Re: [Foundation-l] Announcing my departure from the Wikimedia Foundation
Thank you for all you have done, and the very best of wish for all your future endeavours. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Copyrighted maps and Derived works from copyrighted sources.
jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: Guys, Lets get back to one point : terms of service. We are talking about copyright here the whole time, but the contract agreement in the terms of service are much more binding, they override your copyright. If the terms of service do not allow mass database extraction, WP is violating that on a large scale. 1. Is there mass database extraction of any particular service? If so, who by? Editors have used multiple ways of coming up with these lat/long values; GPS location reader, Sat Nav, Google Maps / Earth, OS maps, maps by other company online and printed, ... Unless there's a bot somewhere that go through one particular service, (say) Google Maps / Earth extracting data that I'm not aware of 2. The contract is between the service provider (again say) Google, and the end user of that service, i.e. the person who access it and later input the value into WP. Nowhere did Wikimedia Foundation come to any agreement with Google. One can't violate a contract that never existed. The online maps are provided to you under very strict rules and to access them you must agree to them. The whole idea of many map providers is that you can only view these great maps using their software and their software keys. If wikipedia is condoning a mass import of data from such a source that goes against that contract, how can you justify it? How can other people trust the judgement of wikipedia on this issue? You are assuming there is 1) any violation of contract in the first place; 2) the wikipedia community is aware of it; 3) said community is condoning it. What if we start to write articles about street and include all the buildings and boring parts of the streets in the WP or some subproject, where would it stop? What would protect a database of streets against such a swarm of fact collectors? mike If you're outside the EU, then not a lot. The EU has the concept of database right, but that does not exist in other part of the world. Wikipedia is operated under US federal and California (?) state laws, where mere collections of facts are considered unoriginal and unprotected. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to reply to a mailing list thread
MZMcBride wrote: This makes for far more noise than signal, as people wade through six copies of the foundation-l footer or eight old and irrelevant replies trying to find the content of the reply to the previous message. I've pretty much be ignoring this thread, and mark everything as read on arrival. However I'll just like to point out that this attempt to increase signal to noise have now resulted in at present count 29 (yes including mine) pretty much pointless emails... KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
Marcus Buck wrote: The Swedish Wikipedia decision is consequent and logical. Logos are copyrighted. Copyrighted material cannot be included. So no logos. It's plain and simple. The problem is not the reasonable decision of the Swedish Wikipedia, but the unreasonable decision of the Foundation to claim copyright for the logos. The foundation did that because they thought that would make it easier to defend the brand. But that's just intermingling trademarks and copyright. Trademark protection does everything we need. No need for additional copyright protection. The Coca Cola logo is PD-old (and in many jurisdictions also PD-ineligible) and they have no problem defending their brand. Why should Wikimedia logos be any different? Just release the logos under a free license and the problem will be gone. Or just use common sense that it's silly for a Wikimedia project to say it's not allowed to use a logo own by Wikimedia Foundation KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
David Gerard wrote: 2009/12/17 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: I agree with Bod - most people I know will have heard of Craigslist, but I don't know anyone that has used it. We know about it because it is mentioned quite often on TV imported from the US. However, despite everyone having heard of Craigslist, it seems Britons aren't inspired to donate by its founder telling them to. While the Craig Appeal banner was being shown 20% of the time, Wikimedia UK saw a 20% drop in fundraising income compared to the WMF (I look at the ratios of our income to the WMF's, which usually cancels out any changes due to the different banners). There is plenty of variation day to day, but 20% is a bigger change that is usual. Local celebrities for next time. Simon Cowell says: Donate to Wikipedia or I'll put out *two* X-Factor singles for Christmas. I warn you. There has been two X-factor singles. One from the winner, and one from all the finalist earlier for charity. ;-) -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipedia-killer-to-a-craigslist-wannabe/ -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
Congratz indeed to the (re)elected, and thank you Domas for all your work, both within and outwith the Board. Andrew Turvey wrote: My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political pro/con reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the anti-incumbency factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be successful if they're well known, and that will give an advantage to more established editors. However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out to sj. I'll have to agree, and also point out that it's a bit silly classing Ting as old guard. Yes, he's a returning member of the board, but considering he was only elected last year, it's not so surprising he did well again this year. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Update on struck votes issue on SecurePoll
Gregory Maxwell wrote: There exists a pre-calculated list of eligible voters used to authorize access to the polls. Is there any reason that this couldn't be made public as soon as it is generated? That particular list file contains non-public information, i.e. an account email address. Whether a redacted version can be made public, *shrug*. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Milos Rancic wrote: On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:00 AM, Casey Brownli...@caseybrown.org wrote: Bot accounts will probably be excluded in the future, since they are explicitly not allowed to vote. I think that it shouldn't be so complicated to do one sort -u over emails. As I said, some of my bots don't have bot flags and because of that they can't be treated as bots automatically. However, I am using just one email address for all of them. Probably, there is number of similar cases with well intentioned sock-puppet owners. Just out of interest, how many such email did you get last year because I'm sure I only (try to) send one email to each email address (that hadn't voted already). KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Milos Rancic wrote: On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Kwan Ting Chank...@ktchan.info wrote: Just out of interest, how many such email did you get last year because I'm sure I only (try to) send one email to each email address (that hadn't voted already). * One email to myself (mill...@gmail.com). I voted first day and a couple of days ago once more [with the same account, of course :] ]. * One email to my main bot account Millbot to another/old email address (mill...@users.sourceforge.net). This bot has global account and bot flag on at least a couple of Wikinews editions (it maintains [[Template:Statistics]] there). * One email to my Wikinews bot Millbot-Beta, which email is mill...@gmail.com, too. It doesn't have bot flag. *Point to last year from original message* ;-) I wasn't responsible for this year email, but was last year. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
