Re: [Foundation-l] Does google favour WIkipedia?
On 20 March 2012 17:20, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: The answer, evidently, is not as much as Bing - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2161910/Bing-Not-Google-Favors-Wikipedia-More-Often-in-Search-Results-Study Thought people might find it interesting :) No question that we are a center of attention for Google. I've noticed that when I create a new article, it often comes up as the first hit on Google for the subject within 5 minutes. There is no way such positioning is based on external links to the article. I believe Google take articles directly from the newpages feed. As to why they're the first hit, I suspect it's more to do with the way that our new articles tend to be on highly specific topics, and are very often the only page on the internet *specifically* about that thing... (The SEO people are correct that Wikipedia has a high Google ranking, and correct that this is something of an odd skew on Google's part. What always amuses me is the recurrent belief that Wikipedia deliberately tries to do this, that we're bribing Google or setting up carefully-constructed semantic traps in our articles or something - the fact that it's not a cunning ploy on our part is completely inconceivable to someone who approaches everything from this perspective.) -- - 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] Image filter
On 11 March 2012 00:23, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 March 2012 22:15, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: The image filter may not be a good solution, but too much of the response involves saying we're fine, we're neutral, we don't need to do anything and leaving it there; this isn't the case, and we do need to think seriously about these issues without yelling censorship! any time someone tries to discuss the problem. There are theoretical objections, and then there are the actual objectors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Gay_pornography The objector here earnestly and repeatedly compares the words gay pornographic in *text* on the page to images of child pornography. Well, yes, and everyone else involved in that discussion is (at some length) telling them they're wrong. There are *other* actual objections, and ones with some sense behind them; the unexpected Commons search results discussed ad nauseam, for example. I don't think one quixotic and mistaken complaint somehow nullifies any other objection people can make about entirely different material... -- - 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] Image filter
On 9 March 2012 14:17, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: We also work quite well as a filter of information. And it is improving this that we are currently discussing. Improving the filtering of information is a critical facet of making it accessible to as many people as possible. If a Muslim refuses to go to Wikipedia because of our image policy - which we (realistically) impose on him - then we have failed in our core objective. I had sworn off commenting on these discussions some time back, but I want to chime in to support this point - the way in which our community handles controversial content is itself a viewpoint position, and potentially a flawed one. Opposing changes to the way we handle and display this content isn't as simple as defending neutrality; it's arguing for retaining the status quo, and thus enforcing our communities' current systemic biases and perspectives on what is acceptable, what is normal, what is appropriate. Those perspectives may be better than the alternatives - sometimes I think so, sometimes I don't - but by not doing anything, we're in real danger of privileging the editing community's belief that people should be exposed to things over a reader's desire not to be exposed to them. The image filter may not be a good solution, but too much of the response involves saying we're fine, we're neutral, we don't need to do anything and leaving it there; this isn't the case, and we do need to think seriously about these issues without yelling censorship! any time someone tries to discuss the problem. -- - 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] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 14 February 2012 06:02, David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com wrote: Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#.22No_Evidence.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#Dubious As with so many cases, causing a stink gets the giant searchlight directed on the article, and things get worked out... it's just a pity it doesn't scale well! This followup may be of some interest: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/does-wikipedia-have-an-accuracy-problem/253216/ I particularly liked this comment: Digging into Wikipedia's logs on the changes, it's clear that the entry's gatekeepers did not handle the situation optimally, chiding Messer-Kruse for his manners and not incorporating the new research into the article, even as a minority viewpoint. But it's also worth noting that the expectation that Wikipedia would quickly reflect such a dramatic change in a well-known historical narrative is a very, very high bar. (...) we hold this massive experiment in collaborative knowledge to a standard that is higher than any other source. We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers. -- - 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] Strike against the collection of personal data through edit links
On 4 February 2012 13:57, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: Also it is becoming uncomfortable to edit section 0 of an article. On a normal wiki article, to edit section 0, one copy-pastes the edit link of section 1 and changes 1 into 0. This is no longer possible in a reliable enough way, as the effect of changing the URL becomes obscure. Changing section=1 into section=0 should still work fine - I've just tested it. The token values seem to be the same for every section, so it's unlikely even to confuse the data! However, this is a bit of a hack in the first place - there's an option in preferences to provide an edit link actually on the page for section 0. Preferences Gadgets, and the first entry under Appearance. -- - 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] Research assistance
On 21 January 2012 13:42, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: While we have a list here http://toolserver.org/~tim1357/cgi-bin/wikiproject_watchlist.py?template=WikiProject%20Medicineorder=desclimit=200t=0m=1b=0user=off=0cat=0hip=0q=1 if multiple edits are made to the same page in a single day it only shows the last one. Is it possible to get a list of all edits? If should be possible to work with this list if another is not available. This is slightly clumsy, but it works: Produce a list of all the articles you want to watch (which is the most tricky part of the process) and format them as a long list of wikilinks. Drop this into a userspace or projectspace page - it should just be a sea of blue links to individual articles. Then, use Related Changes from the sidebar - this will produce a list of all the edits made to every article linked. It isn't treated as a watchlist, so it shows all edits and not just the top ones. One caveat, though - it doesn't handle redirects or pagemoves very well. You need to make sure the links go direct to the target page, not via a redirect, or you'll end up watching for changes to the redirect page; and if a page linked from there is moved, you may miss any changes to it. If I am able to get approval and funding from UBC I am hoping to run a second round collecting the same data but with pending changes turned on for a week on all medical articles. This students would be required to handing all pending changes to all medical articles and will be collecting the same data as before. This will allow us to determine 1) if pending changes affects the numbers of IPs editing 2) if and to what degree pending changes reduces the visibility of poor quality content. The proposed As David says, I fear you may have more trouble getting agreement from the community! I'd love to see this part of the study done (and make a small bet as to what the results might be...), but it's going to be a hard sell. If you're planning to get this running in the summer, you might want to start the negotiations quite soon... -- - 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] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug
On 12 December 2011 19:22, Möller, Carsten c.moel...@wmco.de wrote: It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally got around to writing it Who has asked for such a silly feature? Every uploader sees the image he/she is uploading and has made the necessary rotation beforehand. I've certainly uploaded screwily-rotated files before; it's fairly common, especially with some Windows software, for an image to be shown to the user as rotated while retaining its set rotation in a way that's not visible until it's sent somewhere. I agree applying it to old images was a bit of an odd thing to do (if they were visibly wrong, someone usually went to the effort of re-uploading them), but that doesn't mean applying it to later ones was somehow a stupid thing to do. As to how common it might be in general... testing on Commons is tricky, but I've spent a few minutes sampling the Flickr live upload feed. Over about 20 pages of 20 images each, I found eight wrongly-rotated shots, or eight in 400 ~~ 2%. It's not Commons, of course, but it is indicative. -- - 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] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 12:23, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: So is there a simpler way to do this, is there some flaw in this that would prevent it working, or is this the flying unicorn option? I believe it was envisioned as working for anonymous casual readers as well. There *should* be some way to at least have the no-images option for anonymous readers without ruining caching ... Cookies? It would work on at least a per-session basis, I'd think. One issue here is that if we make it registered-user-only we need to work out how this interacts with account creation - and IP blocks. It clearly will cause problems if people *want* to turn on the filter, go to create an account, and discover one of our famed cryptic block messages telling them they can't... -- - 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] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: One of the objections is that we don't want a Flickr style system which involves images being deleted, accounts being suspended and the burden of filtering being put on the uploader. The objection to a flickr-style concept was to the one size fits all safe/not-safe rating done by a central staff. As Stephen notes, Flickr's specific approach does involve deletion, suspension, etc etc etc, but none of the proposals for the filter have suggested anything like this - there's no desire to remove the images, just to label them for display [or not] in articles. -- - 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] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 14:46, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: I'm uncomfortable about a session cookie based system for IP readers, many of our readers are in Internet Cafes and I'm not sure if PCs in those sorts of environments get rebooted and the session cookies wiped between customers. It varies depending on the specific location - some effectively reboot and wipe the profile between users, some merely kick one user out of the seat and put a new one in without even closing the browser tabs. Same with domestic one-computer-per-household situations! On the other hand, the proposed implementation is relatively transparently reversible - concealed images are shown as a placeholder with a trivial click to display again option - and this sort of legacy filtering should be fairly easy for a user to switch back on or off. It's not perfect, but it's probably no *less* clunky than requiring people to sign in (and the associated forgetting-to-sign-out...) -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 19:05, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: I still can't the a rational difference between images included in articles by the will of the community and text passages included by the will of the community. It's much easier to note offensive text fragments before reading them than to note offensive images before seeing them. But I guess the more fundamental issue is: there are, I assume, people who have requested this feature for images. There are either no or only very few who have requested it for text. I've almost never seen complaints about specific fragments of text in five years of handing OTRS mails, other than vandalism or the sort of bad writing that we discourage anyway. I assume the sort of thing that provokes this is taboo vocabulary - swearing, etc - but we tend to keep that to a minimum in articles anyway. We *do* get more generalised how dare you have articles on this sort of thing, as you'd expect, but those are subtly different. When the objection's to having an article at all, any demand for a filtering system would involve filtering the entire article... and an article you've specifically told the system not to show you is really just the same as an article you've glanced at and decided not to read. It's a bit circular - the filter wouldn't do anything more than your interaction with the site does anyway, so why agitate for one? For images, on the other hand, it's a relatively coherent position to be willing to *read* about sex or violence without wanting to look at pictures of it - a system which allows someone to choose to read the article without looking at the pictures thus makes more sense in comparison. -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter
On 22 September 2011 22:28, Fae f...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: I've almost never seen complaints about specific fragments of text in five years of handing OTRS mails, other than vandalism or the sort of bad writing that we discourage anyway. I assume the sort of thing that provokes this is taboo vocabulary - swearing, etc - but we tend to keep that to a minimum in articles anyway. Beyond the vandalism problem, I have dealt with complaints on OTRS relating to weight, such as emphasis on stories about paedophiles on school articles. However it is hard to imagine how a filter would deal with this and I suspect the majority of our community would not want to start hiding paragraphs that include difficult words such as paedophile, particularly when they are likely to be accurate and verifiable even for articles likely to be accessed by young readers. Yeah. Weighting and appropriate inclusion and so on are basically editorial issues, and any sort of filtering wouldn't help (though sometimes I wonder if some people would secretly like an in popular culture heading filter...). Keyword-matching based filtering is also something that's very easy for a reader to do on their side, so there wouldn't be much reason for *us* to do anything like that even were we being pestered for it. While we're on a tangent, though, it's interesting to imagine what reaction we'd get were there a filter which screened out articles under a minimum quality threshold! Opt-in to see articles with more than two cleanup tags, etc. :-) -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 14:14, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: The real problem here is that if there was a real market for stupid sites like that, they would already be there. And they are not, which does seem to point to the conclusion that there isn't a real market for such sites. Doesn't it? Not really. There are basically no major WP-derivative sites of any kind in existence - the ones that exist are either plain dumps studded with ads, or very small-scale attempts to do something good and innovative. As far as I can tell, it's just very hard to get a fork or a significantly different derivative site up and running successfully; it requires a large investment on fairly speculative predictions. Given this, it's hard to say that the absence of a particular kind of derivative site is due to there being a lack of demand for that *kind* of site - there might be demand, there might not, we just can't tell from the available evidence. (To steal David's analogy, it's a bit like saying that unicorns can't be trained, as there are no trained unicorns. Of course, there are no unicorns at all, and their trainability is moot...) -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 18:20, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: Truthfully, i see not different approach to include images and text passages. Both are added, discussed, removed, re-added the same way as text is. Now i heard some say that text is written by multiple authors and images are only created by one. Then i must wonder that we are able to decide to include one source and it's arguments written by one author, while it seams to be a problem to include the image of one photographer/artist. There really is no difference in overall progress. If we've a choice of several different images, we can pick the one which is most neutral - so if we're writing about a war, we can choose not to use a photograph of the Glorious Forces of Our Side Marching In Victory, and instead pick a less loaded one of some soldiers in a field, or a map with arrows. But there's a problem when the issue is whether it's appropriate to *include an image at all*. If one position says we should include an image and the other position says we shouldn't, then whichever way we decide, we've taken sides. We can't really be neutral in a yes-or-no situation. -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows
