Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
I understand it represents some money to fly ~10 people to SF (though I guess in the end those meetings would match other global meetings such as Wikimedia Conference or Wikimania) every six month, but on the other hand the FDC is gonna be in charge of disseminating ~30million USD, some overseeing/steering group is clearly a need. I agree with Christophe... I've consistently been asking the Foundation to make sure the FDC is set up in a transparent way, with involvement from Chapters and other stakeholders. So it makes perfect sense to me to set up an advisory committee to help make sure it sets out down the right path over the next 18 months, even if that entails some financial cost and some use of volunteer time. It's vital to get this right. Chris (Wikimedia UK board, speaking personally...) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
On 10 April 2012 13:09, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I've asked a very simple question, could you answer it? What questions do you want this process to answer? What it is about the FDC that we don't yet know and need to devote a lot of time and money to working out? The resolution basically says there will be a committee, it will be powerful, Sue has a draft and can figure out the details. It doesn't tell us... well, anything else. There are recommendations, but those are *proposals* and the community may decide it strongly objects to parts of them - now is a good time to figure it out. Many of the key details are sketchy. Some possible questions I can think of, in ten minutes over my lunchbreak: What limits will there be on what the FDC can recommend? What ability will it have to control funding to WMF itself for non-core spending? How independent will it be of either WMF or the chapters? How will it apply to the non-chaptered community? Will it be able to decline to fund Board-recommended projects? Do we need to develop alternative structures for funding work in circumstances impractical under US law? And that is before membership becomes an issue. We argued for weeks earlier in the year about chapter-nominated Board seats - who exactly will sit on the FDC? Will they be elected or appointed; what will the mix of community members versus professionals be? Will there be any non-chapter community members? What will be the legal constraints on its membership? Who are the elected members, if any, answerable to? From my position - and I haven't been following this overly closely, I admit - the FDC looks like it will be a remarkably powerful body; it will have a major impact on any major project not done directly by WMF. It may not have the same power as the board to set overall goals, but it will have a great deal of de-facto control over the implementation of those goals. A lot of our governance problems (or perceptions of governance problems) stem from the fact that the movement evolved organically from a very different thing six or seven years ago, and is perhaps not the organisation we would have designed had we a blank sheet today. Given all this, it definitely seems a good idea to have a detailed look at how it is going to work rather than just bash something together. I can imagine that if the resolution had said ...and directs the Executive Director to pick six people and have the first meeting in May, there would have been an immense outcry that we *weren't* taking the opportunity to think it through, that it was a power grab, etc etc etc... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
On 10 April 2012 13:56, Jan-Bart de Vreede jdevre...@wikimedia.org wrote: Sure just about everything as in 1) Who should be on this committee 2) On what kind of requests should they form an opinion (not microgrants for example) 3) What are criteria 4) What is the process/timeline + 401 other things that we can come up with as questions. But how many of those things are actually going to be difficult or controversial? Shouldn't we at least try and answer them using our standard approach of having an open discussion on a wiki? If it turns out we can't answer them that way, then we can try a more elaborate approach then. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours with the Localisation team 2012-04-18 16:30 UTC
Hi everyone, I just wanted to give advance notice about IRC office hours with the Localization team [1] at the Wikimedia Foundation. Date: 2012-04-18 (every third Wednesday of the month from now on) Time: 16.30 UTC Venue: #wikimedia-office As usual, more logistical info and time conversion links are available on Meta.[2] For a taste of what the localization team has been up to, I highly recommend the blog posts we are have written since out last office hours in February.[3] Thanks, and we'll talk to you later next week! -- Siebrand Mazeland Product Manager Localisation Wikimedia Foundation 1. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Localisation_team 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours 3. http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/features/internationalization-and-localization/ Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Sister Projects Committee
Hi all, The Sister Projects Committee is now a more formal committee, and as such, there's a list of things to do at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sister_Projects_Committee#Task_list. The plan is to discuss all the topics on the talk page and this mailing list when we are looking for wider community input. If you are interested in joining the committee or helping out, please have a look at the talk page, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sister_Projects_Committee, where I've split up each topic area into a different section so that discussions can take place. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on this mailing list or on the talk page. :-) -- Thehelpfulone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone English Wikipedia Administrator ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content
Looks like the BBC are now starting to use goodly amounts of open content. One that's caught my eye is a piece on the seige of Sarajevo, part of which is CC-BY-SA licenced, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17617775. Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0992 -- Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content
Correct: Derivatives are allowed Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0992 -- Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. On 10/04/2012 16:57, David Gerard wrote: On 10 April 2012 16:54, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Looks like the BBC are now starting to use goodly amounts of open content. One that's caught my eye is a piece on the seige of Sarajevo, part of which is CC-BY-SA licenced, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17617775. Have we ever gotten any video of theirs released by them, not just examples of them using others' open content? (IME the BBC is roughly divided between free it all! and that's impossible! with the latter in control.) - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content
There's also a no promotion clause - you can't use the work to promote your organisation. This is above and beyond the normal 'no derogatory use' clause... Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0992 -- Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. On 10/04/2012 17:27, Thomas Dalton wrote: CC-BY-SA-NC isn't a bad license. I know we strongly prefer licenses that allow commericial use (and need them if we're going to use the content on Wikimedia projects), but if -NC is the best we can get we should be trying to encourage it. Is there any way we can revive the 2006 proposal? PS Having just looked at that link, there is a UK only clause. I don't think we could live with that... (I understand why it is there - the BBC makes a lot of money selling its content overseas - but geographic limits are highly impractical.) On 10 April 2012 17:08, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Correct: Derivatives are allowed Richard Symonds OfficeDevelopment Manager Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0992 -- Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. On 10/04/2012 16:57, David Gerard wrote: On 10 April 2012 16:54, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.ukwrote: Looks like the BBC are now starting to use goodly amounts of open content. One that's caught my eye is a piece on the seige of Sarajevo, part of which is CC-BY-SA licenced, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17617775. Have we ever gotten any video of theirs released by them, not just examples of them using others' open content? (IME the BBC is roughly divided between free it all! and that's impossible! with the latter in control.) - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content
On 10 April 2012 17:30, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: There's also a no promotion clause - you can't use the work to promote your organisation. This is above and beyond the normal 'no derogatory use' clause... This sounds like a licence that deserves to die a death. OTOH, actual free-as-in-freedom content reliably explodes heads in the content industry. Me on the phone, multiple times: But we can't just lose control of our stuff! It works for us. You called me, after all. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
Hi - I have created a list of issues to resolve in the FDC process on meta.[1] There are probably additional issues to resolve and it would be great if people would edit the list and start suggesting solutions. IMHO the list of issues is substantial and decisions on the approach to the design will have major implications for entities in the movement. Further, there are time constraints on the FDC process to start functioning quite quickly as entities will want to secure their funding for future fiscal years and I'd personally prefer not to rely on the ad hoc approach that we had last year (since we/I didn't have the capacity to figure out a more structured approach before we were in the middle of the review process). If we simply select an FDC (btw - how would this happen?) and ask them to figure out the issues for themselves, this would be a recipe for serious challenges that could doom the FDC from the start. A relatively brief, but structured process that is open, has an effective advisory group of trusted people, and is supported by consultants who can give us structure and help us with the heavy-lifting on process design seems like a solid way to get us to a good outcome and help the FDC get off to an effective start. On the narrow issue of travel to SF for occasional meetings...this is really a practical consideration. There needs to be a time when the Advisory Group can really dig in and help us push to decisions. It would be ineffective to try to do such a meeting by phone or IRC. Per Christophe's point, it might make sense to have this over two days rather than one. [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_process_issues_list Best, Barry On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: But how many of those things are actually going to be difficult or controversial? Shouldn't we at least try and answer them using our standard approach of having an open discussion on a wiki? If it turns out we can't answer them that way, then we can try a more elaborate approach then. Naturally the process should be public and inclusive. I expect most of this group's work would involve open discussion on wikis. Wiki discussions can be enhanced by calls and in-person meetings, suitably transcribed and shared - especially when getting input from people who are not active wiki users. A structure and timeline for work, and a group of committed good-faith participants to provide a steady core for ongoing discussion, is a good idea for any time-sensitive project. We don't want to appoint FDC members themselves without more discussion and perhaps a distributed selection process, but the background work should begin as soon as possible. As to 'which things would be controversial': as you demonstrated here, even simple discussions can be dominated by a determined critic. SJ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] BBC Open Content
On 10 April 2012 18:12, Richard Farmbrough rich...@farmbrough.co.uk wrote: Well, actually we don't know it works for us. Our stuff is in early draft, and re-use of text is already making life pretty difficult already (checking for copyvios, notability, and clones in repressive regimes (Baidu Baike) ). We are also causing breaks in attribution chains every time we delete something that is mirrored, and the case law is still patchy to say the least. By works, I mean that Wikipedia is the great big unignorable case of free content working and being good enough to be useful. And for them to call me. The context is them saying free content is just impossible and me pointing out we're the counterexample. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] World Bank adopts CC licensing
FYI: The World Bank is adopting CC-BY licensing for it publications and content. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23164491~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/terms-of-use Cheers, Katie -- Board member, Wikimedia District of Columbia http://wikimediadc.org @wikimediadc / @wikimania2012 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic
I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and thought it highly relevant. Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation and manipulation of information here. Andreas On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine deyntest...@hotmail.com wrote: Here's an opinion piece, The Problem with Wikidata, by Mark Graham, who is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, which appears on The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his views but I found this to be an interesting read. http://www.theatlantic.com/** technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/ __**_ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 97, Issue 32
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:27:25 -0600 From: James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide Message-ID: caf1en7ubs8eabne-3l_mzxwc8tcwq3o5sblwmcvho3fyixr...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Yes WikiTravel has some poorly sourced pages that ramble on. However so does Wikipedia. The solution is to increase the size of the community and quality will increase with time. We did not always have strike referencing guidelines. To get this project to grow we need to get it based in an environment where it can grow. The Spanish Wikipedia, if I remember correctly, threatened to split off in 2004 due to Wikipedia having no solid non profit foundation. Those are WT have the same concerns. They do not want all their volunteers efforts going to the bottom line of a for profit (Internet Brands). And would anyone blame them. If we within the Wikimedia Movement want to see this content improved we should welcome them into the WMF. We have 20 editors supporting this proposal as of April 10th, 2012. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian Yes, this. I call on the Foundation to move quickly on this issue and welcome this project into the Wikimedia family without any further delay. Cheers, Craig ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide
@ MZMcBride I just assumed that most would see travel content as educational in nature but have added this clarification to the proposal in in question. If most accept that travel is educational in nature, resources that help with travel would thus be educational resources and within the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation. @ John Vandenberg A recent copy of Wikitravel have been put aside and it is ready to be adding into a mediawiki site. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia mobile application development
