[Foundation-l] supporting small languages (was WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism)
(changing the thread title) On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: I have proposed to spend 100,000,- Euro and this will make major improvements for the scripts, the fonts and the standards for the languages we have a Wikipedia for. This is given the current budget chicken feed. Thanks, GerardM This is not a comment on the amount of money but on the idea of improvements to scripts/fonts/standards etc. I understand there's been discussion about creating a list of problems for representing various languages on the internet. For example, some languages have problems being written online because they are not well supported in Unicode, or some don't have free fonts, etc. etc. These are problems for *any* website that wants to support that particular language. There are also bugs related to how *we* support particular languages in MediaWiki -- as far as I know these have mainly been collected in Bugzilla. So my questions are: 1) have there ever been any comprehensive lists made of these language-related bugs (either within MediaWiki or in general); and, 2) what needs to be done (technically) to support small(er) languages? (I know we, in particular GerardM, have been discussing this for a long time. But I'm curious what the current state of affairs is, and if issues for small languages are collected together in one place). best, Phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] The Signpost – Volume 7, Issue 10 – 7 March 2011
News and notes: Foundation looking for storyteller and research fellows; new GLAM newsletter; brief news http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/News_and_notes In the news: Truth in Numbers? interview; 94% women; Google algorithm update; brief news http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/In_the_news Deletion controversy: Deletion of article about website angers gaming community http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/Deletion_controversy WikiProject report: Talking with WikiProject Feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/WikiProject_report Features and admins: The best of the week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/Features_and_admins Arbitration report: New case opened after interim desysop last week; two pending cases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/Arbitration_report Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/Technology_report Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07 http://identi.ca/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Changes to the CFOO department
Thank you Veronique for taking on that tough job of straightening WMF financial procedures from basically scratch to what they are today. I with you and your family the best of luck ! Florence On 3/3/11 9:41 PM, Veronique Kessler wrote: Hi All, I'll be leaving WMF at the end of June to relocate with my family to Austin, TX.This has been a difficult decision to make. I have worked for the Foundation for more than 3 years and it has been an incredible experience. I've had the opportunity here to wear many different hats and to be part of a creative leadership team at the fastest-growing non-profit in the U.S.I know that I will never encounter another organization quite like WMF again, but I do hope to impart some of the great aspects of WMF (such as transparency and collaboration) to other organizations in the future. I'm sticking around to to complete the development of the 2011-12 business plan, hence I'll be here with WMF until July 1. You can expect me to be doing my normal work until then, and of course I'll be available afterwards if the organization needs anything from me. Thanks to everyone who is part of the fantastic projects of Wikimedia and keep up the good work! Veronique ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Is the Wikimedia Strategic Plan largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan?
Re John Vandenberg's comments on the Strategic plan For a while in late 2009 I was quite active on the Strategy project, and like John Vandenburg I'm one of the hundred or more in the acknowledgements. I didn't sign up to any of the project teams as I had some real life stuff going on in early 2010, and the problems with liquid threads made it very difficult for me to get back in when I tried to. But looking at the end result and comparing it to my memories of the project, and also rereading [[:strategy:Favorites/WereSpielChequers]], I don't think it is fair to dismiss this as largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan. OK not every bright idea made it into the plan, some of my favourites got nowhere, and the plan is not exactly as I would have written it. But there are things that emerged in the final version that I think are really important and would make a huge difference to the project, for example [[:meta:Deploy additional caching centers in key locations to serve growing audiences in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East]], and much where I can see the roots in Strategy wiki discussions. So I wouldn't go quite so far as to describe it as largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan. If there was another version of this process then I think there are some lessons one could learn: 1) creating a fresh wiki rather than running it as a project under meta created some overheads and let in a bunch of banned users 2) I don't think it got enough input from the community, especially at the point when we were evaluating proposals. I doubt if many proposals got even 100 supports. I think it could have stayed closer to the wider community through more signpost reports. 3 Liquid threads was a problem. 4) We should probably have been more ruthless in the early stages at merging overlapping and contradictory proposals, and referring some others to individual projects and uncyclopedia 5) As others have mentioned getting consensus on something so complex is a daunting task, and we don't seem to have evidence for every step of this in the final stages. WereSpielChequers On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: ... Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create. On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: How cares who wrote what? What matters is who came up with what and who thought it was a good idea. I don't know if that information is available in any easily accessible way, but it will all be on the strategy wiki if you wish to search for it. I'm more than a bit disturbed to see my name in the Acknowledgements at the back of the Wikimedia Strategic Plan, which is largely a Wikimedia Foundation business plan. In participating in strategy.wikimedia.org, I was contributing to the strategic planning for the *movement*. I don't think I edited any of the pages relating to this document. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/2010-2015_WMF_Business_Plan Also, I looked for this 188 employees figure in the strategy wiki and couldn't see it anywhere. Was there any attempt to have this document approved by the community? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
A second solution could be the return of the verification edit... I vaguely recall needing to provide a diff with an edit summary stating 'I am xx on whatever wiki'. Storing a link to that from meta keeps all needed information on meta. The sticking point with the steward im discussing becoming compliant with is that my en link back to meta is on top of my usertalk page and not my user page, which is rather silly. -Brock On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: Can we keep the election open while using the SecurePoll? I'm not sure, but do we need to keep it open? IIRC, there was some opposition to using open voting during this last election. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 3/5/11 7:48 AM, MZMcBride wrote: While most donations come from people outside the Wikimedia (editing) community, the people within the community often feel that the very small staff of the past was more productive, more agile, less bloated, and overall more efficient than the larger staff of today. I think this is not true as a matter of content, and certainly not true as a matter of how people view the Foundation. Perhaps you don't remember how completely unresponsive and broken the Foundation was in the old days. The largest staff today is: more productive, more agile, and overall more efficient than the larger staff of today. I remember the bad old days, I was there. Woefully understaffed, we were unable to respond to just about any and all requests from chapters, potential partners, etc. --Jimbo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
--- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. And as Sarah says, if numbers are limited, access should be given to editors based on merit, based on a history of content work that would benefit from such access. Andreas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Mar 8, 2011, at 12:14 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 8 March 2011 13:24, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: On 3/5/11 7:48 AM, MZMcBride wrote: While most donations come from people outside the Wikimedia (editing) community, the people within the community often feel that the very small staff of the past was more productive, more agile, less bloated, and overall more efficient than the larger staff of today. I think this is not true as a matter of content, and certainly not true as a matter of how people view the Foundation. Perhaps you don't remember how completely unresponsive and broken the Foundation was in the old days. The largest staff today is: more productive, more agile, and overall more efficient than the larger staff of today. I remember the bad old days, I was there. Woefully understaffed, we were unable to respond to just about any and all requests from chapters, potential partners, etc. The WMF is certainly able to do (and does) a great deal more useful stuff now. It probably is less efficient, though. When Brion was the only staff member, he probably spent 99% of his time on programme work. Now there are quite a few staff members that don't do any programme work and just support the rest of the office. That isn't bloat, though, it's an inevitable part of growth. If the WMF tried to do everything it is currently doing without those support staff, it would be far *less* efficient. That's how it should have worked in theory (efficiency), but my experience was that small size of the office back in the St. Pete days didn't actually lend it any favors. -Dan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. And as Sarah says, if numbers are limited, access should be given to editors based on merit, based on a history of content work that would benefit from such access. +1 I'm not a university student but for $300/year, could get borrowing privilege at the local university. ( http://www.library.georgetown.edu/associates) I bet as part of our university outreach, from WMF, they might just grant access to some wikipedians. Access to academic databases would also be super useful. I don't have $300 out of my pocket to spare for this. Right now, without being able to checkout books, I'm unable to contribute in any meaningful way to the enwiki US Collaboration of the Month ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:USCOTM), [[George Washington]]. :( But, know the university has oodles of excellent reference materials about him. Yet, I would love to see efforts like USCOTM succeed and sad I can't really help. Cheers, Katie Andreas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