On 21 September 2011 16:53, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: They do it by crowdsourcing a mass American bias, don't they? An American POV being enforced strikes me as a problematic solution. (I know that FAQ says global community. What they mean is people all around the world who are Silicon Valley technologists like us - you know, normal people. This approach also has a number of fairly obvious problems.) I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I think, but this effect cuts both ways. We already know that our community skews to - as you put it - people all around the world who are technologists like us. As a result, that same community is who decides what images are reasonable and appropriate to put in articles. People look at images and say - yes, it's appropriate, yes, it's encyclopedic, no, it's excessively violent, no, that's gratuitous nudity, yes, I like kittens, etc etc etc. You do it, I do it, we try to be sensible, but we're not universally representative. The community, over time, imposes its own de facto standards on the content, and those standards are those of - well, we know what our systemic biases are. We've not managed a quick fix to that problem, not yet. One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that Wikipedia must not be censored because it would stop being neutral. But is the existing Wikipedian POV *really* the same as neutral, or are we letting our aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our discussions... -- - 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] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows
On 21 September 2011 18:04, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that Wikipedia must not be censored because it would stop being neutral. But is the existing Wikipedian POV *really* the same as neutral, or are we letting our aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our discussions... You describe us as geeks and that we can't write in a way that would please the readers. Since we are geeks, we are strongly biased and write down POV all day. If that is true, why is Wikipedia such a success? Why people read it? Do they like geeky stuff? ...no, that's really not what I said. We've known for ten years that Wikipedia editors have systemic biases, and we've tried to avoid them by insisting on NPOV. This is one of the reasons we've been successful - it's not the only one, but it's helped. But being neutral in text is simple. You give both sides of the argument, and you do it carefully, and that's it. The method of writing is the same whichever side you're on, and so most topics get a fair treatment regardless of our bias. We can't do that for images. A potentially offensive image is either there, or it is not. We can't be neutral by half including it, or by including it as well as another image to balance it out - these don't make sense. So we go for reasonable, acceptable, appropriate, not shocking, etc. Our editors say this is acceptable or this is not acceptable, and almost all the time that's based on *our personal opinions* of what is and isn't acceptable. The end result is that our text is very neutral, but our images reflect the biases of our users - you and me. That doesn't seem to be a problem to *us*, because everything looks fine to us - the acceptable images are in articles, the unacceptable ones aren't. People are saying we can't have the image filter because it would stop us being neutral. If we aren't neutral to begin with, this is a bad argument. It doesn't mean we *should* have the image filter, but it does mean we need to think some more about the reasons for or against it. -- - 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] [Wiki-research-l] Summary of findings from WMF Summer of Research program now available
On 8 September 2011 10:58, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: From what I see, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WantedPages is just misleading: For instance, one of the most ranking missing articles, [[Alison Campbell]], has all 5000+ links leading not from other articles, but from article talk pages, where it is not explicitly present, which means someone put this red link into one of the highly used templates for project evaluations (I did not investigate which one). I actually doubt that the person is even notable, though there is a short stub in Dutch Wikipedia. There is no way that this is really one of the most wanted articles. Others I tried from the first page share the same problem. It's in a project-specific to-do list - for a fairly minor project, as these things go, but even a smallish project on enwiki has a lot of articles! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Northern_Ireland_tasks (If anyone's wondering, Alison Clarke is the former Miss Northern Ireland, engaged to marry a prominent sportsman, and thus presumably something of a minor local celebrity. I make no comment on notability.) For future research on redlinks, it would definitely be worth distinguishing between links in article text and links from projectspace / inline templates. Technically more difficult to figure out, of course, but that's why we call them researchers ;-) -- - 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] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On 9 September 2011 13:31, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/9/9 Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com: If you don't like the feature, then don't use it. Every single proposal I've seen on this feature from the staff assumed that the filter will be enabled by default and could (perhaps) be disabled. Did I miss something? My understanding is that the filter *software* will be enabled for all wikis. The default *setting* for that software will be to display all images, and then any individual user can choose their own settings apart from that default. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/FAQ/en All Wikimedia content loads on all user browsers by default. The feature is activated only after all content has been loaded, and then only when specifically requested by a user. (A comparison: user email is enabled on all wikis. But users have to individually turn it on for it to work.) -- - 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] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 4 September 2011 21:38, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Yes (maybe). It's not at all clear that this use case should not be ignored to avoid the possibility of compromising the encyclopedia. I have to ask: if there's such a demand for a censored Wikipedia, where are the third-party providers? Anyone? This is a serious question. Even workplace filtermakers don't censor Wikipedia, as far as I know. It is worth noting here that even if they wanted to partially restrict access to live Wikipedia, it would currently be impractical to do so - there's no easy way of identifying all the problematic sections other than with fairly haphazard keyword matching, meaning that it's an all-or-nothing affair, and all is decidedly unpopular (though we do hear of it sometimes). As to why no-one is distributing a filtered version of Wikipedia, I think that falls more under the general heading of where are the major third-party reusers that anyone actually cares about? - the non-existence of a commercial filtered version is less of a surprise when we consider the dearth of commercial packaged versions at all... -- - 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] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 5 September 2011 17:00, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, but most mirrors are just that - mirrors. As far as I know, there is no Wikipedia mirror that actually contains extra functionality - like improved searching, wisiwyg editing, automatic translation, image filtering, or whatever else one could think of. There have been a couple of attempts to make more-or-less curated mirrors, but they've found it hard to gain traction. It's a bit of a vicious cycle - to get readers you need lots of content, to get the resources to curate lots of content you need readers (this holds whether you rely on volunteers or whether you run it commercially). To have a chance of getting enough readers to make the project a viable going concern, you'd need to invest a lot of resources up front, banking on the assumption that: * a) your difference from the status quo is enough to attract some fraction of users; * b) the search engines would actually work in your favour rather than treating you as Wikipedia-With-Adwords Dump #41,875; and * c) it wouldn't be cloned fifty-three times by next week. This holds regardless of what it is - whether it's stable-versioning or image-filtering, any prospective reuser is gambling on an uncertain level of takeup and a massive unknown in terms of search-engine response. If you have a target audience who you know want your specific flavour of curation, you can bypass this and go straight to them - see, for example, the Wikipedia For Schools offline projects - but it's not clear how you could then use this to bootstrap a successful internet service, since projects like this are usually selections rather than whole-content curation. Some kind of partnership with a portal might work, but I don't know if anyone's tried it yet. In short, the current model for online mirrors serves to discourage people from putting much effort into them, and so all sorts of potentially desirable (or potentially interesting, or even potentially amazingly-bad-example) experiments with reusing our content just aren't happening. It's not a problem we can solve (and it's perhaps not one we should be trying to solve) but it does mean we shouldn't draw any firm conclusions from the absence of any specific types of project - there's an absence of *all* sorts of projects, good and bad ones alike. -- - 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] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 26 August 2011 02:15, David Goodman dgge...@gmail.com wrote: make it plainer, that people who find Wikipedia articles appropriate for advocating their religious beliefs may use the content for that purpose, to that the WMF should find some universally acceptable sets of spiritual beliefs, and use its content to advocate them. Taking one of the proposed possibilities (probably the one that instigated this), providing for censoring images on the grounds of sexual content is doing exactly that for views on sexual behavior. We're officially saying that X is content you may find objectionable, but Y isn't. That's making an editorial statement about what is shown on X and Y. I've finally twigged what's worrying me about this discussion. We're *already* making these editorial statements, deciding what is and isn't appropriate or offensive for the readers on their behalf, and doing it within articles on a daily basis. When we, as editors, consider including a contentious image, we have a binary choice - do it or don't do it. It's not like text, where we can spend a nice meandering paragraph weighting the merits of position A and position B and referring in passing to position C; the picture's there or it isn't, and we've gone with the inclusionist or the exclusionist position. At the moment, there is a general consensus that, more or less, we prefer including images unless there's a problem with them, and when we exclude them, we do so after an editorial discussion, guided by policy and determined by our users on the basis of what they feel is appropriate, offensive, excessively graphic, excessively salacious, etc. In other words, we decide whether or not to include images, and select between images, based on our own community standards. These aren't particularly bad as standards go, and they're broadly sensible and coherent and clear-headed, but they're ours; they're one particular perspective, and it is inextricably linked to the systemic bias issues we've known about for years and years. This is a bit of a weird situation for us to be in. We can - and we do - try hard to make our texts free of systemic bias, of overt value judgements, and so forth, and then we promptly have to make binary yes-or-no value judgements about what is and isn't appropriate to include in them. As Kim says upthread somewhere, these judgements can't and won't be culturally neutral. (To use a practical example, different readers in different languages get given different sets of images, handled differently, in comparable Wikipedia articles - sometimes the differences are trivial, sometimes significant. Does this mean that one project is neutral in selection and one not? All sorts of cans of worms...) As such, I don't think considering this as the first step towards censorship, or as a departure from initial neutrality, is very meaningful; it's presuming that the alternative is reverting to a neutral and balanced status quo, but that never really existed. The status quo is that every reader, in every context, gets given the one particular image selection that a group of Wikipedians have decided is appropriate for them to have, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis... -- - 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] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 26 August 2011 12:35, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: This implies that the proposed image hiding feature is a less repressive form of censorship. I do not see the proposed feature as censorship - all the images remain on the site. Nothing is removed. Nothing is suppressed. Everything remains. The image hiding feature itself is not a form of censorship, as far as I'm aware of. Just as an interesting point I've not seen mentioned yet: ar.wp has an image-hiding feature, implemented using a template (قالب:إخفاء صورة) and which effectively conceals the image until the user clicks to display. It's manually added to pages, is currently used in ~100 (predominantly medical/sexual?) articles, and has been used for approximately three years. I'm not aware of any other projects currently using a similar one, but it doesn't seem to have caused the end of the world there :-) My Arabic is basically nonexistent, so while I can tell there *are* some past discussions about it, I've no idea what they were saying. Anyone? -- - 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] How to free something from Wikipedia in the public domain?
