Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
As a footnote to the prior discussion, it has now come to light that Afghanistan apparently does have a copyright law [1]. It was enacted in the summer of 2008, and establishes life+50 years protection for many works, including those published before the law was enacted. Unfortunately, none of the wiki editors had noticed this apparent change of status during the last 3.5 years. -Robert Rohde [1] http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=241541 (English version) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 3:52 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On English Wikisource, we consider these to be public domain. We tag them that as public domain and explain why. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:PD-Ethiopia https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:PD-Iran https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:PD-Iraq I didn't know Wikisource did this. This would seem to imply that Wikisource is willing to import virtually any text at all from these countries, which seems like an ethically bad idea to me, for much the same reason that importing all possible images on Wikipedia seems like a bad idea. However, setting aside the ethical issues for the moment, it is important to note that these templates are frankly very incomplete, which makes their conclusions potentially erroneous. Under US copyright law (and more generally the Berne Convention), establishing that a work is in the public domain due to a lack of treaty status requires meeting several requirements, and those templates only address the most obvious one. These requirements are: 1) The work was first published in a country that has no copyright relations with the US. 2) None of the authors of the work are citizens of any country that does have copyright relations with the US. 3) Within thirty days of publication in the non-treaty state, the work was never also published in any other state that does have copyright relations with the US. Currently, those templates only mention the first point. However, the Berne Convention extends copyright protection to all citizens of the treaty states regardless of where they publish (point #2), so it is also important to consider the nationality of the authors involved. The third point is actually the most difficult in practice, since it requires proving a negative. The Berne Convention and US Copyright Law consider any publications occurring during the first thirty days to be effectively simultaneous, and authors will enjoy full protection under the treaty if their work was published in any country where the copyright treaty would apply. It is often very difficult to determine with certainty that a work was never published internationally during that first 30 day window. This is especially true as technology has made it easier for works to be widely distributed across international borders. In Kernal Records OY v. Moseley (US District Court, 2011), the court held that putting a sound file online for download amounted to simultaneous publication in all countries where the internet was available. Following that logic, no work first published on the internet could be considered as public domain due to non-treaty status. However, the US case law also contains a largely contradictory ruling in Moberg v. Leygues (US District Court, 2009), involving images appearing on a German website. So the issue of determining national origin in the internet age would seem to be somewhat unsettled in the US. However, the one thing that is clear though is that any claim to public domain status due to the lack of copyright relations needs to address all three factors raised above. John, can you raise these concerns at Wikisource? -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
I have updated http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-Afghanistan in an attempt to be compliant with US law and started a discussion about this at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#PD-Afghanistan The prior template, and the way it appeared to be used in some cases, seemed to suggest that any image taken inside Afghanistan was PD. This is of course not the case. Hopefully my updates at least address the minimum legal issues. I'm not at all convinced that having PD-Afghanistan (or any comparable PD templates on other projects) is a good thing, but at the very least such templates need to be consistent with Berne / US laws regarding the treatment of content from non-treaty states. In my opinion, the larger ethical issues still deserve further consideration though. -Robert Rohde On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: On 2/23/2012 9:37 AM, Robert Rohde wrote: Under US copyright law (and more generally the Berne Convention), establishing that a work is in the public domain due to a lack of treaty status requires meeting several requirements, and those templates only address the most obvious one. These requirements are: 1) The work was first published in a country that has no copyright relations with the US. 2) None of the authors of the work are citizens of any country that does have copyright relations with the US. 3) Within thirty days of publication in the non-treaty state, the work was never also published in any other state that does have copyright relations with the US. Regarding the second point, the coverage is actually even broader than citizenship, it includes residency. So if one of the authors is an Iranian exile living in Turkey, the work may be subject to copyright protection in the US even if it was published only in Iran. I think it's interesting to note that although the approach under discussion may seem like a mechanical application of law and entirely neutral on its face, the scenario I've indicated suggests that its structural effects could be far from neutral, with significant political consequences. Basically, it means that when a country that does not participate in international copyright agreements, to the extent that it may be a repressive and often censorious regime whose opponents are commonly forced into expatriate life, we could be indiscriminately republishing works acceptable to the regime while taking a much more restrictive approach to works from a dissident perspective. --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
Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: Is anybody aware of the situation on Commons with these countries? Should I alert Commons on this discussion? snip Commons requires that all images be free of copyright in both the US and their country of origin. Since most of the non-treaty countries do have domestic copyright laws, the restrictions originating from such laws continue to be enforced on Commons. The notable exception is Afghanistan which apparently has no domestic copyright laws at all. The case of PD-Afghanistan on Commons is mentioned in prior emails on this thread. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
Short version: A few countries currently do not participate in international copyright treaties. Most such countries have domestic copyright laws; however, many works originating in these countries are considered to be in the public domain in the United States due to the lack of a treaty relationship. In 2005, Jimbo declared that we would nonetheless respect the copyright laws of non-treaty countries as best we can [1]. Since mid-January, English Wikipedia has been having a well-advertised, but poorly-attended discussion that contemplates overturning this Jimbo-created rule. The proposed change would mean all works where the country of origin (as legally defined by US statutes) is a non-treaty state would be declared as public domain for the purpose of Wikipedia and allowed to be freely used. The current discussion features a 9-3 consensus in favor of this outcome [2], and some participants are now pushing for implementation on this basis [3]. Though all participants agree there no US copyright protection for works originating in non-treaty nations, this proposal raises a number of ethical and logistical problems. Longer version: As September 2010, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, San Marino and Turkmenistan have no copyright relations with the US. [4] All works published in these countries by nationals of these countries are considered to be in the public domain in the US unless they were also published in a country that has US copyright relations within 30 days of their original appearance. This means many modern and historical works originating in these countries may currently be used freely in the US. Nonetheless, most of these countries have domestic copyright laws protecting the intellectual property rights of their nationals. The law here is not in dispute, the question is how Wikipedia should respond to these works. Under Jimbo-created policy originating in 2005, we treat works from these countries as if they the countries DID have copyright relations with the US, even though they do not. This means excluding many works from Wikipedia that we would be legally entitled to. Personally, I agree with Jimbo that respecting the intellectual property rights of authors in non-treaty states is ethically the right thing to do. Simply appropriating all content published in Iran, Iraq, etc., as free is disrespectful to the authors involved. This is especially true since individual authors in these countries generally have no influence over whether their government chooses to participate in international copyright agreements. Allowing such images to be used on Wikipedia would also create a number of foreseeable problems for us and for reusers. Firstly, works in the public domain due to non-treaty status can be restored to copyright if the nation at issue chooses to join the relevant treaties. At the stroke of a pen, these nations could ensure their works were no longer usable. Such a change could create significant additional work for Wikipedians and numerous hassles for any reusers that chose to rely on such images. It is unclear how likely these countries are to seek treaty status in the future. However, membership in international copyright treaties is generally seen as a prerequisite for full member status in the World Trade Organization. Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Ethopia all have been applying for full member status in the WTO (the process takes years, and Iran began the application in 1996). The desire to join the WTO would appear to make it significantly more likely that these countries will join international copyright treaties in the foreseeable future. Personally, I think Wikipedia ought to focus on truly free content rather than public domain content with a significant chance of being revoked in the future. There are also practical problems with determining that a work originates in a non-treaty state, that the authors are all nationals of that country, and that the work was not also published in a treaty state. (Some US courts have suggested that placing a work on the internet actually counts as publishing in all countries were it is available, which would imply that internet works would be frequently covered by treaty obligations.) Anyway, I think a change of this magnitude needs a more thorough vetting by the community. A consensus of 9-3 shouldn't really be sufficient to change how Wikipedia deals with content from non-treaty states. Though this discussion has been presented to RFC and has been open for quite a while, I suspect that the way the issue was framed made it hard for most people to participate. I'm raising the issue here, because I know many people on foundation-l care about issues surrounding copyright and reuse, and a change like this could set a precedent for what we ultimately do on the other projects. -Robert Rohde [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-August/027373.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Re: [Foundation-l] Smurfs Movie is infringing on wikipedia copyright
Is that screenshot actually from Wikipedia? It looks like the name is File:Blue Moon.JPG (though it is hard to tell from the video), but we have no such image under that name. The article [[blue moon]] actually uses a different image, and as far as I can see from browsing the history it always has. So, it seems like it might not even be a real screenshot of Wikipedia, but rather a page that had been further edited for their purposes. For example, they easily could have swapped in a public domain image of the moon from NASA. -Robert Rohde On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:59:05PM +0100, Mike Dupont wrote: I found a clip with the wikipedia lifting being shown : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJxqFMPe95c Do we get properly credited in the end credits? if not, it's time to ...UNLEASH THE LAWYER!!!... (Who can have a nice sit down and a cup of tea, and make sure they modify the credits properly. :-) ) sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ 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] A possible solution for the image filter
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 4:19 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: snip For obvious reasons we don't want a system that creates a publicly available set of filters that net nannies of various descriptions could use to stop other people from seeing things that they deemed inappropriate. snip Funny, I thought it was obvious that any filtering system should be made available to schools and similar institutional platforms. I have had the impression that the oh-my-god-think-of-the-children crowd was at least 95% of the reason we were discussing this entire endeavor. Teachers are wary of Wikipedia, and one of the reasons (justifiable or not) is that our content is too adult. I recall hearing anecdotes of Wikipedia reading being blocked in some schools because of this. Having a safe version for schools could potentially address that, and I'd always assumed that this was one of the major underlying motivations. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:00 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: The board resolution specifies a magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows. A wide-ranging survey has been conducted on the precise flight patterns and the importance of which way round the rainbow spectrum goes. These tiresome people who keep calling this impossible just do not understand that the high-level decision for a magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows has been set in stone. I don't have any unicorns, but there are lots of ponies. I'd be happy to stick a horn on one and call her sparkles if that would help? User rating / categorization systems are like ponies. They are a familiar and commonplace way of organizing things. They can be used to filter some things and reduce the degree of surprise; however they will always have both a large false positive rate and a large false negative rate. No filter is going to fly or shit rainbows. The question is not where to find mythical beasts, but whether dressing up a horse so that it looks a little like a unicorn would actually be useful. And that depends on whether there is actual demand for such filters, and whether having a filter that is sort-of-okay some of the time would be helpful to the people who want filtering. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] All human knowledge, by Jimmy Wales (?)
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:01 PM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: I think that the phrase meaning refered to Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge which is notable and encyclopedic. Not ALL, ALL, ALL human knowledge. MySpace discarded. When you look back to when that quote was issued (at least 2004), I think I tend to see it as broader and more aspirational. Wikipedia was already the biggest project, but we still imagined ourselves making a statement with Wikinews and Wiktionary and everything else. Back in the day, I can certainly imagine Wikimedia wanting to encompass all forms of human knowledge, including projects going far beyond the confines of what we now see as notable and encyclopedic. We have retreated from that quite a lot. Even within Wikipedia our notions of what was acceptable and what was not were far more fluid. The projects have accomplished an incredible amount, and we should all be very proud and amazed at what we have done. However, I do think we have lost some of that early dream. Back in the day, it was easy to imagine that we would eventually encompass all human knowledge, and now we tend to draw our goals more narrowly. In part, I think our perceptions of that famous quote have been evolving alongside our perceptions of what Wikimedia and Wikipedia have become. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Commons as an art gallery?