--- On Tue, Mar 8, 2011, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. However there is an alternative. There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their research articles (www.opendoar.org). This is the result of the open access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing) which advocates for public access to publicly funded research. Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access can help to support the work of the community. Melissa ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:51 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. I don't mean to derail this thread off-topic ... but I'm a Wikipedian, I can't help myself :) Most (all?) university libraries sign contracts with database/journal vendors restricting access to only faculty/staff/students at the university. The library pays according to how many people that is. Giving access to others is generally a violation of that contract, and could variously: a) cause the library to lose access to the resource altogether, if the publisher determines that many 'unauthorized' people are gaining access or a great deal is being downloaded; b) cause the student to be sanctioned by the university for mis-using their log-in ID. So, uh, yeah, let's not do outreach asking for this. Sadly, most pay-for-privileges schemes like Aude describes, at least for American universities, are only for checking out books, not access to e-resources. (You can probably figure out what this means yourself -- to get access to databases, the WMF would likely have to negotiate similar contracts. For reference, my university employs a full-time person + several other people's time just for this job. Are we special? yes. Are we likely to get publishers to talk to us and do special things? Probably! But it's not totally simple.) /librarian :) phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Approaching the problem from both sides seems useful, however, especially for historical reference works like Wikipedia and Wikibooks. We absolutely do want to include a balance of sources that are not OA, and finding better ways to search them and verify material in them is part of making that work with our current editorial model. S On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Melissa Hagemann mhagem...@sorosny.org wrote: --- On Tue, Mar 8, 2011, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. However there is an alternative. There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their research articles (www.opendoar.org). This is the result of the open access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing) which advocates for public access to publicly funded research. Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access can help to support the work of the community. Melissa ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
DE VERDAD ,QUISIERA PERO NO SE INGLES ,SI PUDIERAS ESCRBIR EN ESPAÑOL TE LO AGRADECERIA , MUCHAS GRACIAS MERI... Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 14:46:00 -0500 From: meta...@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: mhagem...@sorosny.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser) Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Approaching the problem from both sides seems useful, however, especially for historical reference works like Wikipedia and Wikibooks. We absolutely do want to include a balance of sources that are not OA, and finding better ways to search them and verify material in them is part of making that work with our current editorial model. S On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Melissa Hagemann mhagem...@sorosny.org wrote: --- On Tue, Mar 8, 2011, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. However there is an alternative. There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their research articles (www.opendoar.org). This is the result of the open access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing) which advocates for public access to publicly funded research. Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access can help to support the work of the community. Melissa ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
NO ENTIENDO INGLES . POR FAVOR ESPAÑOL...GRACIAS Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 07:21:00 -0900 From: brock.wel...@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues A second solution could be the return of the verification edit... I vaguely recall needing to provide a diff with an edit summary stating 'I am xx on whatever wiki'. Storing a link to that from meta keeps all needed information on meta. The sticking point with the steward im discussing becoming compliant with is that my en link back to meta is on top of my usertalk page and not my user page, which is rather silly. -Brock On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: Can we keep the election open while using the SecurePoll? I'm not sure, but do we need to keep it open? IIRC, there was some opposition to using open voting during this last election. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES HERRERA GARCIA wrote: NO ENTIENDO INGLES . POR FAVOR ESPAÑOL...GRACIAS Don't write in all caps, please. And stop complaining about people writing in a language different than your own. Shouting isn't going to change that. The fact that many threads on this list (and at Meta-Wiki) are in English is an inevitable (albeit unfortunate) reality given the user base. If you want a basic idea of what's being said, try an online translator; e.g., http://translate.google.com/. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
CANT TODO GUSTO RESPONDERIA PERO NO ENTIENDO EL INGLES POR FAVOR ,ESCRIVIR ESPAÑOL ,GRACIAS... From: janb...@wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 08:03:31 +0100 To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation Awesome news! Welcome back Brion (well you never really left in spirit :) Jan-Bart de Vreede On Mar 8, 2011, at 12:27 AM, Jay Walsh wrote: Sending on behalf of Danese... Hello, Yes, the rumors are true! Today I am pleased to announce that after more than a year away, Brion Vibber will be returning as a full-time employee of Wikimedia Foundation on March 31, 2011. The public posting is available http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/03/07/brion-vibber-rejoins-wikimedia-foundation. I'm really excited to be announcing this hire, especially at this time. I've been looking for a Lead Architect for the next generation MediaWiki platform, and Brion is of course the ultimate expert in MediaWiki internals. He's also deeply committed to the work we are doing to keep MediaWiki relevant for the next 10 years. I completely enjoy working with Brion, and I'm totally looking forward to having him back on the team full time (he has always helped out on a volunteer basis). Anyway, I wanted to give you all a heads up before the public announcement. Please join me in welcoming him back! Danese Cooper CTO, Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:21 AM, brock.wel...@gmail.com brock.wel...@gmail.com wrote: A second solution could be the return of the verification edit... I vaguely recall needing to provide a diff with an edit summary stating 'I am xx on whatever wiki'. Storing a link to that from meta keeps all needed information on meta. The sticking point with the steward im discussing becoming compliant with is that my en link back to meta is on top of my usertalk page and not my user page, which is rather silly. That is pretty silly, but if we're being fair, so is the fact that you still don't have a global account. ;-) That would really make everything so much easier! -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
Am 08.03.11 20:20, schrieb phoebe ayers: Most (all?) university libraries sign contracts with database/journal vendors restricting access to only faculty/staff/students at the university. This may hold true for the U.S., but as far as Europe is concerned the situation is different in some points. E.g., in Germany all residents are entitled to access some commercial databases that a national license has been obtained for, cf. http://www.nationallizenzen.de/ and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationallizenz. What's more, university libraries are open to all residents in its vicinity, offering on-line access at least on campus to every user of the library. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, the German chapter of Wikimedia has just negotiated the first settlement for a premium database provider in chemistry, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kurier#Chemie_eLitstip_per_Codc.21. There are plans to expand this programme. Apologies for the links provided in German only, please use a translation service such as translate.google.com if you do not not speak German. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
Lo sentimos, pero el Inglés es el idioma principal en esta lista. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
Lo sentimos, pero el Inglés es el idioma principal en esta lista. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