Thank you very much for the detailed and insightful reply. Tomasz Finc wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 9:37 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Mobile seems to have two branches these days: (1) the mobile versions of the sites; and more recently (2) specific mobile applications. Branch 1 is fairly understandable. What I'm having difficulty understanding is branch 2. While mobile has two branches, I wouldn't slice it that way. The way that we look at it is either * Smart phone development - editing, image uploads, mobile web, apps, mobile frontend, etc * Alternate access methods - S40 (J2ME), SMS/USSD, Zero Okay, I think that's sensible. In my opinion, initiatives such as Wikipedia Zero are exactly the type of work that can only really be done at the Wikimedia Foundation-level and great progress has been made there that I don't think would have been possible with volunteers. And in a lot of ways, being able to host and maintain the mobile sites is something that only the Wikimedia Foundation is capable of doing. The mobile application development was the part that I saw as possibly being ripe for outside organizations, but as you explain below, that may not be the case for a variety of reasons. The idea behind free and open content is that the content can be taken and reused and redistributed by others without issue. That's part of the great beauty of Wikimedia wikis. With a vibrant app market for both Androids and iPhones, why is Wikimedia getting involved in mobile application development? Isn't this something best left to third parties (which, as I understand it, have already filled the Wikipedia app niche with a variety of options for both platforms) or interested volunteers? No, its really not and we've heard from countless people that it wasn't working. There are a number of reasons that my team was asked to do mobile apps and i'll list some of them below * Whenever we talk with carriers about partnering with us they want to see a suite of products they can provide on our behalf. These can range from a basic bookmarks on the mobile web, sms access, to a listing our app within their own markets. Any one thing missing ends the conversation pretty quickly. I suggest reading the original blog post from January http://bit.ly/IFoti4 to gain more insite. Kul Amit can elaborate more on this. I'm a bit confused about the relationship between mobile applications and carriers. As I understand it, carriers in this context refers to cell phone service providers (Verizon, ATT, et al.). The mobile applications are generally at a different layer (Apple's iTunes Store, Google's Android Market, etc.), aren't they? Is this strictly about pre-installed applications on devices sold through these carriers? I'd encourage anyone interested to read both the blog post _and_ the comments below it, where some of these same questions are asked (and answered!). * Were constantly getting asked about why insert new Wikipedia app name in new app store has ads, is not free, and in general doesn't provide a polished experience. Users are confused why the foundation would provide so many bad offerings in each of the apps stores because they associate most apps in the market with something that the foundation has done. I've had users approach me and ask why the foundation puts ads inside their apps and even after explaining that we have no affiliation they insist that its a poor reflection of our projects. No matter how we look at it ... were being judged on behalf of any app that is showing people data from Wikipedia. Rather then having to explain why there are so many bad ones we decided to provide a better solution then the rest to raise awareness that you a) dont have to see ads b) don't have to pay for basic features like saving pages and c) have control in the future direction of the project. Aha! This is a very interesting point. I hadn't realized that this was an issue. Ad blindness seems to have not affected mobile device users as much as it has desktop users (yet). * It's a great way to eat our own dog food. Apps should always be decoupled and with the next release of both of our apps we'll have learned a ton about how our API's are deficient. By better understanding these use cases we've extended functionality for such things as loading articles into small chunks and our mobile web projects will soon be receiving the same benefits. Re-using code like this is key to making both our projects better and third party apps faster. * People use them. No matter if your a fan of apps or not they've replaced the function of bookmarks for most mobile users. They provide a faster and easier way of accessing content and our stats are starting to show it. In just under a month of metrics we've already seen 20+ million page views from the official android app and growth is continuing. * Code re-use. Whenever companies build native apps they have to create
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide
2012/4/11 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com I agree that travel content is within the scope. In addition to the content itself, which helps other people, the process of writing and communicating travel information is educational for the writer. There was a session about WikiTravel on at RCC2011 Canberra, where the need to change host was discussed, and forking generally was discussed. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/University_of_Canberra/RCC2011/All_about_Wikitravel The wikiteam dumps of wikitravel are a bit old now; is someone working on making fresh dumps publicly available? https://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/downloads/list?can=2q=wikitravel https://groups.google.com/d/topic/wikiteam-discuss/0gSFlnxeKOo/discussion Hi; Furthermore, WikiTravel dumps generated by WikiTeam include only the last revision for every article. WikiTravel server is a bit weak, and full history exports fail. We would like to download a full dump if available. Regards, emijrp -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] www.wikimedia.org (Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process)
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:48 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: I've put some initial brainstorming notes about how this could be done here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia.org Nice. We'll add this to the discussions of the new Sister Projects Committee. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sister_Projects_Committee -- Fajro ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide
On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:30:45 -0600, James Heilman wrote: @Yaroslov 1) A merger within a WMF project is supported by admins from both WT and WV. WV is going to be meeting on the possibility of merging June 9th in Germany 2) Wikimedia's mission is to provide freely available educational content I am not sure which WMF principles you do not see such a site as being compatible with? You mention that a good travel guide selects information. A good encyclopedia sections information as well. I am not sure why we would encounter any differences? We deal with spam here on Wikipedia all the time. 2a) Not catering to a specific audience is one of the criticisms of Wikipedia. The proposed travel guide would write for a general audience. Wikipedia has written for a general audience with some success. I actually do not have an opinion on whether Wikitravel should or should not be accepted as a WMF prtoject (I am currently leaning to the opinion it should). I just pointed out obvious problems. I maintain a travel guide website since 2004, and I know the issues are not so easy to resolve, especially the audience. This is why they have so many printed guidebook series IRL, and this is why I only used two or three of these series in my life (and other travelers use something else and under no circumstances would use what I use). These issues should be analyzed very carefully before the actual decision has been made. Cheers Yaroslav ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 11:41, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.comwrote: What I think would be important to avoid is too much subjective information from one individual; for example, where I to write about York, UK I would recommend not going to the Jorvik centre (a main attraction) because I thought it overpriced and boring. Whilst my viewpoint on this is subjectively valid, it may not reflect the overall viewpoint of travellers to York (I know plenty of people who loved it)! NPOV aims to make sure that the most mainstream of these viewpoints if reflected - and any other viewpoints (i.e. hate it) are given space if deemed appropriate. The whole point of a travel guide is subjective information from individuals! However, there are travellers with different interests. Jorvik actually works out pretty well for travellers with children, for instance, but for (young) adults travelling on their own it's pretty overpriced, and not so interesting so that's what the guide should say. I don't think that's NPOV though, because the Jorvik probably think they're pretty awesome for everybody. So in summary I don't see that there is any real difference in our stance on this - it might just need a bit of rethinking. We'd like to express it as Traveller's Point of View. This really ties back into something more important; which is sourcing. I think one thing that WT sorely lacks is secondary sourcing the support the material, and that this would improve its content significantly. I'd be cautious of supporting a new WMF project that avoided sourcing in favour of mostly whatever the editors contribute from their experience. I think a good argument could be made for using personal experience to write a WT guide - but it should also incorporate good sourcing and editorial standards as developed here (Wikinews is a good example of where they successfully manage such a tradeoff). Uh, sourcing? While things like telephone numbers and addresses are clearly sourced from somewhere I tend to think that most travel guide writing is * original* creative work. We've also tried to maintain a slightly cheeky tone, which is hard to do in collaborative work. One further thing worth pointing out; from the discussions so far I gather the current host is unlikely to provide any technical support, such as a full dump for importing? This represents a problem to overcome because of attribution - any import would need a way to record the attribution history of each page (i.e. the authors) to comply with the licensing. I don't think pointing to the original WT page would work because, obviously, that could disappear etc. Just a point to remember. I'm more concerned that now that we're discussing this in a more-or-less public forum that they could get wind of it and start actively resisting. They could make things a bit more difficult, though there are XML back-ups out there which we could fall back on. I still think it's a good idea to not mention them or the collaborative travel guide we're talking about by name for the time being. I do very much prefer to think of them as a hosting provider than an owner, because that's what they do: hosting in return for the right to advertise on the site. They just happen to own the URL and, I believe, the name. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki
We've mainly approached this issue encouraging the different groups of travellers to add relevant content for their areas. We specifically try to mix it all in, because we don't want to section anyone off. There was considerable controversy back in 2005 or so about adding an LBGT section to the guide template: most of the community came down on the side of mixing everything in. Likewise with family-friendly stuff like Jorvik. We have in fact strived for a level of neutrality among different kinds of travel. I think the particular policy document would be worth reading here: Be Fair http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Be_fair I know, I know, I wrote that I'd rather not name the site, and there I go adding a link. I didn't want to cut and paste. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki
What I think would be important to avoid is too much subjective information from one individual; for example, where I to write about York, UK I would recommend not going to the Jorvik centre (a main attraction) because I thought it overpriced and boring. Whilst my viewpoint on this is subjectively valid, it may not reflect the overall viewpoint of travellers to York (I know plenty of people who loved it)! NPOV aims to make sure that the most mainstream of these viewpoints if reflected - and any other viewpoints (i.e. hate it) are given space if deemed appropriate. The whole point of a travel guide is subjective information from individuals! Is it? I'd define it as useful advice for travellers. Subjective information from only a few people can be useless, because most people will have different viewpoints (for example; I would write about the beautiful historical parts of Amsterdam, but, say, a younger person could just have easily been looking for information on drug tourism). The point of NPOV is balancing these personal priorities to make sure the readers gets lots of useful information. Rather than say Don't bother walking up to the Sacré-Coeur, it's a long climb and not worth the bother you'd say The climb up to Sacré-Coeur can be a long one. However, there are travellers with different interests. Jorvik actually works out pretty well for travellers with children, for instance, but for (young) adults travelling on their own it's pretty overpriced, and not so interesting so that's what the guide should say. Well I went as a child; and would recommend families not to bother (overpriced, not all that interesting). Which possibly hihglights the point? I don't think that's NPOV though, because the Jorvik probably think they're pretty awesome for everybody. Well, yes, but that's not NPOV because the Jorvik centre's view is demonstrably biased :) (i.e. not a travellers perspective). So in summary I don't see that there is any real difference in our stance on this - it might just need a bit of rethinking. We'd like to express it as Traveller's Point of View. I think this is a good name for it. p.s. I read your fair link with interest - I think that is a good way to resolve the issue with clashing of personal experience. However one thing a bigger community brings is a difficulty in resolving these problems (or, they crop up more often). On Wikipedia we can use sources so that uninvolved people can voice an opinion and help resolve the situation - but where this relies on personal experience that is simply not possible. Do you have an approach to help scale this form of dispute resolution? Other questions I had: - What sort of size is the WT community at the moment? - What are the policies/approach to copyright violations and other issues such as slander, etc? - What is the policy r.e. advertising and promotional (quite often, when I use WT, I see a lot of content that seems quite promotional in quality - e.g. for a particular restaurant). Cheers, Tom ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki
Just to highlight my earlier point about sourcing, the article on Florence currently says: Opera was invented in Florence. This happens to be true - but I have no proof of it, and it may well simply be the opinion of the original writer. Much of the rest of the historical section is the same; it is encyclopaedic detail about the city, spiced up for travel guide purposes. I have no issue with the spicing up (it is appropriate in the context), but I think this is the sort of content that can/should be sourced to help the reader be assured the material is true in at least some way (even if there is subjective opinion mixed in). Tom ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Mark Jaroski mark.jaro...@gmail.com wrote: We're under the impression that there are other Wikimedia foundation projects which don't use NPOV, and so those of us favouring approaching WMF have been able to argue that we wouldn't be forced to use it. If that's wrong then we should probably just give up this line of exploration and go find another solution. My impression of sister projects is the same. Not all of the same rules that apply to Wikipedia also apply to sister projects. With the exception of very few mandatory things (like respect for information about living persons), individual projects can determine their own rules and policies as much as they want. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