2011/5/16 David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com: How on earth can this become the POTD on any Wikipedia? It's tolerably well executed art, but utterly non-notable. The Commons Picture of the Day process allows photos / illustrations of a very high technical quality to be promoted even if they have no claim to notability at all. In general, notability has very little to do with Commons at any level. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] some worries about fundraiser and editor appeals boycotting it
On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ernesto García wbiblioteca...@yahoo.com wrote: Seeing http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics I'm quite worried about the onlook.. choosing year to date tab shows a definite deacceleration (and we still need about 4x the current cumulative amount). snip The target for fiscal 2010-11 is $20.4 M in total revenue, but only $13.5 M in individual donations under $10k. Most such donations (80-90%) come in via the annual fundraiser. By extension, the target for the fundraiser itself should be about $12 M. We've raised $6.7 M so far, which would be 55% of $12 M. At this point, we are about 40% of the way through the fundraiser. The slowing donation rate over the last several days is a natural result of donor fatigue and a sign of a campaign starting to grow stale. Simple projections accounting for the declining donation rate would put us around $10.5M at the end, and hence somewhat shy of $12M. However, experience suggests that variations in the appeal can often boost the donation rate even late in a campaign. So, while we will have to push a bit to meet the targets, I would say it is still entirely plausible to do so and there is no need to panic. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 5M by 2 weeks
The $5M over 15 days is very good news. I think it is fair to say that this appears to be the best managed fundraiser to date. It has exhibited both high production values and a high level of awareness about how to draw in the small-scale donors that are the backbone of the annual fundraiser. In addition, the communication with the community about the fundraiser seems to have improved over previous years. So great work guys. Keep it up. -Robert Rohde On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl wrote: :] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics and news http://pl.wikinews.org/wiki/Fundacja_Wikimedia_zebra%C5%82a_5_milion%C3%B3w_dolar%C3%B3w_w_ci%C4%85gu_2_tygodni We could expect 20M this year... ;) best regards przykuta ___ 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] Left on the Table
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 05.11.2010 23:44, hett Fred Bauder schreven: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? Fred According to alexa.com Facebook has a 3-month global pageview share of 4.74010%. Wikipedia has 0.52984%. That's about 1/9th. According to Wikipedia Facebook made US$800 million in revenue in 2009. 1/9th is US$89 million. Of course that's not a realistic number. Just an extremely vague approximation of an theoretically possible value. Wikipedia has the advantage that our content has very defined topics and ads matching the article's topic should be much more relevant and interesting to the user than Facebook's ads. But on the other hand Wikipedia is much more limited and cannot use prominent and intrusive ads, which will limit the possible revenue. And of course Facebook has (again according to Wikipedia) 1700+ employees while Wikimedia has just a small fraction of that. It's hardly possible to create similar revenue as Facebook without additional employees. Facebook isn't the greatest analog. One of the limitations is that Facebook isn't really an information site. Content rich sites tend to do better at generating advertising dollars because ads can be targeted to things that people are already searching for. Let's consider a different rough approximation. About.com About.com is part of the About Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the NY Times. According to their annual report [1], the About Group unit of the NYTimes had an annual revenues of $121 million in 2009. The About Group includes About.com, ConsumerSearch.com, UCompareHealthCare.com, Caloriecount.com and various minor sites (but it appears that more than 90% of their traffic goes through About.com). According to Alexa, these sites collectively accounted for 0.043% of global pageviews. (Compare to 0.53% for Wikipedia, 4.7% for Facebook, and 5.2% for Google). So scaling About.com's revenue to Wikipedia's traffic share would estimate $1.5 billion / year. Like the Facebook estimate, this is also a very rough approximation. An astute observer would note there is a very large range between the $90 M suggested by Marcus's look at Facebook and $1500 M suggested by this look at About.com. Personally, I believe the truth would probably be closer to the high end than the low end, largely because About would seem to be a better analog of what we do than Facebook is. But I also think it would be interesting to look at other comparisons. -Robert Rohde [1] http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2009/2009NYTannual.pdf ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Audited Financial Statements for 2009-10 Fiscal Year Now Available
On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Erik Zachte erikzac...@infodisiac.com wrote: snip Anonymous editors are no longer counted at all. This would have resulted in millions of addresses (nowhere near the 75,000 someone stated earlier in this thread). snip Millions of anons have edited. In any given month about a million anon accounts do edit. However, the number of anon accounts with at least 5 edits in any particular month is definitely not millions, it is several tens of thousands. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Mike Godwin leaves the Wikimedia Foundation
I would also like to add my gratitude to Mike for his years of useful service. It is hard to imagine who could be a suitable replacement. -Robert Rohde On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Again Kat found the right words. Thank you very much Mike for all the works you have done. I cannot remember how often I had to ask you about problems from copyright issues to BLP issues alone related with zh-wp. And all best wishes from me. Ting At 20.10.2010 18:39, wrote Kat Walsh: On 19 October 2010 19:45, Sue Gardnersgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, I want to let you know that as of this Friday, October 22, 2010, Mike Godwin will be leaving his role as General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. I'd like to thank Mike for everything. Since the nature of the job means sometimes you can't talk about everything you're doing (and a substantial part of your interaction with people is when something has gone wrong), he may not have gotten all the public appreciation he deserves for his work, but he has really been a great champion of the foundation and the movement, and guided WMF through a major expansion and some truly crazy situations. I have tremendous respect for Mike as an advocate and a person, and I wish him the best. -Kat ___ 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] Page views
Given that there doesn't appear to be any jump in page views or reach as measured by Alexa [1], I would be inclined to assume it is some sort of a glitch with our counting infrastructure. It is hard to imagine any simple external process creating a real 50% jump in traffic. If I recall correctly, Google is the largest single referrer and they only account for 30% of traffic or something, so they would have to more than double their referrals to raise our views +50% in a month. More likely than not, this is some sort of an error in counting for the current month. [1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org -Robert Rohde On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 9:52 AM, Joan Goma jrg...@gmail.com wrote: Is there any explanation for the extraordinary jump in page views this month? http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm ___ 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] Increasing the number of new accounts who actually edit
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I think Andre is right, and this is the reason for so many non-editing accounts, especially since SUL. I am sure someone can run a script to determine how many non-editing English WP accounts have a partner editing account on another project. Circa last May, roughly 15% of new EN wikipedia accounts were being created by SUL cross-overs. Even if you assume that none of these were to engage in editing, it still means that at least 80% of the unused accounts were created via local registration. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Increasing the number of new accounts who actually edit
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wikihanni...@gmail.com wrote: Did you know that less than a third of the users who create an account on English Wikipedia make even *one* edit afterwards? Two-thirds of all new accounts never edit! Interestingly, this percentage vary very much from language version to language version. Now, the question is not: what can we do about it? We know plenty of things that we *could* do. The question is this: what are the easiest levers to push that increase the numbers? I think we need to take a step back first. Before deciding on what to do about this, two other questions have to be asked: 1. Why are people creating an account without editing? 2. Do we want/need to do something about it? There are various reasons why people could register without editing. To name a few: * people coming in from other Wikimedia wikis, auto-registering through SUL * people creating sock puppets, then not needing them or forgetting them when they do need them or having them blocked before they have the chance to use them * people wanting to change personal settings * people thinking they can get something extra by registering (previous category, but then for personal settings that don't exist) * people who out of a habit register for every web site they see where they can * people who find they cannot create an article on en: wikipedia unregistered, want to create an article, register and then find creating an article is too difficult Not all of these categories we want to do something about their non-editing, and when we do want to do something about it, we should not use the same strategy on all. Therefore, before trying to solve the problem, I think you should first determine 1. whether there is a problem, and 2. if so, what the problem is Some recycled stats for EN wikipedia from many months ago: ~ 215 k account creations / month (~15% imported from other wikis) ~ 65 k new accounts will edit at least once ~ 22 k new accounts will edit at least 5 times ~ 8 k new accounts will edit at least 10 times ~ 2.4 k new accounts will eventually edit at least 100 times. There is a huge gap between the number of registrations and number of new accounts that edit. However, there is also a huge gap between the number of people who edit at least once and the number that edit at least 10 times. From the user interaction tests done by the Usability Initiative, it is clear that a significant portion of visitors are confused, intimidated, scared, or otherwise discouraged when they first encounter the editing process. I don't think it takes a big leap to conclude that feeling uncomfortable with making edits is a major reason that people abandon new and lightly used accounts (though it is certainly not the only reason). Currently, only about 1.1% of account registrations reach the level of 100 edits. That conversion rate is tiny. Even if there are many different reasons that such people abandon editing, I have to imagine that a significant portion of the other 99% are people we can capture and develop into active editors given a bit more support. Even if such efforts can only convince another 1% to become active editors, you would still be talking about doubling the size of the active community. So I certainly support initiatives that reach out to and help the very newest users. Exactly what kinds of support we provide will likely vary depending on what issues are determined to be most common, but regardless of the details, I think this is a very important avenue for outreach and growth. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive
Does anyone know what the status of the Internet Archive is with respect to being a practical ongoing concern? In the last couple years IA has added relatively little web-based content. For example, their Wayback Machine currently offers: www.nytimes.com: 11 pages since 2006 en.wikipedia.org: 5 pages since 2008 www.nasa.gov: 12 pages since 2008 scienceblogs.com: 0 pages since 2008 It gives the impression that they are so ineffective at archiving recent content as to be effectively irrelevant. They do have a warning that it can take 6 or more months for newly accessed content to be incorporated into their database, but at this point the delay has been significantly more than that. Even at their peak they rarely archived more than a few hundred pages per major domain per year, which still amounts to a tiny fraction of the internet. The idea of seeking collaborations with people that archive web content is a good one, but I don't know that IA is really in a position to be all that useful. -Robert Rohde On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 6:57 AM, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all; I want to make a proposal about external links preservation. Many times, when you check an external link or a link reference, the website is dead or offline. This websites are important, because they are the sources for the facts showed in the articles. Internet Archive searches for interesting websites to save in their hard disks, so, we can send them our external links sql tables (all projects and languages of course). They improve their database and we always have a copy of the sources text to check when needed. I think that this can be a cool partnership. Regards, emijrp ___ 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] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive
On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: snip No university, publisher, or newspaper has used my CC licensed images either commercially or non-commercially without checking with me first that the work is actually CC licensed. They have always carried out some form of due diligence to ascertain that the image is either licensed properly, and that they get a specific license to reuse. IOW they obtain a 'paper trail' of permission. Good for you. Most professional publishers do make every effort to carry out due diligence. However, I have had a several cases where well known newspapers and magazines appropriated my images without attempting to contact me (and in some cases even without providing any attribution). It does leave me to wonder how many other times my images might have been used professionally and/or improperly and I just don't know about it. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings
Personally, I don't see any intrinsic problem with different wiki communities having different policies about what kinds of auxiliary content they will accept (as long as it doesn't interfere with the basic mission of the project). I will say though that trying to control the ways that already public data might be aggregated is pretty unexpected from my American viewpoint. It is also seems pretty clear that aggregation of edit statistics is perfectly acceptable within the larger WMF Privacy Policy. Hence, I think the German Wikipedia community would find it nearly impossible to enforce their position on privacy with respect to the actions of most external third parties. It even seems likely to me that if the same information appeared on EN or Meta, that they would have trouble finding a consensus for deletion within those communities. So, if the Germans wish to have a more restrictive privacy policy governing their own content, then that seems fine, but I suspect they would have a difficult uphill battle to extend that decision beyond their own immediate sphere of influence. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Banner ads in sitenotice
While I appreciate the comments about people being overly sensitive, I do think it is still true that we should avoid unnecessary clutter. With that in mind, I would like to mention that I don't really like the big empty box approach. On my screen it looks like the banner is about 3.5 times the height of the text, and this feels rather excessive to me. It seems plausible to me that a bigger banner would have a higher click-through rate, though I don't know of any Wikipedia specific evidence to verify that. Even if that is true though, presumably one could have a smaller banner coupled to a longer campaign and accomplish the same effect as a big banner with a shorter campaign. Personally, I think it would feel less imposing and more friendly to have a smaller banner than ran longer. That's just my two cents. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Banner ads in sitenotice
Er, I mean: I think it would feel less imposing and more friendly to have a smaller banner THAT ran longer. Silly typo. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
Some technical questions about the logo: 1) What software was used in making the 3D model? 2) Are the data files for that model available somewhere? (Or will they be made available?) 3) The SVG files provided appear to be based on painted wire frames rather than true 3D renderings. This makes the files more easily scalable (and more compatible with SVG in general), but it also makes the sensation of depth less realistic. Is this a deliberate choice, and if so, why? -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
Myself and several other people find the new Wikipedia logo to be rather disappointing. Specifically it seems too small (lots of empty white space), and the edges of the puzzle pieces lack definition when shown at the web scale. For a discussion of this, including possible tweaks to make it bolder, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#New_logo -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
Tim's post is excellent. However there is a viewpoint on this issue that is important to me personally that I feel is not well represented by his spectrum. To the extent that Tim's spectrum does represent me, I am probably moderate. I recognize that some people (e.g. the conservatives) find certain content undesirable and I would gladly give them the tools to self-filter that content if they wished. Since conservatives are a major segment of the population, I also think it is pragmatic for public relations reasons to avoid collecting large numbers of redundant and/or unused images that have the potential to offend such people. However, I also see the issue from another frame that is not part of Tim's spectrum. Sexual photographs, especially those of easily recognized people, have the potential to exploit or embarrass the people in them. I place a high value on not doing harm to the models pictured. This is essentially a consent issue. If the model is a well-known porn star and wants to be shown nude to the world, then there is no problem. However, many of the sexual images we receive depict non-notable individuals who appear to be engaged in private conduct. If the uploader is being honest and responsible, then this may be fine too. However, if the uploader is malicious, then the subject may have no idea how their image is being used. Even if the person pictured consented to having the photographs made, they may still be horrified at the idea that their image would be used in an encyclopedia seen by millions. At present, our controls regarding the publication of a person image are often very lax. With regards to self-made images, we often take a lot of things on faith, and personally I see that as irresponsible. In a sense, this way of looking at things is very similar to the issue of biographies of living persons. For a long time we treated those articles more or less the same as all other articles. However, eventually we came to accept that the potential to do harm to living persons was a special concern which warranted special safeguards, especially in the case of negative or private information. I would say that publishing photos of living persons in potentially embarrassing or exploitative situations should be another area where we should show special concern for the potential harm, and require a stronger justification for inclusion and use than typical content. (Sexual images are an easy example of a place where harm might be done, but I'd say using identifiable photos of non-notable people should be done cautiously in any situation where there is potential for embarrassment or other harm.) Obviously, from this point of view, I consider recent photos of living people to be rather different from illustrations or artwork, which would require no special treatment. Much of the discussion has focused on the potential to harm (or at least offend) the viewer of an image, but I think we should not forget the potential to harm the people in the images. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Towards actual clean-up...
