Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ for fundraising resolutions
Hi Phoebe, Thanks for posting this. I've asked a question (OK, three related questions) at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Board_FAQ#Why_just_the_four_chapters.3F Thanks, Mike On 5 Apr 2012, at 19:29, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 5 April 2012 19:14, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks, Tom. If you don't mind I'll put it on the talk page; this will likely require some discussion to answer. By all means. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
We ask the Executive Director not to allow any additional chapters to payment process, until the Board revisits the framework for fundraising and payment processing in late 2015 in advance of the November 2016 fundraising campaign. This is very disappointing. It's a real shame that chapters aside from WMDE, WMFR, WMUK and WMCH aren't being given any encouragement to develop their capabilities for handling donations. I have to say that I think this is a fundamental misstep for the Wikimedia movement, and one that we will come to regret in the future. On voting transparency: this is a great step forward. However, I would encourage the WMF to take a further step, and to explain why trustees voted approve/abstain/against. This could potentially be done by (for examples) adding notes next to votes explaining reservations or key supporting factors, or by making resolutions more focused (e.g. the fundraising decision could have been split into four: principles, chapter payment processing, four chapters, and additional chapters, which would have provided more insight here). Thanks, Mike Peel (Personal viewpoint) On 30 Mar 2012, at 22:42, Ting Chen wrote: Dear members of the community, After having discussed the final aspects of this today I would like to announce the following three resolutions 1) Board of Trustees Voting Transparency: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency 1) Fundraising 2012: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Fundraising_2012 2) Funds Dissemination Committee: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee For those of you who are currently in Berlin, we will have a 2 hour window tomorrow to discuss this together, we invite you to send questions for this session to Harel Cain (harel.c...@gmail.com mailto:harel.c...@gmail.com) He will be moderating tomorrow's session which will be similar to the QA session we had in Paris. We are currently working on a Question and Answer document which we will publish as soon as possible. Although the decision has now been made, we have a large number of challenges ahead of us and I hope that we as a movement will come together to make the Funds Dissemination Committee a success by working with us to come up with answers tot the questions that we still have and helping to make it work! -- Ting Chen Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. E-Mail: tc...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
On 30 Mar 2012, at 23:17, Nathan wrote: Since payment processing is not contemplated as a vector for receiving funds, either in 2012 or beyond, [citation needed]. Also, [attribution needed]. There are those that are contemplating this, and those that aren't - it's not as clear cut as you imply. it makes sense to permit processing only where it provides a significant advantage in raising funds and where the reliability and integrity of funds processing is not in doubt. I can't disagree there. But there should be clear routes to ensuring that reliability and integrity, and to foster it where it is currently being developed. Those routes are currently rather conspicuous by their complete absence, and by the lack of WMF interest in fostering these. I hope that the chapters council can play a big role here, but worry that it will be handicapped by this decision by the WMF. As the resolution states, all entities are permitted (and, I'm sure, encouraged) to raise funds in other ways. So ... entities are trusted to receive donations by one method, but not another? That makes no sense whatsoever to me. Either they're trusted to handle funds and resources donated to the Wikimedia movement, or they're not. I'm probably ranting against a fait accompli here. But I'm deeply saddened and depressed by this outcome. Thanks, Mike (Personal viewpoint) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Draft charter of the Wikimedia Chapters Association
Think of this more as the hub of a bicycle wheel with many spokes, rather than a centralised body. A device that makes for quicker progress than walking alone, but isn't a burdensome stone wheel. Having a lightweight central organisation that can keep an eye on what is going on, that can provide advice, and can fix things when they go wrong is vital. Having a single organisation that everything's centralised into is monolithic, bureaucratic and ineffective in the long run. Thanks, Mike On 18 Mar 2012, at 19:47, Nathan wrote: So a group of chapters, reacting against a perceived effort to centralize the movement, create a brand new central body with an extensive (and apparently, expensive) bureaucracy? Are there really a lot of people that think this is a good idea? On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nlwrote: Dear friends, After weeks of full work, this is the draft charter that has been worked on. I copy for you here the introduction and the link to meta. If you have questions about it, you may put them on the talk page or send them to me. Kind regards Ziko In February 2012, in Paris, Chapter representants agreed on creating a new organization. As there was no person or group assigned to write a draft charter, finally, after having talked to some people on general questions, I took the task on me. Subsequently I presented this page (March 7th) which was very much altered in the meanwhile. I have tried to integrate Paris texts, parts from the models B and KISS, and I have contacted a lot of the people who are going to Berlin (end of March; alas I did not find all e-mails but I believed I contacted every participating chapter). There were some phone calls and chats e.g. with Sebastian Moleski. There is also another draft, by Tango, which I (and others) have read carefully. Now we nearly arrived March 18th, on which, according to the timeline, a draft charter is supposed to be ready. Whatever that means, I would like to call the draft provisorily ready (there will be certainly changes, especially for the final incorporation) and invite people again to read. ... The idea is to have an organization with a kind of parliament (Council) and a kind of government (Secretariat). A Judicial Board has the task to arbitrate in severe cases of conflict; this could have been a simple Council committee, but for general reasons a seperate organ is better: the Council or Council members could be part of a conflict. We hope that the Judicial Board will have nothing to do. Normally, the members of the organs are elected for a certain term. This is important to give them a certain independence. There must be a relationship between work, responsibility and the right to make decisions. But if there is a severe problem, then the Council can dismiss people (by a 2/3 majority). There was a lenghy discussion on several levels about the position of the Council members, the Representatives. Now, according to the general principle, the Representative has a fixed term and can be dismissed in certain cases. But the Representative can have a position in a chapter (in contrary to a former model). Maybe the most important question to be answered: If a chapter joins, what are the consequences and obligations? First of all: A chapter joins only if it wants to, it does not become a member automatically. A chapter agrees to elect a Representative and pay an annual contribution. Later in the year 2012, there will be a budget. Possibly, the chapters will have to pay some % of their annual chapter budget. Of course the Wikimedia Chapters Association will consider the financial possibilities of the chapters. Why is it good for a chapter to join? The Association will support the chapters and represent their interests. A lot of international coordination work, that now has to be done by chapter boards, will be done (or supported by) the organs of the Association. Even if a chapter is already big and mature - it is good for every chapter to belong to a big family of well organized chapters. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_Council/Draft_charter_of_the_Wikimedia_Chapters_Association -- --- Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/ Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht --- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books
On 14 Mar 2012, at 12:21, Russavia wrote: Interesting news indeed. Lead's one to wonder when WMF will launch it's first printed encyclopaedia. Perhaps a 2013 Citation Needed edition is in the works? Something like this: http://www.labnol.org/internet/wikipedia-printed-book/9136/ ? (And that's just ~400 FA's...) Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia domains, SOPA, Godaddy and MarkMonitor
Hello, Thanks MZMcBride for your reply here. On 10 Mar 2012, at 22:32, MZMcBride wrote: Michael Peel wrote: I'd like to see more information here. What activities are MarkMonitor involved in with the 'anti-piracy fight'? Are they involved in filtering all peer-to-peer traffic, or just the traffic that contravenes copyright law? As a domain name supplier, what is their relation to ISPs, and how do they practically provide this filtering? What evidence do they supply to copyright holders - I assume that this evidence is related to who has registered which domain, since (as domain name providers) they shouldn't be in a position to provide any other (non-public) information here? How do they monitor titles? Did you do any quick research before asking these questions? Yes. I've been aware of this planned transfer for a while, and I did some background research into MarkMonitor as time has permitted. Of particular relevance here, I've read the (English) Wikipedia article, and the WMF blog post. I'm still surprised at what Domas said here, though, and I want to understand this aspect of the issue. Both my last email and this one was/is sent in the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of this issue from knowledgable people, rather than just relying on a bit of quick research via a Google search. I'm asking this out of genuine interest. My understanding of domain name providers in general is that they provide a service that simply says this domain name points to the server at this IP address, rather than them having any role in filtering, providing evidence, or monitoring. I'm rather surprised to hear that their activities go beyond this. MarkMonitor isn't a typical domain registrar. It's a component of what they do, but they're quite explicitly a brand protection service. A very large part of Web brands just happens to be their domain names. I did some quick research. It looks like MarkMonitor has been involved with a lot of major companies, including Facebook (hi Domas!), Google, and now the Wikimedia Foundation (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:MarkMonitor). There were rumors that MarkMonitor was also involved in the acquisition of mobileme.com and me.com for Apple. http://arst.ch/nu2 was an interesting take on one of the company's reports. I guess they pissed off RapidShare pretty badly at some point. That's interesting to hear, but I'm still curious about the logistics of how they operate, particularly in terms of how them being a domain name provider (which is a rather distinct role) but not an ISP (another rather distinct role) connects to them assisting in filtering content, and also how this link to them enforcing Creative Commons licensing. Speaking as someone that has contributed to the Wikimedia projects, I would be rather surprised if the WMF's domain name supplier started trying enforcing the copyright and licensing terms of the content that I have provided to the projects. I want to see more information here. Ideally, that information would be provided via the Wikipedia article on this organisation. But if Domas could provide links that back up his comments, then that would still be really useful. At the moment, though, I have to tag his whole email with [citation needed]... That's not to provide any sort of opposition to the move that WMF has made here; it's just to make an expression of interest in terms of seeing more information being made easily available (via the Wikimedia projects) on this topic. I'm all in favour of moving the Wikimedia domain names from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor (and, tbh, I'm rather puzzled by why the WMF decided to use GoDaddy in the first place), I'm just rather puzzled by your statements here. Byproduct of history, I imagine. It used to be that it didn't really matter where you registered a domain, as long as they were competent enough to keep it registered and handle your whois data. In most cases and for most people, this is still true. I vaguely recall some major site being interrupted within the past year because their domain registration password (on a site like GoDaddy or HostGator or wherever) was incredibly weak. You'd be surprised what kinds of domains are registered where. :-) Thinking about this further, I guess that this links all the way back to Nupedia being a Bomis project, which would explain why they an unethical domain name provider was used for the Wiki[p/m]edia domains... Thanks, Mike (personal viewpoint) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia domains, SOPA, Godaddy and MarkMonitor
Hi Domas, I'd like to see more information here. What activities are MarkMonitor involved in with the 'anti-piracy fight'? Are they involved in filtering all peer-to-peer traffic, or just the traffic that contravenes copyright law? As a domain name supplier, what is their relation to ISPs, and how do they practically provide this filtering? What evidence do they supply to copyright holders - I assume that this evidence is related to who has registered which domain, since (as domain name providers) they shouldn't be in a position to provide any other (non-public) information here? How do they monitor titles? I'm asking this out of genuine interest. My understanding of domain name providers in general is that they provide a service that simply says this domain name points to the server at this IP address, rather than them having any role in filtering, providing evidence, or monitoring. I'm rather surprised to hear that their activities go beyond this. I'm all in favour of moving the Wikimedia domain names from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor (and, tbh, I'm rather puzzled by why the WMF decided to use GoDaddy in the first place), I'm just rather puzzled by your statements here. Thanks, Mike (NB: please note that although I'm subscribed to this list under my @wikimedia.org.uk address for the purposes of organising my incoming emails, I'm asking these questions on a personal basis.) On 10 Mar 2012, at 19:23, Domas Mituzas wrote: Hi! I hereby congratulate Wikimedia Foundation switching domains from pro-SOPA Godaddy to MarkMonitor. Not that many people know, but MarkMonitor is ahead of the industry in anti-piracy fight: * They have systems to do real-time content filtering for ISPs, that stop peer-to-peer piracy. * They provide evidence for largest media and entertainment copyright holders, that is accepted in civil and criminal courts. * They have state of the art systems to monitor millions of titles on peer to peer networks and send Cease and Desist letters. There're way more anti-piracy activities that MarkMonitor does, and I'm happy that WMF and MM are joining their forces. I hope it will lead to better Creative Commons license enforcing, as well as detecting illegal use of content on WMF sites too, some day. BR, Domas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Copyright and cakes...