On 10 April 2012 17:51, Barry Newstead bnewst...@wikimedia.org wrote: If we simply select an FDC (btw - how would this happen?) and ask them to figure out the issues for themselves, this would be a recipe for serious challenges that could doom the FDC from the start. A relatively brief, but structured process that is open, has an effective advisory group of trusted people, and is supported by consultants who can give us structure and help us with the heavy-lifting on process design seems like a solid way to get us to a good outcome and help the FDC get off to an effective start. We would select an FDC by having a discussion on meta about how we think we should select an FDC and then, once we have a consensus, we implement it. That's how we make decisions around, whenever possible. I think we should at least try and reach a consensus rather than just assuming that we need to delegate decision making power to yet another committee. Can you expand on what you mean by serious challenges? Do you mean people will challenge the decisions of the FDC if it isn't spelt out exactly what decisions they should be making and how? In my experience, the opposite is true. If you try and codify exactly what a decision making body is allowed to do then that allows people to challenge it and you end up with situations like the US is facing at the moment with the legislature having passed a law but it's now going through the courts because people are challenging that law. If you take the British approach of parliamentary sovereignty, that doesn't happen. We elect people to make decisions for us and then we let them make those decisions. If they make bad ones, we elect different people next time. (Of course, we complain constantly about the decisions they are making, but that's just good fun!) With the FDC we would have another safety net in the form of the WMF board's veto. Everyone agrees that the FDC is going to be a very powerful body, but you are trying to restrict its power as much as possible. It will be far more effective if you just give it the power to make the decisions that it thinks are best. That is, after all, its job. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] teaching people how to edit Wikipedia
Thanks, Ziko. That's really interesting and sounds like an effective way of getting them started. I'm curious what kinds of problems people contact you about when they start editing for real? On Apr 12, 2012, at 1:45 PM, Ziko van Dijk wrote: Hello, Myself, I have a presentation which shows a basic wiki principle; I noticed that showing the same thing onwiki would make me jumping too much from page to page. Showing Wikipedia functionalities then onwiki I call Wikipedia surfing (version history, talk pages etc.). If it is a workshop with the intention to make people edit then I create a pseudo encyclopedia on user subpages. That's a number of simplified Wikipedia articles with hardly any markup. From article to article, the complexity and amount of wikisyntax grows. The newbies in groups of 2 correct the language and content (I put in some errors for them). I prefer that because editing real WP makes people anxious, and I want to be undisturbed with the newbies. Kind regards Ziko 2012/4/11 Heather Ford hf...@ushahidi.com: Have a quick question for some work I'm doing on Wikipedia literacy: What resources are folks using to teach others how to edit Wikipedia? At Wikipedia Academies etc? Thanks in anticipation :) Best, Heather. Heather Ford Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org @hfordsa on Twitter http://hblog.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- --- Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/ Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht --- ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l Heather Ford Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org @hfordsa on Twitter http://hblog.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Oxford University, Vatican libraries to digitize works
Trying to Search the index http://www.vatican.va/library_archives/vat_library/index.htm give a dead link http://bav.vatican.va/en/v_home_bav/home_bav.shtml the index of the secret (not really secret http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Secret_Archives) http://www.vatican.va/library_archives/vat_secret_archives/index.htm goes to some page are there any public indexs of documents available? thanks, mike On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 1:20 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/11/net-us-vatican-oxford-digital-idUSBRE83A1HF20120411 Can we arrange to get copies of this stuff without fuss? - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova http://flossk.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Community Fellow Peter Coombe
This is a HUGE need. Awesome! Great to have you tackling this. Good luck, Peter! --Kul On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org wrote: It is my pleasure to introduce our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow of 2012, Peter Coombe. As a fellow, Pete will be working with the community to improve help documentation on English Wikipedia. He’ll be leading a 6 month effort and taking a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages in order to make them more usable for new and experienced editors alike. Pete comes to the fellowships program with an impressive resume. He’s been editing English Wikipedia as The wub since 2005, he’s an admin with over 75,000 global edits, and an active member of Wikimedia UK. Pete volunteered on the Social Media Team in the 2010 Fundraiser, and worked as a Production Coordinator in 2011. He’s got a B.A. and M.Sci. with honors in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and much experience breaking down complex topics into clear written information. He’s participated twice in a program at Cambridge to create online teaching and learning modules on advanced materials science and engineering topics. He’s also worked at The Helpful Book Company, publishing books that teach senior citizens how to use computers. Pete’s talent for making the complex seem simple, combined with his experience A/B testing in the fundraiser and 7 years editing Wikipedia, make him a great fit for his fellowship project. To follow his work or get involved in the redesign project, please visit his project page. More info about Pete and his project are also on the WMF blog. Welcome, Pete! -- Siko Bouterse Head of Community Fellowships Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. sboute...@wikimedia.org ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l -- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] teaching people how to edit Wikipedia
Some tips, best practices and documents available here as well: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Handbook Thanks Nitika On 13-Apr-2012, at 4:04 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote: Oh my god, I think I'll recommend the Germans to create a work group to have a close look at all those materials. :-) Thank's for the links Ziko 2012/4/13 aude aude.w...@gmail.com: Am Apr 11, 2012 um 9:28 AM schrieb Heather Ford hf...@ushahidi.com: Have a quick question for some work I'm doing on Wikipedia literacy: What resources are folks using to teach others how to edit Wikipedia? At Wikipedia Academies etc? Here are some materials we have used at workshop, especially the one-day workshop materials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Workshop Katie Thanks in anticipation :) Best, Heather. Heather Ford Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org @hfordsa on Twitter http://hblog.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- --- Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/ Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht --- ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] teaching people how to edit Wikipedia
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 4:28 AM, Heather Ford hf...@ushahidi.com wrote: What resources are folks using to teach others how to edit Wikipedia? In Wikimedia Argentina we've created Wikipedia en el aula[0] for our workshops and talks. It was specifically oriented to teachers and students, showing them how to edit and use Wikipedia's contents. Regards, [0] PDF: http://wiki.wikimedia.org.ar/images/pdf/wiki_para_armar2.pdf -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 8, Issue 16 -- 16 April 2012
Arbitration analysis: Inside the Arbitration Committee Mailing List http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Arbitration_analysis Paid editing: Does Wikipedia Pay? The Facilitator: Silver seren http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Paid_editing News and notes: French language outreach, WikiTravel debate, and HighBeam reloaded http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/News_and_notes Discussion report: The future of pending changes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Discussion_report WikiProject report: The Butterflies and Moths of WikiProject Lepidoptera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/WikiProject_report Featured content: A few good sports: association football, rugby league, and the Olympics vie for medals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Featured_content Arbitration report: Evidence submissions begin in Rich Farmbrough case, proposed decision in RI Review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Arbitration_report Technology report: MediaWiki 1.20wmf01 hits first WMF wiki, understanding 20% time, and why this report cannot yet be a draft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16/Technology_report Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-16 http://identi.ca/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Facebook goes turncoat on the squash internet freedom battle.
First there were SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and OPEN. Now there is going to be Yet Another Attempt to enact draconian legislation through mislabeling the real purpose of IP legislation by inserting it as a rider to law supposedly intended to help in combatting Cyber-terrorism: CISPA. From the link below: It's a little piece of Sopa [the Stop Online Piracy Act] wrapped up in a bill that's supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defence against cyber-security threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property. In effect this law is directed against file-sharers, not Cyber terrorism. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17730266 -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:44:48 +0100, Thomas Morton wrote: Whether they also want to socialise with other editors is somewhat a secondary consideration/distraction. I disagree. A lot. Of course that is your prerogative. But I think in holding that view you've critically lost sight of the point of being here. We are not building a social network in the background. A social structure has to exists to keep the community going, but the prime purpose is to write/develop free content. But perhaps it would be useful to suggest some specific social features that you'd want - that might help focus the discussion. Tom I actually do agree. It is not a secret that we are attractive for people having personal problems of some sort, who hope that they can get kind of attention in Wikipedia/Wikimedia they can never get in real life. At some point I was even put in a situation when I had views opposed to the views of such people, and I basically had to defend my views against them. This proved to be impossible: I am pretty much successful in my professional career, and for me Wikipedia is, well, a hobby. But for them it is life. It is very difficult to argue with people who are fighting for life, does not matter who is defending what views. Finally, I inevitably had to say fuck you and leave the argument. There is in principle nothing wrong with people who want to get attention. For instance, they might want to get attention by writing articles, creating a big number of FAs abd GAs. Or by fighting vandals. Or by writing useful gadgets. I am all for it. And of course not everybody behaves like the types I mentions in the above paragraph - only a small fraction. But I am afraid that the more we socialize, the more attractive we become for this type of people. And then they tend to form circles, voting collectively at RFAs - up for the those from the circle, down for those not from the circle. Or discussing RfDs. Or whatever. It is extremely dangerous when people start mixing personal and professional relations - to speak in a not-so-much-correct way, when they start making love while in the office. This does not help writing the encyclopedia. And I have seen plenty of examples - and I guess all of us had. This is why I am not particularly looking forward to increasing socialization. Wikilove - fine, as a sign of appreciation (though I personally prefer appreciation written in plain English). Barnstars - ok. But going to a full-scale social network - I am sorry, this is going to kill us. Cheers Yaroslav ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: But perhaps it would be useful to suggest some specific social features that you'd want - that might help focus the discussion. I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about adding social features in the abstract -- we're not aiming to build a social network in the real sense of the term. Rather, we should be looking at the features that drive participation at social networks (and particularly at Facebook), whether those features are an inheret part of the social network concept or merely incidental to it. Consider, for example, that Zynga and Facebook have successfully managed to get millions of people to log in at all hours of the night to milk virtualcows and harvest virtual beans (or whatever it is that people actually do in Farmville). Could we do something similar to drive particpation, particularly in editing areas that don't require long-duration sessions (e.g. adding or verifying citations, categorizing articles, etc.)? Even a few percent of Farmville's user base would be an order-of-magnitude increase of our own editor base; and if the price for that is letting these editors display Citationville badges on their user pages and send each other silly messages, is it not worth it? Cheers, Kirill ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Breivik: My Biggest Influence Was Wikipedia
on 4/18/12 4:53 AM, Mike Dupont at jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: this just in, scary. Breivik: My Biggest Influence Was Wikipedia http://www.businessinsider.com/norwegian-terrorist-anders-breivik-my-biggest - i nfluence-was-wikipedia-2012-4#ixzz1sN3LZci6 On 18 April 2012 13:55, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: Unless he expanded on his statement, which isn't in the posted clip, his answer could very well be a sarcastic non-answer to an entity he believes has neither credibility nor authority over him. Marc Riddell It's my understanding that what he said is that Wikipedia was venue he used for researching his ideology. At the end of the day Wikipedia is full of right wing material - because it is a part of history/culture and we have to record it (neutrally). It is entirely possible to take that material and use it to build a world view. This is what people do anyway. We simply have to be accepting of the fact that, while our intent might be to spread a more inclusive society by opening up knowledge to the masses, there is a portion of the population who will form views we find abhorrent. I agree with you, Thomas, that some persons are going to use - or twist - facts to support their own, already-established views. I also agree with Mike that the growing size and complexity of the Encyclopedia needs stronger and more objective oversight. Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Breivik: My Biggest Influence Was Wikipedia
I find this context upsetting regardless of the points being raised. My personal request for any reader of this email thread, is that if there are any changes you would like to see on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, please don't use anything that this monster says as a reason for action. It would be a terrible starting point and taint any discussion. Nothing he has to say has any chance of being notable or rational enough for us to concern ourselves about. I look forward to him being permanently locked away from society and we can turn our backs and move on. Thanks, Fae -- http://enwp.org/user_talk:Fae http://enwp.org/user:Fae/events ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Breivik: My Biggest Influence Was Wikipedia
Yes, I also found it upsetting, but I decided to bring this topic up as someone had sent it to me, and thought that it is better that we know about what is going on before it hits us and we dont know about it. On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote: I find this context upsetting regardless of the points being raised. -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova http://flossk.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapter software tools work welcome at Berlin hackathon in June
On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 3:06 AM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Oddly enough, I have a CiviCRM developer coming around today to talk about WMUK funding a Gift Aid or Direct Debit module. He's based only a few minutes from our office. There is currently a Make It Happen or MIH in progress for UK Direct Debit http://civicrm.org/participate/mih#ukdd. I can put you in touch with some of the CiviCRM staff is you want more details on that project. -- Peter Gehres Fundraiser Production Manager Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] User retention statistics?