2011/3/8 Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com: Lo sentimos, pero el Inglés es el idioma principal en esta lista. :Not only is english the main idioma, dare I say the only one (any thread started on another language would raise complains and quickly turned into english) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de wrote: Am 08.03.11 20:20, schrieb phoebe ayers: Most (all?) university libraries sign contracts with database/journal vendors restricting access to only faculty/staff/students at the university. This may hold true for the U.S., but as far as Europe is concerned the situation is different in some points. E.g., in Germany all residents are entitled to access some commercial databases that a national license has been obtained for, cf. http://www.nationallizenzen.de/ and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationallizenz. What's more, university libraries are open to all residents in its vicinity, offering on-line access at least on campus to every user of the library. Yes, on-site access is also true in the U.S. for public (state-supported) universities. Additionally many public libraries offer access to research databases, though these may not be scholarly enough for Wikipedia work. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, the German chapter of Wikimedia has just negotiated the first settlement for a premium database provider in chemistry, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kurier#Chemie_eLitstip_per_Codc.21. There are plans to expand this programme. Cool I look forward to hearing more about this. (And I'm certainly not saying it's impossible for the WMF, just saying it's not only a question of money) -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 8 March 2011 19:20, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Most (all?) university libraries sign contracts with database/journal vendors restricting access to only faculty/staff/students at the university. The library pays according to how many people that is. Giving access to others is generally a violation of that contract, and could variously: a) cause the library to lose access to the resource altogether, if the publisher determines that many 'unauthorized' people are gaining access or a great deal is being downloaded; b) cause the student to be sanctioned by the university for mis-using their log-in ID. So, uh, yeah, let's not do outreach asking for this. I was about to reply and say much the same thing! (with the same hat on...) A sample contract, for OUP journals: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/help/instsitelicence.pdf It's a pretty standard limitation: ... affiliated with the Licensee as a current student, faculty, library patron, employee, ... or physically present on the Licensee's premises. Note the last caveat - many institutions will allow use of some otherwise-restricted electronic resources to non-students when physically on site. In these cases, accessibility is usually comparable to that of reading room access - the conditions whereby they'll let you come in and use a desk. Some institutions have an entirely open-door policy, some just ask to fill in a form, some charge a relatively nominal fee, some want evidence of a reason to be there, etc. Getting people in here is one way the WMF (or local chapters) could play a part - the financial side of things fits well with the microgrants programs some chapters have run to pay for books, etc, in the past, and whilst I don't believe we currently sign things to say people are doing valid research, there's no reason we couldn't start doing so. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. Melissa ProQuest can be purchased by corporations. The Wikimedia Foundation is a corporation. Typically a University will give their students access. We could give access to established editors. It would not have to be free. And at ProQuest you don't have to subscribe to every database. We might, for example, take a special interest in Black newspapers: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/histnews-bn.shtml Or any other area which might advance our mission in a special way. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de: Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal. They provide also indvidual subscription but only to the their members. It is relatively easy to become an ACS member - but WMF cannot help too much with this. Maybe it would be more clever to grant access to the top scientific databases - for example for most active editors -leading wikiprojects... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
Am 08.03.11 21:19, schrieb phoebe ayers: As far as Wikipedia is concerned, the German chapter of Wikimedia has just negotiated the first settlement for a premium database provider in chemistry, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kurier#Chemie_eLitstip_per_Codc.21. There are plans to expand this programme. Cool I look forward to hearing more about this. (And I'm certainly not saying it's impossible for the WMF, just saying it's not only a question of money) That's what I think, too. However, the main problem seems to be that database providers (i.e., scientific publishers) are somewhat reluctant to negotiate with Wikimedia representatives. On the one hand, they are interested in having their literature cited in Wikipedia, on the other hand they have a hunch that liberating knowledge under free licenses could make commercial publishers obsolete someday. So, we have to make clear that the latter is clearly not the case because Wikipedia depends on scientific sources, but is not a scientific source itself. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. This is true, but in most cases access to the resource allows transparency and verifiability, and we certainly want those. BTW, do we (Wikimedia communtiy) have good and enstablished contacts with the open access community? I mean, apart from single users or wikimedians. IMHO lobbying with them also at an higher level should be a priority for Wikimedia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com 2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de: Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal. They provide also indvidual subscription but only to the their members. It is relatively easy to become an ACS member - but WMF cannot help too much with this. Maybe it would be more clever to grant access to the top scientific databases - for example for most active editors -leading wikiprojects... AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de: Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal. Ha! I wish it were that cheap. Some journals only cost hundreds, some many thousands. Some (OA) are free to the reader. See: http://www.arl.org/sparc/pricing/ or, for a more entertaining website, see: http://engineering.library.cornell.edu/about/StickerShock2 We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community, including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :) This is also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did you have in mind? -- Phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:20 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: I don't mean to derail this thread off-topic ... but I'm a Wikipedian, I can't help myself :) Most (all?) university libraries sign contracts with database/journal vendors restricting access to only faculty/staff/students at the university. The library pays according to how many people that is. Giving access to others is generally a violation of that contract, and could variously: a) cause the library to lose access to the resource altogether, if the publisher determines that many 'unauthorized' people are gaining access or a great deal is being downloaded; b) cause the student to be sanctioned by the university for mis-using their log-in ID. So, uh, yeah, let's not do outreach asking for this. Sadly, most pay-for-privileges schemes like Aude describes, at least for American universities, are only for checking out books, not access to e-resources. Being able to borrow books would still be hugely useful. I could finish with some of my featured articles and work more on content. (reason I'm here) While I'm at the university getting my books, it's possible to access databases and download anything everything I want. Not ideal, but okay when combined w/ what's accessible via the public library and other means. -Katie (You can probably figure out what this means yourself -- to get access to databases, the WMF would likely have to negotiate similar contracts. For reference, my university employs a full-time person + several other people's time just for this job. Are we special? yes. Are we likely to get publishers to talk to us and do special things? Probably! But it's not totally simple.) /librarian :) phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
Am 08.03.11 21:32, schrieb Andrea Zanni: BTW, do we (Wikimedia communtiy) have good and enstablished contacts with the open access community? AFAIK, not on an official level. However, many wikipedians who are scientists will certainly prefer to publish open access, and those who are librarians will almost certainly push OA resources in their field. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
Am 08.03.11 21:36, schrieb Andrea Zanni: AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). That's right if you would negotiate with the publishers to have all wikipedians take part in the the such a scheme, but access to academic literature can only be offered to those authors who contribute regularly and who are long-time part of a WikiProject or a Portal. Otherwise you would have the effects you've described. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). Limited to editors with 20,000 edits or more? You have to ask, negotiate, etc. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community, including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :) This is also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did you have in mind? I was just waiting the librarians to weigh in :-) I'm really not sure of what we can do together, but I certainly was astonished when few years ago I learned about open access. We have many things in common, and in a certain sense we are more closer to the OA movement than the free software one. Nonetheless, the OA is mainly known by librarians, and (at least in Italy) few scholars and researchers. I think the Wikimedia could do his part to promote OA, and discuss with members of OA to build common strategies. Or at least get to know each other, there are plenty of things we can learn from one another. Furthermore, another direction could be discuss about licensing: OA has a weird form of licensing scholarship, and a way to make the main OA licenses (e.g Bethesda) compatible with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be an huge step forward. Obviously, my 2 cents. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
Why don't we just write in our respective native language, all of us. XD Would make communication much funnier, I guess. :p Th. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
As far as academic journals go most people have some access and don't know it. Most public libraries subscribe to one or more services, and a library card is all they need for that access. Any wmf sponsored access plan needs to keep this in mind and encourage editors to use access they already have first. If we did that and limited to established editors by request we could probably license by number of seats and come out ahead with respect to efficient use of resources. Targeting these efforts towards areas of systematic bias would also be a way in which the foundation could gently steer projects without actually exerting any editorial control. Anyway great brainstorming hope something comes of it. On Mar 8, 2011 3:54 PM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com wrote: ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
