Re: [Foundation-l] Signal languages Wikimedia projects
is a normal motive for every proposed Wikipedia._ Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Signal languages Wikimedia projects
Andre Engels hett schreven: On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Marcus Buck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andre Engels hett schreven: nd this configuration does make sense, in my opinion. If we have a hypothetical language with one million oral speakers, but only a handful of people able to write, it will still be useful to create a written encyclopedia. Cause if you start to teach the one million analphabets how to read, they immediately have written content available. If there is no written content available, there is no incentive to learn to read. It's a chicken or egg dilemma. Why are there so few books in Breton? Cause there are so few people able to read Breton. Why are there so few people able to read Breton? Cause there is so few content available. (among other reasons) It's a self-energizing effect. The more content there is, the more interest there will be. That may be a laudable task, but it is not our task. Are you sane? That's _exactly_ our task! Give access to information to people, who nobody else cares about. English Wikipedia is a great project, but almost all information in it can be found elsewhere on the internet. There are other online encyclopedias, databases, private and institutional websites, Google Books. English Wikipedia is just a more convenient way to access the information out there. It saves you time sorting out the good and bad information on the world wide web. That's it, a convenience tool. But a well-developed Yoruba Wikipedia or Gan Wikipedia or Sango Wikipedia or [add in here one of hundreds of other languages] could be the only easily accessible information resource at all. Nobody cares about giving information access to the five million Sango speakers or the hundreds of thousands signers. We should care! I doesn't cost us much. Well, actually it doesn't cost us anything. You grossly misunderstood me. What I claimed was NOT that we should not be making information available in 'smaller' languages. What I want to claim is that we should do so to make the *information* available, not to help the *language* develop. Wikipedia is there to spread the information. We should have Wikipedia in Yoruba and Sango, not because that helps develop the Yoruba and Sango _languages_ to get more useful and have a higher status, but because it helps the Yoruba and Sango _speakers_ to get the information they want. But those two are Siamese twins. You cannot separate them. That's what I wanted to say. Chad said there's no audience and I said of course there is no audience when the stage is empty. the balcony will fill once the actors enter the stage. In 1880 there were no gas stations. And there were no good roads. Horses were cheap and motor cars were expensive and loud and they stank. They were not even quicker than the horses. There was no market for motor cars. And still some guys tried to sell motor cars. It took decades until the car was able to replace horses. It will possibly too take decades to make Sango and American Sign full-fledged languages. But isn't it worth to take a start? For a person born deaf, learning to read the written oral language of his environment is like learning Chinese for a person speaking English. It's a big mass of signs and the deaf person cannot make much sense out of them cause they are meant to represent sounds. Sounds that have no meaning to the deaf person. For them it's only an array of strokes and curves. I speak three languages and can read some more. But those are all closely related (and well-equipped with resources) Germanic languages. If I were a Sango speaker I had to learn French or English to obtain non-local bound knowledge. Those languages are completely unrelated. It's again like learning Chinese. I am sure the Sango speakers would be very glad if they had not to learn Chinese (perhaps they still would learn it, but they weren't forced any more). If you speak Sango natively and there is a well-developed Sango Wikipedia around, the information becomes available once you attain school and have gained basic reading skills. If there is no Sango Wikipedia around, information only becomes available once you attained school for several years and gained reading and understanding skills in a foreign language. It'll save you some years. An important point is: Wikimedia's goal is not bottling the brains of humankind with as much information and knowledge as possible. That would be easiest achieved with teaching a world language to all people (as a standardized filling spout). No, we only want to _provide_ information. An easily accessible information repository. Everybody who wants information can obtain it from Wikimedia's projects. As a provider we should provide our material in the easiest accessible format (language). And for most people that's the native (or first) language. Marcus Buck
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Gerard, it would be good, if you could add links to all the extension pages in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki, which point to pages which use those extensions. There are links to two pages who use the Uniwiki package, but I was not able to find live examples of most of the single extensions. Where can I find CreatePage live in action, or 'Generic Edit Page' or Layouts? Screenshots on the single extension pages would be good too. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia video tutorials: the making-of
I guess you made some specifications for the videos before you created them. Like, who is the target audience, do we want it to be translated into other languages, where to publish them, what kind of aura should the speaker have, etc. etc. Could you give some insights into these specifications? Especially about languages. Marcus Buck Frank Schulenburg hett schreven: Hi all, As most of you know we've been working on Wikipedia video tutorials during the last few months. The general idea behind producing video tutorials is the belief that videos make learning much easier than text based online help pages, at least for some audiences. We are therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia. For this purpose we would like to distinguish between two sorts of video tutorials: * Guided tours: designed to raise the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia as well as to encourage people to view Wikipedia as friendly. All guided tours will be presented by moderators in order to appear more trustworthy, friendly and encouraging. They will be produced as high quality videos by a production company commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation. * How-to videos: aimed at explaining basic features of the Wikipedia user interface. How-to videos shall be produced as screencasts with a speaker explaining every single step. In a nutshell think of (a) guided tours as videos aimed at giving the audience a look behind the scenes and to encourage them to join us as editors and (b) how-to videos as tutorials to enable newbies to make a successful start on Wikipedia. (a) Examples for guided tours may be: * Editing Wikipedia is easy! * Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it? * What motivates the volunteers behind Wikipedia / Wikimedia? * What you should know about Wikimedia - the organization behind Wikipedia (b) Examples for how-to videos may be: * How to create a user account * The basics of Wiki markup * How do I upload images? * How to find information about a certain topic on Wikipedia? On 19 November 2008, the shooting of the very first Wikipedia guided tours video tutorials took place. We are very happy that we found in Hendrik John of Living Colour film production an experienced filmmaker who managed not only the shooting but also everything related to the development (including the casting of Theresa, our moderator in the first two videos) and the pre-production (like hiring the crew and building the set). A big thanks goes to Lennart Guldbrandsson, the president of Wikimedia Sverige, who helped us a lot with his experience in filmmaking and scriptwriting. Thank you Lennart - I always enjoy our collaboration! To give you a look behind the scenes I produced a short 3 minute making-of video that provides some insights on how complex the production of guided tours may be. You can watch it online: * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorials_making-of_(high).ogv (11.7 MB, better quality) * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorials_making-of_(low).ogv (6.2 MB, lower quality) and also on * http://vimeo.com/2554962 * http://fschulenburg.blip.tv/file/1493287/ * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgJTndVjSYc Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and we hope that they will be online soon. All this would have not been possible without the funding of Wikimedia Deutschland. The German chapter not only paid all costs for the video production but also my travel expenses. So, please join me in thanking Wikimedia Germany for the financial support and ... enjoy the making-of video :-) Frank Schulenburg Head of Public Outreach NB. This mail address is used for public mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will get lost. ___ 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] How to dismantle a language committee
Jimmy Wales hett schreven: Mohamed Magdy wrote: (I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!). I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid. It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken. --Jimbo I agree, that the current process of new language edition approval has major flaws and can be regarded as broken to some degree. And I will not take a definite stance in the matter of arz.Wikipedia. But please be aware, that the question of whether or not language editions in language varieties widely regarded as dialects are stupid, useless or laughable is highly POV. We European or American outsiders have few personal POV about the matter, but we don't know much about the real linguistic differences. Those who know about the differences, have very deep personal POVs. If we grow up in a specific society, we unconsciously internalize the prevalent POVs of that society at a very early age. It's hard to overcome those POVs. In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language. By the way: This uniform nation and stupid language thing is not a Arabian world only thing, that the Europeans got rid of by kicking Latin's ass. The whole repeats itself on lower levels. Look at French vs. Occitan. If you ask Sarkozy or the Parisiens, Occitan is a French dialect. As citizens of the French Republic they should speak French. Trying to establish Occitan as a language on par with French is trying to destroy the unite French nation. But from a linguistic POV Occitan is not very closely related to French. Not closer than to Catalan, Spanish or Italian. Catalan being the next example. The Spanish saw it as a Spanish dialect. But they couldn't manage to drum that fact into the Catalans and Catalan finally became a recognized language. So if the Egyptian VIP laughs, he does not laugh a linguistic laughter, but a political laughter. The emancipation of Arabic dialects could lead to the establishment of a Arabience language family like Latin fell apart in the Romance language family. And that's what many Arabs fear, just as the Latin monks didn't like the end of Latin. But the 'future' (that means contemporary) Italians and French and Portuguese live happily with the former vernaculars. Allowing the Arab dialects to go this way is a highly political decision. Forbidding it would be too. So there is no way Wikimedia could avoid making a political stance. But from the POV of 'Freedom' we should allow. If we forbid that's a definite stance. If we allow, there are still two possible outcomes: Latin will fall or it stand strong and Vulgar will stay vulgar. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
Muhammad Alsebaey hett schreven: The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the Latin Wikipedia. Marcus Buck It is interesting to me to see that Masri condones writing in a Latinized alphabet, I didnt know that until I saw Mohamed's email, so I went looking and they say you can write in both Arabic and 'latinized' characters. I said earlier that I am against deleting any project already opened with an active user base, still I fail to see how articles like the following are of any use to anybody but an elite few who would like to see their language more westernized, and are using Wikipedia to give ground to such experimentation... Do people actually think that the illiterate masses are willing to learn a totally new alphabet that is of no use to them in daily life just to read some information on Wikipedia? anyone else seeing this premise as kind of nonsensical? http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%8A_(%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%8A%D8%A9) http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%83%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7 I don't know, how widespread knowledge of Latin letters is, but I'm quite sure, that you are right. Latin letters shouldn't be encouraged. I did some random article and in 36 random articles (that's a 10% sample of arz.Wikipedia) I found no article written in Latin letters. So I guess, articles in Latin letters are a very limited number. Both examples given by you were created by Dudi on the Incubator. It seems Dudi isn't active anymore, no edits since November. The account wasn't even recreated after the move from the Incubator to the wiki (but perhaps he chose another username). It seems, the problem is very limited. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
Tim Starling hett schreven: Marcus Buck wrote: In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language. I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims? -- Tim Starling There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. What did you hear conflicting things about? About the big differences and problems with mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects or about the notion of one Arabic nation? Well, that Arabic has a wide variety of different dialects, is obvious, if we look at the basic facts. Arabic is spoken over an area that spans thousands of kilometers. Arabic spread from its central area in Arabia in the 7th century due to the spread of Islam. Since then the dialects developed different from the standard that didn't change much since then due to it's liturgical character (just like Latin). Latin was in vulgar use since about the 1st century. So Latin Vulgar had 2000 years to change and Arabic Vulgar only 1300 years. Therefore Latin Vulgar should be roughly 50% more diverse than Arabic Vulgar (Please put the emphasis on roughly cause language change is of course not linear). [English is spread over a very wide area too and does not show that much variation. But English spread from England only 400 years ago and most of the speakers shifted to English only in very recent times. So outside of England there are no real dialects (and even England is no country with a pronounced dialectal landscape). Therefore the whole subject of dialects is a very obscure thing to many speakers of English.] The notion of the one Arabic nation is even more vague. We have to keep in mind, that mentalities do not necessarily differentiate between different identity-building elements. Identity can be based on ethnicity, on language, on religion, on common history, on citizenship or on arbitrary mixtures of these aspects. The most important connecting element for people in the Middle East is religion. The Islam. The Islam connects them to people with entirely different languages too. But the Standard Arabic language is connected to the Islam also, cause it's the liturgical language of the Islam. Saying, that Arabic is a macrolanguage can easily touch religious feelings. That's irrational, but happens. So there are many different levels of identity and interconnections between those levels of identity. It's possible, that you talked to Egyptians and they said those damned Syrians or otherwise showed few Panarabic loyalty. But that doesn't mean there is no common identity. I'm sure you will easily find New Yorkers saying those damned New Jerseyians or US Americans saying those damned Canadians. It's normal to have animosities with the people you know best, your closest neighbors (cause there's few reason to be angry about people you have no contact to). But if it comes to identity or loyalty, New Yorkers and New Jerseyians, Americans and Canadians, and Egyptians and Syrians will stand close and stick together. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