Best all around to simply destroy the evidence (by eating it?). ... can this topic end now? Or be moved on-wiki so that it can be filed under WP:SILLY? Thanks, Mike On 5 Mar 2012, at 23:23, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 5 March 2012 23:14, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: eating the cake would damage the moral rights of the logo author. Since he cannot give general permission to violate moral rights, eating the cake would be illegal. If you take a slice out of the cake, that could be an issue since you have created a new work that negatively portrays the logo. I think the only option is the eat the entire cake at once. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chapter Selected Board Seats - Time for questions
Hi all, I'm expecting to be contradicted here, but I have to ask these questions in order to personally understand the politics surrounding this topic. My understanding here (having been subscribed to the chapters mailing list since the start of the chapter-selected WMF board seats - i.e. since late 2008) is that the Wikimedia Foundation wanted this process to be conducted in private in order to have candidates that would benefit the WMF's governance process, and would benefit from the chapters' networks of experienced and knowledgeable individuals, whilst not requiring those candidates to go through the elongated public ordeal that the community-elected seats involve (and in particular: the public QA and voting requirements that are expected of a community-selected trustee). There were reasons why the Wikimedia chapters were not able to make this process public in the past (and why they are not able to have a public vote on this issue). These reasons are due to the chapter's understanding of the context of this topic, rather than the chapters deciding on their own that the process needs to be kept confidential. It's absolutely fantastic that all of the candidates for this election are willing to make their statements public - but the credit here is really due to the the candidates that have put themselves forward for this election in an open manner, rather than anything else. If I'm wrong here, then I would really welcome corrections. But I really don't like that the requirement of keeping the decisions made by this this process is being put on the Wikimedia chapters rather than the Wikimedia Foundation. It may be that this issue has arisen due to a misunderstanding between the Wikimedia chapters and the WMF, but please don't think that this confidentiality is solely due to the chapters here. Thanks, Mike (internal-l has had the standard approach that Wikimedia trustees can declare that their emails are reflecting personal viewpoints rather than those comments representing the chapters that they are trustees of - and I hope this extends to foundation-l. My comments and queries here are solely my own rather than WMUK's.) On 3 Mar 2012, at 01:29, Tinu Cherian wrote: Thanks Beria for taking the initiative for making the list of candidates and statements on a public wiki. It brings in more transparency and better understanding of the process to the whole of the Wikimedia World. All the best wishes to the candidates! Regards Tinu Cherian Wikimedia India. On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 7:57 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote: Hello people, So after receive authorization from all candidates, the list of candidates + statements are in meta, and you can find it here: http':// meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Candidates Until 14 March is time for questions, so if you have any questions to any of the candidates, please put your question in this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapter-selected_Board_seats/2012/Candidates/Questions(there are already some questions and some answers there) So there is only one thing. Candidates are not forced to answer, and even if they do, they're not forced to answer in public, so might happens that some answers won't go to meta. If you ask a question and the candidate don't want to make the answer public, I will send you a mail with the answer - but of course, you can't leak the answer anywhere. Also do keep in mind this isn't a community vote. We are trying to keep as public as we can, but the discussions the chapters will have will be private. So don't expect me to post those in meta. _ * * *[image: Inline images 1]* *Béria Lima* * * * Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano.* *Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho.* http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos** * ** http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos* ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com On 12 December 2011 18:18, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Technically, nothing was messed up by the feature. Rather, the software previously did not take EXIF rotation into account, and some images had incorrect EXIF rotation information to begin with. Those images are now shown in an incorrect rotation to the user, because the incorrect EXIF rotation info is being evaluated. That's ridiculous misuse of words. What was messed up was the presentation of images that were already displayed correctly. It is entirely unclear to me why you appear to be evading rather than answering a fairly simple and straightforward question: How many images used in the wikis had the pages they were on messed up by this? Actually, I think Erik's use of words here is spot on. The previous images were messed up in such a way that they appeared right by fluke, but their metadata wasn't correct. Now, they can be easily identified and properly fixed by the community. This is a good and useful improvement - well done WMF + tech team for implementing it. :-) From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk 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. With this type of modification, it's natural that it would apply to all images rather than just images uploaded after it was switched on. It would be horribly unnatural and deliberately-buggy if it tried to take the date of upload into account when applying the modification... Thanks, Mike P.S. am replying to the digest - apologies if this ends up in the wrong thread... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia UK report, October 2011
Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 31 October 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page. This report is also available, complete with pictures, on our website at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/October . Contents 1 Program activities 1.1 2012 Activity Plan 1.2 Education projects 1.3 GLAM activities 1.4 Other activities 1.5 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects activities) 1.6 Upcoming activities in November 2 Administrative activities 2.1 Board activities 2.2 Extraordinary General Meeting to change our Objects 2.3 News from the CEO 2.4 Fundraising 2.5 Recruitment Program activities 2012 Activity Plan Our 2012 Activity Plan was posted to the WMUK wiki on 1 October and has been submitted to the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the planning for the annual fundraiser. This plan is an outline of the work we will do in 2012, and the resources we need to support it. It is an important stage in the development of our 2012 Budget. When we’re asking people for money in this Autumn’s fundraiser, the Activity Plan will show people what we’re hoping to achieve with their donations – so it’s also important for the openness and accountability of our fundraising. We welcome any comments or suggestions on the talk page. Education projects Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute, attended WikiSym 2011 on WMUK scholarships this month; they also presented about their work at the Wikimedia Foundation offices. Fiona Apps, supported by Richard Symonds, held a stall at the University of Warwick Freshers fayre, on 1 October. This resulted in over 70 expressions of interest in forming a Wiki student club. We have supported a University of Birmingham bid for JISC funding for World War One digital content prioritization; our letter of support is at File:Birmingham JISC support.pdf. On 24th October, Fiona Apps led a Wikipedia Lounge at The University of Manchester. GLAM activities On October 1st there was a Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass - this was covered in detail in the This Month in GLAM newletter. Also on the 1st, Tom Morris attending Over the Air at Bletchley Park. On the 7th October, an internal training workshop was held at the British Museum. Then on the 13th October, the British Museum Ice Age art Behind the Scenes event was held. Other events this month included: 5th - Martin Poulter spoke on Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia at Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath 8th - Andy Mabbett talked about GLAM and QRpedia at Library Camp UK in Birmingham 14th - CeriseLovesColours from France visits Derby for VIP tour and to pick 2nd prize for the Wright Challenge 28th - Initial meeting for MonmouthpediA - John Cummings A video showing Derby Museum using QRPedia codes was released on Vimeo. Other activities UK Wikimeets this month: Edinburgh meeting (1st), Cambridge meetup (8th), London (16th) 3rd-5th - Roger Bamkin speaking at Europeana Tech Conference in Vienna (report here) 29th - Trevor Johnson hosted a stand and a training event at RISC OS London Show, Feltham Microgrants funded this month include Elections in Europe from User:Number 57 and Copyright law from User:Ironholds UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects activities) Press coverage of Wikipedia in UK publications this month included: Journal: The Linguist (vol. 50 no. 5, Oct/Nov 2011, p. 7 covers Net Challenge by Andrew Dalby listing the winners in Russia, France, Italy, Indonesia and the Czech Republic 1st - continued coverage of QRPedia: How Wikipedia Is Making QR Codes Useful Again, Gizmodo QRPedia: Wikipedia launches QR code tool for museums, PC Advisor QRPedia - simple but effective , i-Programmer Also: Wikipedia Signpost write-up of QRPedia 3rd - Wikipedia codifica tutto, Pubblicita Italia (QRpedia and arty QR codes) 5th-7th - several UK media outlets covered the strike of the Italian Wikipedia: Wikipedia closes in Italy after Silvio Berlusconi 'gagging' bid, Independent Wikipedia shuts Italy site to protest Berlusconi gag law, Reuters UK Italy wiretap law: Wikipedia hides pages in protest, BBC News Wikipedia Shut Italian Site In Protest Over Privacy Law, Huffington Post UK 7th - Die Wikipedia kommt ins Museum, Spiegel on line, Interview with Peter Weiss about QRpedia and GLAM 14th Arriba a Barcelona l’exposició ‘Joan Miró. L’escala de l’evasió, Calalan Wikipedia and QRpedia enable Spanish Art Gallery labelling by Kippelboy Wikipedia vandalism: Rugby World Cup 2011: referee Alain Rolland's Wikipedia account sabotaged after Sam Warburton red card, Telegraph Wiki-d lies so mean say North Lynners, Lynn News When I died on Wikipedia, Guardian Jimmy Wales 23 October, Jimmy Wales: The internet's shy
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia UK report, September 2011
Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 September 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page. This report is also available, complete with pictures, on our website at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/September . Contents 1 Recruitment 2 Program activities 2.1 Education projects 2.2 GLAM activities 2.3 Other activities 2.4 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects activities) 2.5 Upcoming activities in October 3 Administrative activities 3.1 Board activities 3.2 Charitable status 3.3 Fundraising Recruitment This month we completed our recruitment of our new Chief Exec: Jon Davies will start work on 1 October. Andrew Turvey, who led the recruitment, blogged about the process of recruiting our Chief Exec; one of the last steps in this process was the presence of the final three candidates at the 49th London Meetup so that the community could provide their input. Our new full-time Office Administrator, Richard Symonds, known as Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry on Wikipedia, started work this month to assist specifically with the fundraiser work, and also more generally with WMUK's administrative needs. His contract runs until mid-January. Program activities Education projects On the 1st September, Martin Poulter and User:Martinvl ran a workshop for members of the Institute of Physics. The event was written up in a blog post. We funded two scholarships to attend WikiSym 2011 in October 2011. The scholarships were awarded to Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute. Following from the visit, they will also present about their work at the Wikimedia Foundation offices. GLAM activities Two ARKive project events were held in Bristol on 15 September (one in the afternoon, the other in the evening), led by Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), details of which are at Wiki Wildlife Bristol. These were part of a larger collaboration to improve Wikipedia articles on threatened species, full information for which is available at Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive. The events were covered by a number of local blogs and media organisations. QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post about it. See below for links to the news stories. A number of other GLAM activities also took place, including: 3rd - The Mayor of Derby awarded prizes by a webstream to winners in Russia, France and Indonesia for the Derby Multilingual challenge 8th - the first Wikipedia editing training session at the British Museum was, with nine BM people present (a mix of curators, curatorial interns and volunteers) and three Wikimedians. More details are on the Wikipedia project page. 14th - A workshop for GLAMs was run at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. For more information on this, see the 'This month in GLAM' UK report. 27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library by Fae and Roger 30th - Fae meet with Museums Galleries Scotland to talk about an upcoming partnership. Other activities UK Wikimeets this month: London (11th) and Manchester (17th) 2nd-3rd - Mike Peel presented at Science Online London in the How are wikis being used to carry out and communicate science? session, and also the 'Micro-attribution' session. 8th - Steve Virgin and Roger Bamkin presented at TEDx Bristol 13th - Jimmy Wales uses QRpedia in Indianapolis 14th - Editathon in Barcelona creates articles to support QRpedia at Foundation Joan Miro 27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester. A report is available on the wiki. We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference India in November. UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects activities) Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included: 1st - QRpedia and Lori on Indianapolis local radio 8th - Wikipedia creator’s keynote speech at radio festival, JournalLive 9th - Wikipedia founder wows Cambridge Network audience - Wikipedia attracts more readers than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. , also covered in Cabume (13th) 12th - Joan Collins Corrects Wikipedia Entry, Express 14th - Johann Hari: A personal apology, Independent. Also covered in The Guardian and Periscope Post. 15th - QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news GovernmentNews 16th - coverage of ARKive event: Life’s wild editing Wikipedia, Bristol Wireless Bristol ‘Wikipedians’ taught to edit online encylopaedia, Bristol 24/7 ARKive on the Road: Wiki ‘Wildlife editathon’ in Bristol, UK, ARKive blog. 24th - QRpedia on Spanish Discussion programme as part of 40 minute programme on Wikipedia - one of three Spanish TV interviews 28th -