was: Steward election issues On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote: Why don't we just write in our respective native language, all of us. XD Would make communication much funnier, I guess. :p I agree, that it would be funnier, but I doubt most folk on foundation-l will agree. Do we have a multilingual mailing list? I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred language. Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com wrote: We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community, including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :) This is also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did you have in mind? I was just waiting the librarians to weigh in :-) I'm really not sure of what we can do together, but I certainly was astonished when few years ago I learned about open access. We have many things in common, and in a certain sense we are more closer to the OA movement than the free software one. Nonetheless, the OA is mainly known by librarians, and (at least in Italy) few scholars and researchers. Perhaps we can help bridge the gap. I think the Wikimedia could do his part to promote OA, and discuss with members of OA to build common strategies. Or at least get to know each other, there are plenty of things we can learn from one another. Plenty of things. How does OA target audiences to embrace their vision for open access to journals? How could we promote a similar vision for open access to knowledge -- in a way that could influence other sorts of authors and publishers? Furthermore, another direction could be discuss about licensing: OA has a weird form of licensing scholarship, and a way to make the main OA licenses (e.g Bethesda) compatible with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be an huge step forward. I entirely agree. At the very least, coming up with a name in the OA framework for a CC-SA-compatible license (and the acceptance of reuse that this entails) would help us have these conversations without each side running up against unfamiliar jargon. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote: Why don't we just write in our respective native language, all of us. XD Would make communication much funnier, I guess. :p I agree, that it would be funnier, but I doubt most folk on foundation-l will agree. Do we have a multilingual mailing list? I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred language. Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond. This *is* a multilingual list. All languages are welcome here. The issue with Meria's messages have been that she's just been saying the same thing over and over again: please write in Spanish. If she wanted to respond to something in Spanish, that would have been fine. What Thomas says may seem like a joke, but it's actually something that's happened on this list in the past. :-) I remember a thread where I was talking with someone in English while they responded in German. We used Google Translate to figure out what each other was saying and then we responded in our own language. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). Limited to editors with 20,000 edits or more? You have to ask, negotiate, etc. IMO this should be done through the chapters, which are member based organisations, and they can choose whether it is necessary in their country. In Australia we also have very good access available through public and university libraries, but often people arn't aware of the resources they can access if they ask. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/3/8 Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com: Lo sentimos, pero el Inglés es el idioma principal en esta lista. :Not only is english the main idioma, dare I say the only one (any thread started on another language would raise complains and quickly turned into english) I'd like to see that tested, personally. More than 50% of the Foundation contributors do not write in English, and don't read English as a primary language; if this is true, then we should implement a better solution for foundation-level discussions in other major language families. However, Maria's emails haven't indicated that she knows anything about this list, nor has she posted to wikies-l... not the best test case. SJ -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 21:50, Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de wrote: Am 08.03.11 21:36, schrieb Andrea Zanni: AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). That's right if you would negotiate with the publishers to have all wikipedians take part in the the such a scheme, but access to academic literature can only be offered to those authors who contribute regularly and who are long-time part of a WikiProject or a Portal. Otherwise you would have the effects you've described. there might be another effect, which is imo more critical: one might argue that paying somebody to do the opposite of openining up the knowledge under a free license is completely against the basic mission of wmf, and the whole free knowledge movement. my personal guess is that quite a high number of people / donators do not like this. rupert. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 March 2011 00:23, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: Lead Architect for the next generation MediaWiki platform I'd really like to hear more about that. Did I miss something or is this a new project? :-) I'm quite interested in what that concept entails myself! Danese talkes about mediawiki.next in the announcement blogpost, and Brion also goes into a bit of detail about the new parser plans in his own blog: http://leuksman.com/log/2011/03/07/hotel-mediawiki-you-can-check-out-but-you-can-never-leave/Does the next generation mediawiki platform have any relationship to the concept of the “Strategic Product Department” that was mentioned in passing in the recent monthly engineering report (under review system http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/)? The general concept of a NG has been under discussion on the WMF / Mediawiki technical lists for some years. The general approach that Brion listed has been discussed repeatedly for some years, without having enough key support / inertia to get actually going - establish a sane and properly specified subset of the current document structure, especially around the use of templates; use automatic tools to identify in-use pages and templates that don't meet that subset, for people to go to work on fixing by hand; then start rebuilding tools to take advantage of the specified subset That the WMF both got Brion back and specifically to do this task is an excellent step forwards. It may be a moderately painful year or two to come, but five years from now we'll all appreciate it. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:21 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com wrote: Why don't we just write in our respective native language, all of us. XD Would make communication much funnier, I guess. :p I agree, that it would be funnier, but I doubt most folk on foundation-l will agree. Do we have a multilingual mailing list? I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred language. Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond. This *is* a multilingual list. All languages are welcome here. While they are welcome, they are typically shoveled away to another list very quickly. A multilingual space is one where English is not the principle language, and/or people are not expected to use English if they can. foundation-l *does* expect people to use English if they can. My guess is that English is not the preferred language for over 50% of the regular posters on foundation-l, and yet they use English. Pedro's assessment is the reality: On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 7:13 AM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/3/8 Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com: Lo sentimos, pero el Inglés es el idioma principal en esta lista. :Not only is english the main idioma, dare I say the only one (any thread started on another language would raise complains and quickly turned into english) -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announce] Brion Vibber to rejoin Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:33 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 March 2011 00:23, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: Lead Architect for the next generation MediaWiki platform Welcome back, Brion! The general concept of a NG has been under discussion on the WMF / Mediawiki technical lists for some years. That the WMF both got Brion back and specifically to do this task is an excellent step forwards. It may be a moderately painful year or two to come, but five years from now we'll all appreciate it. Brion's blog post about the parser bits was great. I hope it's indicative of a series. -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
- Original Message From: MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, March 7, 2011 6:47:35 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening SNIP If someone has the time to break this report down more completely, I'd certainly appreciate it and I imagine others would as well. I really do understand what your concerns about the possible worst case scenario are. However it would be nice if you took a crack at the kind of research you are suggesting and post any concerns you have on find specific items in the report that you can not correlate to the open discussion. Posting a generalization about how bad the worst case scenario could be and asking people to prove to you that this worst case scenario hasn't happened isn't very helpful. Negatives are difficult prove. So if avoid asking people to prove they haven't incorporated any ideas that were absent from the strategy wiki and switch to asking for more information on the origins of particular ideas you haven't been able to find the origin of would lead to an all around a better discussion. Right now it seems to me like you are asking people to prove to you that the sky isn't falling. I think there is a lot of exaggeration on both sides of this discussion. Defending the strategy process as if it were a dream come true and deriding it as setting aside the values of openness and transparency are both largely inaccurate. Of course the whole process could have been better, more engaging, better documented and produced clearer results. That statement will *always* be true. The last time I can recall that there was a concerted effort to clarify WMF priorities and strategy involving paid facilitation was the 2006 retreat in Frankfurt involving about 21 Wikimedians. [1] The more recent effort on developing the WMF five year plan is much more open and transparent than that one around five years ago. I hope that five years from now we will see another significant improvement in the process. The recent effort was neither poor, nor was it ideal. It was a very nice step forward, which is right about where I believe we all should set our expectations. I find the whole it was practically perfect vs. it was in opposition to our very values nature of this thread quite problematic. Birgitte SB [1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/73086?search_string=report%20frankfurt;#73086 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