Ray Saintonge hett schreven: That's an outrageous assumption. Canadians who attend an international sporting event between Americans and any other country will most often cheer for the other country. Since 1959 Canada has never broken diplomatic relations with Cuba, and has not participated in the US adventures against Vietnam and Iraq. Ec Rivalry in sports is a good example of what I spoke of: animosities between neighbors. There can even be outspoken rivalries between neighboring villages or towns, although both places share every single value or custom or mentality. The mindset is identical and still they can be engaged in contention. But if their basic values or customs are threatened by a third party, they will forget their little animosities and stand side by side. Cuba is just a little Communist island off the coast of America. There's no reason for Canada to show aggression towards Cuba cause Cuba does not threaten anybody. If Cuba would threaten common values of the USA and Canada, Canada would join the USA in its anti-Cuban actions. But we are rapidly degressing from the topic... Identity has layers. Some layers are very emotional, but still unimportant. Sports for example. People can get very hot about sports, but they won't fight wars about it (the Football War being no counter-example). Other layers seem to be less hot-blooded, cause they emerge only rarely, but they can be existential and thus lead to embittered enmities. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Language codes to rename
Geoffrey Plourde hett schreven: I am sure he will handle the rename as soon as he can, but patience is key. cough, please be patient! It's only been three years since mo.wikipedia was closed. The case will be handled as soon as one of our service team members becomes available. Marcus Buck We got 6 million bucks, ain't we? Perhaps we should extend our tech staff a little bit. (Looking at the Bugzilla backlog, looking at the many features we are waiting for since years [global preferences for example], etc.) I don't suggest that Brion and the tech staff do a bad job. I'm sure they are doing their best. But obviously they need more help. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Language codes to rename
Yaroslav M. Blanter hett schreven: Could this thread be killed, please. We will never be able to get rid of this, starting all over again once per month. Cheers Yaroslav It's natural, that unresolved issues come up again. The solution is to solve the issue. It will never come up again after that... Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Domains
On November 4 2003 Jimbo Wales announced, that 200 EUR were donated to register European domain names (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-November/012981.html). Did this ever happen? I wonder, cause as far as I know, many domains are still not registered by people affiliated with Wikimedia (.ru, .es, .co.uk, .it [.it at least redirects to Wikipedia]). If the 200 EUR were spent for domains: Which ones? If they were not: we should make up that and spend the earmarked donation (plus additional money if needed) to obtain those domains (and ideally all wikipedia.xx domains). Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
Brian hett schreven: There is only one thing stopping it from going live in my opinion - developer enthusiasm. What about community consensus? Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] vro
I agree on 'et', but the 'no' case is different. the codes 'no', 'nb' and 'nn' were present in ISO 639 since the beginning. 'no' is the code that covers both 'nn' and 'nb'. When 'nn' split from 'no' it would have been good, if 'no' had been moved to 'nb' the same time. The main difference between the cases of Voro/Estonian and Bokmal/Nynorsk is, that Bokmal and Nynorsk speakers would both agree if you ask them Do you speak Norwegian? But Voro speakers do not agree when asked Do you speak Estonian? They'd say No, I speak Voro. So, both Nynorsk and Bokmal are contesters to the code 'no', but Voro has few interest to be covered by 'et'. That shouldn't surprise, since Nynorsk and Bokmal are two different standardizations for the same language, when Voro and Estonian are different languages. Marcus Buck Lars Aronsson hett schreven: Gerard Meijssen wrote: It is nice that you oppose, there are reasons why it might be a bad idea, but the ones that I know are not the ones you put forward. A reason why a change would be good is that it will prevent confusion. Come on, nobody is confused about what language Estonian is. If giving a language code to a local dialect means we have to rename all URLs for one of the major Wikipedias (Estonian is the 34th biggest, Bokmål is the 13th biggest), this only means we have to oppose all future assignments of new ISO language codes. It is OK to use the standard when naming new Wikipedias, but it's not OK to suddenly change a well-known address. We're here to spread free knowledge. That is not helped by renaming all of our URLs just because of some random ISO standard change. The no and et Wikipedias should be kept as they are. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] vro
Lars Aronsson hett schreven: I'm not talking about dialects or legal standing. I'm talking about renaming thousands of URLs, breaking incoming links from other websites, for no good reason. After a rename the old link will stay as a redirect and won't change for a long time (at least several years) to give people time to attune to the new code. I think, everybody agrees on that. For some years 'no' would be a redirect just as 'nb' is a redirect to 'no' now. When in several years the new code is generally accepted and used by everyone only some links from very old webpages will point to 'no'. 'no' could then turn into a page saying Bokmal Wikipedia is hosted under nb, please update your links. You will be redirected in a few seconds. and after yet another year or so it will become a portal linking to all Norwegian projects. It won't be an abrupt or disruptive change. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Help-book made available in en Wikipedia against Licensing Policy
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven: Hoi What is IUP ? Thanks, GerardM [[en:WP:IUP]] Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Content on Wikimedia
Two comments: Thomas Dalton hett schreven: Topless sunbathing is a legitimate topic for discussion and it usefully illustrate by such a photo. So that rates pretty highly on utility. I think it rates pretty low of potential for harm since the subjects aren't identified and they chose to sunbathe topless on a public beach. A photo where we have the subjects' permissions would be better, but I don't see how we could be sure of that (any kind of posing would ruin the photo - it would turn it from topless sunbathing to glamour modelling, a completely different topic). So I think this photo is appropriate. The subjects aren't identified, but they are identifiable. They indeed chose to sunbathe topless on a public beach, but being naked is a very context-sensitive thing. A public beach is public, but it is still unlikely, that you will be seen by people you know. That's very different from being on the internets. It also rates low on potential for harm since it is almost impossible to identify the subject (it rates slightly higher due to being accidental, albeit reckless, rather than intentional as the sunbathing was, but that is overruled by the fact that you can't identify the subject). almost impossible to identify... If I would know that girl, I would recognize her. You don't need to see a face to recognize somebody you know. This image is indeed harmless, it's just a little flick of slip. Embarassing, but not the humiliating kind of embarassing, but more the oops kind. But we have other ones on our projects, that are more harmful. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Content on Wikimedia
David Moran hett schreven: I think perhaps then the most fundamental disagreement we have is the idea that sexual images equal harm. FMF Not the images themselves equal harm. But it can mean harm to people. As far as I have understood this discussion, we are not talking about deleting sexual images where it is clear, that the depicted person agrees to the depiction. We are only talking about images, where the depicted person is not aware of being published and/or has not agreed to it. People usually don't agree on being published cause they fear to experience some kind of harm if that would be done. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Content on Wikimedia
Sam Johnston hett schreven: Is it ever clear that the depicted person agrees to the depiction? Well, it's not, but that's actually not a very useful point. I was never in Cameroon. I have never met anybody from Cameroon. I have never seen any obvious evidence that Cameroon really exists. And still I do not question that there is a place like Cameroon. Why? Cause people say so. If the uploader confirms that the subject of the image is not underage, has consented to the image and to the upload, that's no evidence, but it's still much more than requiring no confirmation at all. We could require the uploader to give the name of the model for example (by OTRS, not on the wiki). We could require confirmation of age and consent, we could require an explicit identity by asking for a identity card number or anything like that. We should require at least _anything_. At the moment we assume good faith even if the probability for good faith is marginal. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] depth
Mark Williamson hett schreven: I think we should find a way to exclude redirs from depth stats. Redirects _are_ a sign of depth. Well, _meaningful_ redirects of course. But there's no automatic way to distinguish meaningful and less meaningful redirects. And that's the main problem of the whole depth metrics: It wants to be a measure for collaborativeness. But its counting methods are so rough and simplicistic, that inefficiency, messiness and mindlessness are pushing the depth too. Creating a 100 KB article in one edit lowers the depth, while creating a 1 KB article in 30 edits most likely will increase the depth. Creating ten useless templates or creating ten discussion pages with ditsy comments on the articles is good for the depth while ten new elaborate articles is bad for the depth. An edit war is very good for the depth while adding 100 KB text to the 100 KB article of another user adds few to the depth. Well, in the end it's not the fault of the metrics. It's the fault of the people interpreting it as a measure of quality. It's not a measure of quality. The results can easily be skewed by individuals who have much power in a single project (Volapük, Ripuarian for example), it's always skewed for very small projects (Kanuri, Greenlandic), and it is often skewed due to the specific methods of a wiki (English Wikipedia's wikiproject ratings on almost every single discussion page for example put the depth higher). Comparing depths for different projects is almost futile, if you don't know about the specifics of the project that influence the depth. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Non-free content on Commons
Birgitte SB hett schreven: Right, it obviously the pompous English majority conspiring here because you received a prank from every English speaker on the list. If the list were in Spanish so every immature youth in Latin America with too much time on their hands could access it without scholarship, you would be unable to spare the rest of us on Dec 28. Follow David's example and ignore those who actually choose to waste your time and spare the rest of us your stereotyped rant. Birgitte SB Cultural imperialism is not confined to societies. It can be done by individuals too. And Pedro's critical remarks are aimed at individuals. No need to feel offended as a member of the English majority (except you support imposing your own cultural sillynesses on other people, in that case, feel offended). The main problem with just ignore them is: If you don't know the custom of April's Fool day, you won't know that it's a joke. And even if you know the custom you can still fall for the jokes. I am fully aware, that there will always be idiots, who don't know how to behave in an intercultural environment, but only if we tell them that they are idiots, awareness can arise for the idioticy of this behaviour. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interview: Wikipedia usability and test results
Ziko van Dijk hett schreven: Ziko who is culture-imperialistic, spamming garbage, confusing the newbies, making jokes about real dangers, making jokes about disabled people, and unwitty (see how some Wikipedians react to a April fools day joke...) Harsh critic, isn't it? There are two interpretations possible now: a) All those critics are dicks. b) You did something that is indeed critizable. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Interview: Wikipedia usability and test results
Aryeh Gregor hett schreven: On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Harsh critic, isn't it? There are two interpretations possible now: a) All those critics are dicks. b) You did something that is indeed critizable. All those critics being you and . . . who else, again? Part of being on an international list is having to deal with other cultural groups' customs, such as April Fools' Day. Ziko cross-posted his joke on several lists and on the wiki and got critic on several of them. If you want names: Marcela, Janneman, Phantom, Southpark for example. Look at the list: culture-imperialistic, spamming garbage, confusing the newbies, making jokes about real dangers, making jokes about disabled people, and unwitty. The only thing, that I accused him of (at least I used the word, alhough not explicitly in his direction) was cultural imperialism. Fools' days are actually an ethnographic category. There are several time periods in different cultures at which making fun of others is common. Most of the Western world has April 1 as fools' day, the Spanish-speaking world, as Pedro mentioned, knows December 28, somebody mentioned the Yiddish Purim torah, Denmark knows the Majkat on April 30 and May 1 and there are several other occasions in other cultures. Would you like to be fooled on all of them? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] mo.wikipedia is not yet renamed to mo-cyrill as it was promised !