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
From: Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs On 22/09/11 10:12, Andrea Zanni wrote: when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the pages, but none of the sister projects. I have to say, whenever I make a presentation of Wikimedia and mention sister projects, all I get is blank stares. It really makes sense to focus on Wikipedia in outreach activities. Um… no. That means it really makes sense to talk about the sister projects more than just mentioning them, as they are clearly in more need of outreach than Wikipedia with that audience… I often briefly describe the sister projects when I'm doing Wikipedia outreach - and quite often see people making comments on twitter etc. as a result about how they didn't know about a particular project, and were going to take a look at it (and hopefully go on to contribute to it…) Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ring of Gyges
On 30 Nov 2010, at 22:53, Fred Bauder wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30zhuo.html Fred User:Fred Bauder Unfortunately, comments are disabled/absent, which makes it rather difficult to add my own (non-trolling) thoughts... It's well worth reading this for a general insight into the downside of anonymity, although I'm not sure how much it actually applies to Wikipedia. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ring of Gyges
On 30 Nov 2010, at 23:53, George Herbert wrote: Two, nearly all WP users use pseudonymity rather than real names, and for most people not having their real name attached anywhere gives them a sense of anonymous empowerment similar to the truly anonymous trolls seen elsewhere. We see a lot of behavioral problems that are, to anyone who studies interpersonal communications online, extremely common. People don't inherently humanize other pseudonyms; they don't feel that they'll necessarily be held accountable in the same way they would in real life for behavior, etc. Coupled with the inherent degraded emotional communications in text-based communications, we have a lot of the same behavior even with persistent pseudonyms. And you can see a lot of that, where a pseudonym account gets sufficiently bad community karma on WP and they go and sockpuppet off and create another one, not caring about the underlying issue their behavior raised. That sort of thing is not unheard of in the real world, but it's generally felt to be the domain of scam artists and private investigators and the like; at the very least, socially dubious. I guess I'm one of the few that contributes under my real name. One of the options coded into MediaWiki is to submit a real name for attribution at the same time as registering (i.e. you specify both a pseudonym and a real name). By default, this is on when you use a non-Wikimemedia install of MediaWiki. However, within Wikimedia this is always turned off. I've wondered for a long time why this is - can anyone provide an insight into the decision to disable this? Thanks, Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Wikidata
(also including foundation-l as this isn't really a commons-specific discussion) On 22 Nov 2010, at 21:04, Samuel Klein wrote: A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and be seeded with data from dbpedia. A lot of existing proposed projects would benefit from a centralised wikidata project. e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships stored on the wikidata project. wikisource and commons could use the central data wiki for their Author and Creator details. +1 Could this be part of dbpedia? dbpedia is about collating the information available on Wikipedia and providing that as a database for others to use. This is about having a central information store that can be edited to add information. Whilst dbpedia could seed wikidata, they're very different projects in the way they would operate. In my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation should very seriously look into starting something like wikidata. I don't suppose there's a facilitator that could be hired that knows about Wikimedia sufficiently to facilitate an on-wiki discussion and formation of a comprehensive proposal to start this project, including bringing together the various people interested in this project? Mike Peel ___ 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 Nov 2010, at 15:42, Fred Bauder wrote: On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135 I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html -- Amir E. Aharoni Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome? What I worry about is the volunteer time that gets taken up tidying things up after something like this goes wrong - or worse, goes somewhat right but not completely (so that a simple revert is out of the question and a major cleanup of an article is needed, or a lot of discussion with the editor is necessary to set things straight). That's volunteer time that could otherwise be spent either productively, or tidying up after other volunteers. It almost leads into the catch-22 scenario where the paid editors need to guarantee that if their work isn't up to scratch then they'll pay someone else to fix it... Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects
Fantastic. :-) Semantic issue: these aren't new projects, they're new language versions of existing projects. We haven't had a new project since 2007. Mike On 13 Nov 2010, at 18:51, Milos Rancic wrote: Our family has got new projects: * Wikipedia in Gagauz: http://gag.wikipedia.org/ * Wikisource in Venetian: http://vec.wikisource.org * Wikisource in Breton: http://br.wikisource.org/ * Wikibooks in Limburgish: http://li.wikibooks.org/ * Wikinews in Esperanto: http://eo.wikinews.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No, even a couple of Google ads on each page would be a fatally bad idea
On 6 Nov 2010, at 17:43, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 6 November 2010 17:07, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: ads there would be able to be served in a way that is both relevant to the end-user (based on the term being searched for) That's a big problem. To use a somewhat clichéd example, we should not be showing adverts for either Coca-cola or Pepsi to people searching for coke. Precisely. Having adverts on the search page could have a serious impact on neutral point of view, even if indirectly. Another point of view/consideration: if an article doesn't yet exist on a specific organisation/person, then being able to find its website by the Wikipedia search engine might encourage the creation of an article on that organisation - so people could effectively pay for creating new Wikipedia articles on their organisations. Ideally, WP:NOTE wouldn't let that happen though, so that might even be a good thing. ;-) Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No, even a couple of Google ads on each page would be a fatally bad idea
On 6 Nov 2010, at 20:54, MZMcBride wrote: Liam Wyatt wrote: Whilst I don't support or advocate for Wikimedia projects including advertising, I would like to ask a hypothetical question. Would people's opinions towards ads would be different if google's ads were to be incorporated ONLY on the Search page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search in the whitespace on the right. This is by far the most popular individual page http://wikistics.falsikon.de/2009/wikipedia/en/ and ads there would be able to be served in a way that is both relevant to the end-user (based on the term being searched for) and yet without having to sell out our article pages. On the other hand it would mean we could no longer say we have zero ads and it would create a lot of angry Wikimedians (possibly me included) making the slippery slope argument. Careful there. A lot of people (and scripts) go through Special:Search because it follows links much better. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=mw:MediaWiki works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mw:MediaWiki doesn't work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=wikia:un:UN:N works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikia:un:UN:N doesn't work As far as I'm aware, this is the only reliable way currently (and for the past few years) to resolve interwiki prefixes in an automated and accurate way. I can't say for sure, but I have a strong feeling that this is the reason that Special:Search gets so many hits. Erm... how many people actually know what an interwiki is? I doubt it's a significant number. Combine that with how many people would think about of that particular usage of Special:Search, and I suspect that you're talking very small numbers. Certainly, I've never thought of that in ~ 5 years of using Wikipedia. Special:Search also likely gets a hit when the go button (or just the return key now) is used. This strikes me as much more relevant and more likely to generate a significant number of hits. All of these people wouldn't be seeing the page either. So your primary audience would be people searching on Wikipedia for a topic that doesn't currently have an article or a redirect. Given that a another sizable percentage of views comes from search engine results, the pool of actual views you're talking about becomes even smaller. I don't understand why this is a problem - if Wikipedia doesn't have a page on what they're searching for, then wouldn't they be more likely to click a sponsored link to somewhere else that does? The evidence is bolstered by another redirect page (Special:Random) having so many hits according to the data you linked to. It's not even possible to view that page in any meaningful sense. Put some ads there and I doubt you'd hear many complaints, but you'd be getting millions of views each month. ;-) Special:Random is just plain fun, though, especially when you're getting started with reading Wikipedia. It has a huge amount of popular appeal. As a result, I'm not sure that it's quite comparable to the search function, which is obviously much more orientated at finding a specific page/description... Calling Special:Search the most popular page (or basing fundraising theories on it) is dangerous and often misleading work. I'm not convinced of this assertion yet. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Page views
On 22 Oct 2010, at 02:02, Erik Zachte wrote: A quick update on our inflated page view stats: Ryan's hypothesis that deployment of the new CentralNotice banner loader had something to do with it has been confirmed. So those extra page views were actually internally generated requests, which accessed just two new special pages in huge amounts. Special:BannerController and Special:BannerListLoader http://stats.grok.se/en/201010/Special%3ABannerListLoader http://stats.grok.se/en/201010/Special%3ABannerController I'm a little surprised that those numbers are so low. ~70 million page views a day is only about 10-15 times the number of page views that the en.wp main page gets, and is way less than the number of page views that Wikipedia gets each day. It's also surprising that the two pages get different numbers of page views a day. Is there caching going on here, or are these pages not loaded upon every access to the site via other means (are they only called by the occasional centralnotice perhaps)? Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Free culture?
On 19 Oct 2010, at 18:44, Mike Dupont wrote: I don't think we gain anything by providing a platform for Kohs campaign, as illustrated at http://www.mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia against Wikipedia. Wow, this is very well written and interesting! please share more such information. /sarcasm, I hope, given the sheer number of inaccuracies and misportrayals in that document? Mike P.S. +1 for more explanation on why Peter was put on moderation... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Free culture?