2011/3/8 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org \ What Thomas says may seem like a joke, but it's actually something that's happened on this list in the past. :-) I remember a thread where I was talking with someone in English while they responded in German. We used Google Translate to figure out what each other was saying and then we responded in our own language. I remember a French case also :-) -- Regards, Huib Abigor Laurens Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:32 PM, THURNER rupert rupert.thur...@wikimedia.ch wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 21:50, Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de wrote: Am 08.03.11 21:36, schrieb Andrea Zanni: AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). That's right if you would negotiate with the publishers to have all wikipedians take part in the the such a scheme, but access to academic literature can only be offered to those authors who contribute regularly and who are long-time part of a WikiProject or a Portal. Otherwise you would have the effects you've described. there might be another effect, which is imo more critical: one might argue that paying somebody to do the opposite of openining up the knowledge under a free license is completely against the basic mission of wmf, and the whole free knowledge movement. my personal guess is that quite a high number of people / donators do not like this. rupert. We should have no illusion that the WMF or open content movement will zero out the production of copyrighted and not-freely-licensed content - most authors of books, most movie studios, most musicians depend on revenue streams currently mostly unavailable under open content licensing for their day to day income. Lacking a total replacement financial structure for the arts we cannot hope to affect complete change. The situation with regards to scientific journals varies somewhat, but we can't imagine that all the content will just open up immediately. Especially the legacy content. Our encyclopedia (and other project) user community - the readers, not the editors - derive significant value from citing sources and quoting references which are the best available sources and references, regardless of their copyright status and open content availability. They would also gain from full access to the underlying journals and citations and references, yes, but their primary benefit is that we're reviewing and creating quality overview articles from the references. We should encourage open content in every way. But not dealing with non-open content isn't a good choice. Most contributors (financial and volunteer) understand this, I hope. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:55 PM, MARIA DE LOS ANGELES HERRERA GARCIA meriaherre...@live.com.mx wrote: NO ENTIENDO INGLES . POR FAVOR ESPAÑOL...GRACIAS Hola, Maria, Hablamos inglés en esta lista. Quizás usted prefiere la lista de la Wikipedia en español, que se encuentra en https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikies-l. Lo siento, pero Ud. está prohibido de esta lista ahora. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Mar 8, 2011, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com wrote: We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community, including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :) This is also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did you have in mind? I was just waiting the librarians to weigh in :-) I'm really not sure of what we can do together, but I certainly was astonished when few years ago I learned about open access. We have many things in common, and in a certain sense we are more closer to the OA movement than the free software one. Nonetheless, the OA is mainly known by librarians, and (at least in Italy) few scholars and researchers. I think the Wikimedia could do his part to promote OA, and discuss with members of OA to build common strategies. Or at least get to know each other, there are plenty of things we can learn from one another. It would be wonderful if we could find a way for the WMF and OA communities to more closely collaborate. Aubrey is right in that to a large extent, OA is not well known outside the library community. Given the reach of WMF, there seems that there must be a way to try to raise greater awareness of the materials which are being made available through OA. And if there is interest in advocating on this issue, SPARC developed the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/index.shtml) which represents universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, and physicians working to promote OA. Furthermore, another direction could be discuss about licensing: OA has a weird form of licensing scholarship, and a way to make the main OA licenses (e.g Bethesda) compatible with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be an huge step forward. Many OA journals use CC-BY and the DOAJ promotes its use, see http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempltempl=080423. Melissa Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: Do we have a multilingual mailing list? I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred language. Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond. This *is* a multilingual list. All languages are welcome here. The issue with Meria's messages have been that she's just been saying the same thing over and over again: please write in Spanish. If she wanted to respond to something in Spanish, that would have been fine. Casey's right—this is, in fact, the official policy of the list. You can write in whatever language you want, just don't expect much of a reply if you do it in a language that only three other people on the list understand. My reply to Maria was overly simplistic and dismissive, but only because (a) she was just writing I don't speak English, Spanish please, and (b) she did it like six times. If my head were back in California, I could perhaps have given her a better reply, and it's somewhat regrettable that my Spanish skills went down the toilet when I moved to the (no longer Spanish) Netherlands. (As an aside, does anyone know the appropriate Spanish verb for to moderate in this context? I didn't actually ban her, I just couldn't come up with a better word.) Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
2011/3/8 Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:55 PM, MARIA DE LOS ANGELES HERRERA GARCIA meriaherre...@live.com.mx wrote: NO ENTIENDO INGLES . POR FAVOR ESPAÑOL...GRACIAS Hola, Maria, Hablamos inglés en esta lista. Quizás usted prefiere la lista de la Wikipedia en español, que se encuentra en https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikies-l. Lo siento, pero Ud. está prohibido de esta lista ahora. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l However... wikies-l is about spanish wikipedia issues, and certainly not the place to talk with people related to foundation/wikimedia global matters. I understand the ban, but it only highlights the underlying problems for communication in a multilingual community: channels become monolongual and those not knowing the language will just not be able to participate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: This *is* a multilingual list. All languages are welcome here. Ты это серьёзно? Мне кажется, письме на двадцатом Google Translate всем изрядно надоест. К тому же как быть с просторечиями и фразеологизмами, на которых автоматические переводчики постоянно спотыкаются? -Виктор Васильев ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: (As an aside, does anyone know the appropriate Spanish verb for to moderate in this context? I didn't actually ban her, I just couldn't come up with a better word.) I'm pretty sure that it's moderar. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moderar That seems to be the translate that mailman uses too. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
2011/3/8 Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com: Ты это серьёзно? Мне кажется, письме на двадцатом Google Translate всем изрядно надоест. К тому же как быть с просторечиями и фразеологизмами, на которых автоматические переводчики постоянно спотыкаются? It's not perfect, but it's better than saying Victor, speak English or stfu. :-) You use it to get a basic idea of what was said and then respond based on that. In the few times that we've tried it, it hasn't been that much of an issue. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Melissa Hagemann mhagem...@sorosny.org wrote: .. It would be wonderful if we could find a way for the WMF and OA communities to more closely collaborate. Aubrey is right in that to a large extent, OA is not well known outside the library community. Given the reach of WMF, there seems that there must be a way to try to raise greater awareness of the materials which are being made available through OA. There is an ever-increasing number of Wikipedia articles about journals, and they mention open access in the infobox ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AJ And if there is interest in advocating on this issue, SPARC developed the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/index.shtml) which represents universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, and physicians working to promote OA. I haven't heard of this before. The website/campaign name begs a lot of questions. Why tax-payer access only? What copyright license allows for tax-payer only redistribution? ;-) If I understand correctly, they are promoting unrestricted access to tax-payer funded research. Do they explicitly want govt-funded research to be public domain, like US federal works are, and therefore accessible to everyone, in every country? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Steward election issues
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: However... wikies-l is about spanish wikipedia issues, and certainly not the place to talk with people related to foundation/wikimedia global matters. No, certainly not. But given that she typed NO ENTIENDO several times, in all caps, I'm not sure she intended to be here in the first place. At the very least, wikies-l could point her in the right direction. I understand the ban, but it only highlights the underlying problems for communication in a multilingual community: channels become monolongual and those not knowing the language will just not be able to participate This is certainly a problem, and not unique to Wikimedia. Better automatic translation software certainly helps, but only if you are willing and able to use it. I think most of the people on this list are willing, but senders like Maria frequently aren't able. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