Yaroslav - You'll probably find background for some of this on the strategy wiki - that's the community health group that you're thinking about. :-) This is a survey in particular that might interest you: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Community_Health/Former_contributors_survey Also, Zack has some statistics from the Summer of Research, I think, on the other questions you ask. You might write him. pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ruwrote: My message is inspired by discussion in this thread ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Administrators%27_** noticeboard#Loss_of_more_and_**more_and_more_established_** editors_and_administratorshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Loss_of_more_and_more_and_more_established_editors_and_administrators) on Englush Wikipedia. Whereas the thread itself is not relevant to this list, and the points get re-iterated on a regular basis, there were statements made there which contain quantitative estimates (for instance that 90% established users who leave do it because they get a new job or have their external life changed in some other way, and not because of harassment etc). Most probably these numbers are not really justified, but then I wanted to know what real numbers are. I am an Rcom member, but I can not recollect such research being accomplished (I might be wrong of course). I could not find data easily either (I spent half an hour because I remembered we had a Community Health initiative group which somehow evolved into the Movement Roles, but the Movement Roles pages on Meta do not talk about community health at all, and I could not even find an appropriate page to ask the question). After this long introduction, does somebody know / can point out the answers to the questions: 1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on the number of contributions? 2. What are the main reasons why these editors stop editing? Is this correct, for instance, that external reasons are much more important than internal (on-wiki troubles and wiki-related harassment) reasons? The same for say those above 1 edits? Thanks in advance Cheers Yaroslav __**_ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] User retention statistics?
PS. This story was triggered by Fastily's retirement. He has 46000 edits on enwiki, and only about 620 editors have reached that plateau. Of these, 90% are still active. So such retirements are relatively rare. Personally, I hope he decides to come back after taking some time to relax and recharge. It seems to be the case that many such declared retirements aren't really permanent. -Robert Rohde On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: snip 1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on the number of contributions? For enwiki, using data from last August: 28243 users have at least 1000 edits (all namespaces). Of these, 9898 had not edited in the six months before the end of the data set. So about 65% of the major editors are still active, at least occasionally. The mean wiki-lifetime for the 28243 major users was 49.9 months. For the 9898 users who were not recently active, the mean wiki-lifetime was 35.6 months. Further, there are 4685 users with at least 1 edits, and of these, all but 914 were still active in the last 6 months of the data set. So 80% of the editors at the very high end are still active (at least occasionally). The mean wiki-lifetime on the total group is 60.5 months, and the departed group is 42.6 months. Incidentally, the mean account age of individuals editing article space is now over 3 years for enwiki. A lot of the work is being by the relative old-timers. By the same token though, people who have ever made it to 1000 edits are more likely than not to still be active today. -Robert Rohde ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia events: staging area?
On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Hi all, With all the Wikimedia events it is a problem that keeps coming back: whether participants do or do not want to be photographed. Often we get to a very crude binary result: either everything is allowed, or nothing at all. And still most people seem to violate that simply. Hence, I was thinking whether a more personal and photo specific option would be available - allowing people to veto certain pictures before they get 'really' published. After all, Commons doesn't allow deletion simply because you dont like the quality or dont want to become public in that position. Would it be an option to create a staging area, where people can upload their event photos of Wikimedia events, and where people can simply veto their own pictures? The vetoing doesnt have to be water tight, but rather easy. A password to enter the staging area for that specific event could be given to the participants where they can check the photos and veto them. Then we can proceed with 'no veto = published' and mass upload the non-vetoed photos after a while to Wikimedia Commons. If we can develop this centrally (and make it available to all Wikimedia events) or install something on Wikimedia servers that already does this, that would save a lot of event organizers headaches. Any feedback, anyone who would be willing and able to pick this up? This is a really good idea, Lodewijk! Keeping track of who does and doesn't want their photos up on Commons (and which photos they want) can be quite a hassle. -Sage ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia events: staging area?
If we don't want to develop an internal solution, it would be pretty simple to set up a private flickr album and email it out to all attendees for feedback. Kevin Gorman user:kgorman-ucb On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: However this is done, it could also be a cheap first pass at a quarantine for images being worked on with a GLAM institution as well, while cleaned up / license-cleared / de-duped. S. On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Hi all, With all the Wikimedia events it is a problem that keeps coming back: whether participants do or do not want to be photographed. Often we get to a very crude binary result: either everything is allowed, or nothing at all. And still most people seem to violate that simply. Hence, I was thinking whether a more personal and photo specific option would be available - allowing people to veto certain pictures before they get 'really' published. After all, Commons doesn't allow deletion simply because you dont like the quality or dont want to become public in that position. Would it be an option to create a staging area, where people can upload their event photos of Wikimedia events, and where people can simply veto their own pictures? The vetoing doesnt have to be water tight, but rather easy. A password to enter the staging area for that specific event could be given to the participants where they can check the photos and veto them. Then we can proceed with 'no veto = published' and mass upload the non-vetoed photos after a while to Wikimedia Commons. If we can develop this centrally (and make it available to all Wikimedia events) or install something on Wikimedia servers that already does this, that would save a lot of event organizers headaches. Any feedback, anyone who would be willing and able to pick this up? This is a really good idea, Lodewijk! Keeping track of who does and doesn't want their photos up on Commons (and which photos they want) can be quite a hassle. -Sage ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia events: staging area?
If we can't manage to set this up on-project because of rules, we collectively fail Wiki 101 On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote: If we don't want to develop an internal solution, it would be pretty simple to set up a private flickr album and email it out to all attendees for feedback. Kevin Gorman user:kgorman-ucb On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: However this is done, it could also be a cheap first pass at a quarantine for images being worked on with a GLAM institution as well, while cleaned up / license-cleared / de-duped. S. On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Hi all, With all the Wikimedia events it is a problem that keeps coming back: whether participants do or do not want to be photographed. Often we get to a very crude binary result: either everything is allowed, or nothing at all. And still most people seem to violate that simply. Hence, I was thinking whether a more personal and photo specific option would be available - allowing people to veto certain pictures before they get 'really' published. After all, Commons doesn't allow deletion simply because you dont like the quality or dont want to become public in that position. Would it be an option to create a staging area, where people can upload their event photos of Wikimedia events, and where people can simply veto their own pictures? The vetoing doesnt have to be water tight, but rather easy. A password to enter the staging area for that specific event could be given to the participants where they can check the photos and veto them. Then we can proceed with 'no veto = published' and mass upload the non-vetoed photos after a while to Wikimedia Commons. If we can develop this centrally (and make it available to all Wikimedia events) or install something on Wikimedia servers that already does this, that would save a lot of event organizers headaches. Any feedback, anyone who would be willing and able to pick this up? This is a really good idea, Lodewijk! Keeping track of who does and doesn't want their photos up on Commons (and which photos they want) can be quite a hassle. -Sage ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising Banner?
It's probably a regional test; see the bottom-most announcement at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012 Mike On 19 Apr 2012, at 20:14, Richard Symonds wrote: I believe there's periodic fundraising tests scheduled throughout the year. Which country were you viewing WP from, and which language version were you viewing? Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 07885 764 613 Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:12 PM, Abbas Mahmood abbas...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi,I just saw a fundraising banner as I opened an article on Wikipedia. Could the WMF rectify this?--Abbas ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising Banner?
Hi Abbas, I'm glad Richard, Theo, and Michael were able to jump in and provide you with this information. As mentioned, the fundraising team is currently running a short test in a few countries to increase efficiency and improve our donor experience. They will all be very short (a week or less) and should just show up for anonymous users. We put this test on the CentralNotice calendar here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar and we're running a shorter test than originally planned, but this email does bring to light that fact that we could be more proactive in communicating this information to the community. I'll talk with the rest of the team to make sure this is in a more visible place for future tests. Thanks, and feel free to let me know if you have anymore questions or concerns. Best, Josh On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Abbas Mahmood abbas...@hotmail.comwrote: Oh, thanks for the clarification Theo. Richard: I was viewing enWP from Kenya. --Abbas. Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:47:38 +0530 From: de10...@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising Banner? Hey Abbas It is apparently a fundraising test, by the staff - http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNoticemethod=listNoticeDetailnotice=C12_0411_AfricaTest It is scheduled to end on 2012/04/21 00:00, if it helps. Regards Theo On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 12:42 AM, Abbas Mahmood abbas...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi,I just saw a fundraising banner as I opened an article on Wikipedia. Could the WMF rectify this?--Abbas ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Joshua VanDavier Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. +1 415 839 6885 x6730 jvandav...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] There's a wikipedia dress now! ;-)
În data de 19 aprilie 2012, 19:12, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru a scris: On Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:35:22 +0200, Kim Bruning wrote: See http://imgur.com/gallery/v7RRz I wonder if someone could make and wear that for real? (Also, we need wikipe-tan in that dress, of course!) An idea for a T-shirt design? The upper or the lower part? ;) BTW, one should be warned that the 9gag dress is NSFW (at least at my work). Strainu ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] There's a wikipedia dress now! ;-)
On 19 April 2012 17:35, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: See http://imgur.com/gallery/v7RRz I wonder if someone could make and wear that for real? (Also, we need wikipe-tan in that dress, of course!) Credit, where credit is due, here is the artist: http://neko-vi.deviantart.com/gallery/25235063 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Update on the CISPA drafting process, and its significance to the Wikimedia movement.
There have been drastic changes to the CISPA language, (and here drastic is an understatement). Not only have they removed the language that would have made Wikimedia look like right prat -- hooray...ish -- but the emphasis on the agreement between large scale traffic sites giving their userinformation over in a quid pro quo fashion, has shifted towards language enabling them to deputise (security clearances in an expedited fashion) small time hacker collectives to conduct activities which might or might not be illegal, as long as it is for the good of the country, and as long as they can be relied to keep their mouths shut. At this point I think *any* action by Wikimedia would be misinterpreted. There is no-longer any text there that would affect Wikimedia directly. There may be an argument that the bill as a whole is still detrimental to the internet as a whole and to the United States economy, and by that route to Wikimedia. But that is such an involved chain, that we would certainly be accused of being political, if Wikimedia protested in any shape or form, on those grounds. Assuming the draft prevails of course. That is a gamble. I think the backdoor option we have is to pressure Obama to Veto the bill. He needs a win against Congress, and afte the SOPA affair this could well be his, He certainly could activate all the people who phoned in on the SOPA thing, if he wants to. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Funds Dissemination Committee: Your thoughts welcome
Hello! As many of you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation is working with The Bridgespan Group to develop a process for allocating movement funds to programs and other projects. As a part of this, the Board of Trustees resolved to create a Funds Dissemination Committee to make recommendations around how funds should be divided and allocated (see the resolution here [1]). Over the next months, we will be developing the FDC structure and clear processes around funds dissemination. As we do this, we invite you to share your thoughts on how this process can best support the movement's mission in a fair and transparent way. We are hosting a forum for input on the Funds Dissemination Committee Community Engagement page [2] Meta. Visit this page or the FDC main page [3] if you would like to provide your thoughts and to find more information on how to get involved. Please provide your thoughts on Meta, as we are posting this announcement in several places and would like to collect input in one place. Thanks! Meera Chary, from The Bridgespan Team [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Funds_Dissemination_Committee [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Community_Engagement [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC ___NOTICE This electronic mail transmission, including any attachments, contains confidential information of the Bridgespan Group (Bridgespan) and/or its clients. It is intended only for the person(s) named, and the information in such e-mail shall only be used by the person(s) named for the purpose intended and for no other purpose. Any use, distribution, copying or disclosure by any other persons, or by the person(s) named but for purposes other than the intended purpose, is strictly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and then destroy this e-mail. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of Bridgespan shall be understood to be neither given nor endorsed by Bridgespan. When addressed to Bridgespan clients, any information contained in this e-mail shall be subject to the terms and conditions in the applicable client contract. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: European Mathematical Society and Springer create Encyclopedia of Mathematics wiki...