On 26 August 2011 12:37, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote: Sounds a little problematic depending on the details. If the text was released on Wikipedia first, then the contributors agreed to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License. If the all the authors of the article can identify themselves as the same people who contributed under the named accounts for the original Wikipedia article then release to PD is no problem, in practice few articles only have a history of contributors who are using accounts associated with their legal identities. Legal identity is a bit tangential here, I think; if we accept a pseudonymous account as good enough to release the content under CC licenses to begin with, then all you'd need for relicensing would be for those same accounts to agree to it. -- - 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] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
On 18 August 2011 22:33, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Anyone know of other active ones? It'd be great if you could start a list of these accounts on Meta-Wiki. Microblogging accounts or something. I actually stole this list from there :-) I'll have a look at tidying it a bit... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Twitter -- - 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] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
On 18 August 2011 17:39, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: More useful for smaller wikis. Tweeting new pages or recent changes for enwiki would probably destroy Twitter very quickly. When I was more involved with Citizendium, I wrote a script to pipe new pages into Twitter. It's still running: http://twitter.com/cz_newdrafts Wikimedia article feeds on twitter: @en_wikinews @dewikinews @wikinews (Chinese) @el_wikipedia is an article counter @wikipedia_de is the daily FA @zhwiki_newpages is all new pages @ZHWP is some form of selected article feed Anyone know of other active ones? The German approach here seems a pretty good one, at least to test the water - daily featured article, plus possibly other front-page content. Perhaps a feed of all new (rather than featured-that-day) quality content would be interesting, to give people something they might not see from the main page? A feed of enwiki's newly graded FA + GA + FP would be about ten a day, which seems quite a reasonable figure; I'm not sure what the figures are like for others, though, and this would be a bit more unpredictable than the daily feeds. As far as new articles, well. Feeding an unfiltered list would get a lot of junk (and, perhaps more annoyingly, a lot of quickly dead links). If we look at *surviving* pages, and assume we somehow would be able to not send out the ones that are going to get deleted, then we're looking at an article every forty seconds on enwiki, five minutes on itwiki, ten minutes on jawiki, twenty minutes on huwiki... (This might be an interesting tool for trying to stoke interest in less active projects - feeds slow enough to not be annoying, but varied enough they might catch people's attention. Hmm. I wonder what overlap there is between [language groups common on twitter] and [small WP projects needing users].) -- - 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] Black market science
On 19 July 2011 21:48, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 July 2011 21:07, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Vaguely related: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-data-theft Aaron Swartz charged by federal prosecutors with illegally downloading over 4 million journal articles from JSTOR, with the intent to redistribute them via file-sharing networks. Closely related. I don't believe any detail of JSTOR's denials of involvement whatsoever. They're increasingly becoming a problem that needs dealing with. Demand Progress seem to be fairly clear that JSTOR were not the driving force behind the prosecution, and I'd hope they'd know! http://demandprogress.org/aaron ...JSTOR has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute. (I have always vaguely wondered how many cases like this there are - a slapped wrist and request not to do it again by the publishers. You'd think there'd be a couple of dozen cases every year, though I guess by their nature it's quite discreet.) But in more general terms, why do you specifically feel JSTOR are a problem needing dealt with? They do a lot of things right with their repository that more conventional academic publishers often do badly, in my experience. (In no particular order: retroactive access for withdrawn journals; on-site access; corpus research data; subsidised access in the developing world; transparent pricing; etc, etc.) The basic issue of gated access to scholarly research, yes, that's an issue. But it's a pretty fundamental issue to the sector - it's tied up with the whole business model of how we publish academic work - not a quirk of this one organisation for which they specifically need punished. Are there some particularly egregious bits of past behaviour I've missed? -- - 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] NPG still violating copyright
On 16 June 2011 11:03, Scott MacDonald doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: The only other one I had noted was http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp01315/william-dobson This does seem to have been sorted. But I recall people saying there were others at the time, but I don't have any list. As I recall, there didn't seem to be very many - I checked twenty or thirty more plausible candidates (same time period, etc) and drew a blank before finding Dobson. There was one other possible case mentioned on the talkpage, but there both the NPG and WP seem to have derived it from an old copy of the Dictionary of Australian Biography. -- - 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] Interesting legal action
On 22 May 2011 19:58, Sarah slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: The BLP problem is a very divisive one on the English Wikipedia, but it's not entirely clear how grounded it is in fact. Sometimes we're told OTRS is overwhelmed by the number of BLP complaints, but no figures are given. Some hard stats -- X number of complaints concerning Y number of articles within time T, of which Z were actionable -- would be very useful. Some figures Amory Meltzer and I came up with in 2010: In a single week in late 2009, we got an average of 40-50 active tickets per day - not spam, not people thinking we were someone else, etc. 15% of those were about BLP issues. If we look *only* at tickets about specific article issues (removing the general WP/WMF-related enquiries and normal vandalism reports), BLP tickets made up 30% of the traffic. Making an estimate for recurring cases, this suggests we get contacted regarding 2,000 to 2,500 BLP issues per year. I don't have any figures on actionability, I'm afraid, but it's an intriguing question... The vast majority of these were regarding one specific BLP article; a couple were BLP issues on non-BLP articles, usually companies and towns. All told, BLP articles proportionally generated about two to three times more issues than other content. The interesting aspect here is that two-thirds of BLP issues are reported by the subject, or by someone close to or involved with the subject (a relative, colleague, agent, etc). If we look *only* at third-party reports, BLPs seem to generate about as much traffic as any other content. The same held for looking solely at normal vandalism reports - 15%. Read what you will into that one... my personal interpretation is that BLP failings were more likely to be seen and more likely to cause some kind of real or perceived harm, leading to a greater response rate. From the *workload* perspective, however, whilst BLPs only make up ~15% of traffic, they take up substantially more time and effort. My initial estimate was that they take up at least half the editor-hours put into handling OTRS tickets; it would be hard to quantify this without some fairly detailed surveys, but it feels right. Writing to someone involved with the issue personally is always more complicated, especially if they're - justifiably - angry or worried about the situation. The problems are often quite complex, so can sit longer while people consider how to approach the issue, and are more likely to involve (long-term) onwiki followup, or require multiple rounds of correspondence. As a result, I suspect my 30% of article issues and Christine's 45% are closer than they might seem - there's an unusually large backlog of tickets this past month, compared to the situation a few months ago, and so a count based on still open will suggest more of them than actually come in on a daily basis. Regarding a separate BLP queue, we found that a significant number of tickets get handled in the wrong queues, because it's often simpler for someone to respond to the email wherever it's come in rather than move the ticket and then respond to it. Which is perfectly fine, of course - a response goes out and everyone's happy - but it does mean that the response data categorised by queue is often fairly inaccurate. For meaningful data on any particular class of tickets, you'd probably have to sample. Apologies for the length, but hopefully that's of some use! -- - 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] breaking English Wikipedia apart
On 14 March 2011 13:34, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: David, in the BLP policy we advise people to contact info-e...@wikimedia.org. Is i...@wikimedia.org a better address, or do they end up in the same place? Basically, the same place. info@ means it gets manually sorted to the correct queue; info-en-q@ will put it directly there. (There are other shortcut addresses for vandalism reports, copyright issues, etc, working in the same way). The main benefit of using info@ is that it's easier for people to remember once we've given it to them! -- - 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 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] 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 7 March 2011 16:02, Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de wrote: Well, I think there is no right measure for a fundraiser. But I would like to return to the point Tobias raised in the first place: Fundraiser marketing is growing more aggressive year by year. E.g., this time it was not possible to switch the banners off, even you were logged in as a user. And banners appeared to be bigger than they used to be, but I may As I recall, the banners could be removed with a small button in the upper right corner. It was occasionally a bit bad at remembering this between sessions, but I'm sure there was *some* kind of close option. -- - 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] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 1 March 2011 20:44, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: It's not really about my personal preferences (I originally asked how this job opening fits within Wikimedia's strategic plan or mission). You've chosen to side-step the actual questions being asked here (twice now). Based on my past discussions with you, I generally take this to mean that you agree with the premise, but don't want to say so aloud. (Your brand of Wikimedia criticism is much more diplomatic than my own, to be sure.) If I'm wrong and you really do believe that this job opening is a good idea, perhaps you can explain why you think that. :-) Here's one line of reasoning: a) Our fundraising was effective (it brought in money) but also pretty tedious for readers - it relied heavily on variants of one banner, with the side-effect that millions upon millions of people were forced to stare at one J. Wales for quite a while, only lightly alleviated by staring at someone else for a short time before reverting to the original. b) This was widely derided (see discussions passim), with people objecting to it for reasons including (in no particular order): i) undue focus on figurehead personality; ii) stylistic issues; iii) terminology (mostly of non-Wales banners, sometimes of letters); iv) sheer tedium of seeing the same thing for a month; etc. etc. ... c) ...but pretty much everything else we tried didn't work very well... d) ...even though, anecdotally, people liked seeing the other ones much more than they liked the routine banners. e) Running another fundraiser is probably inevitable. Given these points, it seems a good idea to try to ensure that when we next throw big banners up at a million people to ask them for money, we do so in a way that is less tedious and irritating. It seems a fairly good approach (anecdotally, at least) that people like the varied individual user banners; the problem is that there's something not quite working about them. Hiring someone to make them work - thus allowing us to do away with the All Wales, All The Time approach which was, to say the least, not universally loved - will hopefully mean the next donation campaign annoys fewer people. That doesn't seem too unreasonable, to me. (The actual job description did make my eyes roll a bit, though. Storyteller, oh dear.) -- - 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] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 26 February 2011 13:52, Aaron Adrignola aaron.adrign...