John Vandenberg wrote: On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:09 PM, private musingsthepmacco...@gmail.com wrote: No silly - it's a mistake! (don't be so grumpy. - or be aware that this could come across as grumpy at least) I recall the grumbles when Greg sent something out last year or the year before, and feel the same about this as that - the folk sending the email are using an imperfect system, but overall it's worth it - I'm hope that those feeling personally affronted by such an approach can take solace in something or other, and just generally relax a notch or two :-) Oh, I am not affronted. I am thrilled that the election committee decided that computer engineers should be rewarded for their ingenuity by allowing their fine opinion to be counted twice. This motivates me to write more bots for next year. p.s. can the election committee ensure that votes from bot accounts are not counted?? p.p.s. if I can have another free vote, I will gladly write a bot to help the election committee to discount bot votes... The election software should automatically prevent an account flagged as bot from voting in the first place. The committee then have the task of manually vetting the caste votes to ensure only one vote is submitted/counted by each human. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Philippe Beaudette wrote:
Yeah, that one's noted for the post-mortem.
I'm going to add some notes for future generation that send this in 2
years time based on my experience sending this last year (and also
thinking about it this year) before I forget. I'm sure this year's
committee Werdna will have their own note to add.
(Note: this is not a list of what haven't been done, but what should be
considered for someone starting anew.)
* Make sure the committee argues on how who the emails will be sent
early on, and not still wondering about it 4 days before the end of
voting
* Send those emails somewhere near the start of voting, not 3 days
before the end... ;)
* Given a list of all the eligible voters from the start of the
election, remove all belonging to the same user (think SUL), remove and
leave only primary account for non-unified account with the same email
address. Remove in advance, or check and remove in real time all
accounts marked as bot blocked. Remove all those on the
[[meta:Wikimedia nomail list]].
* Take snapshot of all those that have voted at start of email run, and
remove from email list.
In terms of the actual message:
* Translate the email subject as well as the main body text.
* Translate the the string {Year} Board Election Committee or similar
and use it as the From header, and at the end of the the body text.
* Have a table of all active projects in their local name instead of
just using the English version.
Hope that helps anyone reading this in 2 years time. :D
KTC
/me wait 2 years to see if it makes any difference
--
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine
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Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Huib! wrote: Hello, Aren't we working to wrong way, I think it should be better to let people opt-in, because we didn't release our e-mail addresses for this kind of spam. I use different emails for private / mailinglist use and I didn't give permission to use my private email. Can I just point out the email address concerned was supplied by you to Wikimedia Foundation, where your account's preference is set Enable e-mail from other users. I'm not saying only people where that is set was sent email, and no people where that is not set (i.e. email on record only for password recovery) were not sent. However, in your particular case, I or anyone else for that matter could just as easily send you the email via the Commons interface and it would had be no different. Its kind of stupid that this email isn't send out when the election started, but is send when a lot of people already voted, and its unneeded now so its spam. It's unfortunate this year, those that have already voted received the email. Obviously it should be noted so it doesn't happens in the future (i.e. in 2 years time). But there are should a lot of people who is able to vote but haven't voted, and it wouldn't be spam to send them this email. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Cormac Lawler wrote: On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:05 AM, pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm sorry you got an email that bothered you. Trust me, we try to make sure no one is bothered by them. Sometimes people fall through the cracks, and I'm sorry that was the case here and in a few other cases. I'm supposedly one who fell through the cracks. shrug Have to say though, I was impressed by being invited to vote in elections for the board, which operates projects such as Wikiversity. I don't know how you can specify a person's main project in this script (nor do I need/want to know) - but just to give praise where praise is due. :-) The list of eligible voters contain the internal database name /or the url of the wiki the voter is from. It's a simple case of parsing that to personalise the email with the main project name. :-) KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
Pavlo Shevelo wrote: The list of users who have voted is available at https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/index.php/Special:SecurePoll/list/17 Some names/nicks there appeared crossed (by horizontal line). Would somebody please explain what does it mean? Those that are grey out (or at least slightly lighter colour that one can barely see the difference of) are votes that have been superseded by a later vote from the same account. The last vote cast is the one that's counted. The crossed off votes are votes that have been manually struck off by the election committee. For example when the same person have voted from multiple accounts. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ 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?