Springer in cooperation with the European Mathematical Society creates Encyclopedia of Mathematics wiki: http://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Main_Page Invitation to contribute: http://www.euro-math-soc.eu/node/2671 Notice that it is seeded with 8,000 entries from the Kluwer-published Encyclopaedia of Mathematics; these articles remain under copyright to Springer/Kluwer. However, new contributions and edits will be licensed cc-by-sa. Seems like a fun copyright time to me... They are also using MathJax, which I know we are exploring enabling on Wikipedia (and maybe already have?) They also have an editorial board. I didn't delve into it deeply but it's not clear to me what having full scientific authority over alterations and deletions means; though it looks like they are discussing various models of review. As the librarian who sent this around said why wouldn't mathematicians who were so inclined just contribute to Wikipedia articles instead? There is some debate about that point on the EoM talk page. http://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Talk:EoM:This_project#EoM_and_WP This does raise an interesting sourcing issue though -- the published Encyc. of Math is certainly a reputable source, and should be cited in the appropriate Wikipedia articles, though I know there's a lot of debate around whether to cite other wikis as sources. And on the Encyclopedia of Math wiki talk page there's a debate about whether they should copy material from Wikipedia! -- phoebe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: European Mathematical Society and Springer create Encyclopedia of Mathematics wiki...
On 20 April 2012 18:10, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Notice that it is seeded with 8,000 entries from the Kluwer-published Encyclopaedia of Mathematics; these articles remain under copyright to Springer/Kluwer. However, new contributions and edits will be licensed cc-by-sa. Seems like a fun copyright time to me... Sounds like an interesting attempt at an open-core model (a.k.a. having your cake and eating it). If an original article is changed to the degree that no original text remains, will they claim the changes are nevertheless derivative works? Contributing to such an encyclopedia would be far too hazardous; if we are asked, we should disrecommend putting oneself into legal danger in such a manner. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Deutschland: March 2012 report
cross-posting -- Weitergeleitete Nachricht -- Von: Michael Jahn michael.j...@wikimedia.de Datum: 20. April 2012 22:01 Betreff: Wikimedia Deutschland: March 2012 report An: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org Dear all, please find Wikimedia Deutschland's monthly report for March 2012 on Meta[1]. If you don't check it out, you may never get to know why political parties in one of Germany's federal states just can't avoid to answer WMDE's questions these days or which kinds of German newspapers covered Wikipedia workshops lately. And well, there's Wikidata and much more interesting things you wouldn't want to miss! [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Deutschland/March_2012 By the way, I linked this month's report both here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports and here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports Supposedly, all chapter reports should be found in both places, but they're not. Do we need both chapter subpages? Best Michael -- Michael Jahn Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / PR Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstraße 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 260 http://wikimedia.de http://www.wikimedia.de Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch freien Zugang zu der Gesamtheit des Wissens der Menschheit hat. Helfen Sie uns dabei! *Helfen Sie mit, dass WIKIPEDIA von der UNESCO als erstes digitales Weltkulturerbe anerkannt wird. Unterzeichnen Sie die Online-Petition:* http://wikipedia.de/wke/Main_Page?setlang=de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. -- Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstraße 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 260 http://wikimedia.de http://www.wikimedia.de Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch freien Zugang zu der Gesamtheit des Wissens der Menschheit hat. Helfen Sie uns dabei! *Helfen Sie mit, dass WIKIPEDIA von der UNESCO als erstes digitales Weltkulturerbe anerkannt wird. Unterzeichnen Sie die Online-Petition:* http://wikipedia.de/wke/Main_Page?setlang=de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Deutschland: March 2012 report
Dear all, please find Wikimedia Deutschland's monthly report for March 2012 on Meta[1]. If you don't check it out, you may never get to know why political parties in one of Germany's federal states just can't avoid to answer WMDE's questions these days or which kinds of German newspapers covered Wikipedia workshops lately. And well, there's Wikidata and much more interesting things you wouldn't want to miss! [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Deutschland/March_2012 By the way, I linked this month's report both here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports and here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports Supposedly, all chapter reports should be found in both places, but they're not. Do we need both chapter subpages? Best Michael -- Michael Jahn Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / PR Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstraße 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 260 http://wikimedia.de http://www.wikimedia.de Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch freien Zugang zu der Gesamtheit des Wissens der Menschheit hat. Helfen Sie uns dabei! *Helfen Sie mit, dass WIKIPEDIA von der UNESCO als erstes digitales Weltkulturerbe anerkannt wird. Unterzeichnen Sie die Online-Petition:* http://wikipedia.de/wke/Main_Page?setlang=de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Board Meeting Live from Monmouth
All, We'll be webcasting the interesting bits of today's Monmouth WMUK Board Meeting. You can watch by going to http://monmouthpedia.wordpress.com/webcast/. All the best, Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 07885 764 613 Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
Tom, has a reputable news source actually verified this? Even Wikipedia editors know that HuffPost isn't reliable... On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On 16 April 2012 18:41, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, how do we want to work on editor retention if we lack social features at all??? These go in the right direction: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Improving_our_platform http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features Is WMF going to act finally??? Only with community approval. On English Wikipedia, we have discussed social media/social network integration repeatedly. Share This buttons and so on. And editors don't want it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PEREN#Share_pages_on_Facebook.2C_Twitter_etc . English Wikinews already has some, but there's a much smaller community there who can decide which services we wish to integrate with. If we're going to have social features (and I use that word with deliberate scare quotes around it) mandated by the Foundation, I do hope we are going to worry about privacy. A former co-worker of mine discovered that NHS Direct, the health information website provided the UK's National Health Service, had Facebook share this links that were transmitting every page you went to on NHS Direct to Facebook, which could be matched to your Facebook profile if you are logged in. Which is kind of shocking given that people use NHS Direct to look up information on health conditions they think they might have, as well as all sorts of other personal issues (sexual health, gender identity, advice on fixing lifestyle health issues like smoking and drinking). I wouldn't want the clickstream of people visiting Wikipedia articles shared on Facebook without them pretty explicitly choosing to share that information. We've already seen one kid in Britain who has allegedly been thrown out of his house by fundamentalist parents after Facebook algorithmically outed him as gay. [1] I do also hope we'd decide on what basis we'd choose these social services. Okay, yes, Facebook is pretty popular in the West. And Twitter. And maybe G+. But what about in China: do we want to support sharing to sites that are being censored by the Chinese government? Does the Foundation have the expertise to know what the popular social networking sites are in every country and language in the world? And we'd then become a commercial player: if we had done this years ago and had added MySpace integration, the moment MySpace stops being so popular and Wikipedia (whether that's the community or the Foundation) de-emphasizes the MySpace sharing/social functionality, there'd be a big stack of headlines about how Wikipedia is pulling out of MySpace. We really ought to be neutral in this market, and there's only one way to be neutral: try as hard as possible not to participate. You know, there might be an easier solution here: people who are into the whole social networking thing, their browsers ought to improve sharing with their social networks. Social plugins for browsers like Firefox and Chrome are opt-in for the user, and can give a better experience than Wikipedia pages being turned into NASCAR-esque branded adverts for dozens of social sites. I know Mozilla people have been discussing coming up with better ways of doing social sharing at the browser level. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/11/facebook-targeted-advertising-gay-teen_n_1200404.html -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] User retention statistics?
Thank you all for the replies, I need some time to process this information. Cheers Yaroslav 1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on the number of contributions? 2. What are the main reasons why these editors stop editing? Is this correct, for instance, that external reasons are much more important than internal (on-wiki troubles and wiki-related harassment) reasons? The same for say those above 1 edits? Thanks in advance Cheers Yaroslav __**_ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Still, a vote for new members should of been done. Ebe123 On 12-04-22 4:29 PM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: I suspect it's because they're doing a good job in the WMFs opinion, at least, that's how I read it in Philippe's email... Richard On Apr 22, 2012 4:11 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote: Can you explain why you request another year from them instead of running a new process, Philippe? _ *Béria Lima* *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos* On 21 April 2012 22:06, Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org wrote: A sign of a healthy committee is that it does its work promptly and undramatically. The ombudsman commission is such a committee. Charged with investigating alleged privacy violations around the checkuser tool, the commission has functioned with a high degree of professionalism and efficiency. The commission is appointed under the auspices of the Board, who have delegated this role to the staff - first to Cary, and then I took it on. Accordingly, after a great bit of deliberation, I offered the ombudsmen the ability to extend their current term for one additional year. All, with the exception of one, have chosen to do so. The one who has not is Pundit, who has accepted a position as a steward. Dweller, who was an advisory member of the commission, takes Pundit's seat. It should be noted that this was done some time ago - I have been extremely remiss in sending out the notification. There was no lapse of commission, and the commission functioned fully during the gap period. Best wishes, pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Without commenting on the quality of the work of the Ombudsmen, I'll just point out that there has never been a vote for this position. Risker/Anne On 22 April 2012 15:43, Etienne Beaule betie...@bellaliant.net wrote: Still, a vote for new members should of been done. Ebe123 On 12-04-22 4:29 PM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: I suspect it's because they're doing a good job in the WMFs opinion, at least, that's how I read it in Philippe's email... Richard On Apr 22, 2012 4:11 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote: Can you explain why you request another year from them instead of running a new process, Philippe? _ *Béria Lima* *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos* On 21 April 2012 22:06, Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org wrote: A sign of a healthy committee is that it does its work promptly and undramatically. The ombudsman commission is such a committee. Charged with investigating alleged privacy violations around the checkuser tool, the commission has functioned with a high degree of professionalism and efficiency. The commission is appointed under the auspices of the Board, who have delegated this role to the staff - first to Cary, and then I took it on. Accordingly, after a great bit of deliberation, I offered the ombudsmen the ability to extend their current term for one additional year. All, with the exception of one, have chosen to do so. The one who has not is Pundit, who has accepted a position as a steward. Dweller, who was an advisory member of the commission, takes Pundit's seat. It should be noted that this was done some time ago - I have been extremely remiss in sending out the notification. There was no lapse of commission, and the commission functioned fully during the gap period. Best wishes, pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Hi Anne, it was however common procedure to ask publicly for applications before making a decision on who are the best candidates. Maybe they are the best there are - maybe not, we'll never know. As an unrelated sidenote, I still hope the committee will public an annual report of her activities in summary (as I suggested a few members privately). Best, Lodewijk El 22 de abril de 2012 21:46, Risker risker...@gmail.com escribió: Without commenting on the quality of the work of the Ombudsmen, I'll just point out that there has never been a vote for this position. Risker/Anne On 22 April 2012 15:43, Etienne Beaule betie...@bellaliant.net wrote: Still, a vote for new members should of been done. Ebe123 On 12-04-22 4:29 PM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: I suspect it's because they're doing a good job in the WMFs opinion, at least, that's how I read it in Philippe's email... Richard On Apr 22, 2012 4:11 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote: Can you explain why you request another year from them instead of running a new process, Philippe? _ *Béria Lima* *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos* On 21 April 2012 22:06, Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org wrote: A sign of a healthy committee is that it does its work promptly and undramatically. The ombudsman commission is such a committee. Charged with investigating alleged privacy violations around the checkuser tool, the commission has functioned with a high degree of professionalism and efficiency. The commission is appointed under the auspices of the Board, who have delegated this role to the staff - first to Cary, and then I took it on. Accordingly, after a great bit of deliberation, I offered the ombudsmen the ability to extend their current term for one additional year. All, with the exception of one, have chosen to do so. The one who has not is Pundit, who has accepted a position as a steward. Dweller, who was an advisory member of the commission, takes Pundit's seat. It should be noted that this was done some time ago - I have been extremely remiss in sending out the notification. There was no lapse of commission, and the commission functioned fully during the gap period. Best wishes, pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] next Wikidata office hours
Hi everyone! I will be holding the next round of Wikidata office hours next week. You're all invited to ask questions and discuss. If you can't attend there will be logs. * 30. April, English, 12:00 UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=12min=00sec=0day=30month=4year=2012 for different time zones) * 30. April, German, 4:30pm UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=16min=30sec=0day=30month=4year=2012 for different time zones) They will happen in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode. My (virtual) door is open outside these office hours as well of course ;-) Cheers Lydia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Obentrautstr. 72 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