@gmail.com wrote: [via MZM] Sure, but there is a more fundamental question about what the goal and mission actually is. I see it as about content creation. Wikimedia's focus should primarily be creating the best free content it can. Others seem far more interested in creating a movement (a large social network). I think, on the whole, I agree with the primacy of content. That said... To my mind, we can argue for increasing and broadening participation without automatically believing that creating a movement is desirable, or even an expected result. Good quality content creation - and perhaps more critically, a constant and reliable level of content maintenance and preservation - is at risk if we don't have a healthy and robust community; there's no need to press further than that, but we do need to at least be confident we've got that far! [Aaron] That proportion of active administrators to content pages is already the case at Wikibooks. It pains me to say it as a heavy contributor, but the number of admins has fallen to a third of what it was in 2007. [1] While I could hope for content growth instead, that's also stagnated. [2] The figure I quoted, incidentally, is highly active users (users with 100 edits in a given month) rather than active administrators; that said, the two figures generally vary in the same way. I was surprised to see the pagecount figures on en.wikibooks! Is this no new pages being created, or is it page creation being approximately equal to the rate of deleting old pages? -- - 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] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 25 February 2011 03:01, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: English Wikipedia is now sufficiently well known and culturally important, that 'we' no longer need to care about new contributors. Even if only 1% of new contributors work their way past the rejections and through our maze of rules, we will still have significant growth. For content growth (which is broadly ever bigger, ever better), yes, but not for community growth. The absolute number of active community members on enwp peaked in early 2007 and has been in a slow decline more or less steadily since then; it's currently about two thirds what it was. If we don't increase the rate at which we attract and retain new contributors while we can, there's a real danger we could end up by 2020 or 2025 with a virtually moribund community - a small handful of devoted vandal-fighters spending their days trying to keep millions of pages clean and stable, and no influx of new users worth mentioning because no-one has the time to cultivate it. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but there's certainly no end of examples of once-flourishing internet communities that have died that sort of death by neglect, a spiral of spambots, vandals, and passing once-off contributors leaving plaintive notes but with no real way to restart a critical mass. (Interestingly, the decline of editors is more or less proportional to the overall editing rate - since the beginning of 2008, the ratio of overall edits per month to highly active users has been about 10,000:1 - so in relative terms, the recent-changes firehose has been stable for three years) We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in. There already is a relatively rough-and-ready system in place for identifying and categorising new pages by project areas, using keyword analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot producing daily reports like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot/IslamSearchResult Building something which sends targeted invitation messages off the back of that to new users is certainly plausible: Hi! You recently created [[Freedom and Justice Party (Egypt)]]. You might be interested in the following projects working on these topics... with appropriate links and specific messages to, in this case, the projects for Egypt/Africa/Politics/Law/Islam. For people who don't create articles, you could have a bot look at the first (say) ten or so article/talk edits of a new user, and then send a list of suitable projects based on the way those pages were categorised or project-tagged. (I have no idea how easy this would be to implement...) -- - 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] Do we even know if there is a Gender Gap
On 21 February 2011 17:49, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: We have heard a great deal lately about a gender gap. Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_and_notes http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results. It's fair to say that any figures we get are rendered pretty dubious by the privacy/nondisclosure issue, and it's certainly true to say that there are going to be observable and predictable biases as a result, but I don't think this effect is going to be strong enough to entirely explain away the figures. The various calculations and surveys on the demographics of the editing community are probably wildly inaccurate in many details, but with the figure widely quoted of about 10-15% of editors being female ... well, most people seem to have nodded and said yes, that seems about right. It's not widely dissimilar to earlier estimates, and it fits with a lot of anecdotal observations of (and from!) the community over time. -- - 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] share in Facebook/Twitter/etc icon
On 7 February 2011 12:13, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: This sort of thing would best be implemented as a gadget, which users can then choose to switch on with their chosen selection of places to post to. This is the best approach, I think. Or, once out of testing, turn it on by default with *no* services populated and have a little link to turn it off / add services as people see fit. We would need to make sure there were no privacy issues. Users can of course choose to reveal anything they like to Facebook - but is there anything we would need to take care not to reveal inadvertently? Is there a way not to accidentally link their WP username to their Facebook real name, for instance? Unless we take an active step to send out user details, or make it possible to share diffs (which seems unlikely), the only practical way to make such a link would be by sharing a user-specific page, like your own talkpage. This seems quite an unlikely thing for someone to want to do, but a plausible accident - so it would seem reasonable to code the sharing function to only share things in the main image namespaces (and perhaps portals?) - traditional user-facing content. (An elegant trick would be to have the share function for images resolve to the Commons page rather than the local one, where appropriate.) -- - 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] Since Egypt has shutdown internet, should we too?
On 29 January 2011 11:41, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: This seems like a good place to mention that the precedent was set by the Beta news agency ( http://www.beta.rs/ ) which gave permission for its news to be uploaded to Wikinews as CC-BY. I was completely unaware of this! I think we need a list of such examples. A WMF blog post may be appropriate. Agência Brasil (Radiobras), the Brazilian government news agency, releases its material as CC-BY. Using the highly unscientific method of sampling the changes to the Commons template, it looks like they've been doing this since mid-2006: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Ag%C3%AAncia_Brasilaction=history -- - 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] Re： [Wikizh-l] About WM priv ate policy
On 24 December 2010 10:20, HW waihor...@yahoo.com.hk wrote: A recent discussion on zh Wikipedia is talking about the WMF private policy which is on http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy . Some IP user says that in the sentence The Foundation does not require editors to register with a project. Anyone can edit without logging in with a username, in which case they will be identified by network IP address. , createpage is a edit, so the wiki should not disable IP's createpage and allowed only user to createpage. The question is: IS CREATEPAGE MUST NOT BE DISABLE TO IP USER? The short answer is: disabling createpage for IPs does not conflict with the privacy policy and is *allowed*. (zhwp can always decide to turn it back on, though. This is also allowed!) Anyone can edit without logging in with a username, in which case they will be identified by network IP address. The intent of that line is really to say if you edit without a username, you will still be recorded rather than to provide an absolute right for all edits of any form to be IP-based. Remember, normal editing isn't allowed all the time. If we say that createpage should be allowed because it is an edit, and edits should always be allowed, we could also argue that no pages should be semi-protected (people are stopped from editing them without usernames) or IPs blocked (those people are stopped from editing without usernames). Createpage is just a version of the same idea... -- - 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] Wikipedia Executive Director?
On 10 December 2010 11:20, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.com wrote:
Let us add another line to the end of the appeal explaining that the
Wikimedia
Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts {{{SITENAME}}} and
other sister-projects.
We had something like this in the 2008 and 2009 appeals - 2007 was
very Wikimedia-heavy, but these ones had a single section in each.
We currently have the odd situation where a local chapter form:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA1/GB
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA1/AU
is actually slightly clearer on who WM are than the main one:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA1/en/US
Putting a comment under the donation box in the sidebar might work
better than adding it to the end, I think - it means we don't have to
change it each time we change the appeal. We can also adapt it to
mention the local chapter, where relevant, without changing the text -
like WMAU have, here.
--
- 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] Wikipedia Executive Director?