Many people have generally agreed that there are or have been a large number of redundant, low-quality penis pics on Commons. Towards understanding this better, I wrote a script to traverse [[:Category:Human genitalia]] and all of it's subcategories (it is refreshingly finite). In this category we have 772 images of male and female genitalia. Most appear to photographs, though some are illustrations or other art. For each image, I then determined whether it was in use in the main namespace of any Wikimedia project. Of the 772 genitalia images, 347 are currently being used to illustrate some page in the main namespace of some project. (That's still a lot of penis / vulva pics but I'll assume that the projects are at least somewhat reasonable about their uses.) The remaining 425 images aren't used in the main namespace of any project. They may still appear in other places, such as discussion pages or user pages, but are likely to be less valuable. I would assume it is images like these that are most likely to warrant exclusion by any policy that aims to address the proliferation of low-quality and redundant penis pics. Perhaps by looking at this list one can get an idea of what the issue is and consider the best ways to address it. I've compiled the list at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:List_of_genitalia_for_review (There are actually only 411 on the list, as I dropped 14 after my editor mangled the UTF8). -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
As some of you may know, Jimbo has recently used his standing in the community to dictate that Commons should not host porn. [1][2][3] He has interpreted this to include a wide swath of images both photographic and illustrative, and both contemporary and historical. In principle, I agree that having a stricter policy on sexual images is a good thing, but fundamentally we need to have a clear policy on what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Attempts to write one [4] have become a moving target that leaves us without a functional policy or community consensus. Initially, this was based on the characteristics of the USC 2257 record keeping laws, but Jimbo has gone beyond this by deleting non-photographic and historical works that would not be covered by 2257. In essence, right now Jimbo is deleting things based on his singular judgment about what should be allowed. [5] These deletions have continued with little apparent concern for whether or not an image is currently in use by any of the projects. This is a large change and lack of a clear policy creates a very confusing and frustrating environment for editors. (Multiple Commons admins have already stated their intention to resign and/or retire over this.) Again, I agree that tighter controls on sexual images are generally a good thing, but I believe the abruptness, lack of clear policy, and lack of a consensus based approach is creating an unnecessarily disruptive environment. Much of the content has been hosted by Wikimedia for years, so do we really have to delete it all, right now? Can we not take a week or two to articulate to boundaries of what should be deleted and what should be kept? In general, I would ask that things slow down until some sort of a clear policy can be created (either by the community or the WMF / Board). This is especially true when it comes to deleting images that are in use on the various Wikipedias. (Such deletions have already been widespread). I would also like to ask whether either the WMF or the Board plans to intervene? Because of Jimbo's historical standing and technical access, the Commons community is largely impotent to stop him. Multiple requests by the community that things slow down or a clear policy be crafted prior to mass deletions have thus far been ineffective. At the very least it would be helpful if the WMF and/or Board would express a position on the appropriate use of sexual content? -Robert Rohde [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Cleanup_policy (and following sections) [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content [4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sexual_content [5] http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALogtype=deleteuser=Jimbo+Wales ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
2010/3/30 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: That is the website UI, which is not content. They could say that the UI should also be completely free of copyrighted works. IMO that would be going overboard. If that is the case, while I understand and actually respect the decision not to use Wikimedia logos _to illustrate articles_ (although I don't agree with it), I find it extremely inconsequent and illogical to take away the logos that are in navigation templates and pointing to other material in other Wikimedia projects. As far as I'm concerned, these are part of the UI as much as the Wikipedia logo in the top left corner, and, more important, I find this decision actually harms our mission of distributing free content. If Wikimedia projects don't help themselves, I wonder who will. Anything that is rendered as page content will appear in the export dumps and needs to be considered by reusers, which includes those navigational templates. The logo at the upper left is different in that regard since it isn't part of the dumps. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
The related issues have been discussed on Commons, Enwiki, and Meta, at various times and places in the past. There is a legitimate concern that the inclusion of non-free logos is bad for reusers. On sites like Commons, which are expected to be exclusively free content, it also creates confusion to have thousands of non-free logos and derivatives. Personally, I also feel that it sets a bad example for a free content company like WMF not to have any formal policy on the third party use of their logos. Even within Wikimedia there is no agreement about what is allowed and what isn't, except that Mike and others have generally said they don't object to most uses by the community, even while reserving full copyright control and the right to object in the future. It has been three or four years since I first asked members of the WMF to draft a policy on logo use that would be clear about what is allowed both in the community and for reusers. One option is to release the logos under copyleft, but that has historically been flatly rejected by the WMF on the grounds that copyright is necessary for brand protection. I don't think copyleft is incompatible with brand protection, but even if one assumes it is, that isn't the only option. One could still write a policy that made it clear internally and externally that logos can included and reused alongside Wikimedia content, and when derivatives can be created, without going all the way to copyleft. Given that we don't have clear policies regarding logo use, I think the Swedish Wikipedia decision is entirely defensible. I don't think it is a good outcome, however. A good outcome would be one that explicitly establishes the allowed uses of the logos and their compatibility with our larger free content mission. Most of the time when this issue comes up, people just shrug and look the other way, but I don't really think that is a good approach for people that want to be respectful of copyrights. I would also note that the Meta community moved to a public domain logo some time ago in part because of the desire to avoid a copyrighted logo. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: I feel as if the many months of work I put into developing a new, clearer, liberal trademark policy for WMF has gone to waste! snip And now I really, really feel it was wasted! snip Darn it! A waste, I say! And I worked so hard to give you http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy. My sincere apologies to Mike (and whoever else worked on that). I am glad to see it. Though I do wonder why I've never noticed it before now. That document also doesn't seem to be referenced from the Copyright-by-Wikimedia templates, but we can go and fix that. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:11 AM, ster...@aol.com wrote: wikireader doesn't say whether the data is just plain text or somehow encrypted in their format. (I couldn't find it) I don't need pictures, just plain wikipedia-text. Best with the discussion-pages and all that. Suitable for keyword-searches, maybe even from program or batch-file Wikireader is article text only, no images or discussion pages. They include a limited set of formatting and other specialized code for layout in addition to the text, but nowhere near as extensive as raw Wikitext would be. It is all heavily compressed to make it fit in the space available, but that's entirely reversible of course. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects
In the specific case of the 16-year-old uploader's image, we don't really know if it was child porn or not, and the uploader denies that it was. A self-identified 16-year-old girl uploaded an artistically processed image that was cropped to show a woman's genitals apparently engaged in masturbation. Because of the artistic processing it is not obvious whether the image was based on a photo, or if it was based on an illustration (as the uploader claims). Regardless, the image was not identifiable as a child. The entire case that this was child porn is based on the identity of the uploader and the suspicion that the image might have originally been a self-photo before the image processing. Hence the image was deleted and oversighted out of what might be termed an abundance of caution. It might be illicit, and there were some reasons to be concerned that it was, but no definitive knowledge. However, since it wasn't actually useful to our mission probably better to be safe than try to worry about it further. That kind of caution is probably entirely appropriate when minors upload self-made images with sexual content. However, it should be acknowledged that we are unlikely to ever really know whether this particular image was child porn unless the uploader chooses to confess. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:59 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: snip As for the link, showing these in greatly enlarged versions, without the context of the articles in which they are used, is setting up a strong bias. We've never engaged in that use of the material, nor would we. If people want to take our material out of our encyclopedic content and turn it into sexually-focused presentations, that is their look-out. What if they aren't used in an encyclopedic context? PM says he highlighted 17 images [1]. Assuming Commons Global File Links is accurate then these images appear on 27 content pages in Wikipedias and Wikibooks (not counting User and Talk pages, etc.). However, two of the images account for 16 of the uses, and 10 of the 17 images are not used on any project at all. This is of course a largely anecdotal sample (and there is no reason to assume that PM's set is random), but my personal impression has been similar. It seems to like we have seen a rise in unused sexual imagery being stored at Commons. I'll happily defend the usefulness of sexual imagery in many of the places where it is used, but there are downsides to allowing such collections grow far beyond the applications we have for them. -Robert Rohde [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Privatemusings/ImagesUsedInVideoPresentation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/1/14 Nathan nawr...@gmail.com: To avoid the very real chance that the subjects of explicit photos are underage or have not given publishing consent, I would like to see Commons require proof of model release, and age verification, for explicit images. And how exactly would they do that? Upload a picture of the model holding their passport and a sign saying I consent to pictures of me naked to be used for any purpose in a few dozen languages? That doesn't sound practical to me... I don't think having specific material documentation is necessarily as important as asking the questions and getting an identifiable person on the other end to assert that these issues have been considered responsibly. We accept copyright releases into OTRS that are little more than written assurances that everything is okay, and I don't see why we couldn't ask for the same thing here. And, in the unfortunate event that things aren't okay, we would be able to point a specific individual who misled us rather than simply saying that we closed our eyes and didn't care. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 5:05 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: There is one point left. We can't measure the change in traffic to Craigslist but we can measure this: http://stats.grok.se/en/200912/Craigslist If you are going to play that game, the one for Craig Newmark is better: http://stats.grok.se/en/200912/Craig%20Newmark -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 5:05 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: There is one point left. We can't measure the change in traffic to Craigslist but we can measure this: http://stats.grok.se/en/200912/Craigslist If you are going to play that game, the one for Craig Newmark is better: http://stats.grok.se/en/200912/Craig%20Newmark To be fair though, you show a message mentioning absolutely anything 40 M times (20% of 200M daily page views) and some people are going to look it up. Frankly I'm suprised the lookup rate isn't higher. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 5:50 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Aryeh Gregor wrote: On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm not appealing to the PR benefits here, or to the way this action would promote the climate change cause in general. I'm just saying that as an organisation composed of rational, moral people, Wikimedia has as much responsibility to act as does any other organisation or individual. Even accepting the premise that subsidizing renewable energy is a moral duty, that doesn't mean Wikimedia should fund it, any more than it should be spending its budget on feeding starving children. Wikimedia should not be spending any significant amount of donated money on things that do not directly advance its mission, because people donate to fund its mission, not unrelated causes (however important). It's very different from a private individual or company in this respect -- Wikimedia has a duty to spend its money on the things it's accepting donations for. While the major program spending that Wikimedia performs should be defined by its mission, I think small spending decisions, relating to day-to-day operations, can be made without recourse to our mission. For instance, the office staff should be able use recycled paper without there being a Board resolution to put it in the mission statement. In terms of the ethics, there's a big difference between inaction on an issue, say poverty in Africa, and taking direct action in order to make things worse. Wikimedia is not paying people to take food from children's mouths, but it is paying people to burn coal for electricity. I don't think we can claim to be mere bystanders. I agree with both of you. Funding renewables isn't really a small thing, and so doesn't seem discretionary. At the same time, Wikimedia isn't a bystander, and it does contribute to the problem. We are a charity distributing a free public good to the world. I don't think it is out of whack with that to want to also act as responsible citizens. So perhaps something like this actually should be in the mission. Would it be crazy to have a board resolution that said, in essence, Wikimedia should take reasonable and cost-effective steps to reduce or offset its carbon footprint and other impacts on the environment? Assuming the Board and the executive director can share a similar idea of what is reasonable (a few percent of the budget perhaps?), then taking a position like that actually feels like a responsible thing for a thoughtful charity to do. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
The banner can be seen at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=2009_Craig_Appeal1 -Robert Rohde On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: care to give some context to your question? [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:50 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: I see we have taken to advertising craigslist. Would anyone care to explain why? -- geni ___ 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] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: snip So, the replacing current ugly-copyvio-template - OTRS scheme for something else must take into consideration various scenarios which are currently handled by that scheme in quite often teribbly unfriendly style but anyway it is at least handled. So, the point is that we must seek and destroy copyvio and on the other hand we want to stay friendly, try to assume goodwill, and try to remain to be just click and edit wiki project... Tomek, I think you fundamentally misunderstood. I didn't suggest replacing OTRS for all scenarios. I only suggested creating a more standardized approach for those scenarios where an experienced Wikipedian is trying to obtain permission to add materials that he knows are owned by someone else. I believe this is the case that Milos was discussing in the start of the thread (unless I misunderstood something myself). Yes, there are other scenarios we have to deal with, and perhaps some of them could in fact be helped by the development of standardized permission forms, but I was never suggesting that all of OTRS should be replaced. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] DMCA on Google