* How many cases were brought to your attention? around 30, give or take * How many of those did you consider serious enough to warrant investigation beyond direct dismissal? around 10, I'd say * How many cases did you take on *proactively* (without a solid complaint)? none that I would remember * In how many cases in total did the committee take action (or advise the WMF to take action)? we requested user rights changes for the committee or asked for further information we were not able to obtain ourselves several times (thanks to Philippe for helping us all the time with this!), but we never asked/recommended the Board to remove CU/steward rights from anyone. * How many emails did you exchange over the past year on your mailing list? I'd say at least 500. Could also be 1000 or more, I really can't tell you any exact numbers and I won't count it. * Were you able to send a confirmation with the outcome of the case to every complainor? Except for the cases still under investigation, I guess so. We now usually also send a confirmation when we receive a request (we didn't do that in the beginning). * Was the person complained about informed every time of the fact they were under investigation? If someone did not make any mistake we do not tell them that someone complained about them. We contacted them only if we had questions to them or if we deemed it necessary to explain something to them. * Is the process accurately described on meta? Which process do you mean? * Do you have steps in place to ensure every single request gets the follow up it needs, if not will that be improved? We are working on developing a better way of keeping track of the requests at the moment. However, the technical possibilities are limited, for security and privacy reasons. * How many formal complaints were received about the functioning of the committee? I don't know, ask Philippe. ;) I guess some people were not happy about the time it took to get to a result (I'm not, either.), or about the result itself. But there is always a way to improve things. This information could probably be summarized in a few paragraphs. I suspect that the Board already receives such summary (the committee reports directly to the board according to the meta pagehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission) so an extract from that would probably be easiest. Even if that is not the case I have the feeling it should be doable to create these numbers afterwards for 2011. That is not only a big win for transparancy, but also for future candidate members - they would know what they are getting into. Finally, it allows people to evaluate if they trust the committee enough to send their complaints to. I know several people who in the past (before the current committee probably) have sent complaints but felt it was a black box and have no idea what happened to them. That can be quite damaging for the image and should be avoided. Sorry if someone gets the impression of a black box, but as we are investigating privacy violations, we have to be very careful which information to share and we prefer to share as little as possible. The committee works very simple, we receive a complaint, which we confirm to the complainor, then we discuss if a privacy violation can even be involved. If not, we decline the request and - if possible - we try to tell the complainor where they can get help for their problem. If indeed a privacy violation is possible we investigate on this and then we have a result whether or not there was a breach of the policy and we give that result to the complainor, explaining them why we think there was (or not) a breach of the policy. If we do find a breach of privacy we would have to discuss what we do about it. But as I said, we never recommended to the Board to remove any rights from a CU or steward. I hope that such a recommendation will never be necessary, but of course we are ready for this, *if* it becomes necessary. :) This whole investigation process can take a while and can involve contacting the person about whom the complaint was, if we need to ask them for clarification on the issue, or if we need to tell them how to avoid such issues in the future. It can also involve us doing checks on users ourselves to double-check CU results (of course, in such cases we inform the local CUs why they see us in the log). However, when we will finally have set up our technical aids to keep better track of the cases, we will be able to improve on all this. Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
That's not a formal complaint. That's an email to wikimedia-l. For a formal complaint, I'd request documentation of the dates presented, etc. pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 3:19 AM, Etienne Beaule betie...@bellaliant.netwrote: Abigor did a message to wikimedia-I for his complaint. Let's say 1. Ebe123 On 12-04-23 7:16 AM, Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 3:06 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.comwrote: * How many formal complaints were received about the functioning of the committee? I don't know, ask Philippe. ;) I guess some people were not happy about the time it took to get to a result (I'm not, either.), or about the result itself. But there is always a way to improve things. To my knowledge, none. pb ___ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 415-839-6885, x 6643 phili...@wikimedia.org phili...@wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 3:49 AM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote: On my behalve a letter has been send to the foundation and the same letter has ben send by fax. How formal do you wish to get it? Nor I or the person that sended this communication on my behalf got a responds about the complaint self, we only got the responds We don't think any office action is needed. Best, Huib Bearing in mind that it's nearly 4AM, but I'm not aware of that letter. If such a letter was sent, of course, we'll increment that to 1 from zero. :) pb ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
2012/4/23 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: Transparency and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Obviously, the actual content of complaints is usually going to be confidential, but that doesn't preclude the process being transparent. That's why I answered to Lodewijk's questions. I guess the process is more transparent now. You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept up-to-date. You just volunteered to set up such a page on Meta (for 2012, I mean). I already described the process we use, so this should be possible for you to do. Thanks. The ombudsmen commission has always felt to me to be the most cabalistic of all the committees and groups we have. A lot of people don't know it even exists or what it really does. All I tend to hear about it is when people are complaining that their emails have gone into the black box, never to be seen again. Well, we are not going to advertise our services to everyone in person. If the people do not know that we exist, that's not our fault but the fault of the community. What we are doing is already described on the Meta page. If someone has sent a complaint and never gets any answer, then this is of course our fault, and it shouldn't happen. A little reminder usually does the trick, though. As you know, we are all not 24/7 OC workers doing nothing else in our lives. It can always happen that some email gets stuck in spam filters or just gets overlooked especially on days when you receive a hundred or more wiki-related emails, which is about every day in the year. I think what could really help is if we could use the OTRS ticket system for our work (that's an idea that just now came into my mind)... But I don't know how secure that is and if it is even possible to set it up so closed that only the OC members can access those tickets. (Any suggestions from Philippe about that?) Just because it deals with confidential information doesn't mean that it shouldn't be held to the same standards of transparency as every other part of our movement. Well, traditionally the transparency of the OC was very low, that's true. We just took over these traditions from our predecessors, but that doesn't mean that we can't break with these traditions and set up some new standards. It just needs to be done, which means some work. However, don't ever expect that we will publish anything case-related, including people or wiki projects involved. Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:02:29 +0200 From: Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission Message-ID: CAL0e-KVCetcaaKNQuiSwX5ckBnxqw=9_6vhkdj988ypz3wd...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept up-to-date. You just volunteered to set up such a page on Meta (for 2012, I mean). I already described the process we use, so this should be possible for you to do. Thanks. I thought Thomas's requests and suggestions in this case were quite valid and reasonable, and they did not deserve such a condescending and passive-aggressive response. I'm sure you're all very busy but that's no excuse for not continually striving for a higher standard of transparency and accountability (within the obvious restrictions that your work imposes). Regards, Craig Franklin ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On 23 Apr 2012, at 13:02, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote: You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept up-to-date. You just volunteered to set up such a page on Meta (for 2012, I mean). I already described the process we use, so this should be possible for you to do. Thanks. Touché. I believe that if the process is going to be put on Meta we do need actual numbers as opposed to your guesstimations. Hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult to sort out, if you do some searches on Gmail for all the emails that you have received in the last year from the mailing list you should be able to get a better number of the volume of emails that you got overall in the year. The ombudsmen commission has always felt to me to be the most cabalistic of all the committees and groups we have. A lot of people don't know it even exists or what it really does. All I tend to hear about it is when people are complaining that their emails have gone into the black box, never to be seen again. Well, we are not going to advertise our services to everyone in person. If the people do not know that we exist, that's not our fault but the fault of the community. What we are doing is already described on the Meta page. If someone has sent a complaint and never gets any answer, then this is of course our fault, and it shouldn't happen. A little reminder usually does the trick, though. As you know, we are all not 24/7 OC workers doing nothing else in our lives. It can always happen that some email gets stuck in spam filters or just gets overlooked especially on days when you receive a hundred or more wiki-related emails, which is about every day in the year. I think what could really help is if we could use the OTRS ticket system for our work (that's an idea that just now came into my mind)... But I don't know how secure that is and if it is even possible to set it up so closed that only the OC members can access those tickets. (Any suggestions from Philippe about that?) I don't think that OTRS is the necessarily the best option - unless you use it in collaboration with the mailing list, i.e someone sends a complaint to OTRS, the commission discusses on the mailing list and then send out a response to the user. You would be able to easily keep track of what tickets have been answered, but as far as I am aware the OTRS admins are technically able to view all the emails in any queues - so that would be another 12ish people plus devs that would be able to view the tickets. I'm not saying that they would, but bearing in mind a fair number of the OTRS admins are checkusers/oversighters themselves, I think there will be some issues with using OTRS. Thehelpfulone ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
It was not meant passive-aggressive. ;) I know that his suggestion is a good one and I wanted to push him to just do it on Meta. Sorry if you misunderstood that. ^^ Th. I thought Thomas's requests and suggestions in this case were quite valid and reasonable, and they did not deserve such a condescending and passive-aggressive response. I'm sure you're all very busy but that's no excuse for not continually striving for a higher standard of transparency and accountability (within the obvious restrictions that your work imposes). Regards, Craig Franklin ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
2012/4/23 Thehelpfulone thehelpfulonew...@gmail.com: Touché. I believe that if the process is going to be put on Meta we do need actual numbers as opposed to your guesstimations. Hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult to sort out, if you do some searches on Gmail for all the emails that you have received in the last year from the mailing list you should be able to get a better number of the volume of emails that you got overall in the year. Nope. Thomas should just create the page and format it so we can easily fill in the numbers for 2012. (If he doesn't want, anyone else can do that as well, of course. ^^) Let's just begin with this sort of statistics now, for 2012, and let's not do 2011. It's just too much work to dig everything out again just for counting some numbers. Please bear in mind that it's just statistics anyway. It really doesn't matter if it were 28 or 32 requests (or any other number around that) in 2011. I don't think that OTRS is the necessarily the best option - unless you use it in collaboration with the mailing list, i.e someone sends a complaint to OTRS, the commission discusses on the mailing list and then send out a response to the user. You would be able to easily keep track of what tickets have been answered, but as far as I am aware the OTRS admins are technically able to view all the emails in any queues - so that would be another 12ish people plus devs that would be able to view the tickets. I'm not saying that they would, but bearing in mind a fair number of the OTRS admins are checkusers/oversighters themselves, I think there will be some issues with using OTRS. Hm ok, if that's true, OTRS is clearly not an option. ^^ Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: I thought Thomas's requests and suggestions in this case were quite valid and reasonable, and they did not deserve such a condescending and passive-aggressive response. I'm sure you're all very busy but that's no excuse for not continually striving for a higher standard of transparency and accountability (within the obvious restrictions that your work imposes). Regards, Craig Franklin This might be a digression, but I'm fairly new to this list and would like a clarification. What's the decision-making process within the WMF on issues such as this (a request from the community to document a WMF process)? I understand how processes are implemented (or not), and how tasks are done (or not) on en.wikipedia, but I don't yet understand the relationship between community requests (or requests from individuals in the community) and WMF processes and tasks. What are the expectations for WMF employees' response to a request such as this -- presumably they can assess it and say no if they feel that's appropriate? Is it part of their job description to communicate via lists such as this, and justify their decisions? I don't have a strong opinion on this particular request -- I spent years as a corporate ombudsman and so I understand the concerns about privacy and confidentiality, but the request seems reasonable. However, if Thomas feels that it's not as important as other tasks that he has been given to do, what's the expectation -- that he should post an explanation, but is not obliged to do the task? I suppose this is a special case of a general question: presumably WMF employees have two masters -- the decisions of the board, which should trickle down into directives to each group and employee, and prevailing consensus in the communities, which may occasionally conflict with those directives, or which may lead to vocal minority dissent. I have seen a couple of examples of this in practice but I don't have a clear idea of how those conflicts ought to be resolved. Mike ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Ok, for the number fans, I did a filter search on my email archive and I found 660 emails archived that were sent to the OC email address since we were appointed (I don't think I deleted any, so this should probably be it). This includes emails sent from within the committee as well as those sent to us from outside. My estimate was around 500, so it's not so bad, actually. :) No, you do *not* want me to read all that stuff again. Let's just keep it at roughly 30 cases, please. Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