Brion Vibber hett schreven: and there are plenty of things most members of this list would rather see us do first. :) Great to hear you are working on world peace... As the developments on 'things most members of this list would like to see' are rather slow, I'd say, you should urgently hire some more people, who help you do the tasks that need to be done, or alternatively make access to administrative tools easier, so that voluntary helpers can help you do the tasks that need to be done. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
David Gerard hett schreven: (c.f. the earlier proposal for a Victims of Soviet Repression wiki - nice idea, but utterly unsuited to WMF through utter lack of neutrality.) http://sep11.wikipedia.org/ does still work by the way. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven: Hoi, The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the code. This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality. Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an instant on - high quality experience and it is the languages that are currently not supported that have the highest need for tools like this. This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function? (My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80% search engine market share is one of the most important internet access vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to _reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007, although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't care about the rest.) Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven: Hoi, One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. For general availability, the expectation for the quality is quite high. To me this seems to be one reason why Google did not add more languages. Another reason why many corpora are not big enough is because of the problem of identifying a text for the language it is written in. When you consider that a few years ago I learned that only a small percentage of Internet content has the metadata for the language that is used.. When you then consider that something like 75% is actually wrong... Given that Google actually supports MediaWiki, it may be that they are willing to support our language. The problem however is that many of our language have illegal and even wrong codes. The consequence is that it is not obvious to just support our language. This issue will not be resolved because people are under the impression that the community has the final word about the names of our languages. This is naive as well as problematic because it prevents the ease of the argument for Google to support our languages.. Thanks, GerardM Your old ISO code hobby horse ;-) I guess, if Google wanted to, they would be able recognize the languages of our projects. Just like all our users do too. One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. Yes, that was basically my main question: What is sufficiently? How much pages or MB of text? At least the order of magnitude. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
Hoi,
The proper use of language codes is indeed a recurring theme. Calling it a
hobby horse gives the impression that it does not have a real world
application. It does have a real world application and one of the problems
with language is that it is truly hard to recognise languages confidently.
Suggesting that Google can because of its size is too easy. I am sure they
would have if they could.
Thanks,
GerardM
Let's assume Google wants to build an Alemannic translation tool. They
are searching for an Alemannic text corpus. Will they fail to find the
Alemannic Wikipedia cause 'als' stands for a form of Albanian? I don't
think so.
Don't understand me wrong, I am _pro_ the use of correct codes and I
would reject the opinion, that projects have the right to decide to
stick to a wrong code. But I also reject to switch projects to codes
that don't match the project ('gsw' for example is no proper substitute
for 'als') and I reject code switches that do harm to the projects (that
means that the old code has to be a redirect to the new code at least
for several years).
And most importantly I think, that the question of ISO codes is not
related to Google's operations. If Google wants to use Wikipedia content
to improve their tools it should be really easy for them to do the code
mapping (e.g. 'no'-'nb').
So does anybody know how big a corpus must be to be helpful to Google?
Marcus Buck
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Some reflections about the governance of Commons
David Gerard schrieb: 2009/6/15 Rama Neko raman...@gmail.com: The service project angle worries me too. I have noticed that many articles of Wikipedia, the service project that makes it easier to find media in Commons by providing encyclopedic context to our content, utterly lack the proper links to our galleries and categories. Furthermore, I sometimes have the feeling that contributors of Wikipedia expect us to host all sorts of unacceptable media in return of the service that they provide; while we of course appreciate the service projects, this is a problem, particularly when these files are copyright violations. In the particular case of Pikiwiki, it would of course be very caricatural to say that all their images are copyvios. There are lots of out-of-scope party snapshots, too. I'd hope this isn't a summary of the views of other Commons admins. Anyone else? Or is the Commons admin community this insular and derisive? That was an inversion, a change of perspective. A rhetorical measure, that is intended to show how some arguments of the other party feel. Sometimes this can lead to a catharsis where suddenly the own arguments seem less general and valid and suddenly you can appreciate and understand the worries of the other. Sometimes. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Some reflections about the governance of Commons
David Gerard hett schreven: 2009/6/15 Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org: David Gerard schrieb: I'd hope this isn't a summary of the views of other Commons admins. Anyone else? Or is the Commons admin community this insular and derisive? That was an inversion, a change of perspective. A rhetorical measure, that is intended to show how some arguments of the other party feel. Sometimes this can lead to a catharsis where suddenly the own arguments seem less general and valid and suddenly you can appreciate and understand the worries of the other. Sometimes. No, I emailed Rama about this first and he said he was entirely serious (and added a string of personal attacks). It's actually verified as his honest view of things. Which suggests he shouldn't be let near anything to do with any other project, but anyway. So the question is how much this is the atmosphere on Commons. If so, it needs urgent outside action, and no two ways about it. It's not. It's the general atmosphere on Commons that Commons is not just an appendix and that Commons is a project in its own right. But of course nobody thinks that other projects are just service projects or that all Pikiwiki content is useless. That's not the case. And even if Rama _said_ this, I still don't think, that he really _believes_ it (cause it's blatant nonsense). I guess he was just angry. Commons is a project that has to do much workload with few people. A project that is often perceived to be unfriendly or arrogant. This image is partly self-inflicted and partly created by the outside world (that's all the other projects). Cause the users from the other projects contribute much valuable content, but also many copyvios and problematic files. The Commons community has the task to clean up the problematic cases. Some cases can be solved successfully (by adding licenses, sources etc.), others have to be deleted. So Commons has exactly the same problem as administraters in every project. They are always the bad guys cause they delete stuff. If you suggest that there's a general atmosphere like that on Commons, that's just like stories about admin cabals on en.wp (or any other project). There's no evil plan of Commons to subjugate all other projects under its reign of terror. There's really none. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles
Mark Williamson hett schreven: Actually, Google added... Pirate and Montenegrin. Mark I first asked them in 2007 to add my language. They told me, no further languages would be added at the moment and they would inform me, if that changed. I asked them again in 2008 and 2009. One time they answered not at all and the other time they said nothing had changed. Pirate of course is an important addition... And Montenegrin surely was a good measure to endear oneself to the Montenegrin government. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
Andre Engels hett schreven: On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronssonl...@aronsson.se wrote: 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? Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written, people will not read it either. But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in the own language. Another important factor: If your language has no localized version of Windows, of Office, of Google or of equivalent softwares, this almost excludes all people not speaking at least one foreign language from using a computer. If understanding a foreign language is a prerequisite to using computers, there are no native-onlys - who have the most interest in native content - to write native content, and there are no native-onlys to read the native content. The bilingual people have less interest in creating content. And then in many societies which have bilingualism between the people's languages and a non-native official language, there is some amount of elitarism. Good knowledge of the official language and good education provide you a certain social status. Educating the native masses could endanger this social advantage. The more social and general insecurity exists in an area, the more elitarist are the educated. And creating content for the benefit of everybody is a leisure time activity. Poor people rather try to earn money instead of writing content for free. And rich people in under-developed countries ususally won't contribute too, cause to become rich in a poor country, you must be rather callous and not be too social. I guess, it would be possible to greatly improve the number of contributions to several of our Wikipedias, if we established some kind of reward system, in which contributors get paid for their work. E.g. Burundi has a per capita income of less than 150 $ a year. If it would be possible to make some dollars a day by writing Wikipedia articles, you could easily gain some full-time editors with just a few thousand dollars. Rundi Wikipedia article count would surely skyrocket if the Foundation would provide let's say 100,000 $ for a project like that (of course a native Rundi project manager would be needed to ensure the quality of the contributions). Wouldn't it be great if the Wikimedia Foundation could go to the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and say Hey, with 100,000 $ you can help us to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia for 10 million speakers of Chichewa, where before there was exactly _no_ encyclopedia-like content in that language!? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
Chad hett schreven: I agree wholeheartedly. We need to get away from this idea that more projects in more languages is better. It's not. It's lead to the issue we see now: dead projects lying around until somebody bothers to clean it up or close it. More projects in more languages _is_ better. They just need to be cared about. At the moment Wikimedia just sets up the wikis and waits for articles flowing in. The amount of work invested by the Foundation after the initial setup of the wiki is exactly zero. Languages of societies with much leisure time easily gained enough momentum by themselves. But other language versions from societies with educational and social hardships don't gain momentum by themselves. They don't reach the critical mass to sustain active wiki work. Therefore they need support by Wikimedia. Support like hiring somebody who is fluent in several African languages, sending him to Africa and let him promote Wikipedia participation at universities for example. Enthuse a handful of people and let them spread interest in Wikipedia collaboration. Perhaps soon you'll have a stable community. Even if my ideas may be naive, I don't know, at least the foundation could consider and explore projects like that. I don't think that there are generally too few people interested in those languages. It's just hard to make the start. It's immensely frustrating to work on a wiki all alone, writing article for article, and after a year, you maybe have 100 or 200 articles and your Wikipedia is still just a little heap of disjunct articles with hardly any blue links and you realize that it will take years (or decades) until you have written enough articles to establish a resource, that is interconnected through blue links and covering all basic concepts. Most users won't stay for more than some months under circumstances like that. They realize, that they can't achieve the goal all alone and give up. Therefore these projects need starting help. We should aid them until a little community is established and the basic articles are written. Once Rundi Wikipedia is at 100,000 articles, I'm sure, they won't need help anymore, cause at that moment it will be a useful resource, actually used by the people, and it will be fun for Rundi speakers to be part of the community and to add even more articles. Unlike the 38-article wiki we have now at which contributing is _not_ fun. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
Sebastian Moleski hett schreven: This may be a heretic question but I'd like to pose it anyway: why should it be necessary or appropriate for the Foundation to discuss this subject with the project communities? How does this appointment have any impact on the activities within the projects? Best regards, Sebastian The foundation is nothing. The foundation has no meaning by itself. It's just a real-world manifestation of the spirit that is our community. This manifestation is necessary, cause the community as a diffuse object cannot do things like buying servers, signing treaties etc. The foundation is an avatar. This is the sole reason why a foundation exists. To enable the community to act outside cyperspace. Therefore ideally there should be no decision without knowledge and acceptance of the community. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs on Hungarian Wikipedia still not working
Birgitte SB hett schreven: I hope someone is able to shortly fix this issue for you. However I think you have a mistaken idea about WMF. The reason people are wanted to join meta-projects is to ensure that their local wikis issues are understood. The meta-projects *are* hu.WP's projects, not competition for hu.WP. If you, or someone like you, is not part of foundation discussions to both speak up about hu.WP concerns and also to better inform hu.WP discussions about larger issues and trends, then how can hu.WP be properly cared for? Certainly everyone here wishes success for hu.WP and that her volunteers are active and happy. But for the most part, people here are not some abstract WMF-people who have neglected hu.WP. We are en.WS people or fr.WP people or de.WP people. I originally joined this list much like you did. Rather upset at what felt was attacks on en.WS's sincere efforts to do the right thing and general lack of help for us. These WMF-people had been talking about en.WS and saying we would have to delete the UK Hunting Act. I came here hoping to convince these people to actually help us: tell us exactly what copyright allows (very naive I know) rather than just dictating that our stuff be deleted without clarification. But I discovered that these WMF-people were no more than people just like me. Passionate people who found their way here with their feet still firmly planted in their own particular interests. They meant no harm to en.WS, but en.WS didn't rate very high in their concerns either. I quickly realized that someone from en.WS better keep on top of things here, before our interests got inadvertently squashed by someones pet issue. Or we merely got forgotten. So I understand how you might be hoping for for solutions and answers to be found here. I certainly did, but I learned it was a mistake to think there was such authority here. You will find opinions and ideas here. Sometimes you may find needed attention. (I hope this is the case today!) But the only real answer for solving hu.WP issues is to see that hu.WP is in WMF. hu.WP people must be in WMF people. hu.WP developers must be in WMF developers. hu.WP projects must be in WMF projects. Then hu.WP will find real answers and solutions. Or at least, they will find answers and solutions as well as anyone does. Birgitte SB Well, on a general participation level it's all true, what you are saying. But looking at the actual issue Flagged Revs at hu.wp it's very clear: The Foundation pays staff to do administrative tasks local projects cannot do. It's their job to do it. And they haven't done the necessary steps in six weeks. Tisza/hu.wp have done what they needed to do: File a bug at Bugzilla. If the coordination would work properly that should suffice to get the job done. It didn't. He searched to directly contact people who can help about this. And that didn't help too. So it's not Tisza's fault, he did it all right. The problem lies at the foundation level. Some processes are broken. There are two possible solutions: If we don't have enough manpower to handle all requests and bugs than the foundation should hire more staff (with millions in donations flowing in that should be no big problem). The second solution (the cheaper one) would be to create an interface, that allows local bureaucrats to switch on or off a set of approved extensions on their project. The interface would then run the needed scripts automatically. This interface needs to be written, but that's only one time and it will save much time and effort in the future. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 31 august, 20 years of our national holiday Our romanian language in Moldova, mo.wikipedia still in cyrillic !