On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Jimmy Xu xu.jimmy@gmail.com wrote: Hello, First of all, apologize for any inconvenience made by my poor English. I've found that Google sometimes delete some copyvio materials from its database per the DMCA http://www.google.com/dmca.html. And see http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BD, it's an article list of the copyvio ones in the largest Chinese encyclopedia, Baidu Baike. This kind of copying is blocking the development of Chinese Wikipedia, and some people even think that it's Wikipedia who copies. So can anyone tell me, is it possible to mail Google to let it remove these search results per its DMCA implement? In principle it seems like it should be possible. I don't know how difficult it would be, or whether making the claim would be more trouble than it is worth. After all, we do generally want to encourage people to reuse Wikipedia works. We also want them to properly follow the CC-BY-SA and/or GFDL. I don't know the policies of Baidu Baike. If they fail to acknowledge when works are copied from Wikipedia, then that is a problem, but the act of copying itself is something we should encourage provided they are willing to provide the appropriate attribution and copyleft acknowledgments, etc. Has anyone tried talking to Baidu Baike about that? Regarding using the DMCA and other copyright enforcement mechanisms, I will say that the only people empowered to make such infringement claims are the specific authors of the article being infringed. So, for each article you wanted to take down, you would need to find at least one major contributor to that specific article who was willing to file the infringement claim. Wikimedia is not generally empowered to make such claims. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Fundraising Staff: Megan Hernandez
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: snip Just out of curiosity, is a degree in Human Development all about how we progressed from bronze to iron age and so on and so on? My sister has a human development degree. In her case, it was about the physical, psychological, and social changes that occur to individuals over the course of a single human lifetime. Good for understanding people's wants, needs, and expectations. -Robert Rohde PS. Welcome Megan. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:55 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: snip Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all. What resources? With only ~1.5M hits per month, EN Wikinews' share of the tech / internet services budget probably only comes to a couple thousand dollars per year, in other words basically a rounding error in the budget. At the same time, many of the volunteer resources might simply be lost rather than going to work elsewhere, since volunteers are hard to redirect. In a $6 million budget, I'd honestly be disappointed if the Foundation wasn't spending at least $100k on development projects that might some day take off, and I certainly wouldn't begrudge Wikinews a share of that. One of the virtues of the Foundation is that existing infrastructure makes it very cheap to experiment and try some ideas to see what sticks. -Robert rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Annual Fundraiser starts November 10th, UTC]
Not bad. I don't think all of it is good, but generally not bad. (I'd especially question some of the esoteric stuff in phase one, which gives no indication that this is a fundraiser, and simply assaults the visitor with platitudes in large font. I would suggest that the marketing instinct to build mind-share around slogans and the like is actually counter-productive during a fundraiser for a project that is already a household name.) Altogether I think the organized state of things seems like movement in the right direction. I'll be especially pleased if people monitor the reactions in near real time and are prepared to pull or change messages that perform poorly after a few days because there certainly will be some poor performers if my instincts are right. It is easy to forget that most potential donors don't really understand Wikipedia despite using it regularly, so it is good to remind them of the mission and our volunteer nature. Some of the messages do that, which is good. I would also hope we remember the biggest lesson of 2008. The personal appeal, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en , worked REALLY, REALLY well. Like a similar effort in 2005, and contrary to some conventional wisdom, a somewhat longer form appeal can be really effective at telling Wikimedia's story and connecting with potential donors. The two most successful fundraising campaigns in Wikimedia's history (in a dollars raised per visitor sense) both used that general format, and I hope we aim to replicate that again this year. -Robert Rohde On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org wrote: Trying one more time. Seems to have disconnected from my previous message. Original Message Subject: Annual Fundraiser starts November 10th, UTC Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:42:00 -0800 From: Rand Montoya rmont...@wikimedia.org To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Wikimedians-- As some of you know, the 2009 Annual Fundraiser has a projected start date of November 10th, 2009 UTC. You can find a general time line here (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Timeline). This fundraiser has messaging and tone that is part of an overarching public relations plan that was approved by the Board and WMF management, and was developed with a reputable non-profit/cause-focused marketing and PR firm, Fenton Communications. You can read more about the partnership with Fenton here: http://www.fenton.com/intelligence-report/2009/08/wikimedia-selects-fenton-for-two-pronged-marketing-task.html. You can see some of the designs for this year's fundraiser at the following: http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Donate http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Donate-Chapter/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Donate/Thankyou/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Donate/Support/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Donate/WaysToGive/en Banners and Site Notices (a sampling): http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice1/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice2/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice3/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice11/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice12/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice22/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice23/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice27/en http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/2009/Notice28/en And see parts of the messaging and phases through the translation process: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/core_messages/en There is currently lots of valuable feedback at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2009/Website_Design from the community. I appreciate that feedback and encourage more. I will be monitoring feedback there and on this list. It's worth keeping in mind that there is no single message for this campaign. As you can see we're going to test a number of new messages that, backed with some valuable research by the contractor we're working with, we feel will engage a new audience of donors to the Wikimedia cause. We are currently working several ambitious technical upgrades to this year's campaign: GEO IP localization for chapter messaging, local processing of credit cards, and project specific integration of the donation pages. Like all other fundraisers, we appreciate your patience as we work to bring these pieces together. I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. -Rand -- Rand Montoya Head of Community Giving Wikimedia Foundation www.wikimedia.org Email: r...@wikimedia.org Phone: 415.839.6885 x615 Fax: 415.882.0495 Cell: 510.685.7030 “At some future time, I hope to have something witty, intelligent, or funny in this space.” -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support
[Foundation-l] Growth vs. maintenance
I have been part of the wiki community for 6 years now. As I reflect on what I've seen over the years, I've developed a definite sense that the enthusiasm and energy in the community has waned. (I'm going to frame this discussion mostly in terms of the English Wikipedia, though I think it applies to most of the large, mature wikis.) It's a qualitative sense that the community is less active and excited about what they are doing today than they used to be. Some data supports this, like the declines in editor activity and administrator attrition, though I think I perceive it most directly as a change in the experience of being in the community. At the root, I think that Wikipedia is something of a victim of it's own success. We've written the largest encyclopedia in history, become a household name, and created a top web destination. Great job. What now? Most of our processes and policies have changed little in years. Most of the recent software changes are small and evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Compared to the days when parser functions, templates, cite, and other things were being introduced, it is rare to see changes that excite people and grow to be widely used. There are perhaps a few such things still promised on the horizon (e.g. open street maps), but mostly it seems like we've become satisfied with what we have and are slow to change. In the editing community, we see a growing interest in removing redlinks on the theory that if it hasn't been started yet how interesting can it really be, or worse deleting stubs and other incomplete articles because no one seems interested in finishing them. At the Foundation level, we see efforts to leverage Wikipedia with third party deals (e.g. Orange) and important incremental improvements (e.g. Usability), but it is rare to even consider whole new projects or have anyone articulate a grand new vision. I'm wondering what people think about this. On the one hand we could simply accept it. We've already created a world changing encyclopedia. We can embrace Wikipedia for what it is and accept that maintaining it will not be as exciting as building it. That's the direction I think we've implicitly been following, by inertia if no other reason. We allow the policies, processes, and structures we have now to become entrenched, and focus on ensuring that the work which already exists will persist into the future. That would still be a great achievement, but it is not sexy, and I think we would continue to see a slowing and contraction in the community. Filling in details and improving prose, isn't going to easily attract volunteers. On the other hand, I think we could try to recapture some of the vision and fire of our initial growth. Push for new tools (e.g. string functions, data storage mechanisms, new communication tools) and new projects (e.g. directory services, almanacs). There any many risks with innovating. It could backfire and damage what we have, but on the other hand having new things to do and a fresh vision could bring new energy to the community. Personally, I look at Wikimedia and think there is still a lot of room for expansion, innovation, and growth, but I also think we've become resistant to it. I'm wondering whether other people at the Foundation-l level perceive the same trends, and what they think about the balance between innovation and growth versus simply maintaining and solidifying the processes and products that we already have. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Growth vs. maintenance
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: At the root, I think that Wikipedia is something of a victim of it's own success. We've written the largest encyclopedia in history, become a household name, and created a top web destination. Great job. What now? Are you already on http://strategy.wikimedia.org I've read a variety of things there though I haven't yet been inspired to make a proposal. My impression though, and correct me if I overlooked something, is that the strategy development process has generally been framed in terms of individual projects, but there has been very little discussion of general philosophy. Should we be innovating, taking risks, and looking for new growth opportunities? Or, should be focusing on solidifying and maintaining our existing positions and projects? One position or the other might be implicit in some of the proposals, but I haven't seen any discussion of which general path people might want to emphasize. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:02 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: How do you determine the number of views a particular Wikipedia page has received? http://stats.grok.se/en/200910/Colorado%20Balloon%20Incident -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office hours ... the concept of time zones
Really, this all feels very simple to me. You take the earliest time in the morning and the latest time in the afternoon that people working in an office in San Francisco are will to accommodate. Will that satisfy everyone? No. However picking times at the start and the end of the business day is probably the most that it is reasonable to ask of the staff as an ongoing commitment. -Robert Rohde On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Waerth wae...@asianet.co.th wrote: Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/9/30 Waerth wae...@asianet.co.th: Basically if there is room for two sets of office hours it should still be possible to please most of the world. There are times when Europe/Africa and the Americas overlap. And there are times when East Asia/Australia and the Americas overlap There are no hours that all 3 of these rough zones would overlap really and West Asia/Middle East would be a bit tricky to fit in with these zones. Basically office hours for an Americas/East Asia/Australia zone would overlap best from 0300 to 0500 UTC (Evening Americas, Morning/afternoon East Asia/Australia and even west Asia could fit in) That's 8pm to 10pm in San Francisco (daylight saving time, 7pm to 9pm otherwise), I think this really needs to happen during business hours in SF, otherwise staff have to give up their free time for it. If they are willing to do that, then great, but we shouldn't expect them to. That is true ... but it would be awfully nice if they would do ... maybe change their hours for those particular days (instead of 9 to 17 work from 14 to 22?) otherwise it would be difficult to fit Asia/Australia in in any schedule really. The other option would be something like 0200 utc (though very early for India) or 1400/1500 utc (but this would be very late for Japan and Australia/New Zealand). Personally I would opt for 0200 utc then as that would squeeze by best I guess . I know I was being a tad aggressive but I get pretty upset when people plan things conveniently for the Europeans and Americans and forget that there are 3.5 billion people on other parts of the planet out there some of whom do participate . W ___ 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] strategic planning process update
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Eugene Eric Kim ee...@blueoxen.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Pavlo Shevelo pavlo.shev...@gmail.com wrote: Who will decide what the strategy will be, and what will be the decision-making process? this page explains nothing about (or explains in no detail if somebody prefers) how main stakeholder - Foundation will make decision about said strategy. The huge, extremely intensive (and effective, if we will do our best) Earth-wide pipeline for proposal preparation - it's good. But what will be in the very end? How Foundation will decide what idea is good enough to stand behind it (and to put money in it)? Sorry for taking so long to respond, Pavlo. I'm not sure I'm the right person to respond to this. I'll do my best, you can tell me if you think it's clear, and hopefully other folks from the Foundation will jump in. The simple answer is: At the end of this process, there will be a community-developed plan with a set of recommendations. The Foundation board will vote on that plan at its board meeting in November 2010. Assuming we pull off what we're trying to pull off, I expect that to be a rubber stamp. In other words, if this is a good process, if we put lots of thought into it, if a large, diverse group of stakeholders are engaged, I think the board will go with the plan. That is my opinion, not an official statement of fact. :-) I expect people from the Foundation to actively engage in the process with everyone else. I hope that holds true for other stakeholders, such as the Chapters, and I would very much love to see all of our stakeholders both engage in the process and then go through some official approval process. I'm optimistic that this will happen. I know that several Chapters are already engaged in their own strategic planning processes, and I expect those will align nicely with this movement-wide process. I hope that individual projects get more actively engaged as well, as I think this is a wonderful opportunity to reflect together and to take advantage of common resources for this effort. I think it is worth keeping in mind that not all of the proposals are the same either. Though the planning horizon is nominally five years, some of the suggestions include things that could be done relatively easily right now. For example, some issues could be accomplished by a single interested programmer and/or a team of engaged editors, without needing either the Foundation's stamp of approval or funding. I suspect that many such things, if they are truly worth doing and well supported by the larger community, would actually get implemented long before the Foundation gets around to endorsing a long-term plan. It would probably be a good idea for someone to start sorting proposals be their perceived difficulty and/or need for external resources (if no one has been already), so that the easy issues could be separated from the hard ones. -Robert Rohde ___ 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 Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:22 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/9/17 Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net: 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. It's generally a sort of power-law graph, like so many things are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law They're all worth chasing at all levels. In Wikimedia's past public fund raising campaigns (i.e. the things with banner messages shown to the public) one usually sees about 80% of the total income come in amounts of $100 or less. On the other hand, most of WMF's really large grants and donors have come from direct solicitations that are not part of the public campaigns. I would assume that Rand et al. see the $500 to $10k bracket as a target of opportunity precisely because it has been undercultivated in the past. It is a large enough number that such donations are rarely made during the public campaigns (and make up only a small fraction of the campaign totals), and yet at the same time it is too small to have gotten the same level of attention that might go into soliciting a major foundation for $100k+ grant. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial, Is Wikpedia non commercial?