2012/4/23 Mike Christie coldchr...@gmail.com: This might be a digression, but I'm fairly new to this list and would like a clarification. What's the decision-making process within the WMF on issues such as this (a request from the community to document a WMF process)? I understand how processes are implemented (or not), and how tasks are done (or not) on en.wikipedia, but I don't yet understand the relationship between community requests (or requests from individuals in the community) and WMF processes and tasks. What are the expectations for WMF employees' response to a request such as this -- presumably they can assess it and say no if they feel that's appropriate? Is it part of their job description to communicate via lists such as this, and justify their decisions? Mike, the ombudsman commission does not consist of WMF employees. We are just volunteers. We don't get paid for what we are doing. ;) If I got paid for it, I would happily search all my emails and create all sorts of statistics the community wants to have, but I didn't volunteer for being a statistican or doing anything related to that, so I just won't do it. :) Explaining how we process requests is something else, and I did already explain that process. Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Please have a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission#Processing.2FReporting I hope this is sort of satisfying for now? I will not do that for the 2011 term. Already this one cost me more than two hours and it is only from 1st of February to now. :) If you do the maths you end up at ~20 cases for the 2011 term (5 cases in 3 months = 20 in a year). I think there were some more than that but not many more. Also included on that page is the outline of our processing that I gave earlier. Th. 2012/4/23 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: Top posting. This is getting a bit ridiculous. Frankly, while I see the need for *some* statistics, I don't see how the number of emails exchanged is in any kind of way relevant to the work this ombudsmen commission, for one. Seriously, if they solve a case with 2 emails or 200, I couldn't care less. Second, I understand Thomas' reluctance to skim through 600 emails to give a report that was not part of his mandate in the first place, if I am not mistaken. Could the interested people, as was asked, draw up a few report guidelines on meta as to what they would like to see, and could the commission can take just a bit of its time to see what's feasible/reasonable and what is not (as per Mike's proposal), and agree to issue a report at given intervals so that the black box is maybe not so black? It seems that something along the lines of X cases, Y accepted, Z rejected (reason for them being rejected if possible), solved succesfully/not solved and time to solve a case (date it came in, date it was solved) would probably answer most of the concerns expressed here. If you know you have to do it in advance, then the task should be bearable. Let's look forward, and not dwell on what we didn't think about before. Cheers, Delphine On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote: 2012/4/23 Mike Christie coldchr...@gmail.com: This might be a digression, but I'm fairly new to this list and would like a clarification. What's the decision-making process within the WMF on issues such as this (a request from the community to document a WMF process)? I understand how processes are implemented (or not), and how tasks are done (or not) on en.wikipedia, but I don't yet understand the relationship between community requests (or requests from individuals in the community) and WMF processes and tasks. What are the expectations for WMF employees' response to a request such as this -- presumably they can assess it and say no if they feel that's appropriate? Is it part of their job description to communicate via lists such as this, and justify their decisions? Mike, the ombudsman commission does not consist of WMF employees. We are just volunteers. We don't get paid for what we are doing. ;) If I got paid for it, I would happily search all my emails and create all sorts of statistics the community wants to have, but I didn't volunteer for being a statistican or doing anything related to that, so I just won't do it. :) Explaining how we process requests is something else, and I did already explain that process. Th. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- @notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org Photos with simple eyes: notaphoto - http://photo.notafish.org ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
hi, Please do thank the journalist concerned. I agree with the line of reasoning.But I sway away from one of his conclusions. So I think the answer is that Wikipedia needs to be more social. It needs a different kind of moderation. And it needs more mechanisms for positive feedback. Wikipedia does need a different kind of moderation and more mechanisms for positive feedback but do not think that the reasoning makes the case for making it more social. Harlock. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On 23 April 2012 12:41, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/4/23 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: Top posting. This is getting a bit ridiculous. Frankly, while I see the need for *some* statistics, I don't see how the number of emails exchanged is in any kind of way relevant to the work this ombudsmen commission, for one. Seriously, if they solve a case with 2 emails or 200, I couldn't care less. Second, I understand Thomas' reluctance to skim through 600 emails to give a report that was not part of his mandate in the first place, if I am not mistaken. I am very surprised that it would require going through 600 emails to find out how many cases the OC has dealt with over the past year. If they don't have that information somewhere, then they can't have been doing a good job. There is no way they can do their job properly without knowing what cases they've received... I don't think your correlation is correct. Simply because they have not maintained a list of case dispositions (not required or expected to this point, and more particularly very difficult to do when there's no confidential place for them to retain it) does not mean that they have failed to do the job properly. I note the plan to create accesses to CRMs for community uses in Q3 of the draft Engineering annual plan. I'd encourage the Ombudsman Committee to ask that they be put at the front of the line for access to this software. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] FDC Advisory Group selection complete
Hi - Per earlier communications, we have selected the Advisory Group to support the design process for the Funds Dissemination Committee in accordance with the formation process we laid out on Meta.[1] The FDC Advisory Group role and the names of the members can be found on Meta.[2] Thanks to all who were nominated for the Group and we hope that everyone will contribute to the process. Please do watch the Funds Dissemination Committee pages and contribute to the design process.[3] [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_Advisory_Group/Formation [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_Advisory_Group [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee Thanks, Barry -- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Release of educational videos under creative commons
2012/4/24 Andrew Cates andrew.ca...@soschildren.org Um. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video appear to all be images relevant to the topic of videos. Not themselves videos. Sorry, a missing S, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos Owner? Not personally but I am the CEO of the charity which owns them and I can release them. Is there any actual video anywhere on WP and in what format? Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_video_clips The prefered format is Theora https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Video Andrew == (Please, press Reply all to send your e-mails to the mailing list too, and not just me) On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 1:26 PM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/4/24 Andrew Cates andrew.ca...@soschildren.org I am wondering about releasing many hundreds of Africa educational videos under creative commons. They are the videos currently at www.our-africa.org which is a child generated reference site about Africa. There is a lot of material in the videos which could be edited and used to improve Wikipedia article (a solar kettle in operation, a maize plant grinding maize, a variety of musical instruments in use, different religious festivals, cocoa plantations etc etc) However at present Wikipedia does not seem to support or want video material. Wikipedia supports video with [[Media:]] tag. Also, Wikimedia Commons has a little collection of them https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video Does anyone have a feel whether this is likely to change? http://www.videoonwikipedia.com Also, this message is more related to Wikimedia or Commons mailing lists (cc:). If you are the owner of those videos and you want to donate them, some people can help you in the process. Andrew ___ Wikitech-l mailing list wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Wikipedians in Other Languages Needed
Hello All The project we have been working on to develop medical content and translate it into other languages is going well. We have an initial set of 13 top importance GAs ready for translation by Translators Without Borders. Article should begin arriving in a couple of weeks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force We are looking at starting with an initial group of 9 languages and need Wikipedians to help incorporate article into that wiki language in 7 of them including: Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Persian, Romanian and Turkish. If there are people with these language / wiki abilities who wish to help volunteers would be much appreciated. Please sign up here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force#People_involved_.28with_language_ability.29 Also if you know of anyone who is not on this list who might be interested send them my way. Many thanks -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 18:41, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, how do we want to work on editor retention if we lack social features at all??? These go in the right direction: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Improving_our_platform http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features Is WMF going to act finally??? Kozuch Hello, I put together that second link during the strategy process. Others have since added to it but the page looks much the way I remember it from back then. It's really hard for me to recall quite what I was thinking. I did believe that some kind of social glue would make the site more sticky (as the geek parlance goes) but whether I still believe that would lead to a better encyclopedia... I guess I'm not so sure about that now. Probably I was more driven by a sense of loneliness and isolation I felt whilst I did my Wikipedia work. Thing is, I think there are already vibrant communities within Wikipedia and I'm sure there are bonds. Although, I confess, I'm guessing because I'm not involved with any of them. But I would assume that those that put together Signpost each week feel connected. Those in the Military History group I imagine work together. I think if one wants to join a group for social interaction there are plenty of possibilities open to one. So now, time having passed since I put together that page, I more feel that the type of stuff I do on Wikipedia doesn't really lend itself to bonding. I tend to read articles on myriad topics and follow where my curiosity takes me. Is there the possibility of an Autodidact reader's group? If so, what would they talk about? I read *this* today! Cool! Today I read this *other* thing! Is there much value in such exchanges? It seems to me that, no, there probably isn't. There is also the Copyeditors Group but my relationship to it is that there is plenty of info there for me to learn from but I don't feel qualified to add to it. But I do know where to go if I have a question, which is not to be sniffed at. So if I am left daunted I know where to find support. Good. What do I think about it all now... Personally, I think there is no good on-wiki way to address my feelings of loneliness as a volunteer but - guess what - that's fine! Because if I want to salve my solipsism then I am a member of plenty of other websites where I have friends to talk to. However, I imagine there are ways to improve things for the groups that already exist. I would suggest anyone wishing to pursue this interviews regular contributors to the larger Wikigroups such as MILHIST and the Signpost crew. What innovations can be made to MediaWiki to help them do what they're already doing more easily? Maybe liquid threads is enough? (I'm afraid I'm not a fan). Perhaps it would be better if the Signpost guys, for example, want to feel more bonded they simply exchange Twitter/Facebook details? Of course many people want their Wikipedia identity to be separate from their identity elsewhere and so would not wish to share such details. Is there a solution to that? Dunno. To finish: your post as quoted at top states there are ZERO social features. People can quite readily share text and images; there's a talk page on EVERY page we have. I'm not sure what else you expect a computer to do short of adding Skype/Voicemail. en.wp.User:Bodnotbod ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Doctors use, but don’t rely totally on, Wikipedia
All, We think you might find our latest blog post interesting. It's about research in which an online survey of medical staff at two large hospital trusts in England was conducted. Nearly all the 109 responses included free-text comments. Unsurprisingly, the respondents - all medical professionals - all consult Wikipedia. Worth a read, I think! It's at http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/04/doctors-use-but-dont-rely-totally-on-wikipedia/ We owe a big thanks to Suzanne Hardy of Newcastle Universityhttp://www.medev.ac.uk/ for bringing the research to our attention, and Dr David Mathieson of the University of Nottingham for help with this summary. Big thanks also go to Martin Poulter, who facilitated things at our end. All the best, Richard Symonds Office Development Manager Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 07885 764 613 Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On 24 April 2012 01:00, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: Queues are normally setup so that the OTRS admins can see all tickets. This makes things easier when checking for errors, making sure there are no backlogs, cleaning up cross-queue spam, etc. However, there are definitely some private queues -- like the oversight and Wikimedia registration/scholarship queues -- that OTRS admins cannot see unless they give themselves access to it, which they wouldn't do unless they needed to for some reason. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 Oh of course, what I intended in my previous email was to highlight the fact that OTRS admins *technically *have the ability to view private emails that may even be discussing actions that they themselves have done in their capacities as oversighters or checkusers. I completely trust the integrity of the OTRS admins (yes I even trust you ;-) ) to not do anything they shouldn't do, but I see the importance in giving advance warning about who could *potentially *view emails if an OTRS queue for the Ombudsman commission was created. -- Thehelpfulone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone English Wikipedia Administrator ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
This is big news -- though still only part of Harvard's full collection of records. Following the British Library's release of 3M bib records under CC0 18 months ago: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982pageid=icb.page498373 David Weinberger writes: This is the largest contribution of full bib records we know of. Stuart Shieber [of the Berkman Center] (and of the Office of Scholarly Communication) was the driving force behind this. Woohoo! David W. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