David Gerard hett schreven: 2009/8/31 Cetateanu Moldovanu cetatean...@gmail.com: I said OUR, OUR country, OUR language, OUR latin script and alphabet. Please respect us. If by respect you mean agree and do what I say ... then I'm not surprised you have no insight as to why no-one cares about your request. - d. I care about his request (which is reasonable, as geni pointed out) and I'm sure many other people care too, but don't speak up in this forum. Of course it can be annoying, if somebody asks for the same thing again and again, but as his request is reasonable, the only thing you can do about it is executing the request. The only reason why this is not done yet is that nobody, who has the power to do it, cares about it. I really disagree with the foundation people more and more loosing touch with the communities. It's not just this request. It's also the fact, that bugzilla bugs are not worked on for weeks and months, delays in software rollouts, and the low worth that is given to community worktime (like the example given by Tisza Gergő or the thousands of manhours that are wasted every day with setting interwikis which could easily be saved, if we had a central interwiki repository and if this repository wouldn't be blocked by the developers). Perhaps the foundation should hire new staff, whose job it is to _read_ the mailing lists (I'm quite sure, that many of the messages at the lists are read by nobody from the foundation or just by people who say not my department) and to make sure that the relevant foundation employees take care of requests, questions etc. Another function could be taking care of Bugzilla bugs and delegating them to the relevant people. And we urgently need new developers. The current slow pace makes it clear, that the paid staff isn't even able to keep up with maintenance and daily operations. There are really few big innovations. We need developers, who can completely focus on innovation. Like global preferences, like a central interwiki repository, like an integrated map service, like a working interface for category intersection, like a Wikidata-project to keep volatile data consistent and up-to-date (e.g. population numbers). Known problems since half a decade (when I joined Wiki(p/m)edia) and even before. Five years ago I understood that these dreams were impossible, but today we have the money to actually do it. We earned 2 million recently, so please spend some bucks on hiring people to improve the response time to community requests and to improve development. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Font support for our domains
Do you need to register domains under these new internationalised TLDs? To me it seems to be the obvious solution, that the internationalised TLDs will be aliases to the existing ones. So wikipedia.cn and 维基百科. c?n? will point to the same target. That's how I would solve it and I really see no reson to do it in any other way. But I couldn't find any information whether this is the case or not. I still could be wrong about this assumption. But if they will be aliases nothing needs to be done by the Foundation. At the moment it is only planned to internationalise some few country TLDs. .org and other gTLDs will not be internationalised for the moment. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from?
Nikola Smolenski hett schreven: In Page Views Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown I also notice something that should affect chapter relations: there are some Wikipedias which are read from foreign countries more than from the country of origin (probably b/c readers from diaspora is richer and has better Internet access). For example, Macedonian Wikipedia is read more from Slovenia or Germany than from Macedonia: Macedonian (mk) (0.02% share of global total) Slovenia 30.6% Germany 23.7% Macedonia 23.3% It would therefore make sense for WMDE to try to reach Macedonians living in Germany, and for future WMMK to help them in doing so. It would make sense. But at the moment WMDE is not even actively doing anything for the _native_ languages of Germany except for German. I think that would be the first step to do. Marcus Buck ___ 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
Explicit images don't need to be used in an encyclopedic context
(Wikimedia is more than just an encyclopedia). They just have to be
_potentially_ useful in any Wikimedia project context (that's the
narrow, utilitaristic view on Commons) or in any possible educative
context (that's the more broad view on Commons, that views Commons as a
project on it's own instead of a auxiliary project). For almost any
picture it's possible to construct some example cases where the image
could serve a demonstrational purpose even if the quality is low and
similar images are available abundantly on Commons. We have lot's of low
quality penis self-shoots? Lot's of material to illustrate the bad
examples section of the Wikibooks guide How to Present Yourself
Favorably in Adult Forum Profiles!
So we shouldn't think about the question How can we reduce the amount
of material. From the previous e-mails by private musings I got the
impression that he is mainly concerned about the fact that there is no
way to control the display of explicit images on a personal level. Even
if somebody accepts that others want to see the images and if he just
wants to have a method to get rid of them for him personally, there is
no way to achieve this except for don't click on Wikimedia links or at
least think twice whether it could contain explicit images. And I am
with private musings on this. I for myself have no interest to exclude
explicit images, but it means improved freedom for others if we
provide a method to allow excluding explicit content. A template at
Commons like {{explicit content|oral intercourse|penis|breasts}}
stating the explicit contents visible in the image would be an easy
starting point. Let the template add some invisible HTML divs, provide
some Javascript to evaluate the divs and make it a gadget. Then
everybody will be able to exclude the personally unwanted content. If a
school wants to exclude explicit images, they switch on the gadget by
default. It's at least better than having Wikipedia blocked cause the
content cannot be controlled. That way moral panics would be
impossible cause anything immoral can be controlled.
One other thing that as a side effect could reduce the amount of
explicit material is to introduce a more professional release procedure.
If we'd require proper USC 2257 releases for explicit content, that
would improve our legal position and it would automatically lead to less
anonymous low quality uploads. That's something I would support.
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox
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Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from? QA
Joan Goma hett schreven: There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be). It comes from: 1.2 bilingual factor (visits lost because people also understand other languages, even if they have the opportunity to read the article in their mother tongue, they also read it in others). 2.5 size factor (visits to other projects because readers don’t find what they were looking for in their mother tongue). And 2,77 Google factor. (Visits lost because Google directs people to other tongues projects). The only positive factor is the bilingual one. We are working hard to correct the others. For other projects those factors can be very different but the concept can be there. Interesting. What's the math behind that numbers? Or the source? Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Pt-Portuguese Wikipedia
Thomas Dalton hett schreven: On 22 March 2010 19:01, Virgilio A. P. Machado v...@fct.unl.pt wrote: Perhaps the reason the issue keeps popping up is that, although it has been extensively «discussed», it has not been properly addressed, much less solved. I think the reason it has never been addressed is that nobody outside the Portuguese community can see a problem. It all seems to be a lot of fuss about nothing. That means the wider Wikimedia community will never accept a two-wiki solution and the most obvious one-wiki solution is the one used by the English Wikipedia, namely: stop complaining and just write encyclopaedia articles. We're not going to indulge a community engaged in a childish argument about nothing. I hope you speak Portuguese. Cause decisions like this should be made by people who know the language variants and their differences and not by outsiders. Leave the decision to the speakers of Portuguese. Anyway it seems that the majority of speakers does not want to split. Outsiders can assist by giving advice. E.g. how to minimize the problems that arise from the differences. But outsiders shouldn't impose decisions on the community. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
Mike Godwin hett schreven: My guess, admittedly based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, is that the Swedish Wikipedians who created this largely artificial and unnecessary dispute have not consulted independent trademark and copyright experts with regard to the rationale for their decision. Might be true, I don't know. You are an expert, so share your knowledge. What's the difference between e.g. Coca Cola with it's PD-old logo and Wikimedia? Why do we need copyright restrictions to protect our projects when Coca Cola (or any other company/organization with non-copyrighted logo) does not? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
This is a thread that accidentally became off-list due to a wrong reply-to header. Mike Godwin hett schreven: On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Mike Godwin hett schreven: On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Mike Godwin hett schreven: On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 3:45 AM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Mike Godwin hett schreven: On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Mike Godwin hett schreven: On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Mike Godwin hett schreven: My guess, admittedly based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, is that the Swedish Wikipedians who created this largely artificial and unnecessary dispute have not consulted independent trademark and copyright experts with regard to the rationale for their decision. Might be true, I don't know. You are an expert, so share your knowledge. What's the difference between e.g. Coca Cola with it's PD-old logo and Wikimedia? Why do we need copyright restrictions to protect our projects when Coca Cola (or any other company/organization with non-copyrighted logo) does not? This is explained in the policy document I posted a link for. Perhaps there's some magic sentence in that policy document (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy) that explains the difference and is obvious to an expert. I am no expert, so it's not obvious to me. The word copyright is not even mentioned in the document. My question was: why is trademark protection insufficient for Wikimedia when it is sufficient to protect the rights of the Coca Cola Company? Why do we need additional copyright protection when the Coca Cola Company is fine with an uncopyrighted logo? Why do you think the word copyright has to be used in the trademark document when when copyright terms like content are used? It's true that the policy document assumes that a reader will know that content is subject to copyright law, and that free license refers to free copyright license. The reason I think that is that my question specifically was about copyright. You said the answer to my question is in the policy. It is not. Let me once again repeat my question: Why would logos licensed under a license like CC-by-sa weaken our legal position when e.g. Coca Cola has no problem at all to legally protect itself although the logo is PD? The benefit comes from being able to prevent deceptive and confusing re-use of the logo through copyright remedies as well as trademark remedies. As soon as the puzzle globe becomes as widely recognized as the Coca-Cola logo, we can revisit the issue. Thanks. That's what I thought. Basically you are saying you want the logos to be copyrighted to be able to fight trademark infringement (like deceptive and confusing re-use) with non-trademark-law tools. That's not quite right. What I'm saying is that we reserve the right to use any lawful tools to prevent others from misrepresenting themselves as us, and to ensure the freedom of Wikimedia content, including both trademark-law tools and non-trademark-law tools that are available to us. That's the same as I said, isn't it? Just rendered in words that try to sound nicer. It's not the same, no. Weakening our legal ability to enforce free licenses in the name of a misconception about ideological purity is very much an ill-considered idea. Trademark law is designed to protect trademarks. Copyright law is designed to protect the author's rights. Copyright law can be (ab)used to put legal pressure on a trademark infringer but if your case is valid trademark law is sufficient to stop the infringer. No lawyer I know assumes that trademark law is a magical cure-all for cases of infringement. Nor is infringement the only issue that needs to be addressed. And you may call it a misconception about ideological purity but free licenses are part of the Foundation's mission statement. It's not ideological purity, it's integrity to follow your own ideals. You are perhaps unfamiliar with my career if you imagine that I lack integrity or ideals. Yes, I am indeed unfamiliar with your fine career (except for the famous law) but I never suggested anything like that. Anybody re-reading my sentence will recognize that that was not what I said. What I am trying to explain to you is that you have a very unsophisticated, un-nuanced understanding of what free licenses are, what
Re: [Foundation-l] Status report on logo copyright issues at Swedish Wikipedia
Mariano Cecowski hett schreven: Thank you, David; this clarifies a lot. I just wish you had managed to send this some 50 messages ago. :| I doubt that that would have spared you from receiving the 50 messages. Almost all of the facts presented by David were known right at the start of the discussion or were easy to find for anybody who cared to look. It was not lack of information that produced the 50 messages. It's just that people disagree about the conclusions drawn from the facts. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
I try to understand what happened, but I'm not sure whether the pieces that I found so far add up. * Larry Sanger is mad about Wikimedia. [apparent] * Larry Sanger notifies the FBI and tells them Wikimedia hosts child porn. [affirmed] * The FBI is rather unimpressed and does not take swift action. [apparent] * Larry Sanger informs media about us alleging Wikimedia of hosting porn. [unaffirmed] * The (conservative) TV station FOX reports about Wikimedia and contacts many important companies that have donated money for Wikimedia in the past whether they want to comment on the allegations. [affirmed] * The companies are contacting Wikimedia to ask what's going on. [unaffirmed] * The board worries about losses in donations and either sends Jimbo to Commons or Jimbo unilaterally decides to handle the case. [unaffirmed] * Without mentioning the previous developments Jimbo starts to delete all files that are porn (in his opinion, not sparing PD-old artworks etc.). Even engaging in edit-warring and ignoring input from the Commons community and ignoring community policies. [affirmed] * The Commons community condemns Jimbo's actions but has no power at all to stop the Founder-flagged berserk. [affirmed] Is this the story? Or are there any story arcs that I missed? Please correct me, wherever I am wrong. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
