large portions of our content 
> due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content.
> 
> This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content 
> of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of 
> material, hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According 
> to statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely 
> supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding 
> autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of 
> the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions 
> however, both general and technical.
> 
> 1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this 
> size to label their content with ratings, is this correct?
> 2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags
> 3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. 
> This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from 
> the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? 
> (Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you 
> are aware of that controversial image 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer)
> 4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF 
> file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the 
> website ?
> 5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new 
> ratings for non-Western world sensitive issues ?
> 6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate "namespace" that we could 
> potentially use for our own labels ?
> 
> I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue 
> our community debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of 
> content rating. If you have additional suggestions for systems or problems 
> that this web-property should account for, I would more than welcome those 
> suggestions as well.
> 
> Derk-Jan Hartman

You may want to use http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Censorship to discuss
this. It seems that you're community has reached some ideas questions.
Foundation-1 also is discussing several approaches to censorship.

I think we would all benefit from sharing on a common page. I propose to
the foundation mailing list to scavenge the last 300 mails of discussion
to put on this page:

1- a summary of the events of the last days, with the board declarations
and citations, in order to explain why, how and by who the deletions
happened, if they will happen again and how much support there is.
Some mails that I find relevant for starters:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057789.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-May/08.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057802.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057818.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/wikipedia-child-porn-larry-sanger-fbi/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petition_to_Jimbo
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/QA_Wikimedia_Commons_images_review,_May_2010
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058026.html

2 - a summary of the positions about censorship
for exa

Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Noein]

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On 09/05/2010 05:46, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> On 5/8/10 10:02 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote:
>> The deletions themselves aren't the problem; the manner in which they
>> were carried out is. As a lawyer you should understand that the due
>> process is important.
> 
> I understand that and apologize for it.  There was a crisis situation 
> and I took action which ended up averting the crisis.  In the process I 
> stepped on some toes [...]


I'm sorry to step in opposition since we never had the opportunity to
met before, Mr. Wales, and I do respect you. It's with great sadness
that I must disagree with your systematic and apparently deliberated
minimisation or ignorance of the grief you've done. I wouldn't call my
freedom of self-determination "my toes". It's the core of my being.

I feel I have the right to decide for myself about censorship issues. I
feel that my voice should count as one vote, no more no less. I feel
that my intelligence deserves access to the knowledge you used to
declare a "crisis". I don't feel inferior. I am not. Respect should be
reciprocal, and I don't feel this is the case.


>[...] for that I am sorry.

> I won't do it again.
> 
> The most important questions now have to do with policy on commons.


The most important questions for you are not the most important
questions for the community, it seems. The most important question for
ANY person is to be free to decide (and alive). If you negate that then
you can't be sorry. We want a real talk about that, not a dodge. You owe
us some listening.

By promising that you won't do it again you don't understand (or
probably don't want to) that the problem is not adressed. The majority
of the community, I think, don't want the WMF projects to be at the
mercy of just one person's tastes, no matter what he or she promises.

This is too big and important to be that vulnerable. Too many users
depend on these universal knowledge projects. Too many years of work
from thousands of editors were put. You cannot subject the governance of
the universal knowledge to you (or an small elite), because nobody can
hold enough open-mindedness to represent all the humanity. You
contributed the most important milestone for the liberation of mankind.
Don't become a needless tyrant.

Sorry for my arrogance. I know most people will judge my ideas on the
basis that I am nobody and no recognized trajectory, while your
contributions are unquestionable. So be it, I'll take the chance.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

[Noein]

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On 09/05/2010 02:12, Pedro Sanchez wrote:
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Noein  wrote:
> 
>>
>> I'm surprised it is apparently needed to be said, but I'm here too
>> because I have faith in "universal values". In fact I've been attracted
>> like a magnet since the day, one year and five months ago, that I wondered:
>> "In this world rushing into its own demise, who is struggling to better
>> the human condition and protect our Earth?"

> I can certainly say you've been around /only/ a year and half, as you seem
> to believe all this is about  wikipedia.  It's about commons and wikimedia
> in general. (Here, and I've /only/ been around 5 years, but that's
> irrelevant)

No, no, I use wikipedia as a metonymy, because I don't know the word for
the idea behind all the WMF projects. Replace wikipedia by "universal
access to knowledge" if you wish.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

[Noein]

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On 09/05/2010 00:05, Milos Rancic wrote:
> There are some political reasons of why I am here. And they are about
> our values: all human knowledge... not censored... consensus
> culture... building encyclopedia etc., not surrealistic comedy...
> [..]
> 
> Those values are *before* finances. We are here because of them, not
> because of money or strategy. Money and strategy are here because of
> our values.