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: snip Basically I am worred about these student versions of windows infecting open source projects with illegal contributions. Just a crazy idea that has been following me. Rest assured, it is simply a crazy idea. Microsoft has intellectual property right to their own software and codebase (so you can't copy parts of Windows and call it open source), but they don't have any follow-on rights to works wholly created by their users. If I create a novel in Microsoft Word, then Microsoft has no rights that novel, even if the copy of Word I used was completely stolen. They could sue me for the cost of the lost revenue if I am not using a properly licensed copy of their software, but they would have no direct claims over the intellectual works I created using it. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedian image restorations exploited on eBay
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: Дана Wednesday 16 September 2009 00:26:18 Cary Bass написа: These works are Public Domain. Anyone can use them without credit. Since your restoration work did not add any additional copyright, there is no requirement even to credit Wikimedia Commons. Since restoring an image could include some amount of creativity, a restoration could be copyrightable. Certainly, there are people claiming copyright on digital restorations. snip It is settled case law in the US that restorations are not copyrightable as they lack sufficient originality. The intent is to create a slavish copy of the original work. Even if it takes a great deal of skill and judgment to do that, there are insufficient grounds for copyright in the US system. This may not be the case in other jurisdictions (such as the UK) which place a greater emphasis on effort in determining eligibility for copyright. -Robert Rohde ___ 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?
If we are just throwing out random ideas...
I've long wanted to see an open source project to create a world
family tree, i.e. document the ancestry and connections between
everyone ever. There are a couple high profile closed source / fee
based projects aiming to do this, but no successful projects that
really have open access as part of their foundation. Even if we
limited such a project to just deceased individuals (as the big
projects usually do) it would still be a massive undertaking and
potentially very useful for researchers.
However, while a wiki could work, it would be a suboptimal approach.
Much like wikispecies, genealogical information has a heavy component
of structured data that could benefit from dedicated tools designed
for that data. As has been suggested elsewhere, it seems that most of
the things that can be easily done by a wiki are already being done
either by us or by Wikia and similar third parties.
-Robert Rohde
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 8:24 AM, oscar os...@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 9/9/09, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote:
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?
great topic :-D
in my personal vision, it is rather obvious we should consider the
work of the wmf as perpetually unfinished just as wikipedia or any
of its other projects: an ongoing process, never ever {{done}}
completely.
to just do a little brainstorm, let me share some ideas as well:
* a compendium to wikipedia, collecting each and every complete older
encyclopedia (which is no longer copyrighted), thus also giving a peek
into the history of knowledge and of encyclopedias (does this really
belong in wikisource? maybe)
* a wikimusic including a musical dictionary, where one can e.g. look
up themes and melodies, find sheet music and recordings, searching by
notes etc
* i also thought of wikimaps, somebody mentioned this already, imnsho
including all maps in detailed resolutions also historical maps,
thus also giving a peek into the history of geography and of
cartography as well as leaving room for original creations under a
free license (new maps)
just my 2 cts ;-)
all the best,
oscar
--
*edito ergo sum*
___
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] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 7:20 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps we need a peripheral Wikipedia layer for items meeting V, but where N being based on general assumptions: a level for verifiable articles that don't meet current notability standards. It could be a separate project, Wikidirectory--just as we moved out dicdefs, and quotations, and so on, except that there are already too many projects to keep track of. Could we do it within Wikipedia, perhaps as a namespace? David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG Another idea that I encountered somewhere (not currently sure where) was to create a global wiki directory to essentially replace the yellow pages. Something managed under a wiki model to include the names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, and a short description of any and all local businesses. Commercial businesses are a fine example of entities that are usually verifiable but not notable from Wikipedia's point of view, and having a central repository of directory information would generally be useful. A crowd sourced directory would suffer from the general problems of accuracy that all our wikiprojects have to worry about, but probably has the potential to include more comprehensive information than the commercial providers can manage. If people truly believe in the sum of all human knowledge paradigm, then eventually we'll have to confront what to do with a wide range of factual information (like yellow page listings, family trees, sports almanacs, and other things) that are permanent or semi-permanent and yet generally not in the scope of projects like Wikipedia because they aren't very notable. Wikibooks can vaguely address some of this, but shoehorning everything into a book model doesn't really make sense either. -Robert Rohde ___ 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 Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 7:40 PM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: snip In my opinion, What is really missing for example is the ability to find all the articles that occur in a geographic location. I would like to see all the articles about Beijing for example, but it is not easy. Google provides some of this, but it could be better. snip I've seriously thought about implementing this. Enhancing the existing coordinate templates by creating a searchable coordinates table in the database would not be a difficult thing. It requires a bit of thought and effort to make it efficient, but the underlying idea is simple. Locating nearby articles (and geocoded images) could have a lot of uses. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: 2009/9/8 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: As such, it's time to try something different. What do you suggest? Are there models from other mailing list communities that we should experiment with to create a healthier, more productive discussion culture? What, based on your own experience of this list, would you like to see change? I think we should stop using this outdated technology altogether and instead switch to a web-based forum, where comments can be postmoderated (i.e. removed after posting), and unproductive threads can be moved or locked. Mailing lists, by their nature, have a large potential for abuse by trolls and spammers. It's trivial to impersonate another user, or to continue posting indefinitely despite being blocked. We're lucky that the behaviour we've seen here has been merely inconsiderate, rather than malicious. Discussion on the English Wikipedia continues to function despite hateful users who try every dirty trick they can think of to disrupt the community. We're lucky that foundation-l has only seen the merest hint of a reflection of that turmoil, because the tools we have to deal with abusive behaviour on mailing lists are far less capable than those that have been developed for Wikipedia. Some modern forums have features that can interact very intelligently with email, which to my mind might be the best of both worlds. Such things would still allow the features you mention such as thread locking and removal of abuse from the archive, but would also allow people to continue to receive email copies of posts if that is what they prefer. For example, have a forum where people can subscribe to receive email copies of either all posts or just specific threads of interest. Most systems would require that you then visit the website to post replies (which could be facilitated by including a reply url in any emailed copy), though I do recall once seeing a forum email manager that created a unique reply-to address for each thread/user, hence allowing one to email replies directly onto the forum while still having those replies be subjected to any thread and/or user specific rules that had been put in place. In any event, I think we could probably set up a system that provided more flexible control over threads and users without necessarily sacrificing the convenience of email for people that prefer that approach. And of course, people who don't want email interaction could just use such a web forum as a web forum without enabling any email features. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: David Gerard wrote: wine-users - http://forum.winehq.org/ It started as a mailing list, then the forum was set up with a two-way gateway. The forum is where most of the posters actually post from, but so far it works ... surprisingly well! If you allow posting via email, then you lose the ability to properly authenticate those posts. If you allow receiving of the full content via email, then you lose the ability to postmoderate. Maybe it would be useful as a temporary migration measure, but it wouldn't solve any abuse problem until you removed those features. The main thing Wine found is that the forum promptly had 10x the traffic! There's a chance we would see that aspect of it. The mailing lists have a different readership to the on-wiki discussion pages, and that's because of the technical barrier, which works in both directions. Some people prefer the interoperable nature of mail and don't bother reading the wikis, and some people like web pages and find the mailing lists strange, and the subscription process onerous. Because I know that this mailing list is mainly populated with the former kind of person, I know that my desire for a web-only interface is wishful thinking. A properly advertised bidirectional gateway might go some distance towards healing the split in the community that we currently have. But then we would run the risk of losing the people who contribute via mail, on small screens or non-threading clients, who already complain that foundation-l traffic is getting too high. A lower barrier to entry, with a continuing lack of postmoderation, would only make the traffic higher. I'm not opposed to bidirectional gateways, but I do think we should move carefully. If the software is not up to scratch, we could lose what productive public discussion we have, and increase our reliance on private mailing lists. I would assume that any email delivery of posts from a web forum would be an opt-in feature for those that want it. People who want to use the forum merely as a forum without email would have that option, and I'd suggest that doing so is a more natural default behavior. Such an approach would grow the potential participant base by adding forum users who are put off by email, but hopefully reduce the losses from people who require push-based email delivery in order to stay involved. Accepting posts into the forum via email would never be 100% secure, but one could take steps (such as a per user / thread reply-to addresses) to reduce the opportunities for impersonation. I would suggest that the optimal solution is probably a system that is mostly a forum but has a few email features as well rather than thinking of it as a gateway primarily designed to be used around email. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:43 PM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote: snip Robert, is it possible to share the source for generating the revert-based stats with other folks who may be interested in pursuing further work on the subject? Thanks! Not as a complete stand-alone entity. The analysis framework I through together for this has closed-source dependencies. I may help with partial code or pseudocode though. -Robert ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Anthonywikim...@inbox.org wrote: snip Once we have the list, anyone is free to examine it any way they want, and show their results. But we're talking about probably less than 200 instances of vandalism here, so it'll be quite easy (and fun) to lambaste anyone whose methods produce false positives. Comments like this discourage people like me from putting in the time and effort to do this sort of work. Offering constructive criticism is one thing, but looking forward to the fun of lambast[ing] the good faith efforts of others is offensive and not in keeping with the collaborative spirit necessary to run WMF projects. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
Recently, I reported on a simple study of how likely one was to encounter recent vandalism in Wikipedia based on selecting articles at random and using revert behavior as a proxy for recent vandalism. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054171.html One of the key limitations of that work was that it was looking at articles selected at random from the pool of all existing page titles. That approach was of the most immediate interest to me, but it didn't directly address the likelihood of encountering vandalism based on the way that Wikipedia is actually used because the selection of articles that people choose to visit is highly non-random. I've now redone that analysis with a crude traffic based weighting. For traffic information I used the same data stream used by http://stats.grok.se. That data is recorded hourly. For simplicity I chose 20 hours at random from the last eight months and averaged those together to get a rough picture of the relative prominence of pages. I then chose a selection of 3 articles at random with their probability of selection proportional to the traffic they received, and repeated the prior analysis previously described. (Note that this has the effect of treating the prominence of each page as a constant over time. In practice we know some pages rise to prominence while other fall down, but I am assuming the average pattern is still a good enough approximation to be useful.) From this sample I found 5,955,236 revert events in 38,096,653 edits. This is an increase of 29 times in edit frequency and 58 times the number of revert events that were found from a uniform sampling of pages. I suspect it surprises no one that highly trafficked pages are edited more often and subject to more vandalism than the average page, though it might not have been obvious that the the ratio of reverts to normal edits is also increased over more obscure pages. As before, the revert time distribution has a very long tail, though as predicted the times are generally reduced when traffic weighting is applied. In the traffic weighted sample, the median time to revert is 3.4 minutes and the mean time is 2.2 hours (compared to 6.7 minutes and 18.2 hours with uniform weighting). Again, I think it is worth acknowledging that having a majority of reverts occur within only a few minutes is a strong testament to the efficiency and dedication with which new edits are usually reviewed by the community. We could be much worse off if most things weren't caught so quickly. Unfortunately, in comparing the current analysis to the previous one, the faster response time is essentially being overwhelmed by the much larger number of vandalism occurrences. The net result is that averaged over the whole history of Wikipedia a visitor would be expected to receive a recently degraded article version during about 1.1% of requests (compared to ~0.37% in the uniform weighting estimate). The last six months averaged a slightly higher 1.3% (1 in 80 requests). As before, most of the degraded content that people are likely to actually encounter is coming from the subset of things that get by the initial monitors and survive for a long time. Among edits that are eventually reverted the longest lasting 5% of bad content (those edits taking 7.2 hours to revert) is responsible for 78% of the expected encounters with recently degraded material. One might speculate that such long-lived material is more likely to reflect subtle damage to a page rather than more obvious problems like page blanking. I did not try to investigate this. In my sample, the number of reverts being made to articles has declined ~40% since a peak in late 2006. However, the mean and median time to revert is little changed over the last two years. What little trend exists points in the direction of slightly slower responses. So to summarize, the results here are qualitatively similar to those found in the previous work. However with traffic weighting we find quantitative differences such that reverts occur much more often but take less time to be executed. The net effect of these competing factors is such that the bad content is more likely to be seen than suggested by the uniform weighting. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