Very good news for Open Library, and for us too. 2012/4/24 Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org This is big news -- though still only part of Harvard's full collection of records. Following the British Library's release of 3M bib records under CC0 18 months ago: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982pageid=icb.page498373 David Weinberger writes: This is the largest contribution of full bib records we know of. Stuart Shieber [of the Berkman Center] (and of the Office of Scholarly Communication) was the driving force behind this. Woohoo! David W. ___ Wikipedia-l mailing list wikipedi...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Release of educational videos under creative commons
Where's the latest thread on the Timed Media Handler progress? I am meeting with MIT Open CourseWare tomorrow - they want to expand the set of videos they released last year under CC-SA, starting with categories / vids that would be fill gaps on Wikipedia. Any thoughts on how to make that collaboration more effective would be welcome. SJ On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:59 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 April 2012 13:26, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: Also, this message is more related to Wikimedia or Commons mailing lists (cc:). If you are the owner of those videos and you want to donate them, some people can help you in the process. Well, not really - uploading video is still laborious because we've been waiting literally years for the Timed Media Handler, which is a wikitech issue. Andrew could probably deal with the ffmpeg2theora bit, but it's still faffy and troublesome. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
There is no such log within the OTRS software. Admin actions are logged by the OTRS admins on the OTRS wiki. Yes, these are manual edits. There has never (that I know of) been an issue with the OTRS admins accessing queues they shouldn't. While of course it is possible for them to, as others have explained, I'm not sure it is a realistic concern that needs a solution. It would be ideal if the OTRS software logged all actions ... I wonder if this is changed at all in the new version, which hopefully will be set up for Wikimedia soon ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22622). On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:06 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Thehelpfulone thehelpfulonew...@gmail.com wrote: You would be able to easily keep track of what tickets have been answered, but as far as I am aware the OTRS admins are technically able to view all the emails in any queues - so that would be another 12ish people plus devs that would be able to view the tickets. I'm not saying that they would, but bearing in mind a fair number of the OTRS admins are checkusers/oversighters themselves, I think there will be some issues with using OTRS. Queues are normally setup so that the OTRS admins can see all tickets. This makes things easier when checking for errors, making sure there are no backlogs, cleaning up cross-queue spam, etc. However, there are definitely some private queues -- like the oversight and Wikimedia registration/scholarship queues -- that OTRS admins cannot see unless they give themselves access to it, which they wouldn't do unless they needed to for some reason. Is there an auditable log of these actions? i.e. one that OTRS admins cant doctor? -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Ryan User:Rjd0060 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:06 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: Is there an auditable log of these actions? i.e. one that OTRS admins cant doctor? -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l It really amazes me how much we distrust the people who have been doing a great work (otrs admins, ombudsmen, etc). And all upon contrived hypothetical scenarios. And how about one of the root-access devs is secretly working for the goverment of... is anyone working on a solution for this? Pedro Sánchez http://drini.mx @combinatorica ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Release of educational videos under creative commons (Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 97, Issue 73)
Thanks Sumana! :) --michael On 04/24/2012 09:10 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap indicates that we aim to have TimedMediaHandler deployed onto Wikimedia Foundation sites by the end of May 2012. TimedMediaHandler has been reviewed by Ian Baker and Kandalgaonkar extensively, with lots of changes made in response by Michael Dale. Review notes and Michael's follow-up are at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TimedMediaHandler/ReviewNotes . It is currently being tested, including transcoding support, at http://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/File:Electric_sheep.webm . (Copied this from the extensions review queue status at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue .) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Release of educational videos under creative commons
2012/4/24 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com Where's the latest thread on the Timed Media Handler progress? I am meeting with MIT Open CourseWare tomorrow - they want to expand the set of videos they released last year under CC-SA, starting with categories / vids that would be fill gaps on Wikipedia. Any thoughts on how to make that collaboration more effective would be welcome. SJ You can upload them to Internet Archive, if Wikipedia has temporal issues with videos. When the problems are fixed, we can move them from Internet Archive to Wikimedia Commons. -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Harvard University: Drop paywalled journals, publish open access
2012/4/24 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Tangential, but highly relevant to the goal of free content: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448 The Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on grant and research funds. The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised. Meanwhile in Wikipedia we accept these gifts[1] to put links to paywall content. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HighBeam -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Haitham Shamma and the Editor Growth and Contribution Program
Welcome Haitham! Just for a bit of clarification, the post says: Haitham is joining the Wikimedia Foundation in order to support new editor growth on small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects, And then... Haitham will be beginning his work with the Arabic Wikipedia community, and based on what is learned there, he’ll be moving into other languages and geographies soon. So it sounds like when small *projects* are spoken of this means 'small wikipedias' not, say, Wikiversity. Is that an accurate reading? Bodnotbod ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
Phillipe, We are now to day's futher. Still no responds from you on or off list, or any responds at all from the foundation. best, Huib On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 03:52, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: It really amazes me how much we distrust the people who have been doing a great work (otrs admins, ombudsmen, etc). I'm going to suggest a benefit of the doubt response and wonder aloud whether it's more to do with what we've come to expect. Most of us start as editors and we become aware that our every contribution is logged and publicly available for scrutiny. That is of tremendous use to us as editors. So maybe it's just that we all started in that environment and see the value of that and then we tend to carry over those thoughts into every aspect of what happens on the wikis. It may not be achievable, desirable or necessary to have access to that level of monitoring/review for everything else (I know nothing of OTRS and/or ombudsmen), I'm just suggesting why these questions may arise: a cultural thing, if you like. Bodnotbod ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- Kind regards, Huib Laurens WickedWay.nl Webhosting the wicked way. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
Add ALL at Wikisource! On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 3:45 PM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: Very good news for Open Library, and for us too. 2012/4/24 Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org This is big news -- though still only part of Harvard's full collection of records. Following the British Library's release of 3M bib records under CC0 18 months ago: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982pageid=icb.page498373 David Weinberger writes: This is the largest contribution of full bib records we know of. Stuart Shieber [of the Berkman Center] (and of the Office of Scholarly Communication) was the driving force behind this. Woohoo! David W. ___ Wikipedia-l mailing list wikipedi...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l -- _ *M*ateus*N*obre Free knowledge, free software, free culture, open data. *Freedom, acessibility, autonomy, openess, independence, transparency. That's our way.* *And yours?* +55 (84) 8896 - 1628 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
Thanks for sharing, I had read about it on the NYT but nothing was said on license. So now the USA have more open bibliographic data than Germany/Europe? :) lobid.org is a very nice initiative, but other catalog systems have very complex interactions between hundreds or thousands of entities and it's very hard to change the licenses. The main problem is usually deduplication and quality of the records, any information on this for Harvard's data? Mateus Nobre, 25/04/2012 19:44: Add ALL at Wikisource! Wikisource? This is only metadata. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
2012/4/25 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com Thanks for sharing, I had read about it on the NYT but nothing was said on license. So now the USA have more open bibliographic data than Germany/Europe? :) lobid.org is a very nice initiative, but other catalog systems have very complex interactions between hundreds or thousands of entities and it's very hard to change the licenses. The main problem is usually deduplication and quality of the records, any information on this for Harvard's data? Mateus Nobre, 25/04/2012 19:44: Add ALL at Wikisource! Wikisource? This is only metadata. Perhaps it is OK for Wikidata. -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
Hi, yes, there surely were comments from developers... that is positive. But the result as general is still nothing at all (the feature is not even nearing deployment). WMF should invest in new features. I am not a dev and thus can not contribute any code. Kozuch 2012/4/25 Sumana Harihareswara suma...@wikimedia.org: On 04/23/2012 01:03 PM, Jan Ku?era wrote: Hi there, If, on the other hand, you just mean features to promote greater communication and networking between editors, that's a clear priority - I'm happy to talk to people about the work we're doing, and to hear any suggestions along the way :). yes I exactly meant that. It is about making contributing not suck. How often does Wikipedia (=MediaWiki) get big new features??? I posted a bug about integrating some kind of graph/chart feature (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806) and in 9 months almost nothing happened... and this really sucks... beleive it or not... Kozuch Hi, Kozuch. I look at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29806 and I see that, within a day of the issue being filed, multiple experienced MediaWiki developers commented on that issue to explain what the chart software's developers would have to do in order to make it suitable for use on our sites. I've also contacted the author of that extension to point at that bug's comments and at this procedural guide: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment so if you could help me in alerting the extension's author to those comments, that would be great. Thanks! -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:06 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: Is there an auditable log of these actions? i.e. one that OTRS admins cant doctor? As Rjd said, there isn't. Nothing will ever be perfect though. For example, the mailman mailing list that they currently use can easily be accessed by anyone with the root mailman password. The list of people with that password is very small -- and is mostly restricted to sysadmins and high-level staffers -- but there are still people who can hypothetically access it without anyone knowing. It's more an issue of minimizing risk than eliminating it. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
2012/4/25 emijrp emi...@gmail.com: Perhaps it is OK for Wikidata. I think it's perfectly OK with Wikidata, and it would be with Wikisource (if we had a metadata management system :-). As far as I understood, Wikidata will engage sister projects data in 2015 (i'm gonna cry). Aubrey ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: .. It really amazes me how much we distrust the people who have been doing a great work (otrs admins, ombudsmen, etc). And all upon contrived hypothetical scenarios. And how about one of the root-access devs is secretly working for the goverment of... is anyone working on a solution for this? Good governance is not built on blind trust. It is important to be able to periodically check that there hasnt been abuse. The OTRS admins are doing great work, and enwp oversight and arbcom have moved under OTRS despite the lack of an audit trail, but I will continue to ask for one because I believe it is important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
On 25/04/2012 23:50, Casey Brown wrote: I'm not advocating for anything in particular -- I could care less if the ombudsman commission made an OTRS queue. It's entirely up to them. :-) I knew this was going to happen LOL. When I said you, I wasn't aiming it at anyone in particular but making a general statement. Apology for any confusion. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0
On 25 Apr 2012, at 19:29, emijrp wrote: 2012/4/25 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com Thanks for sharing, I had read about it on the NYT but nothing was said on license. So now the USA have more open bibliographic data than Germany/Europe? :) lobid.org is a very nice initiative, but other catalog systems have very complex interactions between hundreds or thousands of entities and it's very hard to change the licenses. The main problem is usually deduplication and quality of the records, any information on this for Harvard's data? Mateus Nobre, 25/04/2012 19:44: Add ALL at Wikisource! Wikisource? This is only metadata. Perhaps it is OK for Wikidata. A mass dump of all of the information onto Wikisource wouldn't be good - but being able to extract complete bibliographies of specific authors on demand would actually be quite useful for properly building author pages on Wikisource, rather than the current ad-hoc and incomplete lists that currently exist. (With the consequence that bibliographies on Wikipedia could be 'outsourced' to Wikisource, bringing that project much-needed readers and editors). Thanks, Mike ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on the CISPA drafting process, and its significance to the Wikimedia movement.
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: There have been drastic changes to the CISPA language, (and here drastic is an understatement). ... At this point I think *any* action by Wikimedia would be misinterpreted. There is no-longer any text there that would affect Wikimedia directly. I think we should take our cues from the American Library Association. Wikimedia is really an outcrop of the Public Library movement. If the librarians oppose it, we are on solid ground opposing it to. Indeed, we can justify our opposition merely by pointing to the ALA's position-- Librarians are like the Military in the US-- everyone loves librarians. Going full black may not be justified, but releasing a statement of some kind (or a small banner of some kind) might be appropriate. Also, remember that we are a global organization. If the US 'legitimizes' universal cyber-surveillance, it could have deep ramifications for our readers editors living under authoritarian regimes. Even if the US is a good steward of these new powers, non-US users are unlikely to be so lucky. The language is reportedly in flux. I strongly suggest taking our cues from the ALA. If they librarians oppose it, let us oppose it too. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