I'm surprised it is apparently needed to be said, but I'm here too
because I have faith in "universal values". In fact I've been attracted
like a magnet since the day, one year and five months ago, that I wondered:
"In this world rushing into its own demise, who is struggling to better
the human condition and protect our Earth?"

I think the whole active community are here because they believe that
wikipedia is a fantastic project leading to a better world.

With time, more and more people will believe it. This, my friends, is an
incredible potential. This is the first time in mankind history that so
much freedom for sharing knowledge is available for so many humans.

We have a duty because we are the first. So let's not forget the long
term goals and what is really at stake. It is good to be concerned by
survival but survival cannot be the first priority, otherwise you'll
lose ALL your values.

It is true that the current crisis must be addressed but at the same
time we must remember that it's just a moment in our long way to go.


What's really important in this discussion is how to ensure that
wikipedia will survive WITH ITS GOALS INTACT.

The answer is yours, but I think that everyone should at least once ask
himself about our current dilemmas (censorship, external pressure, Mr.
Wales' power, etc.):
Is it threatening our goal? (Why and how?)
Is it threatening our survival? (Why and how?)

Mutual understanding and solutions can be built from this mental frame.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Noein]

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On 08/05/2010 22:20, Casey Brown wrote:
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Andrew Garrett  wrote:
>> The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a
>> descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and
>> allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The
>> infrastructure would be technically simple.
>>
> 
> I definitely agree that this would be the best solution.
> 

I agree too. Simple and respectful.
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Board member's perspective

[Noein]

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On 08/05/2010 20:52, Stuart West wrote:
> (1) There were some bad actors at work (e.g. hardcore pornography 
> distributors taking advantage of our open culture to get free anonymous 
> hosting).  (2) As a community (including the Board), we debated the issue too 
> long and failed to drive closure and implement.  (3) There are complex issues 
> around _some_ of the content that is in a gray area and those complexities 
> distracted us from dealing with the clearer cut cases.  

In order to help us understand better the situation, can you refer
concrete examples of 1 and a link to the discussion mentioned in 2?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Noein]

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"Imagine a world where every single media and government on the planet
is given free censorship on the sum of all human knowledge. That's what
we're king of."

I agree with Mike Godwin that this crisis is an constructive
opportunity, not just a destructive event about fears (of FBI, of Fox
News, of dictatorship), angers and disappointments.

But an opportunity for what?
- - to constructively discuss the censorship problem.
- - to constructively discuss the vulnerability of the WMF
- - to constructively discuss the Commons policy

Let's start to pinpoint and synthesize the few big problems and link to
a wikipage to BUILD discussion and answer. 200 mails a day is not the
way, in my opinion, besides the fact that this current discussion is not
(and should not be) restricted to this mailing list.

Do we already have appropriate wikipage (or another collaborative
structure) to discuss these points?



On 08/05/2010 12:48, Mike Godwin wrote:
> I want to write personally -- not speaking on behalf of the Foundation but
> instead as a longtime participant in online communities who has worked
> extensively on free-speech issues -- to offer my perspective on a couple of
> themes that I've seen made in threads here. The first is the claim that
> Jimmy's actions represent a collapse in the face of a threat by Fox News
> (and that this threat was somehow small or insignificant). The second is the
> idea that the proper focus of the current discussion ought to be focused on
> Jimmy (and anger against Jimmy's taking action, or against particular
> aspects of the actions he took) to the effective exclusion of discussion of
> whether Wikimedia Commons policy should be revisited, refined, or better
> implemented.
> 
> First, my belief as a former journalist is that Fox News is not a
> responsible news organization. This means that they get too many stories
> wrong in the first place (as when they uncritically echo Larry Sanger's
> uninformed and self-interested assertions), and it also means that when
> their mistakes are brought to their attention, they may redouble their
> aggressive attacks in the hope of somehow vindicating their original story.
> This I believe is what Fox News (or at least its reporter and her editors)
> were trying to do. If the media culture in the United States were such that
> Fox News had no influence outside itself, we could probably just ignore it.
> But the reality is that the virulent culture of Fox News does manage to
> infect other media coverage in ways that are destructive to good people and
> to good projects.
> 
> I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been better for Fox to
> have gone with the original story they were trying to create rather than
> with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.  Jimmy's decision to
> intervene changed the narrative they were attempting to create. So even if
> you disagree with some or all of the particulars of Jimmy's actions, you may
> still be able to see how Jimmy's actions, taken as a whole, created
> breathing space for discussion of an issue on Commons that even many of
> Jimmy's critics believe is a real issue.
> 
> The question then becomes whether we're doing to discuss the issues of
> Commons policy or discuss whether Jimmy's actions themselves signify a
> problem that needs to be fixed.  You may say we can discuss both, and
> technically you'd be right, but the reality of human discourse is that if
> you spend your time venting at Jimmy, you won't be discussing Commons
> policy, and you'll be diverting attention from Commons policy. My personal
> opinion is that this would be the waste of an opportunity.
> 
> I think it's also worth remembering that when an individual like Jimmy is
> given extraordinary cross-project powers to use in extraordinary
> circumstances, this more or less guarantees that any use of those powers
> will be controversial. (If they were uncontroversial, nobody would need
> them, since consensus processes would fix all problems quickly and
> effectively.) But rather than focus on whether your disagreement with the
> particulars of what Jimmy did means that Jimmy's powers should be removed,
> you should choose instead, I believe, to use this abrupt intervention as an
> opportunity to discuss whether Commons policy and its implementation can be
> improved in a way that brings it more into line with the Wikimedia projects'
> mission. Once this discussion happens, it would not surprise me if the
> result turned out to be that some of the material deleted by Jimmy will be
> restored by the community -- probably with Jimmy's approval in many cases.
> 
> To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered a healthy debate about
> policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions -- not individually
> but taken as a whole -- that he made are justified. (Like many of you, I
> would probably disagree with some of his particular decisions, but I
> recognize that I'd

Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

[Noein]

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A technical and sincerely genuine question about this list. Is somebody,
some bot or some site synthesizing our emailed discussion, or is
everything vanishing as soon as it is spoken?
In this last case, shouldn't we keep an organized trace of the threads
to allow discussion and synthesis? How will we reach fair consensus for
complex and heated discussions otherwise? How do we plan on anger and
fatigue to sort it out?


On 07/05/2010 22:33, Anthony wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:18 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
> 
>> Is there anyone who disagrees that we need to hold to the policies:
>>
>> 2. that no WMF project contain material that it can not legally contain.
>>
> 
> Legally contain according to what laws?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

[Noein]

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This, my friends, beyond the porn debate, is an important lesson about
the vulnerability of wikipedia.
You just have to threaten or convince Mr. Wales to control or shutdown
the entire project. The whole community is powerless.
When this crisis is over, we should think about giving a stronger
autonomy to wikipedia. A project of this magnitude can no longer rest on
the shoulder of one man, depending on his good faith.
Wikipedia is making enemies (today: the prudes). One day they'll force
Mr. Wales to denature the project. Is it today? I don't know.
But don't be fooled about the appearances: the real crisis is not about
porn, but about who has control on the project and who has control on
these critical persons.

If this is an emergency situation requiring a justified, immediate,
unilateral, king-like massive action, I regret Mr. Wales didn't take the
time to explain the emergency to us.
By rush-imposing his views and decisions on people who are not out of
the debate yet, he is browbeating their inner self, ignoring their
beliefs and opinions, discarding the value of the Other. This lack of
respect and of equality of vote should be extremely well argumented and
the reasons transparently communicated.
Otherwise, trust, faith and adhesion to the WMF values dissolve.
I don't think we should let this happen.

Mr. Wales, I hope you enter reason and dialogue realms again.
 We're not idiots who can't understand strategy. And by the way, if you
pretend to calm puritan donors in a first time, then try to reconquer
the lost ground later, you just surrendered the whole project to them by
showing that you will cede before their threat.
Maybe it is time to adopt a bold secularism (morally neutral, but still
respectful of humans)?

Anyway, will I, for one, accept the situation if you don't explain?
I would oppose any person pretending to dictate non-consensually how to
handle the human knowledge: it is part of the Humanity Heritage. But
you're the founder and I'm powerless. Am I? I think many of us are
having these very questions now. Is it good for the WMF that we're
asking them? Is it the consequence of Wales' bold actions? Is the board
voluntarily ignoring our legitimate feelings ?