I've just read two different news stories on Flagged Revisions that described vandalism as a growing problem for Wikipedia. With that in mind, I would like to highlight one specific point in the analysis I just did. The frequency of reverts to articles -- as a fraction of total edits -- has remained virtually constant for almost three years now. There is no evidence that the community is making reverts more often today (relative to total edits) than we were in 2007. Hence, I would suggest that describing vandalism as a growing problem is probably erroneous with respect to actual editing behaviors. Maybe our concern for ensuring accuracy and addressing vandalism has grown, but the scale of the underlying problem of incoming vandalism appears to be more or less constant. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: However, in this case, even if we assume the seat was outright bought for $2M, I don't think there are I'm not sure why people are behaving as though there is any ambiguity on this point. The Omidyar Network agreed to make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation with the understood condition that their representative would receive a seat on the board. There is no need for speculation, it is what it is, like it or dislike it. I hedged my language because I don't believe it is that simple. I do believe the money and the seat are linked, but I don't believe just anyone could buy a seat for $2M. For example, I doubt Mr. Kohs would be seated even if he had $2M to offer. Describing the seat as being bought ignores the fact that Mr. Halprin does bring valuable skills, associations, and what appears to be a compatible philosophy. Would he have been appointed without the financial backing? Probably not. But I don't believe it was the only factor under consideration. (Or at least I want to believe that the existing Board is capable of walking away from piles of money if it came with too many strings and conflicts attached.) -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Nathannawr...@gmail.com wrote: snip One thing I'm curious about... Why did this announcement come from Greg? It appears to be an Omidyar press release (not a WMF one) issued during just the last hour. Beyond that I won't try and speculate on why the Board didn't say anything sooner. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
posted some summary data on the wiki at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_statistics Given the nature of the approximations I made in doing this analysis I suspect it is more likely that I have somewhat underestimated the vandalism problem rather than overestimated it, but as I said in the beginning I'd like to believe I am in the right ballpark. If that's true, I personally think that having less than 0.5% of Wikipedia be vandalized at any given instant is actually rather comforting. It's not a perfect number, but it would suggest that nearly everyone still gets to see Wikipedia as intended rather than in a vandalized state. (Though to be fair I didn't try to figure out if the vandalism occurred in more frequently visited parts or not.) Unfortunately, that's it for now as I need to get back to my thesis / job search. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
, it addressed an issue of interest to me, and I would hope others also find some useful insight in it. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/20 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I wouldn't suggest looking at the edit history at all, just the most recent revision as of whatever moment in time is chosen. If vandalism is found, then and only then would one look through the edit history to find out when it was added. That only works if the article is very well referenced and you have all the references and are willing to fact-check everything. Otherwise you will miss subtle vandalism like changing the date of birth by a year. It's not just facts. There are many ways to degrade the qualify of an article (such as removing entire sections) that would be invisible if one looks at only one revision. Anthony seems to be talking about a question of article accuracy (unless I am misreading him). That is overlapping issue with addressing vandalism, but there are a significant number of ways to commit vandalism that nonetheless have nothing to do with impairing the resulting article's accuracy. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Anthonywikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/20 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I wouldn't suggest looking at the edit history at all, just the most recent revision as of whatever moment in time is chosen. If vandalism is found, then and only then would one look through the edit history to find out when it was added. That only works if the article is very well referenced and you have all the references and are willing to fact-check everything. Otherwise you will miss subtle vandalism like changing the date of birth by a year. It's not just facts. There are many ways to degrade the qualify of an article (such as removing entire sections) that would be invisible if one looks at only one revision. I guess that's true. People could be removing facts, for instance, which wouldn't be apparently by looking at one revision. So such an analysis would potentially understate actual vandalism. But at least we'd know in which direction the percentage is potentially wrong. And anecdotally, I don't think the understatement would be significant. You seem to be identifying all errors with vandalism. Sometimes factual errors are simply unintentional mistakes. I agree that accuracy is important, but I think you are thinking about the question somewhat differently than I am. snip I'm attempting to best answer the question if one chooses a random page from Wikipedia right now, what is the probability of receiving a vandalized revision, which I take to have nothing whatsoever to do with the number of reverts. Let me describe the issue differently. The practical issue I am concerned with might be better expressed as the following: For any given article, what is the probability that the current revision is not the best available revision (i.e. most accurate, most complete, etc.) Vandalism, in general, takes a page and makes it worse. I am interested in the problem of characterizing how often this happens with an eye to being able to go back to that prior better version. (This also explains why I am less interested in vandalism that persists through many revisions. Once that occurs, it makes less sense to try and go back to the pre-vandalized revision.) Your concern for establishing overall article accuracy is a good one, but it is largely orthogonal to my interest in figuring out whether the current revision is likely to be better or worse than the revisions that came before it. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
Personally, I think the 2 articles in the Bengali Wikipedia serving a speaking community of 230 million is an even better example of failure. -Robert Rohde On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Lars Aronssonl...@aronsson.se wrote: Andrew Gray wrote: For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two empty projects). I think we need to get away from counting articles and languages, as if all were equal and more were better. Some languages are far more successful than others. Some articles are far more useful than others. Perhaps some languages and articles should be considered as failures and not be counted among our achievements. Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of 2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than 13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind? But Swahili is far from the worst. Swahili has twice as many speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k), but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs 172 k). Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in more detail. For the speakers of these languages, in which proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio broadcasts) to get news and knowledge? Do they ever use (printed) encyclopedias? People who speak Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian are very similar in wealth, education, living conditions, and computer literacy. Yet, the Danish Wikipedia is far smaller and less visited than the other three. How can that be? Traditionally, Danish is the more literate of these four cultures. If we can find out what holds the Danish Wikipedia back, and find a remedy, perhaps it can be applied to other languages as well. Language Danish Norwegian Swedish Finnish (Bokmål) Speakers 6 M 4.7 M 9 M 6 M Size rank 102 111 78 103 Wikipedia articles 114 k 225 k 325 k 213 k Size rank 23 13 11 14 July 2009 page views 14.7 M 21.5 M 59.8 M 49.7 M Traffic rank 25 23 12 14 Annual growth +18 % +11 % +19 % +2 % Views/speakers 2.4 4.6 6.6 8.3 Articles/spkr .019 .047 .036 .036 Spkrs/article 53 21 28 28 Length of article on Michael Jackson before his death 18 kB 20 kB 41 kB 20 kB Current length 70 kB 26 kB 60 kB 44 kB Views in July 72 k 58 k 175 k 136 k Views/speaker .012 .012 .019 .022 When compared to Swahili or Yoruba, all of these North European languages of Wikipedia have been very successful, having more page views in a month than speakers of the language, and much higher traffic rank (12-25) than language size rank (78-111). But the interesting aspect is the differences within such a group, that presumably should have been even more homogeneous. The German language has 105 M speakers, 942 k Wikipedia articles, and 846 M page views in July 2009, i.e. 8.0 views/speaker (as high as Finnish), but only .009 articles per speaker of the language (half of Danish). The German Wikipedia is generally considered to be successful, yet it has a low number of articles per speaker of the language. So maybe articles/speaker is a useless metric. If the Finnish Wikipedia can get 8.3 page views per speaker of the language with only 213 k articles, then perhaps their articles are better (more informative, more useful) than the larger number of articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, which only attract 6.6 page views per speaker of the language. The German article on Michael Jackson got 2.1 M page views during July, or .020 per speaker of the language, similar to the Swedish and Finnish Wikipedia articles. Why did the Danish and Norwegian articles get only 12 page views per thousand speakers? -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se ___ 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] Wiktionary logo competition makes b3ta
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanencimonav...@gmail.com wrote: David Gerard wrote: 2009/8/14 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com: Sigh. Of course you know, Bob, the MediaWiki flower isn't a trademark or anything remotely of the sort owned or even claimed in other than authorship fashion by anyone. You're probably wrong there, actually - I am virtually sure I am not wrong in fact. even if the MediaWiki flower isn't a registered trademark, it could probably be quite well defended by use as a trademark. Perhaps, if it weren't for the inconvenient - for your theory - fact that the author (Florence Devouard) explicitly freed the image into the public domain, so as to be utilizable everywhere where mediawiki is used, regardless of licensing scheme. Slippery thing, law. It may be slippery, but trying to claim trademark protection for a PD image, is even beyond the unctuousness of the legal profession. There are many trademarks that are in the public domain due either to old age or due to their design being too simple to be eligible for copyright protection in the first place (e.g. text logos). The Coca-Cola logo is a famous example of public domain image (by age) that is also still a current trademark. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Trademarks There is no reason that public domain images can't also be a trademarks, though it may be harder to establish it as such. In the specific case of Bob the flower, the bigger problem is that no one has been actively defending its use as a trademark. The more examples of use there are unaffiliated with Mediawiki, the more difficult it would be to assert that it is a trademark representing Mediawiki. It is also unclear who would be in the position to authorize the use of such a trademark, i.e. who would own the rights to the mark. -Robert Rohde. PS. Since when did the flower have the name Bob? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later
Some weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk with a Google employee about a number of topics. One of the things we discussed was Knol. Setting aside the way it may have been marketed in the popular press at the time, she suggested that Google does not currently see Knol as a collaborative medium in the way Wikipedia is. Rather, they currently regard Knol as more of a web publishing platform. In other words, it is a place for individuals and small groups to post their work online with a certain degree of infrastructure and visibility (and Google ads, of course). Whether Knol has distinguished itself from other ways of publishing online, I don't know, though I haven't seen much evidence of that. However, she also made the more interesting point that most of Google's current development efforts with Knol are focused towards foreign languages and scripts. By providing a high level of UTF-8 support, they seem to be hoping that they can capture a significant portion of the non-English web publishing community, which is of course a rapidly growing segment that isn't always well supported by some current offerings. Rather than being the next Wikipedia, maybe a better analogy would be to think of Knol as the next Geocities. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 12:34 AM, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: I had forgotten that my bot gave me a second vote. Is that a joke? -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I think this is a fantastic idea. I think the biggest problem the tech side of the WMF has had over the last year or two has been prioritisation and splitting the job like this should help that no end. I'm curious - would the Senior Software Architect report to the CTO? If so, that means Brion has, technically speaking, proposed his own demotion - there aren't many people big enough to do that! Without changing anything else about this proposal, I'd like to suggest that Brion's job title come with a more imposing description than Senior. For example Chief, Lead, or Head Software Architect. There is only one Brion, and I assume he will remain singularly important in his role overseeing software development (even if he gets a new boss). By contrast large corporations often have many people who are titled Senior this-or-that but are still relatively unimportant. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: Our approach to job titles actually has an emerging basic pattern. :-) It's not 100% consistent because we sometimes have stuck with commonly used titles like Office Manager and General Counsel, but generally one we try to follow: [snip] It's not bad to have an internal pattern, but I think it's more important to match the practices in industry. By containing the magic words senior and architect the proposed Senior Software Architect is, in my experience, not inconsistent with industry naming practice for the most important tech guru who isn't primarily a manager. It's not a bad title in any case. snip I would like to note that it isn't just internal naming schemes and/or industry conventions that matter. Brion is also engaged in a significant amount of interaction with external communities, including the volunteer developers and the Mediawiki user base. In that context, I think a description such as head or lead would help explain his role more clearly than senior does. Anyway, that's my two cents. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Analysis of statistics