What Thomas says may seem like a joke, but it's actually something that's happened on this list in the past. :-) I remember a thread where I was talking with someone in English while they responded in German. We used Google Translate to figure out what each other was saying and then we responded in our own language. It was only half a joke. ;) I did really want to suggest that other languages are allowed on the list, but this is obviously already the case, so it's fine with me. :) María may use Google Translate to get the important points, and answer in Spanish if she so wishes. Most people who have learnt any of the Romance languages or Latin can make some sense of Spanish anyway so that there is no real problem. ;) Th. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
- Original Message From: SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com To: fredb...@fairpoint.net; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, March 7, 2011 10:03:48 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser Why is there a feeling alienation? Because the Foundation is raising millions of dollars from people who read our articles, but isn't spending the money on helping to increase the quality of the articles, or make life easier for the volunteers. It's all about moving to San Francisco (how did that help?), opening new offices overseas, employing new fundraisers, etc. Let me apologize here if that sounds too cynical or unfair. I'm just giving a worm's eye view, which I accept may be uninformed, but it's what things look like from down here in the mud. :) I think you have to consider the context of the timing of the move to SF before declaring the decision as blatantly unhelpful. It was before the financial meltdown. Attracting and keeping talent, especially given the stress of having the quality their work and even the basic decision to pay someone to their job regularly attacked, was a big concern. For historical accuracy think what Danny dealt with (or search foundation-l archives if you weren't around) and forget anything recent that may or may not be such an attack. I thought Danny was absolutely crazy to work at WMF, and I work in a family business where task-irrelevant stress and a complete lack of boundaries make corporate jobs seem fabulously pampered. Asking people to relocate to some random place when they were probably already worried about whether they will be able to handle working under that kind of strain was going to be quite difficult in what was it; 4.7% unemployment? SF has a big internet and tech base. It has always made sense to me that WMF would be able to both find likely candidates already in SF and attract better candidates to SF where the obvious back-up plans for a WMF job not working out seemed rather palatable to the sort of people WMF would want. Given how the larger world events turned out, those concerns seems less relevant. 8.9% unemployment leaves good candidates sitting around just about everywhere. But seriously it's 2011, can we be stop discussing the move to SF. Is anyone seriously complaining about funds from the 2006 fundraiser? Who should be brought to account for SF being a sub-optimal location? The staff who were not yet employed by WMF? The board which includes more people who where not board members when that decision was made than where involved in the decision? What is the point of bring this up? WMF is located in San Francisco. Not in Boston, London, New York, DC, St. Pete, nor in any city that was never even under consideration. Can we please count this point as a given and consider those people who were alienated from WMF back in 2007 as below the threshold of relevance at this point in time. Birgitte SB ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
John Vandenberg writes: This *is* a multilingual list. All languages are welcome here. While they are welcome, they are typically shoveled away to another list very quickly. A multilingual space is one where English is not the principle language, and/or people are not expected to use English if they can. foundation-l *does* expect people to use English if they can. I don't want to anthropomorphize the list, but it's certainly true that having 99 out of 100 messages in English makes people who want to write in other languages feel shy. Most of the deeply eloquent people whose posts I enjoy reading on lists in other languages do not post here; possibly because they don't care for the topic but possibly because it takes more effort to be eloquent in English. And presumably this assumption makes some people not sign up at all. It might not be a bad idea to have a multilingual foundation list where the expectation is inverted -- that most people won't use English unless it is their best language, or they find it necessary to communicate. -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list
Zen is very good way to contemplate limitations of human nature. One of the limitations is very limited ability to learn languages. There are more than 5000 languages in the world and just extraordinary individuals are able to speak more than 10. And when I say speak, my ru-2 is not counted. Because of that genetically inherited disability, humans tend to learn one language common for the cultural context in which they live, which is called lingua franca. With some pauses, from ~100BC to 1900 it was Latin in Western Europe. In Eastern and Central Africa it is Swahili. And today it is English in the world. Or at least on Internet. So, there are a couple of options: (1) Change gravitational constant locally with the aim to catapult all English language out of Earth. (2) Learn all languages of the world. (3) Invent new lingua franca and teach everybody to use it. Or just try Zen. It is not American, you are safe. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
Birgitte SB wrote: But seriously it's 2011, can we be stop discussing the move to SF. Is anyone seriously complaining about funds from the 2006 fundraiser? Sure, in a sense, what's done is done. However, it has (or had) little to do with the relocation costs. You have to maintain salaries, buy office space, etc. in that market going forward until the office moves again. That is, the initial costs are bad enough, but expanding in that market is even worse. As Wikimedia's paid staff continues to grow, the decision to move to San Francisco (and its consequences) actually gets amplified, doesn't it? It would only be offset by the benefits that Wikimedia gets for being in that particular location (partnerships with other San Francisco-based companies, presumably). I think the (relatively) low salaries make it even harder to attract people when the cost of living is as high as it is in San Francisco as well. There are plenty of other people on this mailing list who could speak better to this than me, though. Maybe some of them will chime in. All of this makes for one of the stronger arguments for a more decentralized office structure at this point, in my opinion. (Lightly echoing what Liam said.) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2015 strategic plan pdf and licencing/attribution practices
Teofilo, Some of my comments below - sorry for the delay. On Mar 5, 2011, at 4:15 AM, Teofilo wrote: Just a few remarks about the 2015 strategic plan pdf (1) *http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode 4(a) You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform is infringed This is a good point that wasn't worked into the currently designed version. Does this mean that any instance of the free license descriptor CC-BY-SA including a description of the creative commons license requires a permalink to the page detailing the license? *The sunflower picture on the last page is what people colloquially call a stolen picture. The attribution right of Uwe H. Friese Bremerhaven 2005 (User:Vulcan) is infringed (2) If that's the case, and if Commons users address this infringement then we could certainly adjust the image credit in the viewing PDF for the correct one. For now I haven't seen that take place. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunflower_Bl%C3%BCte.JPG *I could not find out where the other sunflower picture on the front cover page is taken from. The image in 'acknowledgements' is credit to Pascalou Petit. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tournesol1.jpg In future design products we also intend to make the user name credits linkable to the image in Commons. *The photographer/cameraman , original author of the portraits page 3 is not attributed, which in turn prevents users from reusing the pictures. That's a good point. These are all freely reusable images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_video_project_July_2010 But we missed inclusion of the 'photographer/creator' name. I'm going to work that into minor edits for a new version. *When distributing portraits of living people with a free license, a good practice is to include a warning such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Personality_rights ; If the pictures/videos were taken with the understanding between the cameraman and the models that they are taken for the purpose of documenting the WMF projects, it should be made clear to future reusers that we don't have a model release for other purposes. We actually do have releases for these images, but as you'll see the images also include personality rights warning. *The WMF logo on the back cover page is apparently released under CC-BY-SA *The reader is not reminded that the WMF logo (together with the series of words Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wikispecies) is trademarked *The pdf does not contain any instruction pertaining to the conditions under which the WMF logo on the back cover page can be reused : **Is verbatim copying of the pdf allowed ? I guess yes, but if you don't write it down, people are not supposed to distribute the pdf verbatim, freely, because it contains a copyrighted logo. The question whether people can freely upload and redistribute this pdf on their own website is not addressed. I'm also conferring with our legal team to determine wording to include in the document that will declare that the Wikimedia Foundation mark is trademarked. I'm not particularly concerned with users mis-interpreting its inclusion in the CCBYSA work as a free release of the image's trademark, but I appreciate that this needs to be clarified. **Is modifying the whole document (including the WMF logo) allowed ? Or should the creator of a modified version remove the WMF logo ? Even for a translation ? What are you allowed to do with the other trademarks ? Indeed as a cc by sa work the piece can be remixed and modified - however a clarifying sentence such as 'the wikimedia Foundation mark is trademarked and may only be used with permission' etc The above is the sort of things which happen in an organization which does not put « foster good licencing and attribution practices » high enough in its priority list and in its budget (and in its strategic plan ?) 2015 (1) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/WMF_StrategicPlan2011_spreads.pdf found at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary (2) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunflower_Bl%C3%BCte.JPG Production of paper/printed works introduces some minor complications in the use of CCBYSA licenses, but none of these are difficult to fix. I appreciate your feedback and points and we'll try to roll these changes into a new version of the report asap. thanks jay -- Jay Walsh Head of Communications WikimediaFoundation.org blog.wikimedia.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