On 9 December 2010 18:54, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: it into the story for fundraising and other communications. We need to both make sense and be accurate. If it's accurate and doesn't make sense, it probably won't be effective, but also just because something makes sense to people doesn't make it accurate, and that's equally a problem. It may be a bad move in this case, but I don't think we should *always* avoid this sort of glossing. We ran banners on the English projects, for example, describing people as Wikipedia authors; this is a term not generally used there, preferring editor instead. But to an outsider, author is a much more descriptive term than editor; it doesn't imply seniority or control, and so while it's technically inaccurate it actually gets the idea of a normal user across much better than having the right terminology would. (Many of us have seen seen cases where someone's heard editor of Wikipedia and got drastically the wrong impression...) -- - 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] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching
On 8 December 2010 11:46, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: For some time i used to fight this problem by adding -site:wikipedia.org-site: wapedia.mobi -site:miniwiki.org etc. to my search queries, but i hit a wall: Google limits the search string to 32 words, and today there are many more than 32 sites that clone Wikipedia, so this trick is also becoming useless. As noted above you can use -wikipedia; alternately, keywords common on mirrors, such as -mediawiki, -gfdl could be worth trying. -- - 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] Shopping-enabled Wikipedia pages
On 4 December 2010 20:28, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: Does WMF have money from trademark usage on pages starting from this one: http://www.amazon.com/wiki/Main_Page ? It seems we don't, and there's no agreement in place: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2010-December/107830.html We were not consulted, and are currently fully examining this. It is not official or endorsed by us. [Erik] -- - 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] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
On 29 November 2010 10:11, Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com wrote: The sampled 1/1000 squid logs can be used for statistical purposes, such as page view stats. Someone more techy can answer that better than I can, if the samples include IP addresses that could be used w/ geoip for geographic analysis. (I think perhaps not) we do aggregations on full sample, not 1/1000 1/1000 gets saved to a file for post-mortems and wtf is going on type of analysis. Ah, that explains it - I was wondering how we could get something as precise as three views one day, five the next out of a 1/1000 sample! So am I right in assuming that what happens is: 1) page request comes in and is served 2) every thousandth request is sent to a separate file and logged 3) the rest are stripped of all data bar X page requested 4) this is kept for the pageview statistics, which are very fine-grained The end result: one file with 0.1% of requests logged in detail and another file with hit counts and no more. -- - 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] Paid editing comes of age
On 18 November 2010 11:30, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135 Well, fools and their money are easily parted, I suppose. http://wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html sounds very nice - an improvement on most online marketing consultancy services that vaguely promise this sort of thing - but I wonder what will come of it in practice. (I have written articles on companies. I never thought to *invoice* them for it...) -- - 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] Paid editing comes of age
On 18 November 2010 22:40, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: If it is that easy, maybe it should be a feature available as a courtesy to anyone or any organization that has an article about them. And to everyone else, too :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Smithfeed=atomaction=history All you'd need to do is produce a nice wrapper for it... -- - 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] Page views
On 18 October 2010 20:05, Mathias Schindler mathias.schind...@gmail.com wrote: If it is not a bug[1], I think it is newsworthy What was the day again when Google switched on the Instant feature? Google Instant began to be rolled out on 8 September, and I think was broadly arrived for most users by a week or so later - the middle of the month. If we were going to see a surge from that, we'd have had it appearing in late September, but that month doesn't seem to be particularly unusual. -- - 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] Expertise and Wikipedia redux
On 13 October 2010 14:42, Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com wrote: I find it interesting that some 18 hours after Gerard's notification (and my posting a comment on The Australian's page), still not a single comment has been approved for publication. I wonder why that is? Is there some official policy within the pro-Free Culture movement that mandates suppression of critical viewpoints of the movement? I doubt that the pro-Free Culture movement controls the comments section of the website of a major Australian newspaper! (If it did, they might have posted some praise of their own rather than just leaving a blank void.) The most recent of the editorial articles in the HE section to have any comments at *all*, good or bad, is from 29th September - there have been ten posted since then. I suspect the site operators are just not very responsive at approving them... -- - 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] How to improve quality of Wikipedia?
2010/10/10 Виктория mstisla...@gmail.com: *Dzień dobry, *Przykuta One of Wikipedia perennial dilemmas is quantity vs. quality. Low depth and low articles to non-auricles ratio usually a sign that too many articles were created semiautomatically, by bots and the community is spread too thin e.g. there is not enough people to correct and discuss these articles. Polish doesn't seem to have more bots *editing* than other projects do. A few months back, I graphed all the Wikipedias by number of bot edits as proportion of total edits: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proportion_of_bot_edits_on_Wikipedia_by_overall_edit_count.svg Polish isn't marked here, but it's eighth from the right - it doesn't seem to be a statistical outlier at all. Unless the bots are concentrated solely on new articles, which is a possibility, this seems normal. So perhaps it's something about the way the Polish Wikipedia works? A few thoughts: * Polish doesn't host any images - unlike most other projects - so there's no need for image pages, image talkpages, etc. On some projects, such as German, as many as 6% of pages are in the image namespace! * Polish doesn't seem to use article talkpages much. I've just spent some time hitting Losuj artykuł, and about 10-20% of the articles I found had talkpages. In English, this is about 85-90%, and in French, about the same. In the other languages these may just have project tags (this article is part of WikiProject Something) or metadata (this article is rated C-class and needs an image), but they still show up as non-article pages. There's currently ~735,000 articles and ~595,000 non-articles; if another 70% of articles were to have talkpages - making it comparable with English and French - this would make ~1,110,000 non-articles, or 1.5 non-articles per article. * Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users than any of the next three smaller Wikipedias - Italian, Japanese and Spanish - which might be significant here. Fewer users talk less, so there's fewer natural discussion pages. You can also have an X week where X is any topic of articles created by bots. People like to work together on a common goal, in the Russian Wikipedia thematic weeks are very successful. English Wikipedia has had some success with a cup system - a hundred Wikipedians competing over several months to improve articles, etc. It's hard to say how much impact it's had, or how much work people would have done *without* the contest, but I've seen estimates that a quarter or a third of all highly-rated content over the last year has come from participants. In some cases, it was so popular it overwhelmed the review processes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiCup I've not participated in theme weeks before, but I've heard pretty good things about them. Were they usually focused on creating articles or on saving existing ones? And lastly you can start nominating articles created by bots and not touched by a human hand since then for deletion. They will be either improved or deleted and any outcome will increase average depth. In RuWiki nobody tries to nominate significant bot articles like German cities but superfluous ones about obscure 70s C-movies and far far away galaxies NGO... are nominated for deletion 5 per day. Harsh but fair! How strict is the bot-approval process on Polish Wikipedia? If there's a problem with mass creation of articles, you could try being stricter about requiring community approval before the bots are allowed to run, to check that you actually do want these topics. -- - 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] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
On 2 October 2010 18:13, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: And you've missed the point. The entire thrust of our mission is to make readers into editors. Inasmuch as we have a mission, it is to create a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home That is the point of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. ...which is a tool to achieve the goal above. We should be careful not to mistake the fundamental goals for the methods we choose to achieve them. Those methods are important, and we would be lost without them, but they are emphatically *not* primary goals in themselves. -- - 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] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On 7 September 2010 11:01, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: No and there won't be (at least from me). Because I don't know if it is a bug or a feature. Show me the specification of the pdf tool first. I will see if the specification says that pictures' photographers should be credited. If the specification says so, I will report it as a bug. But if the specification does not say so, it simply means that I disagree with the specification. And I don't think bugzilla is the proper forum to discuss specifications. Given that you report below it's working for some images and not the others, it's very unlikely it's working to spec, unless that specification is itself deeply flawed! Glancing at the image files, it seems that it may be having trouble parsing the author sections of the Commons credits. I'll try and look into this more closely soon - for now, has anyone else identified attribution problems with the PDF generators? -- - 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] Reconsidering the policy one language - one Wikipedia
On 24 June 2010 15:52, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: What about wikipediajr.org ? And so we would have en.wikipediajr.org, fr.wikipediajr.org etc. Or even just a modifier - jr.en.wikipedia.org jr.de.wikipedia.org ...to which we could also alias simple, kinder, etc etc. This helps emphasise the distinction between languages and subsets-of-languages, and also means we can be more fluid about the simple/for children presentation on a project-by-project basis. -- - 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 7 June 2010 08:42, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation. There is a piece of user js which was implemented on en which does this, incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manishearth/Scripts#Wikipedia_interwiki_translator - it turns, eg, Espanol into Spanish (t), with the (t) link going to a Google translate link for the target page. I haven't used it much, but it's a useful tool to have. -- - 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 21:21, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. FWIW, the only time I've heard a complaint about the visual effect of the interwikis is where we have a very short article on an internationally popular topic, such as: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa ...here, 90% of the page area is blank space, as the article has stopped but the interwikis keep on going, and it feels as though the page is a very weirdly laid-out way of referring people to different languages. (This is quite rare on enwiki these days because due to sheer numbers, it's unusual to find a topic covered in ten or more languages which is a mere stub on en. But there's still plenty of cases out there.) Interestingly, even with the full list of languages, the page above looks better in Vector than in Monobook: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=vector http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=monobook - dropping the solid boxes from the left-hand column means that it doesn't look so dominant when expanded. -- - 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] Vector skin on Wikisource