On 19 Oct 2010, at 19:06, Mike Dupont wrote: On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: On 19 Oct 2010, at 18:44, Mike Dupont wrote: I don't think we gain anything by providing a platform for Kohs campaign, as illustrated at http://www.mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia against Wikipedia. Wow, this is very well written and interesting! please share more such information. /sarcasm, I hope, given the sheer number of inaccuracies and misportrayals in that document? serious This page about wikipedias faults points to some concrete places to help improve the quality of wikiepedia. of course you have to take it all with a grain of salt, I am just reviewing the wikia links right now. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearchlimit=5000offset=2target=http%3A%2F%2F*.wikia.com For example, who added a link to wiki http://water.wikia.com/wiki/Oil_sands is linked from How to Boil a Frog ? It is a link that is not obvious as how to value is added to wikipedia. * David Dodge, Dan Woynillowicz Chris Severson-Baker [http://water.wikia.com/wiki/Oil_sands], That page on wikia has some reference to an article from Woynillowicz but does not justify the link, doe it? Those sound like typical problems with external links on Wikipedia, not anything specific to Wikia. It's a shame that there isn't an easy way to only see the links in the article namespace, though, as that might make this list of links somewhat more useful (and a lot smaller)... Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Five-year WMF targets exclude non-Wikipedia projects
On 10 Oct 2010, at 11:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Despite repeated assurances at Wikimania, on lists and on strategywiki, that the strategic plan was going to consider all Wikimedia projects as important, now at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets the second target, «Increase the amount of information we offer» considers only the number of Wikipedia articles. «We're aware of the challenges around bot-created articles, articles of low quality, etc., and the limited focus on Wikipedia, so this metric shouldn't be seen in isolation, but is an important indicator.» Yes, but a wrong one. I'm, very, very disappointed: I have to conclude that all the words on community participation etc. were only empty rhetoric. It's a shame that the number of Wikipedia articles is the only entry under that heading, but this appears to be a vastly simplified document that is very black and white - every single objective only has one unit of measure, whereas there should be several for every one of them. I would hope that the Foundation's board recognised this (either officially or unofficially) during their consideration of it, and that the extrapolation of saying that community participation was only empty rhetoric is not a good extrapolation (I sincerely doubt it is - that reassurance will have been based in reality). In any case, I think one of the major benefits of the strategy exercise was to get Wikimedians considering where Wikimedia should be in 5 years and setting their individual aims accordingly. Getting the WMF Board to recognise those aims is only a secondary consideration, really, as it's the community that drives Wikimedia's success and breadth/depth/etc. of content. Mike Peel ___ 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?
Czesc all, On 10 Oct 2010, at 06:54, Przykuta wrote: Hi In pl wiki depth is very weak. We have many edits, like other bigger Wikipedias, but Ratio is problematical (Non-Articles/Articles). We have not a lot of non-article pages. Could you help us? Any ideas? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=good_desc http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ANowe_stronynamespace=4tagfilter=username= Przykuta It's a bit ambiguous as to whether this is number of non-article edits/non-articles over article edits/non-article edits (or even the number of articles vs. number of non-articles), but I'll assume the first one of these. Is this actually a symptom of a problem? It could even be viewed as the absence of a problem. One of en.wp's problems can be over-discussing something before it is carried out in article space, which can be seen by the extremely high number of edits to the talk pages compared to the content pages. Having a minimal amount of discussion per article can be seen as an efficient way of creating articles. However, it could also be seen as people not wanting to challenge the content of an article in a critical way, which might be more of a downside - a reasonable level of debate/controversy about articles tends to be productive in producing a balanced article on the subject I think image discussion is somewhat of a red herring/off topic discussion, as I'm not sure that there is much discussion that actually happens around individual images. The same applies to bot article edits, if these only make small numbers of edits. Does pl.wp have WikiProjects? If not, then perhaps this could explain the reduced number of non-article edits, given how many pages on en.wp only have wikiproject templates on their talk pages (or cases where having a non-redlink has promoted discussions). Thanks, Mike Peel P.S. I wish that en.wp sent all images to Commons - it would ease a lot of issues. ;-) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Free speech
Hi Peter, On 9 Oct 2010, at 11:15, Peter Damian wrote: My apologies for the Godwinism. I am a writer, the idea of preventing someone expressing a viewpoint is reprehensible. Disruption to the project of building a comprehensive and reliable reference source is one thing. That is a matter of a 'preventative block'. Punitive blocks intended to prevent expression of ideas is another. As you must all know, Larry Sanger was indefinitely blocked simply for expressing the wrong opinions: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logtype=blockpage=User%3ALarry+Sanger Note that Larry was unblocked within ~30 mins of being [unjustly?] blocked on wiki. By our own Phil Nash, in fact. The practice of a 'community ban' is simply a matter of a few admins getting together and imposing one. On the comparison with China, that was naughty, I concede. But imprisoning someone is the only way of preventing the expression of opinions in the real world. In the virtual world, blocking is far simpler. That is the only difference. As a writer, I find the suppression of free speech far more painful and immoral and intolerable than mere incarceration. If I were in prison and still permitted to write, that would not be an imposition. Being prevented from writing is the worst crime of all. The mailing list is not a wiki; subscribers receive all emails sent to it regardless of whether they are productive input or not (compared to a wiki, where people can watch the pages they want and hence filter the comments based on their interest). As such, you should make sure that any comment you make is important enough to justify distracting several hundred people with it. There was nothing in the moderation process to the mailing list that prevented you from writing; it did prevent your comments from being heard for a short while (whilst a moderator checked that they were reasonable to send around, or even blocking them if they were troll-like), but that doesn't express you from presenting them in a blog post / email to individual people / academic paper / etc. Fundamentally: this was not the appropriate place for you to send that email. I fully support the moderation that ensued. Please, stop seeing absolutions* where there aren't any. In relation to your earlier comments about philosophy articles: if an irrational argument is preventing you from sharing logical arguments, then present a rational argument against it at the same location, remembering that there is a community present rather than a dictator (and hence there are always people to talk to on-wiki that aren't against you; if they're not around that specific talk page then their attention can always be attracted). Thanks, Mike Peel (who is hoping that this is of use/interest to the bulk of subscribers to this mailing list; apologies to those it needlessly distracted...) * This doesn't seem to be the right word; does anyone know the appropriate word for seeing 'absolute' interpretations that doesn't infer release from guilt/obligation/etc.? (offlist, please) ___ 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 5 Oct 2010, at 18:48, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: What is the main point of wikipedia to edit it, or to read it? Because the readability of something like the Bulger article is very low. Making it easier to edit with peppered refs will probably mean that more refs get added making it less readable. NOTE: when reading an article or a book one rarely looks at the references. They are, in the main, a distraction. I disagree completely; if I'm reading a non-fiction book, I find the references very useful, and wish that they were easier to track down. I find the ease of access of Wikipedia's references absolutely vital in its role as a starting point for research, as well as a double-check of where the information comes from. This is possibly due to my more academic background (I'm used to reading papers with lots of references, although I much prefer Harvard-style to the numbered style that Wikipedia uses), so I'm not saying that this is a widely held viewpoint, but bear in mind that there is a wide spectrum here. The references are there in articles or books for a reason. ;-) BTW, if anyone's not tried using navigation popups to read references while reading an article, then you're really missing out - it's fantastic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
Erm ... huh? 1) If you're interested in helping, and have experience/knowledge of languages, then get involved with the committee. 2) They're getting things achieved - they're fostering the development of new language projects, making decisions, getting the projects started, and doing this in a very effective way. Compare this with the ineffectual procedure for starting an entirely new project in any language, which hasn't gotten anywhere in the last 3(?) years. 3) Please point to _recent_ examples where they've made a bad choice (i.e. Klingon doesn't count, as that was before their time). I'm not aware of any. I agree that it's not good that they have a hidden discussion forum; as much as possible of the discussion leading up to a new project should be public, and i can't see a reason for secrecy. Apart from that, though, I don't understand these (somewhat bitchy) comments at all... Mike On 25 Aug 2010, at 21:21, Mohamed Ibrahim wrote: On 25 August 2010 23:01, Muhammad Yahia shipmas...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: I think it has been proven many times over now that the Language Committee works in mysterious ways with little or no community oversight or input, essentially a self-appointed committee of experts, mostly from similar linguistic backgrounds, handing down judgements about the rest of the world's languages from their overwhelmingly European ivory tower. It seems we as a community of people who care deeply about the future of potential new languages and the success of existing language versions within our Wikimedia community have no choice but to watch from the sidelines as they do what they please. -m. +1 Add to that the fact that a portion of their discussion archives is deliberately hidden from the public as if they are debating state security issues. So even after a decision is taken, we only have a patchy view of the process that led to that decision. -- Best Regards, Muhammad Yahia ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I agree with what Muhammad and Mark has said it's a pity that such resolutions that affect the whole community is controlled like this.. resulting in such projects that really make Wikimedia looks like a host for childish projects that's written in a funny language never seen written before in any respectable scientific book, website, etc.. -- - Arabic Wikipedia: http://ar.wikipedia.org/ Share your knowledge ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
On 23 Jun 2010, at 16:23, David Gerard wrote: Reliance on Google for what is really an essential function for those who aren't native English speakers is problematic because it's (a) third-party (b) closed. Same reason we don't use reCaptcha. I always think than not using reCaptcha is a shame, as it's a nice way to get people to proofread text in a reasonably efficient way. It would be really nice if someone could create something similar that proofreads OCR'd text from Wikisource... hint, hint. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikisource and reCAPTCHA
(Renaming the subject as we've changed topic) On 23 Jun 2010, at 21:31, Mariano Cecowski wrote: --- El mié 23-jun-10, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net escribió: I always think than not using reCaptcha is a shame, as it's a nice way to get people to proofread text in a reasonably efficient way. It would be really nice if someone could create something similar that proofreads OCR'd text from Wikisource... hint, hint. And how do you decide that what was entered is wrong or right? Better take a look at Project Gutemberg's Distributed Proofreaders[1]. Cheers, MarianoC.- [1] http://pgdp.net My understanding is that original text within the reCAPTCHA is shown to several different people; if they agree then the word is counted as correct. Looking at the Wikipedia article, it's a little more complex than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA There's a reason why there are two words to solve during a reCAPTCHA. What Distributed Proofreaders can do, Wikisource can do - but in a Wiki environment. If you haven't checked out the proofreading features that Wikisource now has, I would encourage you to give them a go, e.g. at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Frederic_Shoberl_-_Persia.djvu/92 Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creating articles in small wikipedias based on user requirement
Is it just me, then, that finds it easier and quicker to read top post replies than to search through large amounts of text to find the response? Inline posting makes sense if you're replying to an email that makes its point in the space of a few lines, but otherwise it seems easier to me to top-post and to leave the previous email below for context. Of course, any way that people reply always leaves duplicate and unnecessary text in the email, which can be a pain when you're catching up with a large number of emails in a thread. That's just one of the downsides of the mailing list format, with a setup that can't cope with full conversation trees but instead assumes that the conversation is perfectly linear. Another way of arguing this (since I only just found Keegan's second reply when cropping the previous email...): having a mixture of posting styles reflects the rich historical culture of email transactions, and is something that we should foster rather than try to do away with. Mike On 14 Jun 2010, at 05:23, Keegan Peterzell wrote: I agree ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On 24 May 2010, at 07:57, Erik Zachte wrote: Revision Review is my favorite. It seems more neutral, also less 'heavy' in connotations than Double Check. Also Review is clearly a term for a process, unlike Revisions. The downside is that 'Review' could be linked to an editorial review, and hence people might expect to get feedback on their revision rather than a simple 'yes/no'. I'd also personally link the name more to paid reviewing than volunteer checking. Combining the two, and removing the potential bad bits (i.e. double and review) how about Checked Revisions? Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion
On 9 May 2010, at 17:57, Anthony wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do things from the Founder flag. I even removed my ability to edit semi-protected pages! (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.) The community recognizes that you have given up certain permissions under controversial circumstances and reminds you that you that those permissions may not be reinstated without a proper request for permissions on meta. Daft question: the community here being ... you? Or is there a wiki !vote page saying this? Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Announcement list is active
On 21 Apr 2010, at 16:08, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 21 April 2010 05:43, Huib! abi...@forgotten-beauty.com wrote: Participation announcements for Wiki meet-up I'm sure there is a Wiki meet-up every weekend around the globe, posting this information to this list will probably spam. People interested in joining wiki meet-ups would find it in a local site and this list would probably reach to much people. Or there should be more information like Wiki meet-ups bigger than X people or something like that. I agree. Meetups, other than Wikimania, should be announced on local lists. I have no interest in meetups that are happening outside the UK since there is no chance I'll be attending them (if I know I'm going to be in another country and would like to know if there will be meetups there while I'm there, I will subscribe the the relevant local list, as I have done in the past). A summary, once a month or so, of the upcoming meetups could work well. I believe that there's a sufficient number of meet-ups that there should be something nearby to a significant fraction of the audience of the announce list; if not, then a note at the end saying Can't see a meetup near you? Organize one! might change that over time. It's probably something best appended to other information, though. E.g. have a headline of first meetup in [Country X] planned, or coverage of a big in-person event, and then append a list of meetups after the main story. Having said that: there's lots of other things that the announce list is better suited for than this. Mike Peel P.S. I'm looking forward to the day when we can have geolocated sitenotices for advertising meetups etc... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome to a new board member
Hi Bishakha, Welcome! I hope that you enjoy your new role. Could you share a little about your involvement with the Wikimedia projects before this, either as an editor or a reader? Thanks, Mike Peel On 5 Apr 2010, at 15:03, Bishakha Datta wrote: Thanks, Michael and Ting. Look forward to this new adventure, to becoming part of the community - and to meeting up soon. Yes, I did wonder whether you'll had noticed the POV-NPOV irony - but no worries on that score. Cheers Bishakha On 05-04-2010 14:06, Ting Chen wrote: Welcome Bishakha and looking forward to meet you soon in person. Ting Michael Snow wrote: As many of you know, we have had one vacant seat left on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees for the board to appoint. We have now filled that seat by appointing Bishakha Datta, a journalist, filmmaker, and nonprofit leader from India. In the course of finding Bishakha, we met with a number of great people and had a lot of support going through the process, and I want to thank everyone who participated. I hope everyone will warmly welcome Bishakha as part of our community. By way of background, Bishakha runs a nonprofit based in Mumbai that focuses on conveying women's perspectives in culture and the media. She also has been involved in other international nonprofit work, and her knowledge of India should be a great help to us as we move forward with the strategic plan. In general, her experience will be a wonderful asset and I think she is an ideal fit for the remaining board seat. In a bit of an ironic twist, Bishakha's organization is called Point of View, but rest assured that she understands and endorses the neutral point of view approach for Wikimedia projects. Her journalistic background means she appreciates the value of an objective presentation, and throughout our conversations with her it was clear that she supports our mission and values. We will have an official press release in the next day or so with some more information. I'm excited to be able to work with Bishakha, and I know that she is looking forward to being involved as well. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] list o' image donations?