Bleh. When did this become an either-or proposition? You go recruit retired professionals. I'll go recruit young people. Someone else can recruit soccer moms, and yet another person can go after teachers. Everybody wins. The only way to lose is if either: A) You believe one of these groups should not be participating in Wikipedia or B) You believe efforts to recruit professionals will actually interfere with my efforts to recruit young people, etc. If you believe A) then frankly I believe you are out of touch with the ethos of the projects. Different groups may need a different amount of guidance before they are prepared to contribute, but there is no group of people we should be categorically shutting out or discouraging. If you believe B) and somehow think that recruiting one group somehow interferes with recruiting other groups, then I'd like to see an explanation of that. It seems unlikely in most cases. Besides which, there are many things we can be doing (such as improving the editing interface and documentation) that should widely benefit most groups of potential new editors. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Donation Button Enhancement : Part 2
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:15 AM, effe iets anderseffeietsand...@gmail.com wrote: What about changing it every hour? Then you have sufficient randomness over time, and no flashy buttons. You still have the problem that peoples response to future buttons will depend on the past buttons they've seen. Yeah, I'd suggest it is better to show each person one button type and stick with it. One can approximate that behavior either by assigning each user randomly and tracking their type via a cookie or by selecting based on higher order bytes in the IP address and assuming those are fairly stable (e.g. using BBB mod 4 where the address is AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD). Neither approach is foolproof or totally without bias, but one can do fairly well. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 3:02 PM, wiki-li...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: Ray Saintonge wrote: wiki-li...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: David Gerard wrote: Explaining this to professional content creators and media companies leads to exploding heads. Pointing out that giving it all away has made Wikipedia a top-ten website and must be doing all right from it isn't enough to convince them ... it goes so much against everything they think they know about the world. And in turn there are those of us that will not give anything to these media companies. I'll see a company like News International rot in hell first. a properly viral licence will constrain the commercial publisher with the requirement that any use by him will also render his new context for that photograph just as available for free use as the photograph itself. No it does not. The viral (SA) part of the CC license only applies to derivatives. It does not apply to collections, it does not apply if used to illustrate an article or advertising flier, ... It does not apply to collections of truly independent pieces. Whether SA applies when you merge an image into an article, or vice versa, is less than clear. At some point the merger of multiple works into an interdependent whole should logically and legally be considered a derivative work rather than merely a collection of separate and independent works (quoting the license definition of a collection). Where the line between collection and derivative lies however tends to be a fuzzy concept not well defined by existing licenses. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board elections candidacy period time change
Given that CentralNotice still isn't working, I've taken the hopefully temporary and short-lived approach of simulating the candidate notice using enwiki's local site notice. Extending the nomination period does little if people don't actually know about it. Philippe has been posting a notice about the extension at various community noticeboards, but that will of course be rather hit and miss. At the same time, creating a local site notice on one (or just a few) wikis could also be seen as quite hit and miss. For that reason, I wanted to mention this action here in case people wanted to take similar steps on other wikis. Hopefully though some form of CentralNotice will be restored shortly. -Robert Rohde On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: Ladies and Gentlemen, As you may be aware, there is concern that the sitenotices regarding submission of candidacy for the Board of Trustees election were not seen anywhere but Meta after the 11th of this month. Because of the potentially massive consequence of this, and to encourage a full and active election, the election committee has determined that: - Candidacies will be accepted through July 27th at 23:59 (UTC) - The period for questioning candidates begins immediately. Candidates that are late to the party will, no doubt, be scrutinized by the community. The Committee hopes that the community will work to actively ensure that all candidates receive equivalent questioning. - The dates of election will not change. The election will begin on 28 July and end on 10 August. Please know that we recognize the radical nature of altering the schedule in the midst of the election and would not do it if we did not absolutely believe that there was a possibility that others may be interested and qualified and may not have known about the key dates. For the committee, Philippe (in my capacity as a volunteer, and not as an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Donation Button Enhancement : Part 2
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Rand Montoyarmont...@wikimedia.org wrote: Wikimedians-- As many of you know, last month we began work on exploring the visibility of the donate button on all Wikimedia projects. After a long comment period, we received many comments and many new ideas. Some of these ideas we have incorporated into a new set of test buttons. Thank you to everyone who took the time to evaluate Round 1 buttons. You can see those discussions here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade/Round1 We have 4 designs that we will be testing on the Wikipedia:EN main skin during August and the first part of September. We are going to evaluate each button for one full week. This process will unfold over the next two months. You can see the designs and timeline at this link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade Testing should be done in parallel, not in sequence. History has demonstrated that donors have a tendency to respond disproportionately to the new thing. Which means that whatever button you test first will have an advantage over whichever one you test last. Probably the easiest way to get a reasonable distribution is to vary which button people see based on their IP. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] About that sue and be damned to the NationalPortrait Gallery ...
On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 2:11 AM, Tom Maaswinkeltom.maaswin...@12wiki.eu wrote: The part I am talking about is the part where they say that they want to talk to the Wikimedia Fundation to have a discussion about making low-resolution images of paintings in its collection available! Incidentally, the NPG appears to have removed the zoomify feature from their website (or at least it wasn't present on the sample of images I looked at). As a result, it would appear that WMF presently has more detailed images on Commons than are available in any form on NPG's website. In the typical case, our images appear to be 3 or 4 times larger in linear dimension than the largest view they currently make available. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] About that sue and be damned to the National Portrait Gallery ...
On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: snip I don't know as much about UK copyright law as perhaps I should, given my choice of hobby and my location, but I would be surprised if there was enough creativity or work involved in taking a photograph of a painting for it to be independently copyrightable. There are serious legal disagreements about this, but people have argued for some time that the UK is perhaps the purest example of a sweat of the brow state with respect to their copyright law. In other words, the prevailing view of many has been that UK law rewards an author's effort irrespective of creativity (neither creative nor creativity appear in the UK statute at all). There has never been a good test case, but serious people have opined that Bridgeman v. Corel (the US case establishing PD-Art for photographs of PD works) would have been decided the opposite way in UK courts. In other words, there have been opinions that the effort involved in creating high quality photographs is by itself sufficient to embue that photograph with copyright protection in the UK even if the work being photographed is PD. However, though there is no statutory requirement for creativity, there is one for originality. Hence, most of the arguments in the UK hence turn on whether such a photograph would qualify as orginal or not. Some people believe that merely moving the image into a new medium is sufficiently novel to qualify for protection, while others dispute this. Again, there isn't a lot of guidance on this point. As repugnant as the conclusion might be, it is entirely possible that the NPG could win this case under UK law and establish that photographs of PD works are definitively not PD in the UK. It's not a sure thing, and comptent legal representation would no doubt make an important case out of it, but my reading of the commentaries in this area would such suggest that a victory by the NPG is entirely possible (and perhaps more likely than not) assuming the issue is decided based solely on UK copyright laws. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 10:29 AM, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote: snip Getting back to the point attempts to highly optimize code to stay within whatever the new equivalent of [[Wikipedia:Template_limits]] would risk even a fairly clean language turning into something of a mess. Any reasonable attempt at a clean language should reduce the coding complexity in the most common use cases compared to the current system. Yes, there will always be boundary cases that are likely to be complicated and hackish; however, I'd consider it a net benefit as long as the most common cases are made more legible and intelligible. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote:
snip
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
Returning to a chunk of discussion from last week...
I wrote code as Extension:DelayedDefinition that actually implements
the define and display system suggested previously. I'm not sure
the WMF editing communities would actual want to go this way though.
It's a pretty drastic step from the point of wikicode layout and a
good WYSIWYG would be a better long-term solution to the same problem,
so it may have been something of an academic exercise.
Also, there is an enormous hack in the middle of it where it makes a
recursive call to Parser::parse (labeled with screaming comments). I
realize doing that is the height of all evil, but the existing
recursiveTagParse, Hooks, and similar don't actually seem to offer
enough control to make this work properly. So, if someone were ever
to actually consider this for production use, the parser would
probably need to be patched to allow a more appropriate solution.
-Robert Rohde
___
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I actually was not aware that the terms now ask you to link not only to the article, but to the license as well. That is a burden. Linking to the license (or providing it's actual text) is an explicit requirement of CC-BY-SA. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
snip
I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement
happened.
The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
programming in template space. But they did so in a half-assed way
that was bad for server load and template management, so bad in fact
that their approach was provoking arguments between the community and
the developers (see the enwiki history of WT:AUM circa 2006, for
example). The initial parser functions where created to answer that
demand in the community in a way that wouldn't cause the servers to
explode.
Hence the demand for programmatic templates came from the community
initially, the developers simply responded to that in a way that was
necessary to keep things working. (For the record, I'm referring to
the earliest history of ParserFunctions. I'm not sure about the
history of #expr and some of the later bits.)
-Robert Rohde
___
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for
simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex
conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into
what appears to be line noise.
In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the
template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of
articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke
templates, or rather how we make data available to templates.
If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50
lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is
declared multiple times like so:
|birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}}
born July 6, 1946
|DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946
Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about
articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can
imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once,
like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And
so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than
declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly
inline in the text in a highly readable format.
Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them
within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce
the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning
of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph.
Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is
declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article.
This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation.
Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all
circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our
visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those
articles is another page where users can control higher level
organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it
in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new
programming language, and place it in a variety of locations
throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the
wikitext at all.
It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases,
such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that
the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated
that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider
editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to
MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data
to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called.
I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so
unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from
articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be
rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond
wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all
of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the
reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people
were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem
that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been
adequately characterized.
I'm not sure how one would make your hook system work in a way that
was practical and not totally opaque to the editor.
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
There is actually code lying around somewhere that implements such a
system for ref so that the first call would not need to attach the
full reference definition but could simply use ref name=foo / if a
corresponding ref_define name=foo.../ref appeared later in the
text.
Personally, my guess is that a system of placement by reference would
make for a more flexible / less confusing approach than trying to
create a system of article hooks and attach infoboxes and the like to
them.