On 07/05/2010 17:19, Marcus Buck wrote:
> I try to understand what happened, but I'm not sure whether the pieces 
> that I found so far add up.
> 
> * Larry Sanger is mad about Wikimedia. [apparent]
> * Larry Sanger notifies the FBI and tells them Wikimedia hosts child 
> porn. [affirmed]
> * The FBI is rather unimpressed and does not take swift action. [apparent]
> * Larry Sanger informs media about us alleging Wikimedia of hosting 
> porn. [unaffirmed]
> * The (conservative) TV station FOX reports about Wikimedia and contacts 
> many important companies that have donated money for Wikimedia in the 
> past whether they want to comment on the allegations. [affirmed]
> * The companies are contacting Wikimedia to ask what's going on. 
> [unaffirmed]
> * The board worries about losses in donations and either sends Jimbo to 
> Commons or Jimbo unilaterally decides to handle the case. [unaffirmed]
> * Without mentioning the previous developments Jimbo starts to delete 
> all files that are "porn" (in his opinion, not sparing PD-old artworks 
> etc.). Even engaging in edit-warring and ignoring input from the Commons 
> community and ignoring community policies. [affirmed]
> * The Commons community condemns Jimbo's actions but has no power at all 
> to stop the "Founder"-flagged berserk. [affirmed]
> 
> Is this the story? Or are there any story arcs that I missed? Please 
> correct me, wherever I am wrong.
> 
> Marcus Buck
> User:Slomox
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

[Noein]

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Thank you for this analysis, Milos. I think you should definitely take
the time to explain yourself more often since 1/ your bold statements
are not unanimously intuitive 2/ we need to share visions, skills and
knowledge to understand what we're talking about when we talk about
wikimedia and the world.

>> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Yann Forget  wrote:
>> I can tell you of my experience with people from Kosovo who are not native
>> english speakers, many of  have a hard time reading anything longer than 140
>> characters. The dont like to read and books are very expensive, and the
>> written language is very different than the spoken one.

*** warning: long reasoning ***
I was talking yesterday with a french woman who went for two years to
help peasants of the Choco in Colombia. They are of oral traditions.
Some are descendant of white colons. Some are Amerindians. Some are of
African roots. No villager can read, only some bachelors from the
cities. Internet doesn't reach the agricultural communities in this
jungle where you only travel by boat.
The only way my friend found to inform them and communicate was by
creating role-playing scenarii with local, more educated inhabitants
from the city; then go with them to the villagers in the jungle and
communicate through the role-playing games.

This understanding of the situation and this roleplay idea has a
potential. Is it urgent? Is it immediately feasible? Does it concern the
WMF? I don't know. But I think it is linked with the bigger problem of
outreaching people, which is one of the core problems of the WMF (and
mankind).

What I know is that as long as we are alphabetized, educated,
computerized, living in the comfort of occidental life, we're some kind
of rich, literate elite (this not an insult nor an arrogance); we need
to establish bridges with the 5 billions people who work with different
minds and conditions, without imposing our culture or forcing our values
into them.

One of the first fundamental questions to think about the supreme goal
of the WMF is: "do every human WANT to access mankind knowledge?"
In my opinion, it is too late to preserve most ethnic cultures from say,
capitalism or western culture. Admittedly, I have very limited
knowledge, even if I constantly try to learn about this problem, so I
know that I may be wrong. However, I have lived and traveled in South
America long enough to see the crushing of traditions and culture by one
dominant, predatory culture.

Since it is too late for them, since their virginity is only a memory, I
can accept the goal of reaching every human, even if they didn't ask for
it, to give them a way to know what they want to know about the world
they're being anyway sucked into.
Because if I had to ask just one question to another being it would be
"is it really what you want?", because of that I think bringing
knowledge to analphabets, poors and minorities is justified, it gives
them the choice.

For this particular targeted public, my limited mind concludes that the
WMF needs humanitarian, pragmatic volunteers who want and know how to
deal with real, non-occidental people. I don't think it would cost that
much to ally with people already accomplishing ethnological or
humanitarian missions: WMF would just have to provide the internet
devices and software to facilitate an access to knowledge during
interaction with ethnies.
Etc.
(A lot more could be discussed about this idea. I feel that coherent
projects can be developed and built from this seed, and I know some
potential partners, but this is just a coincidence of my eclectic
knowledge. I'm personally more interested in black holes, so don't take
my mail as proselytism for a personal agenda).

Please forgive the time I'm stealing from you with my considerations.
I'm not a natural english speaker and an additional effort from your
part may be required in order to understand me.

I think we need to solve diary problems AND discuss long term goals, in
this very mailing list: in my opinion, both poles of reflection/action
should go hand in hand so that when the implementation reaches the goal,
it IS what we wanted.


If I'm not in the right list for this kind of talk please redirect me.
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Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

[Noein]

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Please stop any sarcasm. There are ideas worth the consideration, as
with any newly available technological tool.
We're aiming in this mailing list to shape the futur of the human
knowledge through the foundation, right? So it is right to talk about
the future, it's not an arrogance.
Of course, any affirmation about the future must be considered an
hypothesis, however convinced may seem his bearer, but also however
unconvinced we are. Listen and think. Then answer so that our
interlocutor listens and thinks too. Otherwise, all this mailing list is
sheer struggle of prestige, power or noise.