On 4 June 2010 03:40, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: If the interwikis are not displayed in the vector skin, either Wikisource cant use the vector skin, or Wikisource will need to move these links into the content of the pages. I've started a discussion about this on the multilingual wikisource scriptorium A question: rather than modify the main vector skin, I believe it's possible to alter the *local* vector skin for an individual site or project? See, for example, the local changes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector.css If so, Wikisource could set the toolbox section to be expanded by default in the same way the interaction section is... -- - 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] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On 4 March 2010 19:41, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Which means of course that a person could claim copyright to the very technology underlying Wikipedia, and demand the entire project be taken down. In fact a different mentally ill person could make this claim every month and force the project offline. That's the world you're advocating? No responsibility on the part of the office to even make the slightest attempt to verify the claim? I think we're falling into the trap of constructing strawmen to fight here. I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that if someone wrote to the WMF claiming to hold the rights to the text of, oh, /Bleak House/, that we would then be obliged to take a copy of it down - because the claim itself is patently nonsensical and can be ignored. But the fact that we can ignore patently invalid demands - and I am quite sure we do, without a qualm - doesn't mean that we ought to feel we can or should start adjudicating on the reasonableness of any not-entirely-clear-cut case that turns up, such as this one... -- - 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] Building up the reserves
On 3 March 2010 20:53, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: mid-2007 - - - - - $1m end-2007 - - - - - $2.3m - - - - - $0.21m - - - - - 11 mos. mid-2008 - - - - - $3m - - - - - ($0.32m) - - - - - 9 mos. end-2008 - - - - - $6.7m - - - - - $0.43m - - - - - 15 mos. mid-2009 - - - - - $6.2m - - - - - ($0.54m) - - - - - 11 mos. end-2009 - - - - - $12.5m - - - - - $0.65m - - - - - 19 mos. It occurs to me this morning that there's a major problem with that last column - it's x months reserves *at the previous six month's averaged operating costs*. Costs are increasing all the time. (Fun fact: the WMF's operating costs seem to have increased linearly, at a steady $18ish-k/month, over the past few years) Adjusting for that, we end up with... hmm, something like end-2007 - - - - - 7 mos. mid-2008 - - - - - 6 mos. end-2008 - - - - - 11 mos. mid-2009 - - - - - 9 mos. end-2009 - - - - - 15 mos. Still pretty good (after the last two fundraisers), but not quite as comfortable as it originally looked - and, presumably, it gets a little tighter right before the fundraisers. That said, it suggests that purely from a safe margin perspective, we could safely lower the target amount for the late-2010 fundraiser - we did very well last year, after all. On the other hand, William's suggestion about treating this as the nucleus of an endowment rather than as an operating margin is an interesting one. Hrm. Further research, as they say... -- - 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] Building up the reserves
On 3 March 2010 13:35, effe iets anders effeietsand...@gmail.com wrote: I assume you do realize that this 12.5M is /after/ the fundraiser, hence including the huge amount of donations that has been raised? ...as, indeed, was last December's glut. Looking at both mid-year and end-year reports, the cashflow status becomes clearer: Assets (cash) versus monthly running costs (estimated) mid-2007 - - - - - $1m end-2007 - - - - - $2.3m - - - - - $0.21m - - - - - 11 mos. mid-2008 - - - - - $3m - - - - - ($0.32m) - - - - - 9 mos. end-2008 - - - - - $6.7m - - - - - $0.43m - - - - - 15 mos. mid-2009 - - - - - $6.2m - - - - - ($0.54m) - - - - - 11 mos. end-2009 - - - - - $12.5m - - - - - $0.65m - - - - - 19 mos. Reserves jump dramatically each year-end report, but then idle until the next fundraiser - as running costs increase roughly linearly, though, the average number of months funding in reserve seesaws. I don't know what's considered a normal margin to have - I'd presume around a year or so is considered quite good - but hopefully someone more au fait with standard practice in the field could enlighten us. -- - 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] Werner Icking Music Archive may be closing
On 1 March 2010 00:06, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work out. I sent Christian Mondrup an Email asking for more details and he responded that he had already contacted Wikimedia. As the majority of the works cannot be licensed under a Creative Commons license (from which I conclude that the works are non-free), WMF won't host the website. Judging from (an older version of?) the website, it's a general non-commercial license on all submissions: ::: The archive contains free sheet music, free for non-commercial usage. This ::: means that you may download the files and print paper copies, but neither ::: the files nor the paper copies may be sold. (...) http://www.daimi.au.dk/~reccmo/scores/Introduction.html#copyright I suspect the older ( definitionally public domain) material, could be rehosted, but we'd have to seperate that out from the rest, and then tackle the problem of whether any editing people have done to them gives rise to new copyrights... -- - 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] Where do our readers come from?
2010/1/14 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs: Nikola Smolenski wrote: In Page Views Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown I also notice something that should affect chapter relations: there are some Wikipedias which Also, any ideas why is Commons so popular in Spain and Latin America? Some Wikipedias - the ones which insist on only-free-images - do not use local uploads at all, and instead direct everyone to Commons. Both es.wikipedia and pt.wikipedia work this way, so they'll send a lot more of their users to Commons than a project which uses local image uploads. As a result, I suspect you'll find that traffic to Commons increases proportionately with traffic to Spanish/Portuguese Wikipedia usage. -- - 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] Follow up: Fan History joining the WMF family
2009/11/29 Laura Hale la...@fanhistory.com: As some one who has proposed a new project for the WMF (which would really probably be an acquisition if it happened), some changes need to be made: (...) This sort of presupposes that WMF, on the whole, wants to acquire projects. My understanding for several years has basically been that we don't; we build very large-scope projects in house, and gently encourage people who come to us with more specialised projects to either find a way to work them into one of the umbrellas, or to find a more appropriate home elsewhere. So, if WMF is going to begin to acquire projects, it first needs to decide that it wants to do that at all. And *that's* a big step; it'll need discussion and debate, a rethinking of what we conceive of as WMF projects, and how we decide on what is an appropriate use of funds; it's not just something someone in the office can sign off on. Once we have that - if we have that - then we can decide on a policy to handle such cases. That's the sticking-point here; deciding on the merits or demerits of the FH proposal are somewhat secondary to deciding whether we should be thinking about entertaining the proposal at all, and we can't just finesse past that stage. -- - 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] Wikinews has not failed
2009/11/5 Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com: Wikinews has it's problems, and is often overshadowed by it's bigger brother Wikipedia. But it certainly hasn't failed. There's a respectable amount of content being produced, including original reporting that just would not fit on Wikipedia. Articles are picked up by Google News (at least, they will be again once a bug is fixed). And there is a fairly small but dedicated community. Mmm. It's fair to say that Wikinews has not exploded massively, or become a first-rank household-name service like Wikipedia has. It'd be great if it did, of course, but not doing so isn't a sign of failure! We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good luck. It's got a wiki in it isn't a magic spell, after all. Wikinews is, as Pete says, flourishing quietly; it has a community, it has readers - though I'd be interested to see figures - and it is making steps in the outside world, reaching people and making a niche independently of its big sibling Wikipedia. It's not become a top-ten website, it's not a household name, but then, neither are the other sites working in this field. The readership of the English Wikinews is 8m pageviews/month; this is only about 50% less than the English Wikiquote or Wikisource, both quite stable and regarded projects. There's certainly a core of people out there who read it, and who are presumably satisfied enough to keep doing so. The authors enjoy writing it; the readers continue to, well, continue to read it. Administratively and technically, it's a small cost; from a volunteer perspective, the loss to the other projects of people who might be working on them is offset by the fact that there's a definite social benefit to keeping multiple projects so that people can change what they're working on for a whle rather than burn out and leave entirely. And, of course, people who actively want to write journalism have somewhere to do it. -- - 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] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
2009/11/2 Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com: One bug: I got a graph of Imran Khan's bowling statistics rather than his portrait... And if you give me code to identify a person's image, I'll be happy to implement it, as would the NSA. As it stands, I chose a random article from e.g. [[November 2]], then chose a random picture from that. First image is probably your best bet - the odds are reasonably high it'll be a picture, or something else representative, in the conventional top-right slot. Certainly better odds than random selection! -- - 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] Charity Navigator rates WMF
2009/10/8 Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com: Our data shows that 7 out of 10 charities we've evaluated spend at least 75% of their budget on the programs and services they exist to provide. And 9 out of 10 spend at least 65%. We believe that those spending less than a third of their budget on program expenses are simply not living up to their missions. Charities demonstrating such gross inefficiency receive zero points for their overall organizational efficiency score. While the WMF seemed to be narrowly meeting these guidelines (according to the site's Revenue/Expenses Trend histogram) in perhaps 2007, it appears that in 2008, the trend got decidedly worse. Perhaps I am misinterpreting the criteria and/or the graphic. But, the 2-out-of-4 stars rating is decidedly clear. As far as I can see, the ...at least 75% ... at least 65% ... less than a third relates to the proportion of program expenses to overall expenditure, which as the table and pie-chart shows is ~66% for the WMF. The histogram doesn't seem to directly relate to those numbers or that criteria; it shows absolute program expenses against absolute overall *income*, not expenditure. I think interpreting the proportions of the histogram using the rules applied to a different ratio is going to get confusing. (The reason it seems to have got substantially worse is a $4.3m increase in income against a $800k increase in expenses, compared to an increase of $1m in income versus $800k in expenses from 2006-2007. I do not know to what extent this will continue in 09.) WMF could no doubt spend a lot more in program expenses, though defining exactly what those are is a pretty fun game. But it's certainly not spending as inefficiently as the histogram might seem to suggest. For comparison, witness an organization cited by Charity Navigator as similar to the WMF -- the Reason Foundation -- and see how their Expenses are a much larger portion of revenue for them, and thus obtain a 3-star rating: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summaryorgid=7481 Again, expenses/revenue isn't where the rating comes from; it's program expenses/total expenses. Reason are indeed doing better at this than WMF - 87% versus 65% - but it's important to distinguish between the two ratios. It's interesting to note that Reason show the same expenses pattern as WMF; they have program expenses increasing at a fairly linear $1m/year, but unlike WMF their income is plateauing - they'll be exceeding their income this year at that rate! -- - 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] It's not article count, it's editors