Also see the 'content partnerships' page on the Wikimedia UK wiki that I've put together: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships/Content_partnerships Additions are welcome. Thanks, Mike On 16 Mar 2010, at 23:33, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, They are not donations they are images shared as part of a partnership. The partnership part expresses that care is expected of us to handle this material. It is vital that we produce the wonderful statistics as created by Magnus Manske. We have to refer back to the GLAM not only as a courtesy but also to provide provenance for the material that we show. Check out the info it produces for the Tropenmuseum.. Actually we should provide such courtesy if they are our partner or not .. http://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/glamorous.php?doit=1category=Images +from+the+Tropenmuseumuse_globalusage=1ns0=1 Thanks, GerardM On 16 March 2010 23:30, Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com wrote: Hello, Thanks for the question, Phoebe. Indeed, maybe it is better to begin a new page like Commons:Donations and have there a list in chronological order. Kind regards Ziko 2010/3/16 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com: On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 4:04 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Is there an list somewhere of major image donations/collections that have been uploaded to Commons in the last few years? E.g., the Bundesarchiv donation, Antweb, etc. It looks there's a list, but it's not updated. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Commons_partnerships (That's the category, also see the first page in it.) Thanks Casey. I wonder if partnerships is really the right all-encompassing term for that kind of large donation to Commons? Anyway, that's the kind of page I was looking for -- it just needs to be updated! Thanks. -- Phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Call for Participation - Wikimedia Track at the Open Knowledge Conference/Wikimedia UK AGM 2010
For anyone in the UK (or willing to visit the UK ;-) that hasn't seen the below, please take a look. Apologies for the cross-posting. This event is also hosting Wikimedia UK's AGM, so it is fairly important. ;-) Please distribute it to anyone else that you think might be interested. Thanks, Mike Begin forwarded message: From: joseph seddon life_is_bitter_sw...@hotmail.co.uk Date: 25 February 2010 12:01:55 GMT Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] Open Knowledge Conferece - Wikimedia Track (Call for Participation) Reply-To: wikimediau...@lists.wikimedia.org This year Wikimedia UK is partnering with the Open Knowledge Foundation in the organisation of the 2010 Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), an interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops. At this year's conference, Wikimedia UK will be supporting and organising a track dedicated to the projects and communities central to Wikimedia. We need your help to create an exciting and interesting track that will inspire and challenge Wikimedians and others alike. Could you give a presentation or host a discussion on a Wikimedia theme? Any subject relevant to the Wikimedia communities, free content or Wikimedia UK are welcome. Timeline February 25 (Thursday): Submissions will open March 28 (Sunday) 23:59 UTC: Closure of submission dates April 7 (Wednesday): Notification of acceptance of submission April 24 (Saturday): Open Knowledge Conference 2010 If you wish to participate but with good reason cannot meet one of the above deadlines please email conferen...@wikimedia.org.uk before the deadline as it may be possible to accomodate late submissions Themes Submissions should address one or more of the following themes: Wikimedia Communities - Interesting projects and characteristics within the communities; policy creation; conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity; multilingualism, languages and cultures; the development of Wikimedia UK. Free Content - Open access to information; ways to gather and distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and usability; copyright laws and their interaction with Wikimedia projects. Culture and Heritage - Ideas for potential partnerships, building on previous partnerships and the legal, technical and resource issues that are barriers to such partnerships. Technical infrastructure - Issues related to MediaWiki development and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; the Toolserver; the Usability Project; new ideas for development (including Usability case studies from other wikis or similar projects). Submission Guidelines Please email submissions to conferen...@wikimedia.org.uk. Please email the following details, all in English: Title: Theme: Closest category from above for your submission. Abstract: 50-100 words summarising the topic Summary: Detailed description of the topic - 300 words or more. May contain a link to a more details. Contact information: Email/Telephone and whether we may publish these details Additional Information: 1-3 sentence biography of the author(s). any special requirements (e.g. flipchart; OHP. A digital presentation will be assumed as standard) whether you will attend the 2010 Open Knowledge Conference (a) definitely, (b) probably, (c) only if your submission is accepted. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On 2 Mar 2010, at 01:18, MZMcBride wrote: You know what sounds toxic? The claim that a man is a new resident in the area and a known child molester. That's been in one of our articles for months and months; the only provided source is a dead link that's part of an advocacy site. Reverted last night by Wjhonson, for anyone wondering: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=West_Memphis_3action=historysubmitdiff=347211677oldid=346894057 Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Announcing: Britain Loves Wikipedia
Hi all, In case you haven't heard already, Britain Loves Wikipedia, a free photography scavenger hunt following on from Wiki Loves Art et al., will be taking place in 21 museums and archives across the UK throughout February, and is launching on Sunday at the Victoria and Albert Museum! Full details are now up on the WMUK blog, at: http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/01/britain-loves-wikipedia/ and also the Britain Loves Wikipedia website at: http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/ Thanks, Mike Peel Wikimedia UK PS: Apologies if you're not in the UK... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] open wikis for chapters....?
My viewpoint is: why restrict editing? As Geoffrey and Peachey mentioned, there are some pages that do need protecting, but other than that? A central part of the Wikimedia zeitgeist for me is that anyone can edit. If you restrict editing, then you're removing the ability for non- members to give their opinions and help out. They _might_ become members so that they can edit, but odds are that won't be the primary driver for them joining. Then there are people that can't join for whatever reason (in another country [if your bylaws restrict that], no money, ...). The Wikimedia UK wiki (http://uk.wikimedia.org/) is open for everyone to edit - even anonymous editors (who can even create pages - so we're more open than Wikipedia. ;-) ). There are pages that are necessarily locked down, but the talk pages are always open. That's worked out well for us so far. There's a little bit of vandalism, but it's been kept in check by board members and some trusted members that are also admins. BTW, I've never liked that the WMF's wiki is completely locked down. It feels a bit like a cabal. ;-) Mike On 12 Dec 2009, at 10:01, effe iets anders wrote: what will be the goal of the website? Answers should depend on that. The question whether open editing is a good thing or not, is not an absolute question, but depends on what you want to reach etc. First get consensus on that, then find the model best suited for that. -- eia 2009/12/12 private musings thepmacco...@gmail.com: G'day all, over on the wikimedia au mailing list, we've been having a discussion about whether or not our 'official wiki' should be able to be edited by more than just the current financial members (I think we've got around 30 - 50 members at the mo) ( see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaau-l/2009-December/ 002745.htmlfor the thread, and it sort of gets just a little bit heated) I thought I'd flick this list a note because the tensions between the foundation's aims and this more pragmatic decision have been discussed. What I'd like to ask this list's members is whether or not you agree that open editing is a good thing, and as many pages as possible on a chapter's wiki should be open to as many folk as possible? Obviously there are important factors to keep in mind in making these decisions, but I feel it would be useful for others not quite so connected to 'WMAU', but with a close connection to WMF in general, if they have a moment, to review our thread, and offer feedback and ideas as to whether we're doing it right, or (as I feel) we really should open up the wiki a bit more :-) best, Peter, PM. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF
On 10 Oct 2009, at 00:41, Samuel Klein wrote: In my experience, high-school teachers were 90/10 anti Wikipedia 3 years ago, and are slightly in favor of it today. This sort of thing would be a fascinating survey to run year after year. Does the WMF commission surveys like this? It would seem a natural thing to do - there are third party organizations that are capable of performing this sort of survey in a statistically unbiased way. (Am I correct in thinking that the only surveys done to date are those held on-wiki, and possibly that done by third parties such as ComScore without the request of Wikimedia?) Mike ___ 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
On 10 Oct 2009, at 15:00, geni wrote: 2009/10/10 Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net: On 10 Oct 2009, at 00:41, Samuel Klein wrote: In my experience, high-school teachers were 90/10 anti Wikipedia 3 years ago, and are slightly in favor of it today. This sort of thing would be a fascinating survey to run year after year. Does the WMF commission surveys like this? It would seem a natural thing to do - there are third party organizations that are capable of performing this sort of survey in a statistically unbiased way. (Am I correct in thinking that the only surveys done to date are those held on-wiki, and possibly that done by third parties such as ComScore without the request of Wikimedia?) Mike The complexity is that in certain groups being anti-wikipedia is a requirement for fitting in. A statement that you take knowledge seriously. I'm sorry; I can understand those sentences separately, but not when they are combined. Wikipedia is a way to take knowledge (and the spread of knowledge) seriously. That's why I'm here. I would hope that being anti-wikipedia (or anti-knowledge) is not a requirement for high-school teachers. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising Promotion and Job Opening
On 17 Sep 2009, at 17:22, Gregory Kohs wrote: They are a key constituency in supporting the financial stream, as every single one of them is worth 16 or more average donors. This doesn't seem quite right to me. average donors may financially be worth less in each donation, but remember that there's a lot more of them, and they're more likely to give repeat donations. Also, there's more to worth than just financial, e.g. in good will / spreading the word. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimania-l] Thank you!