Now, one of the unsolved questions of the WMF is: how do we plan to
communicate with analphabets?

Even supposing we could bring them a (free) internet terminal, which is
far from done, we would still face the barrier of language and the
uselessness of writing.

A first answer comes to my mind: with the oral or gestural tradition,
using roleplay communicates an idea and interacts with the stranger.

Because we cannot send people to each ethnical community and leave them
as crucial interprets their whole life, this impossibility undermines
seriously the main objective of the WMF.: "Imagine a world in which
every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all
human knowledge."

If we cannot immediately alphabetize people, should we abandon them?
Can't we try alternate ways than text?

Is the computer completely useless or has it other uses?
Does it offer real options to communicate with indians or amerindians
tribes, without teaching them nor forcing them?

3d worlds could tell myths (our myths and theirs) way better than words
or scriptures. An itinerant wiki worker could interface those people
with his or her wiki-device (labtop, mobile, pda, portable
videoconference device, etc.) and show them things they would understand.
Without forcing, just proposing.
The wiki worker would teach the people to use the device to keep
interacting with the wikimedia net when he's gone.

Would they care to know something? Would they care to ask? Would they
care to say something? To answer something?

If we keep with this scenario, "Wikiask" mission would be to collect the
question of an ethny, translate it to everybody, collect the answers of
people who want to answer, and send back the various answers to the
ethny through understandable means: a 3d world, a theater piece played
by comedians, a film, a story in your language, an artisanal object,
art, whichever channel the ethny understands.


An example of communicative art:
Roleplay is a narrative technique that makes understand and live an
information (a situation). There are other techniques, but bear with
this one for a while and let's develop the idea.

There are humanitarians people and passionate ethnologues who know the
exact difficulties of communicating with non-occidenal communities and
who may even know some solutions. They may need funds, material,
technologies, internet, videos and 3d worlds to give (never sell!) free
access to knowledge.

Then again, maybe not. Discuss.

Note: I'm not necessarily fan of the 3d idea, but as Robert Honing said,
we should embrace new ideas and juggle with them. Voltaire have said: "I
do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death
your right to say it."
Don't lose the gigantisc scope of the goal. The roleplay idea and the 3d
idea are just hypothesis. The point is, what's at stake is so deep that
we should investigate any promising idea.)

My 2p.



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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Protection update for April 29

[Noein]

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Respect.

If you can't, use private mail.
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[Foundation-l] Comments on New Reports from November 2008 Survey Released

[Noein]

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Hello,
I've been reading the survey.

http://wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_NonContributors_15March2010-FINAL.pdf


Suggestions:

a) In my opinion, one of the things that make the learning curb steep to
start editing is the fact that most of the essential concepts of
Wikipedia are discussed through accronyms: ie, NPOV.

If a bot could automatically add an explicitation, visible when hovering
the mouse on the acronym, then the discussions pages would be self
contained.

b) Currently, the edition mode shows a different page with a different
syntax than the article page which immediately rebukes the would-be
editor. A WYSIWYG edition mode coupled with an AJAX technology would
leave the editor in familiar grounds.

c) A synthesis and a link to the main rules for writing an article
should be present when in edition mode. Currently, if you want to know
how to respect the conventions, you have to search for them by yourself.

d) The notices that state one or other way that an article doesn't meet
the wikipedia standard (ie, "this article needs clean up") assume that
the reader knows what the standard is. A link to an example of what is
expected from the editor would clarify things: ie, an example of a
"before clean up article/ after clean up article".


e) I think there are two main psychological steps required for editing
and sharing knowledge.
 I - You notice that something is wrong or incomplete. That is, you know
something that is not in the article.
 II - You find a way to pour your knowledge. You must be confident and
comfortable with this way.

Currently, step II can be achieved through two options: you edit the
article or you start a discussion. This requires time, confidence,
experience and will. Sometimes you just want to point out an obscure
passage or an external link, without editing the article or leaving
comments.
I think those procedures should be assisted so that the editor can
contribute with a single click or a link, leaving the rest of the task
to others.

f) I think that some potential editors are afraid of their first
contribution. Once they're engaged and lost their a priori and fears,
they should be more proactive. So I think small and easy participations
should be made available to them. For example, right-clicking a word and
correcting it's spelling with an integrated dictionary instead of going
through the editing interface could be a determining step.

g) Youth. There is no data on youth in the survey. I think they have
specific patterns of thoughts and behaviours. Wikipedia should be
adapted to them too. They're the future.

Cheers





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