2009/9/23 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: The reason how we have not reached large parts of the world yet is because access to Wikipedia is significantly influenced by things outside of Wikimedia's control and scope. A dramatic demonstration of this: if someone in Beijing flips a switch tomorrow, and zh.wp becomes blocked, our potential audience changes by three hundred million (internet users) or a billion (speakers) overnight (depending if you count population or internet users) and our nominal penetration among Chinese-speakers would presumably collapse as a result. Surely someone must have a respectable count of internet users by language that we could use for comparison? That would be a much better metric for our success today; while raw literate speaker numbers would be a useful comparison for what we could start reaching with non-internet mechanisms. There's a couple of estimates on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage though they look a little dated. Alternatively, users by country is reasonably well estimated, I think, and you could try estimating based on languages from that. -- - 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] strategic planning process update
2009/9/15 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I poked around a bit, and I think they have to actually sign in with the new account before its in the table, which makes sense, and means the #s are reasonable. This is certainly my understanding - the account is created as-and-when you log in at the new wiki, or visit it whilst remaining logged in. (This latter part, especially with people looking at article interwikis, will probably account for quite an upsurge in account creation post-SUL...) -- - 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] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial
2009/9/15 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Hay (Husky) hus...@gmail.com wrote: with its 255 pages this might be something that you would rather like to skim through instead of fully read :) Anything to disrupt my view that the NC licenses suck because it's unclear what they mean? Not a view I disagree with, personally! One interesting example the blog post brings up - a nonprofit-with-ads, paying for hosting costs that way, is that commercial? 60% of creators say it is non-commercial, whilst *70%* of reusers think so - which really does begin to sound like a recipe for unintentionally annoying a lot of people releasing material under the license. I wonder, perhaps, if the best thing the next generation of the -nc- licenses could include would be a long list of worked examples... -- - 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] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial
2009/9/15 Mike Linksvayer m...@creativecommons.org: It's not that bad. What you see is a scale where 1=noncommercial and 100=commercial, and creators rated the case you mention 59.2 on that scale, users 71.7 -- so creators see that case as less commercial than users, which is ideal if fewer disputes are a good outcome (and as far as I know there aren't many). You are entirely correct, and I seem to have thoroughly misread that section! Of course one of the ways disputes are avoided is that users just avoid NC licensed content, as Wikimedia projects do. Kudos. Yeah. Not the most desired outcome for the creator, though. One of the benefits of CC is to encourage worry-free distribution by helping creators be entirely up-front about what they're happy to have happen with their material, but this sort of ambiguity seems to bring us full circle. -- - 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] Security holes in Mediawiki
2009/9/15 Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com: I was sort of surprised to learn today that Mediawiki software has had 37 security holes identified: http://akahele.org/2009/09/false-sense-of-security/ Are most of these patched now, or are they still open? If still open, is the Foundation making site user security more of a priority in 2010? The most recent one (the only 2009 notice) which that blog links to is explicitly resolved; http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2009-0737 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2009-February/83.html Note that it was entered into the database on 25 February, two weeks after solution and marked as not affecting the most recent release version on the same day. Skimming down the list, it looks like most of them are in the same boat - CVE-2008-5688: MediaWiki 1.8.1, and other versions before 1.13.3, when the wgShowExceptionDetails variable is enabled... CVE-2008-5687: MediaWiki 1.11, and other versions before 1.13.3, does not properly protect against the download of backups of deleted images... The database appears to record *known* problems in all versions of the software, rather than just open problems. I haven't checked each one, but all the recent ones look solved, so I think we're safe - at least, safe from the problems we know about, which is always the important caveat! -- - 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] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009-
2009/9/12 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: While I don't doubt that the Portuguese Wikimedians are acting in good faith, trust requires two things - good faith and competence. They are almost certainly not competent since they haven't had an opportunity to develop that competence yet, so they should not be trusted to be making the right decisions. I'm a bit worried about this sort of approach. Taken to extremes, we wouldn't let the local chapter organise itself at all, because clearly none of them would know how to do it until after they've had experience running it, etc etc etc. People will make bad decisions, estimates, projections, guesses, conclusions sometimes; it happens. We spot them the second time around, once we've realised they're wrong, fix them, and move on. -- - 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] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
2009/8/20 Erik Zachte erikzac...@infodisiac.com: There is another way to detect 100% reverts. It won't catch manual reverts that are not 100 accurate but most vandal patrollers will use undo, and the like. For every revision calculate md5 checksum of content. Then you can easily look back say 100 revisions to see whether this checksum occurred earlier. It is efficient and unambiguous. A slightly less effective method would be to use the page size in bytes; this won't give the precise one-to-one matching, but as I believe it's already calculated in the data it might well be quicker. One other false positive here: edit warring where one or both sides is using undo/rollback. You'll get the impression of a lot of vandalism without there necessarily being any. -- - 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] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
2009/8/20 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: Going back to your simple study now: The analysis of vandalism duration and its impact on readers makes an assumption about readership which we know to be invalid. You're assuming a uniform distribution of readership: That readers are just as likely to read any random article. But we know that the actual readership follows a power-law (long-tail) distribution. Because of the failure to consider traffic levels we can't draw conclusions on how much vandalism readers are actually exposed to. We're also assuming a uniform distribution of vandalism, as it were. There's a number of different types of vandalism; obscene defacement, malicious alteration of factual content, meaningless test edits of a character or two, schoolkids leaving messages for each other... ...and it all has a different impact on the reader. This has two implications: a) It seems safe to assume that replacing the entire article with john is gay is going to get spotted and reverted faster, on average, than an edit providing a plausible-sounding but entirely fictional history for a small town in Kansas. So, any changes in the pattern of the *content* of vandalism is going to lead to changes in the duration and thus overall frequency of it, even if the amount of vandal edits is constant. b) We can easily compare the difference in effect for vandalism to be left on differently trafficed pages for various times - roughly speaking, time * traffic = number of readers affected. If some vandalism is worse than others, we could thus also calculate some kind of intensity metric - one hundred people viewing enormous genital piercing images on [[Kitten]] is probably worse than ten thousand people viewing asdfdfggfh at the end of a paragraph in the same article. I'm not sure how we'd go ahead with the second one, but it's an interesting thing to think about. -- - 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] New projects opened
2009/8/13 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: Yesterday, new projects were opened: * Sorani Wikipedia (http://ckb.wikipedia.org/) * Western Panjabi Wikipedia (http://pnb.wikipedia.org/) * Mirandese Wikipedia (http://mwl.wikipedia.org/) * Acehnese Wikipedia (http://ace.wikipedia.org/) * Turkish Wikinews (http://tr.wikinews.org/) For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two empty projects). Turkish Wikinews is the 28th Wikinews project - there's now Turkish editions of wikinews, wikiquote, wikisource, and wikitionary, as well as wikipedia. -- - 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] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
2009/8/1 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Samuel Kleinmeta...@gmail.com wrote: Also... *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas) Why not just do this in the Wikisource project? 99% percent of every published work are free/libre. Only the last 70 years worth of texts are restricted by copyright, so it doesnt make sense to build a different project for those works. I think your estimate's a little off, sadly :-) Firstly, copyright lasts more than the statutory seventy years, as a general rule - remember, authors don't conveniently die the moment they publish. If we discount the universal one-date cutoff in the US eighty years ago - itself a fast-receding anomaly - extant copyrights probably last about a hundred years from publication, on average. But more critically, whilst a hundred years is a drop in the bucket of the time we've been writing texts, it's a very high proportion of the time we've been publishing them at this rate. Worldwide, book publication rates now are pushing two orders of magnitude higher than they were a century ago, and that was itself probably up an order of magnitude on the previous century. Before 1400, the rate of creation of texts that have survived probably wouldn't equal a year's output now. I don't have the numbers to hand to be confident of this - and hopefully Open Library, as it grows, will help us draw a firmer conclusion - but I'd guess that at least half of the identifiable works ever conventionally published as monographs remain in copyright today. 70% wouldn't surprise me, and it's still a growing fraction. -- - 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] Donation Button Enhancement : Part 2
2009/7/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: Testing should be done in parallel, not in sequence. History has demonstrated that donors have a tendency to respond disproportionately to the new thing. Which means that whatever button you test first will have an advantage over whichever one you test last. Probably the easiest way to get a reasonable distribution is to vary which button people see based on their IP. Or simply to randomise it entirely. If either of those aren't possible for technical reasons, it might be practical to rotate them - run each button for x many hours at a stretch, rotating them so as to ensure they don't regularly go up at the same time (of the day or of the week) and so that they get roughly equal coverage. -- - 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] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
2009/7/17 Harald Krichel harald.kric...@googlemail.com: Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. eg.: http://wp.cx/3tT5u7Z redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=302589573 I discovered yesterday that: enwp.org/Article redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article Sadly, it doesn't work with revision IDs, but it's a start! -- - 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] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
2009/7/1 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example: An article might start: display name=infobox / Thomas Jefferson was the third president... This is a marvellous idea, and presumably a lot of the code for it is already in existence (what with ref etc). It'd also solve the issue with people wanting to templatise content such as infoboxes in order to reduce the clutter on a specific page. Can anyone see any obvious downsides? -- - 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] Why Wikipedia and not the Wikipedia?