-Robert Rohde
___
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Issues about Copyright
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Jimmy Xu xu.jimmy@gmail.com wrote: Hello all, These days at the Village Pump of zhwiki, many wikipedians are arguing about whether Wikimedia project should apply to the US Copyright Law that is where the servers were placed, or the local ones, for us, that is the P.R. of China Copyright Law. These thread came from a disagreement of fair-use text of news in article, so I'm willing to find some (kind of) official resolution. Thanks a lot. jimmy_xu_...@zhwiki 06/25/2009 All projects must be compliant with US law. Many projects whose language lends itself to a particular national focus additionally work to be compliant with the national laws relevant to their target audience. The decision of whether or not to also try and follow national laws (e.g. Chinese law in your case) is left at the discretion of the individual wiki's community. So in short, you must comply with US copyright law. You have the option of further restricting content based on Chinese copyright laws, if your community so chooses. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Issues about Copyright
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 6:01 AM, Jimmy Xuxu.jimmy@gmail.com wrote: So that is, due to P.R. of China Copyright Law, text that published in newspapers, periodicals, radio and TV stations and other media reported the news of the simple fact are not copyrighted. But I cannot find these exception in US Copyright Law. Maybe it's only because my English is not so good and I didn't caught it, maybe it's a possible conflict. And if so, can we use these text published in P.R. of China in Wikipedia as if they were in PD? And, the image now has no problem at all, everything causes by the text. Simple facts are not eligible for US copyright. Only creative expression is protected under US case law. One of the more important Supreme Court cases dealing with this is: [[Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service]] -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GFDL-only + OTRS
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Pedro Sanchez wrote: On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: Of course, there are and always have been a wide range of free content licenses used for images on Commons, not just GFDL and CC. Thanks, Pharos OTRS doesn't handle only commons. This meant wikipedia's text Text may not be GFDL-only at this point. Actually, there is an important added point that OTRS-ers may help with. Text originally published under GFDL-only somewhere outside of the Wikimedia projects can only be relicensed if it was included in one of the WMF projects before Nov. 1st, 2008. (Or if the original publisher decides to change the license.) So, anyone that has handled OTRS requests associated with the inclusion of GFDL-only text since last November should look at those as potential copyright violations at this point. This applies specifically to works published elsewhere under the GFDL. It does not apply if the work was published elsewhere, but the first GFDL publication was in a WMF site. -Robert Rohde ___ 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 Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Geoffrey Plourde geo.p...@yahoo.comwrote: 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. You are ignoring the efforts of the photographers, graphic artists, restorationists and free image sleuths that consider building the archive at Commons as their primary goal. There is a great deal of content added and maintained in Commons that is uploaded with no particular WMF use in mind. An organizaed and well-documented free content repository -- for use by the wider world -- is valuable regardless of whether the works it contains happen to be used by the WMF. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reuse policy
The terms of use for editors will require that editors accept linking as sufficient attribution; however, the instructions for re-users will explicitly say that this is only one form of possible attribution and highlight more permanent forms of attribution, such as creating author lists. I would expect that book publishers and other concerned with permanence would choose a more permanent format. In the attribution survey of 1000+ editors in March, attribution by link was the most popular option (though certainly not universally accepted). Given that, I would expect that most text contributors will happily continue editing, and it won't lead to the end of Wikimedia projects as you suggest, even though some individuals may choose to stop contributing. -Robert Rohde On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Jiri Hofmanhofm...@aldebaran.cz wrote: Hello everybody, I hope, it is never too late to discuss these things. Today, I have noticed the Commons added following text under the edit window: Re-users will be required to credit you, at minimum, through a hyperlink or URL to the article you are contributing to, and you hereby agree that such credit is sufficient in any medium. I was and I am a fan of switching to CC-BY-SA 3.0. However, I am not a fan of this violation of freedom which Wikimedia declares for its projects. It is true, a similar statement is present at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update . But this change was not discussed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers as I can see (it was shortly discussed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers/Oppositional_arguments ). Also it was announced nowhere (as far as I know) that this policy will be advertized in this explicite manner. I feel to be cheated. I was voting for an easier implementation of freedom. I was definitively not voting for the end of freedom. And this statement means the end of freedom. Why end of freedom? Just imagine, the Wikimedia will have closed the business. Everybody, who used links to provide a sufficient list of authors, will be in troubles immediately. Yes, everybody can download dumps. But will this be enough? No. For example it will not be possible to easily update just published paper books (for example textbooks for children at schools). The publisher will not be able to use the freedom, he could think he enjoyed. Yes, the publisher can always exactly follow the license. But then Wikimedia should not even suggest that something less than exact following of license could be enough. Similar, may be more understandable problem: just imagine, the article which was reused, is deleted in the Wikimedia project. The list of authors will be lost in a very similar way like in a case of Wikimedia shutting down completely. Just another problem: imagine, the Wikimedia foundation will get into financial troubles. This can happen very easily (I hope it will not happen soon). All the reusers who have thought linking to Wikimedia site was sufficient, will be pushed under a serious threat. They can be blackmailed: give to Wikimedia foundation money or you can close your business based on CC-BY-SA licensed content. And one problem more: what about works of third parties? If somebody issues his work under CC-BY-SA 3.0, how could anybody insert it into Wikimedia projects when Wikimedia allows to re-use it and not to follow the original attribution manner specified by the author? Either nobody could insert the works of the third parties into Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia would explicitely allow to violate the third party's rights given by license the third party have chosen. What is a freedom if it cannot be guaranteed for ever in all conditions? It is not a freedom anymore. I am an author of quite many texts in Wikimedia projects. I can hardly accept my work could be misused in such a way. I do not allow to attribute my old works in this way. And I will be not willing to continue working at, for example, Wikipedia if this becomes a common policy there. I understand this does not have to be a big problem at Commons - the image descriptions are usually not the most important part of the articles. The media (image, video, sound) is. And if I understand it well, the authors of the media must be still attributed directly. However, I see it as a major problem in case of Wikipedia and similar projects. I understand re-using the texts inside Wikimedia project is complicated if the attribution means a list of writers. But we should deal with this. It's a challenge. We can show the world the collaborative authors can get appropriate credits. Please, do not apply this policy there. It will be a serious hit into a face of freedom. It can mean the authors will not be willing to contribute so much anymore. It can mean the Wikimedia foundation will be discredited. It can mean the people will not be willing
Re: [Foundation-l] Reuse policy
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, There is only one way to cite a Wikipedia article with a reasonable chance of success and that is by referring to the permalink. Thanks, GerardM Which of course renders the historical wikicode through the current parser with current templates, current stylesheets, current image versions, etc., etc. ;-) -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. It would greatly add to how much stuff we get, as it would save the user the trouble of re-encoding, or installing Firefogg, or whatever. So why don't we do this? Has it been officially assessed as a legal risk * (and I mean more than people saying it might be on a mailing list **), has no-one really bothered, or what? Patent encumbered formats often have licensing fees when you perform encoding / decoding at commercial scale. For example, the MPEG licensing association expects a fee from anyone distributing more than 100,000 MPEG encoded files per year, and those fees can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. The WMF has a big enough budget that they could probably consider paying such fees (and enough clout they might negotiate a better than average rate), but even so it is still likely that paying the MPEG tax would require forgoing one or more staff hires. It's not inconceivable, but such projects would require looking carefully at the trade-offs involved, and I think in many cases avoiding proprietary formats makes sense. That said, in my ideal fantasy world the educational value of the free encyclopedia would be maximized by accepting all mainstream formats, performing automatic conversions and providing users with any mainstream format of their choice in return. But such thinking seems to be pie in the sky at the moment. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 8:26 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. It would greatly add to how much stuff we get, as it would save the user the trouble of re-encoding, or installing Firefogg, or whatever. So why don't we do this? Has it been officially assessed as a legal risk * (and I mean more than people saying it might be on a mailing list **), has no-one really bothered, or what? Patent encumbered formats often have licensing fees when you perform encoding / decoding at commercial scale. For example, the MPEG licensing association expects a fee from anyone distributing more than 100,000 MPEG encoded files per year, and those fees can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. The WMF has a big enough budget that they could probably consider paying such fees (and enough clout they might negotiate a better than average rate), but even so it is still likely that paying the MPEG tax would require forgoing one or more staff hires. It's not inconceivable, but such projects would require looking carefully at the trade-offs involved, and I think in many cases avoiding proprietary formats makes sense. Just to be clear, there are potential fees along all the food chain, i.e. encoding, decoding, and distribution. I picked on distribution because it was the one I knew off-hand. Since David is talking about decoding and re-encoding as Ogg, there would be a different set of fees to consider which I haven't looked at. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Peter Gervaigrin...@gmail.com wrote: snip The community cannot decide that Random_user1 and Random_user2 etc will agree with the communities view on the stats being passed to an external server. As you are aware it's not really random user, so what you write is more rhetoric and less facts. I debate your statement as I believe the community can pretty much decide anything unless it violates some higher level policy, and it's been told this predates the PP. And I tend to disagree in its violation, but it's an open debate. snip The wording of Privacy Policy has always been rather vague and mushy (something I've complained about in the past). However the spirit of the policy, and the way it has been applied, might be summarized thusly: Personally identifiable data does not leave the WMF's control without the WMF's express permission. In general, the circumstances where people have access to such data and the purposes for which they can use it are explicitly defined in advance. You may not be aware, but the relaying of page view data to third party analysis platforms has been tried on a number of occasions in the past and consistently shutdown. (I think this even includes cases before the Privacy Policy was adopted.) However, to my recollection there has never been a case that quite mirrors yours since we are talking about a privately hosted server administered by a highly trusted community member. Given the situation with Wikimedia DE and the toolserver cluster etc., I think it should be possible in principle for the WMF to reach an agreement that allows data to be communicated to servers operated by Wikimedia chapters for purposes that benefit Wikimedia. In light of current sentiment and Foundation practice though, I think that any such arrangements should require prior approval. That your set up has existed for years can provide some confidence in its reasonableness and security, but I wouldn't support turning it back on until people have looked at and reviewed the details though. Sorry for the abrupt way that things were handled, but erring on the side of protecting user privacy is generally a good thing. Now that you are here discussing the matter, I'd hope a reasonable solution can be found. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: Installing Google Analytics, even for our own purposes, is a bad idea. For one, it creates a link to google that is not necessarily what we want; it would be a big target for people to try and hack, and it presents tempting security risks on Google's end. Not to mention, as far as I know the program is proprietary. snip I may be misreading, but I believe Unionhawk's suggestion was to setup -- but not install -- Google Analytics in the hope that simply registering the accounts would block anyone else from creating an Analytics account pointed at Wikipedia. (I don't know if it actually works that way.) That strikes me as rather too much work though. Better to block the relevant URLs from being inserted in the first place. That could be accomplished in any one of several technical ways. One idea is the proposal to install the AbuseFilter in a global mode, i.e. rules loaded at Meta that apply everywhere. If that were done (and there are some arguments about whether it is a good idea), then it could be used to block these types of URLs from being installed, even by admins. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Aryeh Gregor
simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote:
One idea is the proposal to install the AbuseFilter in a global mode,
i.e. rules loaded at Meta that apply everywhere. If that were done
(and there are some arguments about whether it is a good idea), then
it could be used to block these types of URLs from being installed,
even by admins.
No, it wouldn't.
document.write('script' + ' src=' + 'http://www.go' + 'ogle-an' +
'alytics.com/urc' + 'hin.js type=text/javascript/script');
Obviously more complicated obfuscation is possible. JavaScript is
Turing-complete. You can't reliably figure out whether it will output
a specific string.
However, perhaps a default AbuseFilter could be installed telling
admins that installing Analytics is a violation of Foundation policy
and that they'll get desysopped if they continue. That wouldn't stop
them from doing it if they were determined, but it might be able to
trigger an alert to get the appropriate parties to make sure they
didn't try evading it. Maybe the filter could be installed on Meta
and local violations could go to Meta logs so stewards will see? Are
global filters possible right now?
At a bare minimum, such a warning would reduce inadvertent errors.
Yeah, I meant it could detect and block the inadvertent uses by admins
who think they are doing something cool / clever. Yes, if someone
wants to intentionally ignore the warning and install an obfuscated
URL anyway, they still could; however, doing that is probably grounds
for summary desysop.
Global filters would run from Meta. Logs are intended to be both
global and local. My impression is that global filters have been
technically possible since April, but that there is social
resistance to installing them over questions like: who should control
them? when should they be used? how do you ensure that you aren't
blocking good edits to project W when confronting vandalism at X, Y,
and Z? You should talk to Andrew for more details on current status.
-Robert Rohde
___
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
On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se wrote: Gerard Meijssen wrote: Lars PLEASE read the license before you comment. Of course I have read the short license text at http://www.waveprotocol.org/patent-license It says that as long as we follow Google's protocol standard, they won't sue us for infringing on their patents (patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification). Oh, how very generous. But what if we want to implement some of their features in MediaWiki without following their protocol? That is where we should be worried. What exactly is it that they have patented? Assuming Google is intending to be not evil about this, I would guess the point of the intellectual property (e.g. patents and trademarks) is to prevent people from creating things that are called and/or identify themselves as Wave servers and yet don't conform to the communications protocol. And there is a reasonable point there. Regardless of what features and services a server might offer, it is still important that the underlying communications protocol be something that all parties can make sense of, otherwise your network gets bogged down in gibberish. Anyway, that's the optimistic interpretation. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)
On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: snip The technical specifications of such a device allow for it to be extremely cheap. snip I think you are underestimating the size of Wikipedia. Even compressed a snapshot of the English articles with both text and low quality images would run you 20+ GB. At that storage capacity a handheld display device using modern technology would cost $200+, which is probably way too much to ask a third world person to pay. For comparison, OLPC has a total capacity of only 1GB. In another decade perhaps it would work, but I don't think it is currently an economical project to talk about giving large numbers of people static copies of Wikipedia. (There is perhaps something to be said for distributing a much smaller core subset of articles though.) -Robert ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Information about 2009 Board of Trustees election
On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 9:16 AM, philippe philippe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Ah, OK, sorry for my misunderstanding of the question. Indeed, we had that same discussion amongst the committee. In the end, the vote timing is driven by Wikimania and the need to purchase tickets for the new trustees-designate to get there (at a reasonable price, which usually requires a 14 day advance purchase), while also taking the time to get the translations done as completely as possible. In addition, it was our feeling that last year that the first week had - by far - the vast majority of the votes cast with relatively little movement afterwards. You mileage may vary of course, but the Licensing Update vote had roughly 60%, 25% and 15% of votes cast during each of its three weeks. I'd hate to have ignored 40% by stopping after only 1 week. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Information about 2009 Board of Trustees election
Have you discussed software requirements with developers? I'm not sure the new SecurePoll software is yet set up to allow for preferential voting (either on the input side or the tallying side). Also, we had a number of problems with tallying [1]. Some of which was a result of essentially overloading the software with 17000 votes, but even if you avoid that issue (for example by having stricter suffrage requirements), there are still some things to look out for. Which reminds me that I still need to go file some Bug reports... August is plenty of lead time to address these issues, but they shouldn't be kept to the last minute. -Robert Rohde [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/licom-l/2009-May/000245.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