On 14 Sep 2009, at 22:47, Tim Landscheidt wrote: At another conference, the video switched from the camera viewpoint to the slides back and forth (I do not know wheth- er that was done while recording or in post-production). Ob- viously, this requires more manpower but the result was worth it. Tim The easiest way to do this is to create images of the powerpoint slides, and add them into the recordings post-production. I believe that adding images into videos (with fading in/out) is fairly standard in video editing software. It's something that could be done by the community a) if they want, and b) if they have the software. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On 9 Sep 2009, at 00:42, Yann Forget wrote: Michael Peel wrote: ** A few of my favourite examples: WikiJournal, publishing scholarly works; These works are welcomed on Wikisource, if they are under a free license, of course. WikiReview, providing in-depth reviews of subjects; I think this can be hosted on Wikibooks or Wikiversity for the most part. There's a big difference between starting a new section of something, and starting something completely new and fresh. With the former, you get all of the baggage of that project so far - e.g. if you want to start something slightly different on the English Wikipedia, then you have to modify huge numbers of policies, argue with many thousands of people, etc. Sometimes it's easier to split something off and do it seperately - as WikiSpecies has been doing, for example. There's also a big difference between testing a project and launching a project. Tests are normally small-scale, aimed at just trying something out, rather than actually doing a project. It's very difficult to establish critical mass with that approach. Launching a project involves announcing it loudly to the world, and getting the attention of lots of people. As long as the basic idea is sound, you then get a large influx of people who want to try it out. Perhaps they don't all stick around - but some of them will. Of course, you can't do either very often, otherwise people will stop paying any attention. But for some projects, it could work very well. Especially if there's the backing of e.g. a funding body, which could easily be attracted now that Wikimedia is so large and popular. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] open IRC meeting w/ Wikimedia Trustees: this Friday, 1800 UTC
On 8 Sep 2009, at 18:46, Samuel J Klein wrote: Hello, We wanted to have a more informal forum for discussing Wikimedia issues with Board members, so the three new Wikimedia Trustees (Arne, Matt, and myself) are hosting an open meeting on IRC in #wikimedia this Friday. Where : #wikimedia When : Friday September 11, 1800-1900 UTC (11:00-12:00 PST / 14:00-15:00EST / 20:00-21:00CEST) Other Board members will hopefully be there as well; we picked a time when we knew all of the new members could attend. Please join with any thoughts or questions you have for the Board or about Wikimedia in general. If you'd like to see something on the agenda, whether or not you can attend in person, please add it here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Talk:Wikimedia_meetings#September_open_meeting Since we only have an hour, we will try to keep to the agenda. New topics brought up after noon UTC the day of the meeting will be addressed on-wiki if we run out of time. I'm looking for someone to help moderate the chat. If interested, please reply offlist. Thanks! SJ Great idea! I hope that this is the first of many. I'd love to attend, but won't be able to at that time. Will logs/minutes of the meeting be made available after the event? I've just added a question about transparency to the suggestion list - hope that's OK. I'd love to get the Board's views on cleaning up the WMF website (e.g. lots of material is still on meta!), but I'm not sure how well that would fit in. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On 2 Sep 2009, at 12:35, David Goodman wrote: There is sufficient missing material in every Wikipedia, sufficient lack of coverage of areas outside the primary language zone and in earlier periods, sufficient unsourced material; sufficient need for updating articles, sufficient potentially free media to add, sufficient needed imagery to get; that we have more than enough work for all the volunteers we are likely to get. I apologise for taking this slightly out of context, but it touches upon something I've been wondering about recently, which is: do we have a complete set of WMF projects? David focuses on Wikipedia, which is the main project, and also touches on Wikimedia Commons. We also have (in no particular order) WikiBooks, WikiSource, WikiNews, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and WikiSpecies, in all their various languages. Each of these has essentially its own set of volunteers (so I disagree with David's assertion at the end of his paragraph - different work brings in different volunteers). The latest* one of these projects is Wikiversity, which opened on 15 September 2006. That's almost 3 years ago. In terms of internet time, that's practically a generation ago. Do we now have all of the projects running now that we could have running? Are all of the gaps in our project coverage already done sufficiently well by someone else that we couldn't improve on matters by having our own? My personal feeling is that there's plenty of scope for new Wikimedia projects. There have been plenty mentioned on this mailing list, or on the various wikis, etc.** A wiki version of OpenLibrary is a good example of something we could try; even if it failed then it wouldn't be time wasted, as the result could be fed into OpenLibrary. So, I think the answer to my question is no. What could be the cause of this recent dearth of new projects? Could it be the presence of Wikia? Are we stuck in the mindset of just Wikipedia + supporting projects? Is the technical side of things too moribund to easily establish new projects? Are we afraid of trying new things (or worse, unable to try new things)? Do we lack the leadership to make new projects successful? Is it a limitation of not being able to make a living from working on Wikimedia projects? Wikimedia is big enough that it can launch new projects very publicly, and get a lot of support (both volunteer and financial) very quickly. It's widespread enough that you can ask a group of people in any room if they know of Wikipedia, and over half of them will.*** Actually editing Wikipedia might not appeal to them, but working on a different project could, especially if it's in their speciality. One final question: do we need to start looking for project donations - i.e. absorbing projects started elsewhere? Mike PS: my questions here are posed to be provocative. Please don't take them as accurately representing my viewpoints. * Note that increasing the number of languages that these projects use doesn't in my mind count as a new project. ** A few of my favourite examples: WikiJournal, publishing scholarly works; WikiReview, providing in-depth reviews of subjects; WikiWrite, where fiction can be written collaboratively; etc. *** Country-dependent. Your language may vary. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
On 23 Aug 2009, at 09:50, Bod Notbod wrote: On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com wrote: There won't be new lingua franca. ~30 years is now very small amount of time for changing behavior of the global society, while it is very large amount of time for machine translators. (Translation engines between similar languages are very very good now.) The Google Wave demo shows real time translation as things are typed. I'm sure you'll inevitably end up with some of the very strange sentence constructions you get whenever you do an online translation but it's still quite a remarkable feat. I was at a demonstration of Google Wave yesterday, and someone asked for a demo of the live translation robot. They weren't able to demo it; apparently it's been decommissioned by Google. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Email list archives
On 16 Aug 2009, at 03:58, Pavlo Shevelo wrote: For me Google Groups do a good job and it's enough. Yes, I would support the proposal to look at Google Groups (as alternative mailing list platform) closer. As we can see Wikimedia Brasil and Wikimedia UK are using that platform and perhaps not only them (I'm pushing this platform for Wikimedia Ukraine while we started from Mailman-based list, provided by WMF). WMUK still use the standard mailman platform [1]. As far as I know, it's just WMBR that are using google groups. Does Mailman not provide any sort of templating options that make it more useable? I see that the wikien-l mailing list has a themed front page which greatly improves how that page looks [2], but that doesn't seem to extend any further than that page. Mike [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning IRC office hours
The website link states 21st July - so I assume this evening... Mike On 21 Jul 2009, at 10:37, Florence Devouard wrote: Eugene Eric Kim wrote: Hi everybody, We're still in the process of getting up to speed, but I'm anxious to start interacting with more of you and garnering some feedback as we prepare to initiate this process. As a way to get to know each other and talk about the process, Philippe and I will be holding IRC office hours tomorrow on freenode's #wikimedia channel from 8-10pm UTC. (You can convert this to your local timezone using: http://bit.ly/ 1aCw9p ). It will be informal. We'll be around to chat, hear your ideas, and tell you what we know thus far. Please join us, and please spread the word to others who might be interested! Thanks! =Eugene Hello Kim, With hope that tomorrow is the 22nd, I'll try to be around :-) Happy to meet you. Ant ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia in the UK
What Wikimedia events or activities would you like to see take place in the UK? We're currently trying to pull together ideas for initiatives that Wikimedia UK can support, at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Proposals There have been lots of ideas posted at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Ideas which need fleshing out before they can be taken forward. We've also got a list of things that we've already supported at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives We're having an open IRC meeting to discuss possible initiatives, which will take place this coming Tuesday, the 30th June 2009, at 8.30PM BST (19:30 GMT), in #wikimedia-uk on irc.freenode.net . For more information, and to say that you'll be coming, please visit: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetings/Discussions/Initiatives Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, and is set up as a membership-run non-profit UK company limited by guarantee. To find out more information, to join or to donate, please visit our website at http://uk.wikimedia.org/ . Thanks, Mike Peel Chair, Wikimedia UK - http://uk.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited. Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository
On 26 Jun 2009, at 02:08, Samuel Klein wrote: Wikimedia currently doesn't like files as large as a feature film, or even a high-def short. (how should we address this? Brion mentioned something about making video easier to upload in November.) As I understand it, there are three issues with having large video files on Wikimedia: 1. Server capacity: Disk space + server load + bandwidth 2. Interface: Ogg only, no ability to create clips, rescaling, etc. 3. Community will (1) I assume is fairly easy to solve (simply by throwing money at the problem) provided that there's sufficient demand and money available. (2) is at least partly on its way, I believe, as per recent news stories [1]. (3) I don't know whether there's the will in the community to have large video support, partly as it's already done to an extent by archive.org and partly due to bandwidth/resource concerns (both the uploader's and Wikimedias) Videos are resource-heavy, and community-light, unlike text content on Wikipedia, or even images on Commons. It will remain community- light unless we want to go the way of YouTube. It's still very difficult to create decent quality, useful video. Having said that, IMHO having a usable (high quality) copy of public domain videos, and educational videos (PD or user-created), on Wikimedia sites can only be good. But is there any reason not to include other bodies of published sources now available under free license? Wikisource is currently the closest thing available to a unified place to categorize, comment on, and provide bidirectional links to source text and files of any sort. It should in some ways be our largest project, and even our most widely cited. Wikisource is for textual sources, not videos or files in general - that's Wikimedia Commons. Mike [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10269308-17.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons: Service project or not?