Amory Meltzer hett schreven: This is nuts. Literally, nothing has changed. Stuff on Wikimedia sites needs to be either educational or aimed at furthering the goals of the project and the foundation. We don't host articles about my her breasts or his penis, and we don't need to host images of them either. Arguing otherwise is just looking for a webhost. The thing that has changed is the fact that this was decided by the community, by admins who have earned their rights in a community vote, and according to policies. Take e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F%C3%A9licien_Rops_-_Sainte-Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se.png. That image is a 19th century artwork, a drawing, from an important artist. It was uploaded to Commons in 2006 and never questioned. But Jimbo didn't file a deletion request, he didn't even put a speedy delete. He just deleted it with a generic message given as reason. Two times the deletion was reverted by longstanding Commons admins who wanted to uphold Commons policy about deletions and two times Jimbo deleted it again, with the same generic reason. At the moment the file is again undeleted by a third Commons admin. (Jimbo is not online at the moment to overturn that decision.) I think this is a really obvious example how Jimbo breaks policies and why large parts of the Commons community are upset. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
Ting Chen hett schreven: For me, this statement is at the first line a support for Jimmy's effort. It is a soft push from the board to the community to move in a direction. Not my definition of a soft push. In my opinion it's not the task of board or foundation to push the community in any direction. It's the other way round, the community forms board and foundation. The task of board and foundation is to operate the servers, to develop the software needed to operate our projects, and to stop members of the community or of the outside world from doing things harmful to the community, e.g. by violating the law. But they should not decide on the actual content, that's the task of the community. If e.g. USC 2257 requires us to keep records, that would be okay to me. It would decimate our explicit content, but having content with clear provenance would be a nice advantage. But at the moment I see no rational reason like a law or anything like that. Just some vague scope that is inherently undefined and used to cover cleansings on moral grounds. We do not need 10,000 close-ups of penises. But we need some penises. Small, medium, big, from different ethnicities, crooked, shaved and unshaved, with jewelry, with diseases etc. pp. We will never reach a state where the number of our penis images is low enough to make conservative agenda makers happy without leaving medical articles or articles on sexuality unillustrated (which would lower their informativeness and thus their educational value). We had discussions on sexual content before. I proposed to use a technical solution in which images are tagged with tags that give detailed information about the form of explicit content present. The images could then be filtered by anybody who wants them to be filtered. That can be done on a per-user basis, but also on a per-project basis, or a per-country basis (based on IP geolocation). So if the people of the Kerguelen Islands don't want to see boobs and vagoos (or the government disallows showing them) a filter could be set to remove those images. Creating a technical solution like that is the task of the foundation. The _real_ task of the foundation. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] What the board is responsible of (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)
Florence Devouard hett schreven: To be fair, I am *extremely* disturbed by the above statement. Since when is the board DEFINING the scope and basic rules of the projects ? As a reminder, the WMF was created two years after Wikipedia. The scope, the basic rules did not need WMF to be crafted. Over the following years, the scope and even the basic rules have evolved, usually for the better. The WMF certainly pushed on some issues, but largely, the rules and scope have been defined by the community. And this is the way it should be. You are shifting the role of the WMF in a direction that I find greatly impleasant. The original reason for creation of WMF was that we needed an owner for our servers, we needed a way to pay the bills. We needed a way to collect money. WMF was here to support the project and to support the community dealing with the project. It was here to safegard our core values. Thanks for that comment. It gives me hope that there are sane people out there ;-) We need people like you back in the board. I too am disturbed by the attitude that board and foundation rule over the projects. As I have expressed previously: In my opinion it's not the task of board or foundation to push the community in any direction. It's the other way round, the community forms board and foundation. The task of board and foundation is to operate the servers, to develop the software needed to operate our projects, and to stop members of the community or of the outside world from doing things harmful to the community, e.g. by violating the law. But they should not decide on the actual content, that's the task of the community. It's a common misunderstanding/misrepresentation that governments rule over the citizens. That was the case in absolutist and feudal systems where the power of the rulers came from I make the rules, cause I can. In a democracy the government is just an executive branch of the overall society that takes measures to improve the society's welfare. The Foundation is just the executive branch of the Wikimedia community. It's sole purpose is to serve the community by doing tasks that cannot possibly evolve from community self-organization. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening
J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov hett schreven: I have a problem with basing it on IP addresses. As a non Muslim in a Muslim country, why should Wikimedia decide that *I* cannot see Muhammad pictures but that it is perfectly OK to show it to a Muslim in Germany / France wherever. I think the world has moved on a bit from the one country, one religion / set of values / morals. You are of course right. But what is the alternative? The only alternative is not basing it on location so everybody sees the same. That's like one world, one set of values. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
Tim Starling hett schreven: On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote: BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees? Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed. We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source software stack and its free content license. If Wikipedia wouldn't have been so free today it would stand where Citizendium stands and another free encyclopedia project would have evolved in place. Wikipedia wasn't the only community-driven encyclopedia project. But it made the race and beat all its competitors cause no other project was as free and easily accessible as Wikipedia. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Are Wikimedia websites a proper venue for an artistic contest ?
Teofilo hett schreven: I discovered this morning poor composition as an argument for deleting a picture (from someone else, not me). It means that the picture of the day people are slowly highjacking Wikimedia Commons to turn it into a beauty contest. If that really is the only reason for deletion then the deletion request will be denied soon. It's just a single person. Everybody can file a deletion request. You don't need to bother about a single person with bad judgement. There are other people with better judgement who will straighten it. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Are Wikimedia websites a proper venue for an artistic contest ?
Apparently the image in question is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guy_with_pierced_nipple.jpg. The deletion request didn't say bad composition but Low quality, outside of project scope http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:PS. Being listed in a gallery does not grant an automatic in-scope determination. The image is low quality and it wouldn't be a great loss. But I'd still vote keep cause the ways of relevant image use are inscrutable. Even if the piercing can be hardly seenm the image can still be used (just some ideas): * an article about the specific type of necklace * some article about human mimic * a wikibook about image composition (as a bad example) Even bad images can be useful in other contexts. Contexts the original uploader and the delete voters may not have thought about. There's no limit in disk space, so no reason to delete images that could be useful in contexts that may not be imagined at the moment. Marcus Buck User:Slomox Marcus Buck hett schreven: Teofilo hett schreven: I discovered this morning poor composition as an argument for deleting a picture (from someone else, not me). It means that the picture of the day people are slowly highjacking Wikimedia Commons to turn it into a beauty contest. If that really is the only reason for deletion then the deletion request will be denied soon. It's just a single person. Everybody can file a deletion request. You don't need to bother about a single person with bad judgement. There are other people with better judgement who will straighten it. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Country portals
Casey Brown hett schreven: I created a page about country portals a while ago (things like wikipedia.de), with the intention of asking people to take a look at it, make sure everything was right, and expand it... but I never got around to it and here I am now. ;-) The page is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Country_portals and I'd appreciate it if you made sure that your local portal is on there. If you know anything about portals, please add to the page. :-) In an edit comment editing http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Country_portals User:Nemo_bis asked ''do we really want random people to create such portals?'' I agree that the portals shouldn't be created by random people. They also shouldn't be created by chapters. They should be created by the Foundation. The Foundation should create a uniform portal for all ccTLDs. The design should be uniform, each domain should provide access to the Wikipedias in all languages autochthonously spoken in the respective country. And the portals should be fully localizable using Translatewiki translations. And ideally the same would be done for our other projects. I don't think it is acceptable, that domains are monolingual or offer access to one project only or even redirect to a single project when the country the ccTLD refers to has in fact many languages. Some domains are unregistered or registered by thirds, sometimes redirecting to a single project, sometimes redirecting to non-Wikimedia-related sites. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
An'n 03.08.2010 09:13, hett emijrp schreven: User contributions are also aggregated and publicly available. User contributions are aggregated according to their registration and login status. Data on user contributions, such as the times at which users edited and the number of edits they have made, are publicly available via user contributions lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users. Perhaps you could compare it to this situation: It's not illegal to look at a house from a public place. It's not illegal to use binoculars in a public place. It's not illegal to take photos in a public place. It's not illegal to follow a person. It's not illegal to look into someone's trash can. It's not illegal to enter someone's childrens' school. But if you do this all day long to a single person, you are a stalker and legal action may be taken against you. Just because collecting public data is legal doesn't mean that aggregating it is legal. And German law is less lax with privacy than other laws. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
An'n 03.08.2010 18:58, hett Marcus Buck schreven: An'n 03.08.2010 09:13, hett emijrp schreven: User contributions are also aggregated and publicly available. User contributions are aggregated according to their registration and login status. Data on user contributions, such as the times at which users edited and the number of edits they have made, are publicly available via user contributions lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users. Perhaps you could compare it to this situation: It's not illegal to look at a house from a public place. It's not illegal to use binoculars in a public place. It's not illegal to take photos in a public place. It's not illegal to follow a person. It's not illegal to look into someone's trash can. It's not illegal to enter someone's childrens' school. But if you do this all day long to a single person, you are a stalker and legal action may be taken against you. Just because collecting public data is legal doesn't mean that aggregating it is legal. And German law is less lax with privacy than other laws. Just to be clear, with this comparison I am referring to the first aggregation tool that created a analysis of edits over daytime and other statistics. That was the reason for the policy in the first place. I don't think that emijrp's tool violates German privacy law, but it violates the policy. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] data centralization for the benefit of small (and also bigger) projects
an unsuccessful search on the local wiki (as you will get it as of now) is a dead end. It certainly is worth putting some resources into it. What do you think? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] data centralization for the benefit of small (and also bigger) projects
Am 23.08.2010 18:20, schrieb Ole Palnatoke Andersen: On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote: ... In view of the potential usefulness I cannot think of any argument that speaks against this in general. The prospect of providing at least basic information about millions of objects in all the different languages seems really great to me. While I like the idea, I wonder how (and in which language) the community of this project will establish consensus.. -Palnatoke It'll be multilingual in the same way as Meta or Commons or our other cross-language-border projects. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] data centralization for the benefit of small (and also bigger) projects
An'n 23.08.2010 18:31, hett David Gerard schreven: It'll be multilingual in the same way as Meta or Commons or our other cross-language-border projects. So, English then? ;-p Yep, de facto English ;-) I don't like it and I spend much time to improve the usefulness of Commons for non-English speakers, but improving the participation oppurtunities for non-English folks on our multilingual projects is a different task with enough complexity in itself. Although I'm sure they will establish sub-communities on the new wiki like they did on Commons. E.g. German speakers meet at the Forum (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Forum) instead of the Village pump. That will happen on a datawiki too and probably these subcommunities will focus on their respective regions, e.g. German speakers will focus on maintaining the town data for places in Germany, Austria, Switzerland etc. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] data centralization for the benefit of small (and also bigger) projects