As Wikimedia's paid staff continues to grow, the decision to move to San Francisco (and its consequences) actually gets amplified, doesn't it? It would only be offset by the benefits that Wikimedia gets for being in that particular location (partnerships with other San Francisco-based companies, presumably). Since I wasn't an employee when the Foundation made the move to San Francisco, I can't speak for all of the motivations. From my perspective as an open source software developer working on such a novel project, there are a lot of advantages to being in the Bay Area - namely proximity to lots of other projects with similar values (for partnerships, support, networking, etc) as well as a large pool of excellent developer talent. Of course, excellent developer talent is not unique to SF (evidenced by the fact that so many of our developers are remote), I believe it exists here in a much more concentrated fashion than elsewhere. Also, the Bay Area has a ton of non-engineering talent with non-profit and community focused experience. I can only speak from my own experience and anecdotal evidence, but I would argue that the Bay Area is a hub (at least in the US) for both engineering and community development/non-profit professionals. I think the (relatively) low salaries make it even harder to attract people when the cost of living is as high as it is in San Francisco as well. There are plenty of other people on this mailing list who could speak better to this than me, though. Maybe some of them will chime in. Again, I can only speak from my experience and anecdotal evidence - it's true that the salaries for engineers are significantly lower than they would be if we working for for-profit software projects - particularly at any of the other top-5 websites. At the same time, it means that our engineers (and I presume this is true for the other departments as well) are not here for the money - we're here because we truly believe in the mission. Arthur ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Arthur Richards aricha...@wikimedia.org wrote: As Wikimedia's paid staff continues to grow, the decision to move to San Francisco (and its consequences) actually gets amplified, doesn't it? It would only be offset by the benefits that Wikimedia gets for being in that particular location (partnerships with other San Francisco-based companies, presumably). Since I wasn't an employee when the Foundation made the move to San Francisco, I can't speak for all of the motivations. From my perspective as an open source software developer working on such a novel project, there are a lot of advantages to being in the Bay Area - namely proximity to lots of other projects with similar values (for partnerships, support, networking, etc) as well as a large pool of excellent developer talent. Of course, excellent developer talent is not unique to SF (evidenced by the fact that so many of our developers are remote), I believe it exists here in a much more concentrated fashion than elsewhere. Also, the Bay Area has a ton of non-engineering talent with non-profit and community focused experience. I can only speak from my own experience and anecdotal evidence, but I would argue that the Bay Area is a hub (at least in the US) for both engineering and community development/non-profit professionals. Yes, that was what we were said several years ago and I think now there's ample evidence to show it was true, look at all the partnerships and support we got ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
Yes, that was what we were said several years ago and I think now there's ample evidence to show it was true, look at all the partnerships and support we got I presume you meant that sarcastically? I don't know much about any official partnerships the Foundation has, but a non-trivial amount of in-person collaboration and information sharing goes on on a regular basis in the office between other tech organizations/companies (like Reddit, Google, OWA, Creative Commons, CiviCRM, etc) that would be impossible if we were working in an office in, say, Duluth, Minnesota. Or St. Petersburg, Florida for that matter. This has extraordinary benefit for us, at least in the technology department. Arthur ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 6:09 PM, Arthur Richards aricha...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yes, that was what we were said several years ago and I think now there's ample evidence to show it was true, look at all the partnerships and support we got I presume you meant that sarcastically? I don't know much about any official partnerships the Foundation has, but a non-trivial amount of in-person collaboration and information sharing goes on on a regular basis in the office between other tech organizations/companies (like Reddit, Google, OWA, Creative Commons, CiviCRM, etc) that would be impossible if we were working in an office in, say, Duluth, Minnesota. Or St. Petersburg, Florida for that matter. This has extraordinary benefit for us, at least in the technology department. Arthur ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Thank you for your enlightening response. * Reddit ... a project with values similar to ours * Google ... a project with values similar to ours * OWA ?¿ * CivicCRM ... this one offers services to help internal management * Creative Commons ok, finally one project with similar values than ours: free content Now, out of the five, only one is actually related and shares similare values with our purpose. Then if you're part of staff, you're ina much better position to know about the benefical exchanges allowed by the move (which I agree, it's pointless to discuss now, what's done it's done). But now, if there are so many benefits over these years, but even people working closely don't know, this only hilights how disconnected are the elite from the working community. Now, actual exchanges that have got a lot of publicity and results: Kaltura: SF? No.. NY PediaPress: SF? No, Germany ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
* Reddit ... a project with values similar to ours * Google ... a project with values similar to ours * OWA ?¿ * CivicCRM ... this one offers services to help internal management * Creative Commons ok, finally one project with similar values than ours: free content Now, out of the five, only one is actually related and shares similare values with our purpose. I didn't mention those orgs in my most recent reply to suggest they had similar values. Regardless, they have an enormous amount of experience in a very similar problem space (technologically speaking) as we do - and in that, there is tremendous value in exchanging ideas/sharing information/collaboratively problem solving/etc. Also, while sarcasm may be considered by some to be the highest form of wit, I find that it can be difficult to detect and properly understand in emails - particularly for users who are reading in a non-native language. For better clarity and the sake of non-native readers, please keep it to a minimum when illustrating your points. Arthur ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 3/8/2011 4:24 PM, Pedro Sanchez wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 6:09 PM, Arthur Richardsaricha...@wikimedia.org wrote: I don't know much about any official partnerships the Foundation has, but a non-trivial amount of in-person collaboration and information sharing goes on on a regular basis in the office between other tech organizations/companies (like Reddit, Google, OWA, Creative Commons, CiviCRM, etc) that would be impossible if we were working in an office in, say, Duluth, Minnesota. Or St. Petersburg, Florida for that matter. This has extraordinary benefit for us, at least in the technology department Thank you for your enlightening response. * Reddit ... a project with values similar to ours * Google ... a project with values similar to ours * OWA ?¿ * CivicCRM ... this one offers services to help internal management * Creative Commons ok, finally one project with similar values than ours: free content Now, out of the five, only one is actually related and shares similare values with our purpose. Then if you're part of staff, you're ina much better position to know about the benefical exchanges allowed by the move (which I agree, it's pointless to discuss now, what's done it's done). But now, if there are so many benefits over these years, but even people working closely don't know, this only hilights how disconnected are the elite from the working community. Now, actual exchanges that have got a lot of publicity and results: Kaltura: SF? No.. NY A big part of Kaltura's contribution was to sponsor the work of Michael Dale, who works out of the San Francisco office, and who previously was at the university in relatively nearby Santa Cruz. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 9 March 2011 00:24, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for your enlightening response. * Reddit ... a project with values similar to ours * Google ... a project with values similar to ours * OWA ?¿ * CivicCRM ... this one offers services to help internal management * Creative Commons ok, finally one project with similar values than ours: free content Now, out of the five, only one is actually related and shares similare values with our purpose. I note that Arthur qualified his list with ...at least in the technology department. From that perspective, WMFs similarities to the first two are more along the lines of running very large websites than they are generating free content. The latter is the fundamental goal, of course, but we'd have problems if the *technical* staff spent all their time working on it! CiviCRM, incidentally, is the main software WMF uses for internal donations management. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 09/03/2011, at 10:15, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: All of this makes for one of the stronger arguments for a more decentralized office structure at this point, in my opinion. (Lightly echoing what Liam said.) MZMcBride That's actually not what I said, or at least not what I meant to say. I am very supportive of the WMF being headquartered in San Fran and also of having offsite employees when applicable (being one myself for this year). But by decentralising I was referring to a focus more on building up the professional capacity of the Chapters and did not mean to refer to expanding the number of WMF offices (nationally or internationally). The strategic projects to create 'catalyst' teams/offices in India, Middle East and Brazil are very cool/worthy/useful projects and I support them fully. Ultimately though I would like to see these being developed with an aim to the infrastructure being handed over to the local chapter once it too is up to an appropriately professional standard. This is not the same as saying that the WMF should decentralise. I think the question that makes this debate the clearest is when you ask: should there be a Wikimedia USA chapter. If you think Yes then that implies there will be a USA office (in NYC?) that is for domestic issues and the WMF office in San Fran for the movement generally - rather like the way there is a Red Cross Switzerland and also the International Committee of the Red Cross/Crescent in Geneva. If you think No then that implies that Chapters need only be in places/roles that the WMF choses not to focus on. Unsurprisingly - I think Yes. -Liam Wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:50, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. And as Sarah says, if numbers are limited, access should be given to editors based on merit, based on a history of content work that would benefit from such access. I'm not a university student but for $300/year, could get borrowing privilege at the local university. ( http://www.library.georgetown.edu/associates) I bet as part of our university outreach, from WMF, they might just grant access to some wikipedians. Access to academic databases would also be super useful. The nearest university to me will give access to databases for $150 a year, but they make non-students and staff travel to the university itself to do it; no logging in from home, and that turns into a serious hassle over time (travelling there, very high parking fees, not being able to browse at leisure). I think those of us who criticize the Foundation have to take some responsibility for not asking for these things. For my own part, I get discouraged because the Foundation seems distant, and seems to have other priorities. But in fact I've never put together a proposal for the kind of thing I'd like to see the Foundation help with, so actually I'm criticizing them for failing to be psychic. Let's get together and try to write something about how the Foundation could help more Wikipedians gain access to good databases. It's something that would definitely transform the quality of content. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 2015 strategic plan pdf and licencing/attribution practices
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: ... *The sunflower picture on the last page is what people colloquially call a stolen picture. The attribution right of Uwe H. Friese Bremerhaven 2005 (User:Vulcan) is infringed (2) If that's the case, and if Commons users address this infringement then we could certainly adjust the image credit in the viewing PDF for the correct one. For now I haven't seen that take place. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunflower_Bl%C3%BCte.JPG I think Teofilo is saying that the WMF has credited the username 'Vulkan', but not the person's real name, which is given. the username was not put there by the contributor. someone else added that. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Sunflower_Bl%C3%BCte.JPGoldid=830243 Thanks, John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
--- On Tue, 8/3/11, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: From: George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com We should have no illusion that the WMF or open content movement will zero out the production of copyrighted and not-freely-licensed content - most authors of books, most movie studios, most musicians depend on revenue streams currently mostly unavailable under open content licensing for their day to day income. Lacking a total replacement financial structure for the arts we cannot hope to affect complete change. The situation with regards to scientific journals varies somewhat, but we can't imagine that all the content will just open up immediately. Especially the legacy content. Our encyclopedia (and other project) user community - the readers, not the editors - derive significant value from citing sources and quoting references which are the best available sources and references, regardless of their copyright status and open content availability. They would also gain from full access to the underlying journals and citations and references, yes, but their primary benefit is that we're reviewing and creating quality overview articles from the references. We should encourage open content in every way. But not dealing with non-open content isn't a good choice. Most contributors (financial and volunteer) understand this, I hope. The main initiative should be in telling universities or other content providers that this is one way they can help Wikipedia. In addition, a case can be made to providers of copyrighted content that providing free access to active Wikipedians may actually benefit them financially. How so? An article* by Caspar Grathwohl (Oxford University Press) in The Chronicle a few weeks ago contained this telling passage: ---o0o--- One scholar issued a challenge: Wikipedia is where students are starting research, whether we like it or not, so we need to improve its music entries. That call to arms resonated, and music scholars worked hard to improve the quality of Wikipedia entries and make sure that bibliographies and citations pointed to the most reliable resources. ***As a result, Oxford University Press experienced a tenfold increase in Wikipedia-referred traffic on its music-research site Grove Music Online.*** Research that began on Wikipedia led to (the more advanced and peer- validated) Grove Music, for researchers who were going on to do in-depth scholarly work. ---o0o--- This effect should not be underestimated. Providers should be alerted to the fact that such an arrangement may benefit them, by making their material visible to an immense new target audience. Grove Music Online is a subscription site.** As George says, copyrighted content will not disappear. The people who do high-quality research invest considerable amounts of time in their work, and they rely on income from publications just like musicians do. We cannot expect them to work for free. But spreading the knowledge they have worked hard to collect is both in our and their interest. There is no need to provide login access to everyone who creates a Wikipedia user account. Most of the committed content work is done by regulars, who number a few thousand; certainly far less than the number of students in the world who are granted such access. Of course we would expect that providers and universities will only be able to provide a limited number of users with access. But access rights could be awarded on the basis of merit, say, to users who have written at least one Featured Article (Exzellenter Artikel, etc.), or have contributed 50 DYKs, or what have you. This would actually provide users with a motivation to create quality content as well. It's worth thinking about. Perhaps Grathwohl might be worth contacting about precise figures for the traffic increase they experienced, and how it affected their bottom line. He might be able to advise us on how feasible it would be to base a marketing strategy on this effect that could be pitched to content providers. Anyone in the Foundation interested in giving this a go? Andreas * http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/ ** http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/;jsessionid=93B8672443F20934DC6FAF3B3F96FE3D ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:50, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: From: Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and databases such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit into our budget. I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in which the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and which would make a significant difference to article quality. This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases from their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support Wikipedia that this is a really important way in which they can support the project, by allowing established content contributors access to these databases. And as Sarah says, if numbers are limited, access should be given to editors based on merit, based on a history of content work that would benefit from such access. I'm not a university student but for $300/year, could get borrowing privilege at the local university. ( http://www.library.georgetown.edu/associates) I bet as part of our university outreach, from WMF, they might just grant access to some wikipedians. Access to academic databases would also be super useful. The nearest university to me will give access to databases for $150 a year, but they make non-students and staff travel to the university itself to do it; no logging in from home, and that turns into a serious hassle over time (travelling there, very high parking fees, not being able to browse at leisure). I think those of us who criticize the Foundation have to take some responsibility for not asking for these things. For my own part, I get discouraged because the Foundation seems distant, and seems to have other priorities. But in fact I've never put together a proposal for the kind of thing I'd like to see the Foundation help with, so actually I'm criticizing them for failing to be psychic. Let's get together and try to write something about how the Foundation could help more Wikipedians gain access to good databases. It's something that would definitely transform the quality of content. Sarah Excellent, I'll start researching possibilities. My situation is very similar. I'm good friends with the folks that run the local college library (even to the point I might get a password) but it is 50 miles away and not driving all over is very much one of my goals these days. I'm going to check out the possibilities. There might be some opportunities we're not aware of. To say nothing of expanding our listings of free databases. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