You know, this comes up every year. And there's always good argument to both sides but there's never consensus to actually change it. There has been an election in one form or another since 2004, and except in 2004 where the requirement was having an account that is at least 3 months old or be a sysop on a project that is less than 3 months old (hey, Wikimedia *was* new after all :D), there has been an edit requirement to vote. Between 2005 to 2007, a voter was required to have had made at least 400 edits to a particular project (by roughly a month before voting) and be at least 3 months old. Last year, the requirement were raised to 600 edits by 3 months prior and 50 edits any time in the previous 6 months with exceptions granted to server administrators, paid staff of at least 3 months old, and current or former trustees. This year the requirement were relaxed slightly such that the 600 edits can be made up to 2 months prior, and with unified accounts combined votes across projects. At the end of the day, what form the suffrage requirements take depends on what group of people we want making that decision. Is it on one extreme the end user of the product, i.e. the readers of Wikipedia, Wikinews, etc...? Is it on the other extreme only people the editing community has decided to entrust with additional privileges, i.e. sysops? Or perhaps only people who have supported the projects in the form of monetary contributions? Or somewhere in between the two extreme, as we have now. Once that has been decided, the technical means of restricting voters to only that group of people can be arrived at, hopefully relatively easily. X number of edits by Y time is just a method of restricting suffrage to the group of people we want. It's a waste of time arguing X should be Z, or edits should include mailing list posting (which mailing list?), MediaWiki commits, Bugzilla bug tickets, ... We could spend all day doing it. Instead of arguing over the method of restriction, define who we want to restrict it to first. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ 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?
Philippe Beaudette wrote: I'm sure that if there is significant response to the edit count requirement, next year's committee will happily (he said confidently, with no intent to volunteer for next year's committee) review it then. LOL, how many have you been on now? :P There's no (planned) election next year, I don't think *anyone* is planning on volunteering for a committee that won't exist. ;-) KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stevertigo
stevertigo wrote: It's a little late for this. Besides you didn't killfile the thread (whatever that translates to in grown-up terms) - you moderated/blocked me, and did so without serious or even sufficient public notification. The seven-word private reply you gave me (quoted below somewhere) was substandard, as far as explanations go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file Any emails to the mailing list with that subject line get auto deleted. And you can see, no email with that subject line has appeared since. 1) I did post on another topic. 2) Who is we? You? 3) A few hours later is not acceptable, particularly in contexts where discussion moves quickly. 2. I would supect we are the moderators of the mailing list. 3. That's what being under moderation means. Whether any particular person should be under moderation is a different argument. Yes, and in that post I indicated I would not continue posting to that thread on this list. Assuming your moderating me was valid in the first place, you evaluated my post incorrectly - the evidence being that its still has not been posted. See above. A thread that has been kill file'd gets auto deleted. He or any other moderator can't post it even if they want to. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ 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?
Brian wrote: The WMF is a far cry from the original vision of it as a membership organization. Also, the board propagates stale laws under the notion of status quo for which the original consensus is no longer remembered. There is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any good ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of those ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system. I'm going to take particular issue with the last point here. On 3 June *2008*, right after last year election, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild), one of last year election committee member, posted on the talk page of either Election 2009 or election 2008 (and subsequently merged with this year) If you have an idea on how to improve the 2008 board elections system for 2009, please post them below under a section name that briefly summarizes the subject. Philippe posted this year rules on this mailing list on 27 May. It has always been the case that election committee will take any feedback or concern expressed and change the rules based on those concern if needed. Example of that happened last year when the recent edit over last 3 months requirement was added and subsequently modified based on feedback to last 6 months. This year, the period of candidate presentation was extended significantly, right up to the start of the election, again based on feedback here on this mailing list. You can't complain that the election committee don't take on board new ideas or feedbacks if you haven't expressed it before the election started. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Congratulations to Gdansk!
Michael Bimmler wrote: On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com wrote: Tomasz, To be able bring what captivates me on a daily basis back to the city I was born and grew up in makes happy as can be. Heeheee, :-) And I hereby declare my Green Wikimania, I'll carpool to get there! ...bycicle, Domas, bycicle... And I was thinking of walking and swimming -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WP edit/access blocking in the UK - statement from the WMF
Platonides wrote: David Gerard wrote: 2008/12/8 Jay A. Walsh: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Censorship_of_WP_in_the_UK_Dec_2008 http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/07/how-the-great-firewa.html How the Great Firewall of Britain works - d. Interesting, which urls are they blocking? AFAWK, an exact match in page request for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg and nothing else. As been said, any variation to that is unblocked, including when the above image is part of any other articles. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine PGP.sig Description: PGP signature ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