2009/6/27 Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com: Hello, Could someone explain to me why Wikipedia is without definite article? In English you say the Britannica, so why not the Wikipedia? I am wondering that also in German Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians tend to drop the article, although we say der Brockhaus. We do indeed say I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but we also say I looked it up in Encarta or I looked it up in Whitaker's. Whether or not something gets an initial article is a bit erratic, on the whole... (Perhaps Britannica gets it because Encyclopedia is a common word - we'd feel silly with the sentence I looked it up in Encyclopedia Britannica, because I looked it up in encyclopedia would itself be wrong) For what it's worth, I've noticed that the Wikipedia is becoming more common, but more among third parties than among people associated with the project. -- - 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] Issues about Copyright
2009/6/25 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com: What are examples of something which is fair use under chinese law but not under US law? goes to check the discussion http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China_(2001)#Section_4_Limitations_on_Rights I believe (10) is not very effectively protected in the US, but I could be wrong. (3) is quite a common provision, but (4) takes it further than usual. (I really like the spirit of nr. 11, but I can see how it's not really applicable here...) -- - 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] Issues about Copyright
2009/6/25 Jimmy Xu xu.jimmy@gmail.com: And here is the issue that in Berne Convention Article 2 (8), it says The protection of this Convention shall not apply to news of the day or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information. So whether these kind of stuffs can be used as if they were in public domain? Or some other steps has to be taken. Here's my interpretation of this: there are two sides to copyright, the concept and the expression - the idea, and the way you write it. If you've written a novel, you have both kinds of copyright. I can't tell the same story by changing all the words without infringing - the idea is still the same. If you're just writing about simple factual information, however, then you don't have copyright in the underlying facts - but you still have copyright in the way you write about them. So, a newspaper can't claim copyright on the concept of one of its stories - I can't copyright the idea of writing stories about an election! - but the actual text of them is still copyrighted, so we can't simply reprint copies of it as though it were public domain. Additionally, if so, that means for a news, the five Ws are not eligible but the comment by the author is eligible for copyright. Am I right? Thanks. I'd extend comment to be the words they've actually written, but that's about it. They can't stop you paraphrasing or rewriting it. -- - 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] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
2009/6/4 Unionhawk unionhawk.site...@gmail.com: So how do you propose we enforce this? I'm thinking we need to prevent this from happening in the first place. Analytics like this could pretty much give checkuser powers to anybody! There's not that many places where this sort of thing could be implemented - would it be too impractical to just regularly run a script to check those for things like Google Analytics links, and remove them with a polite note when found? -- - 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] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! -- - 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] Court: Congress can't put public domain back into copyright
2009/4/6 Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com: While this is definitely encouraging news, we might want to hold off on changing our evaluation of URAA restorations. The tenth circuit doesn't include Florida. I don't know exactly what the next level of appeals would be, but we might want to wait for a ruling that covers WMF servers before we act on it. I hope these restorations continue to be struck down in the courts. It will be much simpler to determine copyright if they go away. Somewhat tangentially, do we still need to worry about Florida? I was under the impression we'd moved wholesale, servers and all, to California, so we were in the ninth circuit jurisdiction... -- - 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] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: (My usual answer: Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of contacting us end up there anyway. This seems to work a bit.) Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... -- - 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] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: As far as I can make out, the present situation on en:wp is: a proposal was put which got 59% support. That's not a sufficiently convincing support level. So Jimbo is currently putting together a better proposal, with the aim of at least 2/3 support and hoping for 80% - it'll be more robust. Timeframe, er, I just asked him as well. Bleh. Well, at least it's *something*. I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and uncomplicated BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. This leaves lots of BLP stuff (the systematic POV problems, etc) that it wouldn't address, certainly, but I reckon at a stroke it would pre-empt a good *third* of our email load. It'd probably prevent even more by proportion if we turned on a report this function, since that'd heavily be skewed towards vandalism. Enabling both, together, would be excellent. But I think making it something for after we get the thrice-blesséd FlaggedRevs might be the most efficient approach. -- - 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] Simple English Encyclopedia
2009/2/25 Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se: Work for easy-to-read Swedish was started in 1968, and since 1987 operates as a government-sponsored foundation, described in this Swedish Wikipedia article, http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrum_f%C3%B6r_l%C3%A4ttl%C3%A4st On that Swedish foundation's website, you can also find information about them in English, French, German, and Spanish, http://www.lattlast.se/ (Le Centre Facile à Lire; La fundación sueca de nombre Centro de Lectura Fácil) Marvellous, thanks! Someone should compile an article on en.wikipedia about such initiatives in various countries. The article [[Simple English]] branches out to various special forms, but doesn't provide the international overview of the topic. Yes, I was thinking much the same. I browsed a bit, and could find an article on a simplified form of Latin, but mostly it's all conlangs... ...oh, well, another on for the to-do pile :-) -- - 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] Simple English Encyclopedia
2009/2/25 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com: Hoi, When the use case of the Simple Wikipedia is better understood, it may even make room for more simple projects as in simple projects in the biggest languages. This is quite an interesting thought. The language used by Simple English is (apparently) derived from two defined simplified versions of English which were deliberately designed - have there been projects to do the same for, say, French or Spanish, or would we have to do the heavy lifting ourselves? -- - 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] Top posters, special edition
2009/2/19 Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com: I still hold the crown on Wikipedia-l. Whatever happened to that list, anyways? Most of the people wanting to have abtruse cross-project theological debates just took it to foundation-l :-) -- - 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] An technical idea on spreading and improving Chinese Wikipedia
2009/2/20 Mingli Yuan mingli.y...@gmail.com: Since Songhu Hui use Wordpress, so I just propose a technical idea to improve the cooperation between Wikimedia and Songhu Hui. How about a keyword-link-generator to Wikipedia for Wordpress? This new Wordpress plugin will query Wikipedia to get a keyword list, and then make links in article in Wordpress automatically. But some technical problems still be there, for example, the Chinese word segmentation. Some googling throws up this existing tool: http://www.dijksterhuis.org/wordpress-plugins/keyword-link-plugin/ which isn't *quite* what you want, but you can see the potential. -- - 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] An technical idea on spreading and improving Chinese Wikipedia
2009/2/20 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: re/ the earlier comments, remember that we don't have to invent keyword identification from scratch. There's quite a bit of stuff out there already - I've seen a tool for writing blog posts, for example, which automatically adds in contextual Wikipedia links to the end of the text - which reduces the amount of work needed on the obvious problems of linking irrelevant words etc. Link suggestion is much easier - perhaps we could write a plugin that suggests possible words to link to Wikipedia and the author can choose which ones are appropriate. Or, even simpler (for the user), a plugin where the author selects a word or phrase and the system generates a Wikipedia link for it. Should be relatively effective for nouns and names, at least... -- - 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
[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-) On this list, a minority will be real names (John Smith); the rest, if we discount the thousand variants on anonymous via our IP editors, are pseudonyms (WikiUser) or modified names (JohnSmith78). In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that John Smith was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc. It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username translate into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little neater for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation. So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging: * each user has a credit field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences * when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off this credit name rather than simply using the normal internal username, if one is available. I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical? -- - 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] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this pseudonym can be linked to their real identity. I can't say I agree with your general thrust here - I think that if people contribute to a massively open project, well, they have to accept massively open. Bending over backwards to retroactively provide anonymity gets impractical fast. However, this proposal could allow an effective opt-out from any form of downstream attribution - some kind of NOCREDIT magic word, perhaps. This would neatly sidestep the worry of people not wanting credited downstream... -- - 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] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. There's two different issues, here, really, and I think you're chasing a different one to my original suggestion. I'm certainly not saying that this method for generating names is automatically a mandate to require they be used to top and tail every article - just that if someone does attribute that way, it'll help them do it better. *However* we decide that downstream reused material should be attributed, be it heavily or as lightly as possible, there's going to be a step in the process - perhaps only an optional one - where someone takes a Wikipedia article and tries to shake out some authors. Figuring out how to make that work efficiently and cleanly and helpfully is a good thing in and of itself, whatever conclusion the main debate comes to. -- - 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] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/1/28 geni geni...@gmail.com: Copyright issues mean that it will be heading for deletio n once we switch toi CC-BY-SA-3.0. Yes, along with all the other imported GFDL material... oh, wait, sorry, I mean all the material which a contributor has chosen to license under GFDL 1.2 or later... oh, wait. How is this a special case? The CC switch, when and if it happens, will be complex enough without inventing extra problems! -- - 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] Commons and The Year of the Picture
2009/1/28 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: Material in the public domain or under a fully free licence does not require any kind of fair use consideration. I'm not talking about genuinely free material, I'm talking about protected (copyrighted/trademarked) material being uploaded by others - for example a periodic table of elements or medical charts which would normally be subject to deletion (except that they are currently immediately available for sale!). I'm a little confused - surely we would delete this stuff whether or not there's a buy a print now clickthrough button? I can't see anyone arguing to keep it because they want to run off a poster... (and to a degree this is rendered moot by that helpful lowest useful resolution requirement of the unfree material rules) -- - 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] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/1/28 geni geni...@gmail.com: Yes, along with all the other imported GFDL material... oh, wait, sorry, I mean all the material which a contributor has chosen to license under GFDL 1.2 or later... oh, wait. How is this a special case? The CC switch, when and if it happens, will be complex enough without inventing extra problems! It is imported GFDL material. Which is a problem. Normaly we have very little imported stuff so not something I worry about overmuch but someone might want to give a heads up to the publishing company and author that we will be looking to switch it (and since it is imported we can't do that automagicaly). This is pretty silly. The author is... an active Wikipedia user, and has been for three and a half years. All his GDFL contributions made to Wikipedia can be relicensed without any fuss, but his writing first published elsewhere under *exactly the same license* and then re-uploaded, by himself, licensing his own intellectual property and ticking all the implicit boxes in exactly the same way as if he had first written it here, can't be? But even if it weren't, I'm stull confused over how we have the right to use one set of GFDL v.1.2 or later contributions, and not the other. It is, after all, *exactly the same license*... -- - 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] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. Apropos of which, a thought. We have spilled a good bit of ink over whether or not it is appropriate for the reuser to attribute Wikipedia users either alone or in addition to the usernames - should the project have a right to attribution, etc etc etc. In practice, wouldn't it be almost essential to name the site where the work was done *as well* as the usernames? Many of the pseudonyms, in effect, depend on that context... (Apologies if this was raised before - I don't remember seeing it) An article which has had many developments and been passed on might then wind up with an amalgamated attribution line like: by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (1962), Wikipedia contributors NukeUser, John Smith, Jane Doe and Mike Placeholder (2004-2007), Citizendium contributors Alan White, John Smith and Betty Green (2007-2009), and anonymous contributors. It's not exactly smooth, but it is comprehensible, and it does seem helpful to name the project to give some context to the names. -- - 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] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable. It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-) I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data... -- - 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] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/23 Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com: I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data... If you define nontrivial for me, that should not be too hard... Nikola's cutoff above was If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded... - this sounds not unreasonable, since adding three words or more will take you over it. I'm not sure quite how the results were obtained via WikiBlame, but it certainly seems a little more meaningful than just dumping every name which appears in the article history. (Admittedly, that has the advantage of not accidentally excluding anyone...) -- - 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] Commons and The Year of the Picture
2009/1/23 Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com: To be honest, that link is not that different from what [[Special:Booksources]] does, apart from the fact that for the moment there is only one company offering the service. Nothing prevents other companies to offer something comparable and feature in that link. Yeah; I was writing something about this earlier but never got around to posting it. It's relatively easy to imagine some kind of similar thing for a dozen different image-printing suppliers; obviously you wouldn't be linking to a preexisting sales page, you'd need to create some kind of interface to send the file through, but the basic concept remains. Go to image page, press button, and bang, a list appears. The problem is, it could get massively unwieldy very fast - the frwp booksources list is tidy and clear and has thirty or forty entries, but the enwp list has ballooned to around six hundred! Especially for something like this, we might well have to exert editorial control sooner or later as to who gets listed - I'm all for doing it, of course, but I think we need to be aware from the start that the ideal everyone gets listed might break down in the long run. -- - 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