On 16 Jun 2009, at 18:56, Geoffrey Plourde wrote: Commons is an oddball project. Other projects produce work, but Commons stores it. Wikisource could be considered another oddball for the same reason. At this point in time, I would class Commons as a service project (and wikisource as well) because it provides a service to other projects and its only point is to provide a service to other projects. Unfortunately, I can not fathom any reason that Commons should be or is a independent project in its own right. It would be like making all the filing cabinets in an office their own division. I produce images for Commons in an analogous way to producing text for Wikipedia. I don't expect all of the images that I upload to Commons will be used in Wikimedia projects. I do hope that they will be useful for projects/education/life in general, though, both within Wikimedia and without. Wikipedia itself can be regarded as a service project - it is providing content/a service for other projects. Fundamentally, we are about making content/information available freely to everyone. I think that Commons (and wikisource) does this as well as any other project (although of course they do this more effectively in combination than separately). Commons does however provide multimedia for Wikipedia. Hence I view it both as a project in its own right and a service project, but primarily the former. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Some reflections about the governance of Commons
That is more to do with the interface to Commons, as I understand it, rather than the governance of it. Flickr is seen as being much easier to use. I believe that was also the origin of Pikiwiki - essentially creating a better interface to Commons. BTW, to date I've never had a problem with Commons (after 2000 edits and 500 images uploaded). Mike On 15 Jun 2009, at 17:58, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, There is a project called Wiki loves art/nl In this project people make pictures of objects in museums in the Netherlands. The thing I have been wondering about is that the pictures are first published on Flickr and then are copied into Commons. This is a project of the Dutch WMF chapter and some other organisations. I read it as there are too many problems with posting on Commons directly. The reason why I bring this up is because it demonstrates how Commons is not thought of as the helpful project it should be and it is not only pikiwiki that has a problem. Thanks, GerardM 2009/6/12 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de Hello, I had started a discussion on the Village Pump of Commons. I think Commons is a very important project, and a very complicated project. With more and more projects initiated by our chapters to encourage other organizations or individuals to give their content free and upload them to Commons it also becomes a fassade project of the Foundation and its chapters. This and other reasons make me think that we should as broadly as possible to discuss a few issues on Commons. The discussion is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Commons:Village_pump#Some_reflections_about_the_governance_of_Common -- Ting Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
Having just watched the talk/show/discussion/dancing, I agree completely with Steve's comments on wikien-l: On 29 May 2009, at 04:52, Steve Bennett wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQeurl=http%3A%2F% 2Fwave.google.com%2Ffeature=player_embedded (See from about 31:00 onwards for the relevant bit...) Real-time collaborative editing. Scroll back and forth through history, showing changes by a single user or of a single paragraph. Embedded comments updated in real time. Edit from multiple clients. Could we please have all of this? This is several orders of magnitude better than MediaWiki's collaborative editing features. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list wikie...@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l I'm not so sure about the rest of the wave idea (I dislike being trapped within a browser rather than using the whole of a computer's interface, and I'm vary wary about the apparent lack of interaction with existing systems and the whole client-server interaction), I thought that the interface was amazing. I would love to see a Wikipedia article develop along the lines of the play back option; it would be great to be able to instantly edit Wikipedia, and see other people's edits in real time (although real- time vandalism could be interesting...). Being able to drag-and-drop images into an article/onto Commons from a desktop, or from elsewhere on the web, would be a real timesaver. Could this be considered by the Usability team, or is this way beyond their scope? Could we ask Google nicely to come up with a brand new interface for mediawiki? ;-) Mike On 29 May 2009, at 20:10, Milos Rancic wrote: Probably, some of you already saw that Google made something for which I think that it will be the new form of the mainstream Internet perception. You may read Slashdot article [1], a good description at the blog Google Operating System [2] (not officially connected with Google) and, of course, you may see the official site with more than one hour of presentation [3]. I expected such kind of tool (a client connected with others via P2P XML-based protocol; with servers for identification). However, I didn't expect that i will come so soon, that it will be done by one large corporation and that it will be done at the right way: open protocol, free software referent implementation. At the official site they said that it will start to work during this year. As one large corporation is behind the project, as well as free and open source community is able to participate, I have no doubts that it will be implemented all over the Internet (and not just Internet) very quickly. Probably, in two years the basic component of one modern operating system will not be a Web browser, but a Wave client. Probably, Web will become a storage system, while all of the interaction will be done via Waves. This development of Internet is very strongly related to the Wikimedia projects: * I want to be able to edit Wikipedia through the Wave client. * I want to add my own notes to articles, history of articles etc. * I want to have collection of my knowledge at one place, including Wikipedia articles and my notes. * I want to be able to make a program which would analyze articles on Wikipedia and to give program and/or analysis to my friends. * I want many more things to be browsable or editable or whatever from a Wave client... All of those my (but, in one year, not just my) wishes may be fulfilled just through work on MediaWiki and Pywikipediabot. So, I am calling all of you who are willing to think about it or who are at the position to think about it -- to start with thinking :) [1] - http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/1912226/Googles-Wave- Blurs-Chat-Email-Collaboration-Software [2] - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html [3] - http://wave.google.com/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
On 15 May 2009, at 08:36, Nikola Smolenski wrote: Michael Peel wrote: On 15 May 2009, at 08:01, Nikola Smolenski wrote: Perhaps this is off-topic, but I wanted to say it for a long time. The more time passes, the more I wonder if people who work on Wikipedia have ever seen an encyclopedia. On Wikipedia, dictionary definitions and image galleries are forbidden, and stubs are frowned upon. Yet every encyclopedia I have ever seen has dictionary definitions, and image galleries, and stubs-a-plenty. I guess that conclusion is that we are doing something wrong. They're not forbidden: they're just in a different location (Wiktionary and Commons). Wiktionary has dictionary definitions, but they can't be expanded to cover what encyclopedic aspects of the topic could be covered. Commons has image galleries, but it does not have encyclopedic image galleries. Commons galleries feature images based on their aesthetic value, but do not offer encyclopedic information about the topic that should be presented by the images. In cases where there is encyclopaedic benefit and/or aspects to having definitions and/or image galleries, then I'd expect WP:IAR to be applied. In the vast number of cases, though, I'd be very surprised if this was the case - e.g. nearly every single image gallery I've seen on Wikipedia has been for the benefit of showing off the authors' photography skills. ;-) (BTW, I've seen image galleries used at least semi-encyclopaedically, e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Solar_eclipse_of_August_1,_2008 , although perhaps someone will decide to remove them after this email...) Could you clarify what you mean by stubs are frowned upon? The only reason I can think of for that is that it would be better if they were developed into better articles rather than left as stubs... People dislike stubs. Sometimes, stubs get deleted because they have too little information, even while they are about a valid topic. Sometimes, stubs get merged into larger articles with suspicious choice of topic. Sometimes, stubs get converted into redirects to articles on similar topics, where information contained in the stubs is eventually lost. All of this is done in cases where a traditional encyclopedia would have stubs. All I can say to that is that it's a great pity if that happens... Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
I don't want to restart this rather long (but very interesting) topic, but I'd like to point out / remind people that a couple of well-placed fires could wipe out most of wikipedia et al. as we currently know it - surely the first priority, before thinking about the real long term, is to sort that out? Remember the Library of Alexandria... Mike On 7 May 2009, at 15:21, Aryeh Gregor wrote: On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: In that futuristic approach I find it more likely that there will be no paper / printer, but instead everthing will be stored into computers/PDAs and transfered between them. So in the event of the catastrophe you'd be only able to access it with the surviving devices. In such a futuristic world, I would expect that the major sources of power would be things like solar and geothermal that don't require long-distance supply chains. Then even if the world falls into anarchy, some well-stocked parts will still have power for a good long while. So you wouldn't need to actually print it out, you'd have computers running continuously in some places. Even if 95% of humanity was wiped out, you'd still have a few hundred million people. Not one of them is going to be in a position to save some computers? Even militaries, which are prepared for all sorts of disasters -- some of which will have computers in multiple geographically distributed bunkers deep underground with enough fuel on-site to keep them running for days to years? You have a copy of wikipedia on your hard disk. You can access it. But your computer lifetime is finite. And you also don't know for how much time you'll still have electric current. What do you do? Screw Wikipedia. If I want to preserve useful knowledge, I'll make sure to safeguard my textbooks. In terms of utility for rebuilding society, the value of Wikipedia is zero compared to even a tiny university library. And there are many thousands of university libraries already conveniently scattered around the world, not a few of them in subbasements where they'll be resistant to nasty things happening on the surface. On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I wouldn't go quite that far. The idea of doing it (or having done it) makes people feel good, due to the collective sci-fi-like fantasy implicitly promulgated by the project itself -- a future world of poverty and decay, saved by the serendipitous discovery of a time-capsule sent from the past. It's a spectacle, a stunt, and it has PR value. I certainly don't begrudge the Long Now Foundation for having done this with the Rosetta Project, since their primary goal is to encourage long-term thinking, and expensive stunts are obviously a key part of that. But Wikimedia's goals are somewhat different, and we could probably find some stunts which are more relevant to our mission. Okay, I can agree with that. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
On 10 May 2009, at 22:06, David Gerard wrote: 2009/5/10 Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net: I don't want to restart this rather long (but very interesting) topic, but I'd like to point out / remind people that a couple of well-placed fires could wipe out most of wikipedia et al. as we currently know it - surely the first priority, before thinking about the real long term, is to sort that out? Remember the Library of Alexandria... The new dumps are progressing very well. Presumably when they're done we can give the Internet Archive and any similar archivists a yell. I'll believe that when the dump's finished running... (or is the dump process recoverable now?) Personally, I'd like to see much more mirroring of the live databases, spread around as many countries/continents as possible, in addition to dumps being made available regularly. Does the WMF have a disaster recovery plan? Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people
From the Chapters point of view, Berlin is pretty much as central as you can get (restricting locations to those on the surface of the planet!). I don't know the distribution of developers, so can't comment about that. If you look at the board meeting alone, then yes, it would probably make much more sense to hold it elsewhere - but combine it with the other meetings, and Berlin is a very sensible place to hold it. Voice and video conferencing have come a long way, but are not even close to meeting in person in terms of time-effectiveness or effect on relations, especially if the people involved haven't met each other before. Until meetings can be held in immersive 3D environments, I doubt things will improve (and even then, meeting over tea/beer can't happen, which is incredibly useful to get to know someone). The locations that you list for board meetings all tally extremely well with places that other events have happened in - mostly Wikimanias - and I would assume that the dates are in very good agreement. It makes a huge amount of sense for board members to go to those events (whose location isn't determined by the board), and once they're all together why not hold a board meeting? Note that within the academic world, far more exotic and far-flung places are chosen for conferences. In comparison, the WMF is incredibly restrained! BTW, I trust that, since you are so in favour of being green, you never go on holiday to foreign countries, and avoid making any unnecessary trips (be it long or short distance)? Mike Peel On 1 May 2009, at 18:06, Gregory Kohs wrote: The purpose of my question was to examine the carbon impact on our global environment by holding this meeting in Berlin, which (by my estimation) is quite a ways off from the point of least cumulative distance that could have been achieved for at least the mandatory attendees. All of that additional jet fuel and hotel consumption (laundered sheets, poor recycling standards, etc.) is something to consider if the polar ice melts and floods San Francisco one day, thanks to CO2-accelerated warming. A shorter-haul Boeing 737 flight burns about 200 pounds of fuel per passenger. I can only imagine that a trans-continental flight, plus a trans-Atlantic leg to Berlin, is likely burning at least 400 pounds of fuel per passenger. Return trip makes that 800 pounds of fuel. I hope each of the San Francisco-based attendees feel comfortable that their burning of 800 pounds of jet fuel (about 114 gallons) in order to attend the conference in Berlin (a conference that, as far as I can tell, had zero dial-in conferencing options offered) was justified? I get the impression that there is a corporate culture afoot at the Wikimedia Foundation that stifles any attempts to optimize meetings and conferences in ways that might be more economical and environmentally friendly, with innovations such as Skype and video- teleconferencing. My sense is that interesting and exotic places are chosen instead... San Francisco, the Netherlands, Berlin, Taipei, Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia), Buenos Aires, etc. I suspect it's part of the corporate culture to get the backwater taste of St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) out of everyone's mouth, to select all of these far-flung, non-English- speaking locales for a Board that consists mostly of North Americans who speak English, and who are funded mostly by U.S. dollars. I know that regarding a recent trade conference that was only 124 miles from our headquarters, my Fortune 100 employer sent down an edict that only one of the 3 people from our team of 14 personnel who were interested in going, could actually attend. Certainly, this was more of an economic decision than a green decision, but frankly, the two are often hand-in-hand outcomes. Is the Wikimedia Foundation very green in its governance practices? I know that Wikia, Inc. touts its dedication to Green, but what about the WMF? Here's a 100-gallon aquarium: *http://tinyurl.com/100-gallon-tank* Imagine it full of jet fuel, then setting a match to it, sucking oxygen out of the air, and replacing it with carbon-laden molecules. That's what each of the North American board members did to enable travel to Berlin to hold their meeting which seems to have exhausted most of the attendees. -- Gregory Kohs ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] depth