An'n 23.08.2010 19:20, hett Magnus Manske schreven: On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 6:13 PM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 August 2010 17:43, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Although I'm sure they will establish sub-communities on the new wiki like they did on Commons. E.g. German speakers meet at the Forum (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Forum) instead of the Village pump. That will happen on a datawiki too and probably these subcommunities will focus on their respective regions, e.g. German speakers will focus on maintaining the town data for places in Germany, Austria, Switzerland etc. I do like this idea very much indeed. What will it take in software terms? Something similar to Freebase? Something like Freebase bolted onto MediaWiki? OmegaWiki? I thought transwiki template transclusion is being worked on? Magnus If what I proposed is planned to be part of transwiki template transclusion and if transwiki template transclusion is real soon now in the literal sense and not real soon now in the extended sense, than I'm happy and satisfied ;-) Is there a roadmap for transwiki template transclusion and is it decided that at the end of this roadmap transwiki template transclusion will go live on the Wikimedia projects? Additional question: My idea involves calling a local template from within the transwikied template to do the localisation. Will that be possible with transwiki template transclusion? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 25.08.2010 22:42, hett Michael Peel schreven: On 25 August 2010 23:01, Muhammad Yahiashipmas...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with what Muhammad and Mark has said it's a pity that such resolutions that affect the whole community is controlled like this.. resulting in such projects that really make Wikimedia looks like a host for childish projects that's written in a funny language never seen written before in any respectable scientific book, website, etc.. -- - Arabic Wikipedia: http://ar.wikipedia.org/ Share your knowledge Erm ... huh? Exactly what I thought first. But he's from ar.wp, so I guess he's referring to arz.wp, the Egyptian Arabic version of Wikipedia. Arabic (similar to Chinese) is actually a big group of languages which are arched by a common standard. Supporters of the standard consider the different Arabic languages as dialects and their use in written form as an assault on the common Arabic culture. Although I don't share his view on arz.wp I do share his negative view on the Language Committee. Gerard Meijssen keeps his contributions to the discussions secret and even for the more-willing-to-share committee members there are no archives since June 2009. The committee claims success for the fact that none of the projects approved by them has failed (failed in the sense like Herero and Kanuri have failed, not producing any articles in years). That claim is correct, but it also came with a significant decline in approval numbers. When the language approval policy was created in 2006 we had about 250 wikipedias (that's 50 per year since 2001). Now we have 270 wikipedias. 20 new wikipedias in almost 4 years... (that's 5 per year.) Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 26.08.2010 00:41, hett David Gerard schreven: On 25 August 2010 23:34, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Gerard Meijssen keeps his contributions to the discussions secret Is this true? If so, what is the rationale? Described like that, that sounds ridiculous and unacceptable. Well, the latest archive (June 2009) is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Archives/2009-06 The other committee members' posts are shown, but Gerard's are all replaced with: this user has not agreed to public archival. Somewhere on Meta there is a discussion years ago (I cannot recall whether I asked him or whether it was somebody else who asked) where Gerard explains his decision. I am unable to find it (perhaps it was removed from the public archives? ;-) ). But if I remember correctly his answer was not that helpful. It was something along the lines of I have my reasons, but I cannot disclose them in public. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 26.08.2010 14:20, hett Gerard Meijssen schreven: Hoi, Other members of the LC can confirm to you that there is little need to discuss things on our list. Most mails are boringly business like. If it's boring there is no reason to keep it secret. So no argument for your position. When you find the explanation provided not enough, then that is tough. At the time we were really happy to gain a new member with its qualifications. I am not willing to abandon people now for opportunistic reasons. We were really happy and fortunate deepening the experience of the LC as a group. As there was a requirement for confidentiality, it was and is in my opinion not fair to filter only one person out. You try to make it appear like an attack on a single person. It's not about removing any person from the committee, we just want them to be transparent and stand to their words publicly. And it's also not a single person, it's you and one more committee member. I don't like speaking in mysteries. The second, so far unnamed member whose posts are secret is User:Karen. She seems to be solely active on the mailing list and has zero edits in the wiki. Some info about her is in the edit history of her user page on Meta. I have no specific reason to doubt that she is a competent contributor to the committee's discussions, but on the other hand there seems to be not a single word from her mouth publicly documented on the committee's home wiki Meta and not a single bit of information available about her qualifications or the reasons and circumstances she became a member of the committee. I have no idea why you put the word 'opportunistic' in your comment. According to Wikipedia opportunism is: [..] the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances, with little regard for principles. Making decisions that affect the public (like the creation of new Wikimedia projects) public and transparent is a principle (a very important principle). That's the exact opposite of opportunism. The added benefit of confidentiality is that we are more free to discuss things. It limits the amount of double talk a lot. As a consequence there is hardly any pre-cooking of mails going on. Any decision of the committee should be based on facts and the language proposal policy defines which facts are to be considered. So if you abstain from personal judgements in your decisions there is just no reason that could cause external criticism. And if it should be the case that you and Karen make statements in the discussions (the others do not, as I can check in the archives) that would make mandatory the application of double talk to be acceptable when uttered in public, I'd find that worrying. The language committee is not the only confidential list. Its remit is extremely limited. Compare that with the internal, the chapter, the cultural list who are confidential often for reasons that are as appropriate. What has a limited remit to do with transparency? The things you do in your limited remit are extremely relevant to some groups. Our mailing lists should be public whenever possible so people have the chance to object to wrong or bad decisions, to give additional input, to understand decisions etc. That's the basic idea behind transparency. Internal-l was created as an internal counterpart to foundation-l on purpose for discussions that cannot be done in public (e.g. for legal reasons). I hope and assume internal-l sticks to this purpose and all topics that don't require privacy are discussed on public lists. I don't know the reasons why the chapter and cultural lists are internal, I have not even ever heard about cultural list (what is it?), I assume there is a reason. If there is no specific reason they should be open and transparent. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
Gerard, would you be so kind and post a message on your mailing list informing your co-members about this discussion and inviting them to join in with their opinions? Would be especially nice to hear from Karen! Is that okay? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 26.08.2010 21:29, hett Jesse (Pathoschild) schreven: On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 10:14 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: Can anyone else from the language committee offer a credible explanation of their special requirement for secrecy? Surely if this is a requirement, it can be explained, as Gerard did not. Hello David, There are some cases where confidentiality is necessary. We routinely ask external experts for their evaluation of the test project content before project approval, as Yaroslav mentioned early in this discussion. These external persons are sometimes in situations where speaking negatively about the content may be seen as an attack on nationalist or culturalist interests, and put them at risk of professional or personal reprisal. These persons are offered confidentiality to protect them and to ensure we get their honest opinion. Thanks for your comment. In the years I had occasional contact with the language committee I always found your answers to questions helpful. Although sometimes I didn't agree with them you at least always tried to address the actual topic while Gerard often tends to evade questions and spin them into something different. If external experts indeed personally fear repercussions for their comments in individual cases I would accept that as a reason to not archive their comments. But this certainly does not apply to Gerard or Karen. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 26.08.2010 23:21, hett Gerard Meijssen schreven: Hoi, Let us have a sense of history here. When the language committee started, there were no linguists or other experts members on the committee. We were really happy when we got someone who is part of the standard bodies that are relevant to what we do. It meant that we had a way to assess what the likelihood was for requests to the standard bodies. The only problem was that for professional reasons it is not possible to publish the point of views expressed publicly. As this may affect the employability, this is not a trivial matter and confidentiality is the only way got relevant and significant contributions. As a consequence, the mailing list for the language committee became confidential. At a later date, some members were not happy with a confidential list and wanted to make *their* contributions public. I opposed this because it is not that hard to deduce what someone said by the answers from others. As a consequence I keep my contributions private to the members of the committee. At a later date we started to seek expert opinion about the contributions in the incubator to ensure that contributions were in the language that goes with the ISO-639-3 code. The comments of these experts are in some cases best kept private. We seek assurances for ourselves so that we can honestly inform the WMF board that in our opinion a project in a new language can start. The policy allows for only one Wikipedia per language and, requests by people that seek to force one orthography or one script do not find acceptance in the policy and by the committee. At that we deliberately keep such deliberations outside of the WMF LC and leave it to the standard bodies to define what makes a specific language. If this gives you the impression that there is not that much to discuss, you are completely correct. Thanks, GerardM In other words: most of the members of the committee agree that transparency is useful for the list and you are boycotting their move towards more transparency. As I have said in reply to Jesse, I do not object to confidentiality if experts from conflict regions choose to not make public their opinions. I do not consider reasons related to employment a valid reason. I cannot really imagine any situation where an employer would say ZOMG, you supported a wikipedia in X?!? that'll have consequences! but if it's like that and the person cannot give information then search another expert. If Karen is in a situation like this: Well, delete the history of her userpage and let her contribute pseudonymously. The employer won't know. Just use pseudonyms! Even the experts from conflict regions will be safe with pseudonyms. Better than publishing the names without the content. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
An'n 27.08.2010 00:00, hett David Gerard schreven: On 26 August 2010 22:48, Muhammad Yahiashipmas...@gmail.com wrote: I personally don't agree with this. I believe a person with such problematic employment situation is not a good fit for a supposedly community committee. And even if there is a great need for this person's expertise, other arrangements could be made so that the 95% of discussions (based on the current participation level of that person) where he/she is not involved can be public. A tricky bit appears to be when expertise is offered on the basis that it is confidential, due to fear of attacks on the expert in question from aggrieved nationalists. It's not clear how to work around that one. Not that tricky. Instead of publishing their name and censoring their message, they could censor their name and publish the message. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Language committee] Transparency
An'n 16.09.2010 06:08, hett Milos Rancic schreven: As Karen fixed her anonymity issue, archives of the Language committee will be public by default starting from September 12th, 2010. We will continue to use the same method for the list archives, as it allows us to talk about confidential (mostly personal) issues. Previous emails will stay as they are, according to the old rules. Thanks for this change from me too! Thumbs up! Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How bureaucracy works: the example
An'n 25.09.2010 17:53, hett Milos Rancic schreven: Today I am working from my netbook. It is not so easy to find the right button and the screen is small. I wanted to upload 20k logo for new Wikipedia edition (in Banjar) [1]. I wanted to find the right copyright tag (logo is trademark of WMF). So, I clicked on Permissions link, instead on question mark. When I went back all of the form was blanked. I guess you are right, that the Wikimedia bureaucracy can be improved although I have no actual ideas how to do it. But I don't think that your example with Commons upload is a good example. This behaviour certainly is a total failure in usability (I never experienced the problem because I use the classic uplaod form). But the problem is not conflicting design goals of developers and Commons admins. It's just some error in the Javascript. The error can be fixed and the upload form should work as expected. If anybody knows where in the code the form blanking happens please report it so it can be fixed. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How bureaucracy works: the example
An'n 25.09.2010 18:32, hett Milos Rancic schreven: On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 18:28, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote: An'n 25.09.2010 17:53, hett Milos Rancic schreven: Today I am working from my netbook. It is not so easy to find the right button and the screen is small. I wanted to upload 20k logo for new Wikipedia edition (in Banjar) [1]. I wanted to find the right copyright tag (logo is trademark of WMF). So, I clicked on Permissions link, instead on question mark. When I went back all of the form was blanked. I guess you are right, that the Wikimedia bureaucracy can be improved although I have no actual ideas how to do it. But I don't think that your example with Commons upload is a good example. This behaviour certainly is a total failure in usability (I never experienced the problem because I use the classic uplaod form). But the problem is not conflicting design goals of developers and Commons admins. It's just some error in the Javascript. The error can be fixed and the upload form should work as expected. If anybody knows where in the code the form blanking happens please report it so it can be fixed. There are other issues besides JavaScript. I needed 15 minutes to upload image (after the initial problem) not because JavaScript problem, but because of not various requirements which are not well defined. Okay. Could you elaborate on that? What do you think should be changed? Which requirements are not well defined? So far I don't understand where exactly you see the influence of bad bureaucracy playing a role here. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] subtitles for Wikimedia videos
The videos Wikimedia recently produced are available on Youtube, Facebook and several other sites. Can somebody from the Foundation who has access to the videos update them and include the subtitles in several different languages that were provided by Wikimedians on Commons (see the file description pages of the four videos in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:September_2010_Wikipedia_Videos)? The default video player on Commons does ot support subtitles. They are only available through the mwEmbed extension. But Videos on Youtube, Facebook etc. support subtitles natively. That would make it much easier for non-English Wikimedians to direct the interested public to the subtitled video in the respective language. Thanks. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Kosovo Chapter?
An'n 28.09.2010 13:45, hett David Gerard schreven: On 28 September 2010 12:40, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 27 September 2010 21:02, Joan Gomajrg...@gmail.com wrote: We are here to promote Wikimedia projects not to promote Serbia union nor Kosovo independence. Very true, but allowing separate Kosovan and Sebian chapters (which is probably best for the WM movement, since the Serbian chapter presumably can't operate effective runs the risk of appearing to promote Kosovan independance. I would love it if we could stay out of the dispute entirely, but it isn't easy to do. Well, we already have four (or is it five?) Wikipedias for the one language in the area. We've already dived right in. Please keep that out of the discussion. These two disputes have nothing in common except that they are both a result of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] subtitles for Wikimedia videos
An'n 28.09.2010 20:50, hett Jay Walsh schreven: Hi Marcus - thanks for the note. I'll be looking into this right away to see if we can get the good work of the subtitlers/translators into the whole presentation of the videos on youtube and Vimeo. Thanks for the pointer. As soon as we have some progress on this we'll let you know (but hopefully you'll see this unfolding). thanks! jay I saw it unfolded now. Thanks! One small issue: 'nds' is not Dutch. It's Low Saxon. And I have no subtitle selection menu (just an on/off switch that gives me random language subtitles) with HTML5, but I guess that's a problem of either my browser or YouTube and cannot be fixed on Wikimedia's side. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 04.10.2010 01:59, hett K. Peachey schreven: On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: English Wikiquote? Once the decision is made, then it falls to the developers to actually flip the switch or say the magic words, or do whatever it is they do to close the project. Philippe It has already been closed and added to the list[1] which is the standard practice, From my understanding is that they want the domain actually removed which we don't normally do (as to my understanding). -Peachey [1]. http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/closed.dblist We don't do this if the project is valid, just inactive and can restart at a later date. But we usually remove projects entirely if they are closed forever. See tokipona.wikipedia.org or tlh.wikipedia.org. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 04.10.2010 02:13, hett Zachary Harden schreven: The project was active, but judging by the comments made before and after the closure, it was closed due to a political spat (like a lot of projects coming from the Eastern Bloc). Which ones exactly where closed? I don't think this claim is valid. In the case of Moldovan it wasn't a political spat but the plain fact, that Moldovan is just another name for Romanian. Here's what I wrote on the wikitech-l thread about the same topic: There are 19.7 million speakers of Romanian in Romania. There are 2.6 million speakers of Romanian in Moldova (they call their language either Romanian or Moldovan, but it's the same language as in Romania). Both Romania and Moldova write the language with Latin script. Then there are 177,000 speakers of Romanian living in Transnistria. Transnistria is officially part of Moldova, but it is a de facto independant state. Transnistria's population is about one third Romanian, one third Russian and one third Ukrainian. When Moldova became independant in 1991 the Russian group in Transnistria feared that their privileged status would change and that Romanian would become the most privileged language in the new state. A civil war broke out and supported by Russian troops Transnistria became a de facto independant state. This state holds Russophile policies and the Romanian language (called Moldovan) is written in Cyrillic. The Cyrillic script was introduced by the Soviets as a measure of cultural Sovietization. So for the Romanians and Moldovans the Cyrillic script is a symbol of Soviet cultural imperialism and more importly a dividing line that excludes 177,000 speakers of their language from participation in Romanian-language cultural affairs (at least in its written forms). mo.wp is Cyrillic but uses the code 'mo' that stands for Moldovan and would thus in theory cover all 2.78 million speakers in both Moldova and Transnistria. For Moldovans mo.wp feels like Wikimedia tries to promote Cyrillic in Moldova. The code 'mo' by the way is deprecated because ISO recognized it as being identical with Romanian. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
Have a look at http://www.marcusbuck.org/ro/. It's a quick demo of
ro.wp content converted to Cyrillic. It's just a tiny extract of about
50 ro.wp articles (I wanted to import the full dump, but I have a
limited bandwidth connection and the dump upload failed at 90% of the
1GB file). The conversion isn't perfect yet, some special cases are
missing, but nothing that cannot be fixed relatively easily. It took me
about 30 min to get this result.
The demo doesn't support Commons images, interwiki links, templates etc.
but all this would work on a real Wikimedia wiki.
Things that won't work without syntactical support in the ro.wp source
(and ro.wp won't agree to put -{...}- syntactical markers into their
articles):
- foreign names will be converted even when inappropiate
- Roman numbers will be converted (a conversion exception could be added
for Roman numbers, but that can also affect strings that just look like
Roman numbers)
Apart from the mentioned issues most of the converted articles look okay
to me. I wish to emphasize the word look. I don't speak a word
Romanian and even less so when it's written in Cyrillic.
So if Wikimedia wanted to support a read-only Romanian in Cyrillic wiki
at ro-cyrl.wikipedia.org it could easily go live in one day. From a
technical point of view it's not hard.
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox
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Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 05.10.2010 21:03, hett M. Williamson schreven: Marcus, thank you for the test. I don't think anybody doubts or doubted that this is possible - of course a few more rules need to be added, for example ea is almost always converted to cyrillic Ya, with special exceptions, and several other minor mistakes, but that isn't anything to do with the actual technical feasibility. The only problem I have with this is: why should it be read-only? I have mentioned it before and I will say again, it is not fair. It violates the Wiki principle of anyone can edit. Having a Wiki that is read-only and that Cyrillic editors cannot edit in Cyrillic is, in my opinion, never ok. -m. Because users of Romanian in Latin script don't want it. And they are more than 99% of all Romanian speakers. Users writing Romanian in Cyrillic are a very small minority. And they don't use Cyrillic because they think it's the better method but because their regime wants them to. When Moldova became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991 one of the first things they did was switching from Cyrillic back to Latin. I'm quite sure if the Transnistrian speakers of Romanian had the chance to decide freely they'd see some benefit in using the same script as 99% of all other Romanian speakers. Imagine there was some ideologically isolated de facto regime somewhere in the world where English must be written in Cyrillic by presidential decree. Would you agree that English Wikipedia should have a script converter and should allow articles written in Cyrillic? 99% of all English speakers would be barred from editing the Cyrillic script articles on en.wp. (By the way, my test was not to prove that it's technically possible to convert. It was meant to prove that it's _easy_ to implement. Since four years the developers are telling that they cannot rename the project because it's too much work and other things are more important. So if renaming is much work, well, I can testify that implementing a full wiki with converted content is not much work. Much more work was spent in writing mailing list posts insulting Cetateanu Moldovanu calling him a nationalist than would have been necessary to create a solution to the problem.) Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 05.10.2010 22:24, hett M. Williamson schreven: 2010/10/5 Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com: Hoi, Technically it is easier to transliterate from Cyrillic. So when transliteration works in a round robin fashion, it does not really matter in what script people edit. It will only be stored in one script. The choice for a script can be based on a user setting or on the method access to the information was sought. Thanks, Gerard, I am aware of all this, however in the proposals of Marcus there is constant mention of a read-only Cyrillic portal rather than a round robin transliteration program which enables editors to create content in Cyrillic which is saved to the database in Latin. -m. I'm trying to promote a solution that _works_. If you want a solution where Cyrillic users can participate on par with Latin users you need the support of the Latin users. I'm sure you won't get that support. You can critizise ro.wp for being unwilling to give that support but that won't change anything about it. If you try to impose something on them that can break the ro.wp community. If just 2% of all active ro.wp Wikipedians leave the project in disagreement about the issue that's twice as worse as if the 1% Romanian speakers of Transnistria are unable to participate. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 05.10.2010 22:56, hett Gerard Meijssen schreven: Hoi, Your approach is the wrong one. Our aim is to bring information to all people of this world. When people leave for political reasons, they are welcome to leave. Their point of view is clearly not the Neutral Point Of View that is also expected of them in their contributions. Thanks, GerardM So you would be willing to blow up the active ro.wp project just to be indiscriminatory? Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_schools_in_Transnistria. They want to switch to Latin since long but the government does everything to stop them. Wikipedia - although free to be edited by everyone - is usually edited by educated people. It's very likely that most educated Transnistrians know how to write Romanian in Latin anyway. It'll still be discrimination to those who are not educated enough to know Romanian in Latin. But to me actual content is much more important than the ideology of can be edited by everyone. I don't want to sacrifice dozens of actual working Wikipedians just for the ideological and theoretical chance of a 1% minority to edit. Gerard and Mark, the most likely outcome of making this a discussion of ideology is, that the status quo will stay. The status quo is the worst possible outcome. The current content of mo.wp is useless. So at the moment there is no useful Wikipedia content at all for users of Cyrillic. My solution is not ideologically pure, but it at least provides access to the full content of ro.wp to the Cyrillic users. Your solution is ideologically pure, but will be devastating to ro.wp and damage that wiki severely. Therefore I ask everyone to prevent that the status quo is kept and to implement a realistic solution. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 06.10.2010 00:00, hett Muhammad Yahia schreven: The Romanian Wikipedia would be eligible when support is provided / allowed for the Cyrillic script. I do not involve myself in the closures of projects. Typically they are not closed and often people have agendas asking for closures. So a Romanian language would not be eligible unless it allowed support for Cyrillic, even if there is no community that is interested in writing in it? There's nothing in the language proposal policy that says anything like that and many Wikipedia versions have been created without support for all common scripts. So that's not true. My point is simply that there seems to be a lot of discussion, but I am yet to see participation from people who actually want to read and write in Cyrillic. I've seen the requests for closure repeated over the years after it was frozen, but I have not seen anyone speaking for the community that supposedly finds mo.wp useful who is actually part of that community. Well, as I said more than 99% of Romanian speakers live in Romania and Moldova and use Latin script. There are only 177,000 speakers of Romanian in Transnistria. There are some schools that teach Latin script even in Transnistria (the government prohibits it in public schools, but some public schools were turned into private schools to make it legal). So the number is definitely lower than 177,000. Then there are some people who haven't learned Latin in school, but who have learned later. Where Russification policies were successful many use ru.wp. Internet penetration in Transnistria in general is low. All this adds up. From a purely statistical point of view it's unlikely that there's a big number of possible contributors in a population small like that (the language proposal policy speaks of 5 users as a the minimum to approve a new Wikipedia edition). Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 06.10.2010 00:13, hett Gerard Meijssen schreven: Hoi, The only thing expected is that they allow for a round robin transliteration. The default will be the Latin script, there will only be an option associated with the Romanian language that allows for the text to be shown in Cyrillic. The language policy allows for one project per project. It does explicitly not allow for the exclusion of people who use another script. I demand that you give the exact quote from the policy that defines this. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 06.10.2010 00:16, hett Nathan schreven: On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Muhammad Yahiashipmas...@gmail.com wrote: So a Romanian language would not be eligible unless it allowed support for Cyrillic, even if there is no community that is interested in writing in it? My point is simply that there seems to be a lot of discussion, but I am yet to see participation from people who actually want to read and write in Cyrillic. I've seen the requests for closure repeated over the years after it was frozen, but I have not seen anyone speaking for the community that supposedly finds mo.wp useful who is actually part of that community. As far as I've seen, the only person arguing for a usable mo-cyrl wiki is Mark Williamson. I sort of doubt that he is actually from Transnistria or a Romanian speaker, but his philosophical point seems to be that having a wiki in your native language and script is a basic human right. I'm not sure when that became the dominant criteria for opening or maintaining a wiki in a particular language. Nathan Mark's self-assessment is mo-2 and he was one of the main contributors before the wiki got closed down: http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilizator:Node_ue. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