Perhaps a better thing to quantify is the usefulness, rather than the quality? That is, ask the people reading and using articles how useful the article has been to them? Or, more generally, ask them to rate articles on a scale of 1 to N, where N is e.g. 5. By doing that, you can learn about the distribution of ratings (== quality/usefulness/???) within a wikipedia, or within a subsample of the wikipedia (e.g. featured or good content). It provides a complementary statistic to article ratings, which are generally done by editors. It also highlights articles where we as editors think we've done a good job, but perhaps readers don't. Add in the evolution of the rating with time (possibly with a half-life for an individual rating) and you get to see the direction that the article's heading in. It's a simple, unobtrusive, commonly used tool that's much more likely to be used than any type of survey, yet is direct from the users rather than being an inferred quantity. (This isn't my idea; if I remember correctly, it's [[en:User:Majorly]]'s. I hope he doesn't mind me passing it on. I've just added my slant, and hopefully inserted it at a useful point in this discussion.) Mike On 23 Mar 2009, at 20:26, Nikola Smolenski wrote: Дана Monday 23 March 2009 20:00:06 Thomas Dalton написа: 2009/3/23 Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com: There are many situations in which it could be useful to have a way to quantify the quality, rather than just number of articles, of a Wikipedia edition. If the whole formula is flawed, we should find a better one. Step one: Define quality. If you give me an unambiguous, uncontroversial definition of quality, I'll find you a formula for it. It doesn't have to be unambiguous or uncontroversial, it only has to be useful. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
On 20 Mar 2009, at 08:57, Tim Landscheidt wrote: Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: The issue, from my point of view*, is that they do suddenly become devoid of meaning as soon as those links stop working. This can happen for a number of reasons, including article moves, deletions, and (insert deity forbid) wikipedia.org going away. There are no guarantees that I'm aware of that the links will continue to work for even a decade, let alone the full length of copyright (and, given the tendency to attribute authors even for PD works, afterwards). On the other hand, a local copy of the author list (normally) stays accessible as long as the work does. [...] Is this problem really exclusive to online references? I'd guess there is plenitude of author references to [...] et al. (or none at all) out there that cannot be resolved without access to a catalog or the source material itself and become devoid of meaning at the latest when these re- sources are destroyed or not accessible. I'm not talking about references to a text, I'm talking about a copy of the text. That's completely different. Please, give me examples of where text is reprinted with the authors attributed as [...] et al. or none at all. If the shards of a coffee mug with a URL attribution get excavated 100 years in the future, I think a bit of research on the part of the archaeologists can be asked for. The whole discussion of coffee mugs is a red herring. That's most likely using a quote from an article, which would fall under fair use anyway and probably wouldn't (or shouldn't) need URL attribution. I'm interested in the cases where a substantial part (or all) of the text is used. Wikipedia has many uses, and I don't think a one-size-fits-all attribution-by-url works, technically nor logically (and possibly not legally, given the debates going on at this mailing list). I'd much rather see a sliding scale of attribution, based on how much of the content you're wanting to reuse and the situation in which you're reusing it. If you're printing a book with wikipedia content, then a full author list is reasonable. If you're using a paragraph online, then perhaps attribution-by-url is appropriate. If you're using a sentence in a news article or on a coffee mug, then attributing Wikipedia would probably be OK. So long as the tools for the different levels of attribution exist (the only two lacking are an easy and obvious way to get an author list from wikipedia and a decent history URL), then why not set up a page on wikipedia (et al.) which the community can edit (and debate), defining the levels of attribution required? Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language
On 20 Mar 2009, at 17:03, Ray Saintonge wrote: Michael Peel wrote: On 20 Mar 2009, at 08:57, Tim Landscheidt wrote: Is this problem really exclusive to online references? I'd guess there is plenitude of author references to [...] et al. (or none at all) out there that cannot be resolved without access to a catalog or the source material itself and become devoid of meaning at the latest when these re- sources are destroyed or not accessible. I'm not talking about references to a text, I'm talking about a copy of the text. That's completely different. Please, give me examples of where text is reprinted with the authors attributed as [...] et al. or none at all. A copy of Wikipedia text is frequently used in eBay descriptions of books. The attribution is simply to Wikipedia, and does not progress so far as to say [...] et al. That's about as much as anyone could reasonably expect, no matter what the licence says. I was meaning non-Wikipedia text, i.e. existing attribution methods for other works. In the case of eBay, where the use is temporary, attribution by URL seems fine to me. Were it more permanent (e.g. a proper website, or a book), then attribution by author names would seem more appropriate. Only my own laziness and the economics of publishing prevent me from putting together a book of related Wikipedia articles. (Maybe a wiki-guide to Vancouver in time for the upcoming Olympics.) If I did I could do so safely in the knowledge that no-one would sue me. For any author to expect otherwise is to suffer (to use Milos's appropriate term) from bourgeois egotism. That's an argument for clear rules, with no relation to attribution. A simple rule saying if you use this text for that, attribute these authors suffices and removes any doubt about anyone being sued. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The reality of printing a poster
On 2 Feb 2009, at 07:11, Gerard Meijssen wrote: - When I TELL you that something spoils a picture for me, you can ignore this, or you accept this. When I have a framed picture I do not want the license printed with it, I do not want a list of authors. I want a clean picture just as it would be when I have it printed at my local copy shop. Is this full stop, or meant in a specific way? Obviously, having the license, author list, etc. printed on top of the image is unacceptable. However, I've seen posters with a small white space at the bottom where the author name and copyright is given. I've also seen posters where the information is put on the back of the page. Would those options be acceptable? I have made a number of images available on the Wikimedia Commons under a CC-BY-SA license. I'm quite happy for people to print them off, so long as my name remains attached to them (i.e. I'm attributed, as per the license). It's easy to do this in an unobtrusive manner. I've so far been unable to find out whether the WMFR poster printing setup includes attribution or not; does anyone know the answer to this? Mike PS: To date, I'm aware of one of my images being printed out in poster form. In this case, I wasn't attributed - but in this specific case I don't mind because they sent me a copy of the print (there was a delivery mistake, and they got two copies). That was fine by me, but it would have been even nicer if I was attributed ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The reality of printing a poster
On 3 Feb 2009, at 21:39, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, The change of the license will happen not only for Wikipedia but for all projects as I understand things. The change of license can only apply to wiki-created GFDL works, which does not apply to the images. They will remain with their current licenses. When you do not like the notion that in real life people want a clean print, you will find that your legalistic approach hardly survives the real world. There are people who like their jeans with labels. I remove them if I can. In a way you take the position of the RIAA. Thanks, You still buy the jeans with labels attached; it's up to you if you remove them later. The RIAA's stance is completely different to mine. They want you to pay money (preferably repeatedly); I only care about attribution. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
Hi all, The author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton, has just uploaded the book to Wikipedia under the GFDL, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual My reaction when I spotted this was: great, but shouldn't this be on Wikibooks? Part of the author's response to this was that the agreement between O'Reilly Media and the Wikimedia Foundation was that this would be at /Wikipedia/ ... [do] not remove it from this site without a /lot/ more discussion among a /lot/ of other people. Did the WMF really make an agreement saying that the content should be on Wikipedia, rather than a WMF project or simply under a free license? Does anyone want to weigh in with comments on this on the talk page? Thanks, Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
On 11 Jan 2009, at 21:46, Erik Moeller wrote: The GFDL (including prior versions) deals with author names for three different purposes: * author credit on the title page; * author copyright in the copyright notices; * author names for tracking modifications in the history section. ... In the context of Wikipedia, authors are not named as part of the copyright notice. I'm curious: why isn't a copyright notice displayed at the bottom of each article, stating the copyright owners of the material? That appears to be how GFDL is supposed to be used (as per How to use this License for your documents), taking document to mean an article. It's also standard practice to state the copyright owners (look at the large majority of webpages, or any book). Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL QA update and question
On 8 Jan 2009, at 22:16, Thomas Dalton wrote: I don't think that's clear at all. I don't know how many authors you are meant to attribute things to under CC-BY-SA, it may well be all of them. I need to do more research (or, I need someone to tell me the answer!). My preference would be: all authors that have contributed to the article, where that contribution has not been reverted, unless the authors say that they don't want to be attributed. There is a large amount of leeway here, though: I think even Wikipedia would satisfy the license, or on the other scale a complete list of every editor of the wiki. The WMF really needs to state up front what the attribution should be before we have the vote / start using the license (assuming we do). Note that for the GFDL the requirement is that five (or all if less than 5) of the principle authors of the document (which I would interpret as an article) should be attributed. Personally, for everything I've written, and any photograph I've taken, I want to be attributed when it is / they are used, with the option to waive the attribution if I dislike the usage of it. That applies both to content I've submitted to Wikipedia et al., and in general to anything else I do. I'm happy for that attribution to be relegated to an et al. in the case of being one author among many, where my contributions are less than the N authors being attributed. Mike Peel ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
On 13 Dec 2008, at 14:02, Platonides wrote: teun spaans wrote: Many times it works well. But the procedures also irregularly goes amiss. I also received deletion messages of a pic i had uploaded with a correct license. Some wikimedian had accidently removed the license, making a bot come along and warn me. By pure coincidence i happened to come along at commons - sometimes months go by without me dropping in - and was able to restore the license, protest angainst its deletion, and so on. 7 days is awfully short. One easy thing that can be approved is an email instead of a bot message on a talk page. But that wont change the self centered attitude of commonists. You *will* get an email if have chosen on your Preferences to get an email whenever your talk page is modified. Having that option available on WMF wikis was pushed from commons community, and in fact Commons was one of the first projects where it was added. Now it is enabled on all wikis but the big ones. From personal experience, this feature doesn't work reliably. I have a fairly large number of items on my watchlist at Commons and on Meta, such that there are edits made on average once a day, but I only receive the emails about those edits sporadically, and often in bursts. It is still a very useful feature, though. It's a pity that you can't have two watchlists on en.wp, such that you can use one to keep an eye on articles you're particularly attached to, with the other handling all the rest. Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] European Commission Green Paper - Copyright in the Knowledge Economy
On 14 Nov 2008, at 15:47, geni wrote: 2008/11/14 teun spaans [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Agree. And perhaps other organizations working with copy left licenses could be informed? There is nothing in there of any real significance to free licenses. Isn't that something that should be fed back to them, with a question of why this is? Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