An'n 10.10.2010 22:50, hett M. Williamson schreven: Yes, and I would like to remind you that until relatively recently, all varieties of Romanian/Moldovan were always written in Cyrillic. Anti-Cyrillic position is to state that Moldovan Cyrillic is an artificial, Russian-based orthography, but some Soviet linguists stated that it was a reform of Romanian Cyrillic, which to me does not seem entirely incredible. In fact, the old Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was used exclusively until about the 1860s, and still used by some until the 1920s. Moldovan Cyrillic was first used in 1926, thus an argument can be made... The first documented Romanian text in Cyrillic is from the 16th century and the first documented Romanian text in Latin is from the 16th century too (although a few years younger). Both systems where in use in the following centuries (although Cyrillic was used a bit more often). Romanian was an unregulated language and every writer chose whatever orthography and script he knew better. This unregulated state basically lasted till 1860 when the United Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia officially regulated the language and chose for the Latin script. The United Principalities didn't encompass all areas where Romanian was spoken and it took some time until the regulation took hold among all Romanians. This recognition phase indeed lasted till the 1920s. The 1926 regulated Cyrillic script was not based on the old unregulated Cyrillic script but was newly designed from scratch to replace the Latin script. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Controversial Content Study Part 3
An'n 11.10.2010 13:15, hett wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk schreven: thepmacco...@gmail.com wrote: failed at copy / paste - with apologies, here is the link to the image I would think it best to remove permanently; http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Closeup_of_female_masturbation_pastel.jpgaction=editredlink=1 You are aware that, if it is an image is of an underage person, then in some jurisdictions clicking on that link and having the image downloaded in your browser cache is illegal? Also that having it found in someone's browser cache could cause them to be barred from various types of employment for life. And additionally the same would be true if the image was embedded on a wikipage which someone clicked on. The file doesn't exist anymore, so that's hardly a problem. I don't know the original image but if it was an image of a 16 year old that's not child pornography. It's illegal and I agree that it's illegal for a good reason, but it's not sexual child abuse. And every legislation that deems a single image of a naked underage girl in your cache illegal or would lead to a lifetime employment barring is plain moronic. The internet is full of this stuff. Nota bene: not full of child abuse, but full of material of biologically mature, but underage individuals (amateur porn). As the amount of consumed non-professionally produced porn grows, the probability to encounter underage porn approaches 1. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia
unideological point of view the equal rights conversion would be the right thing to do. But given the fact that that could totally blow the whole and very active community of ro.wp and given the fact that we would risk this for a less than 1% minority, a minority we have no proof of that they would take the chance to participate if we gave it to them or that they are even interested in the content, I think we would be ideological dumbasses if we would accept this risk. @FoundationStaff (one of whom is hopefully reading these discussions on Foundation-l): I hope the Foundation is interested in this discussion too. Bringing knowledge to the people of the world and stuff. So, what's the Foundation's position on this? The current lack of any action from the Foundation's side suggests that it opts for status quo. So what's the Foundation's rationale for not serving the Cyrillic users? (Oh, and please don't answer with limited resources, other important stuff to do. That would be a weak response. Any of the above options should be technically implementable in a single working day and I think it's worth to spend one working day if that means making Wikipedia available to 177,000 additional people.) Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia: Coherent proposal
An'n 13.10.2010 16:49, hett Gutza schreven: On 13-Oct-10 17:40, Milos Rancic wrote: I think the community at ro.wiki wouldn't mind that. Are you saying that ro.wp community would agree with transliteration engine between Romanian Latin and Moldovan Cyrillic orthographies? I'm saying that I *think* the ro.wp wouldn't mind a *gadget*, even though I have already received some negative feedback on ro.wiki for advancing that proposal without consulting the community first. But it's impossible to juggle two heated conversations at once -- I'm trying to find what I think is an acceptable compromise here, and, if we do actually find it, I'll get that back to ro.wiki and see if that's allright with everybody. Gutza Yep, that proposal sounds sensible. Much better than my proposal because it allows full participation as requested by Mark and Gerard and yet not being intrusive and combined with the same level of perceived recognition that upsets the Latin users. And it's even implementable without action from the Foundation! Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia: Coherent proposal
An'n 13.10.2010 17:31, hett Gutza schreven: On 13-Oct-10 18:25, Milos Rancic wrote: That sounds reasonably to me. I have to check what do other LangCom members think about it. What is it exactly that sounds reasonable to you? I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. I don't know how the Chinese/Serbian engine works -- you're moving ahead with incomplete data. Gutza Look at http://sr.wikipedia.org/. There's a tab with an arrow besides the link for the talk page. You can choose between Latin and Cyrillic script. I don't think that would find consensus on ro.wp. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Please delete mo. wikipedia: Coherent proposal
I created a small test script at
http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Slomox/vector2.js. Works well to
Cyrillize nds.wp ;-) (or any other wiki). It only supports reading so
far, editing will be harder. The problem will be cases like a Romanian
article written in Latin script and containing Cyrillic characters on
purpose (like http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscova). The word Москва́
in the first line would be latinized when a Cyrillic user edits it.
Hard to fix it without escaping (which is done with -{ ... }- syntax in
conversion wikis like zh or sr). But with escaping we are again at
imposing stuff on ro.wp. Cyrillic users could escape strings in the edit
window which would be removed on save, but that of course means escaping
on every edit. On the other hand Javascript-based escaping could lead to
increased revert quotas if Cyrillic users forget to Javascript-escape
strings. Well, that's all theory as long as there are no active
Transnistrians editors...
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox
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Re: [Foundation-l] subtitles for Wikimedia videos
An'n 04.10.2010 21:32, hett Erik Moeller schreven: 2010/10/3 Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org: I saw it unfolded now. Thanks! One small issue: 'nds' is not Dutch. It's Low Saxon. And I have no subtitle selection menu (just an on/off switch that gives me random language subtitles) with HTML5, but I guess that's a problem of either my browser or YouTube and cannot be fixed on Wikimedia's side. Thanks for the report. I've made a renewed call for translations here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2010-October/001184.html Please continue to report any issues. We'll import any new translations and fixes after the translation deadline, October 15. Sigh. I just checked the videos. 'nds' isn't called Dutch anymore, istead it is now called German: Low German. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. In one of the other videos it is called German: LowGerman and in one even German. The language 'nds' refers to is called Low Saxon and I don't think that Low Saxon will be all that useful for users expecting German subtitles after clicking on German. How about just using the same labels we use on our interwiki links? Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal for new project
An'n 20.10.2010 20:30, hett Leonardo Oña schreven: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiFix WikiFix is aimed at explaining *HOW TO* repair different ítems such as telephones, microwaves, autos, tables, furnitures, walls, decorations, wears, etc. We should have in mind that each model of a product is specific when repairing it since its failure is different, and that is why each page of the site will deal with one trouble of a specific model and item. Articles listed in the site will be grouped in categories such as: Electrodomestics, Autos, Houses, Clothes and Shoes, Kitchen accesories, etc. You can Add your signature to cooperate whith the proyect. Best regards. Leonardo Oña. I think your proposal is a good idea and that that wiki could develop into a very useful resource. However it does not fit into Wikimedia. Wikimedia is strictly about educational content and neutral point of view etc. and your how-to is just the opposite of neutral point of view. It collects the experience of people from their own point of view. Please don't get me wrong, I don't want to offend you, but I want to avoid any false hopes: there's no chance at all that your proposal will be adopted. No chance at all. Wikimedia has denied (or ignored) dozens or hundreds of project requests, many of which were really good ideas and which were then established elsewhere and have developed into flourishing wiki communities since. If you really want to develop that idea, I suggest that you have a look a Wikia: http://www.wikia.com/Wikia. It allows to create your own wiki. But you should also check whether the project WikiHow (http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page) is close enough to your idea. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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
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. Even will all their revenue, Facebook is not yet profitable. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?
An'n 12.11.2010 08:56, hett geni schreven: Should we offer to host citizendium? Headlines of tomorrow: Wikipedia buys out competitor. Chucked-out Editor-in-Chief Larry Sanger says: They try to defend their de-facto information monopoly before their challengers become too strong. Or something like that. Okay, pure speculation. But I don't think it's a good idea to host them. If we want to keep them for the innovative effects of competition we should keep them organizationally separate from Wikimedia. If Wikimedians want to rescue them: donate money to them. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [SPAM] Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered
An'n 15.12.2010 01:36, hett Brian J Mingus schreven: http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979773872.txt Nice to see that the quality of posts on the mailing lists was low and discussions lame and rapidly off-topicking since ... the very first day! ;-) Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Translatewiki illustrates how low internationalisation is in the priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation
An'n 28.01.2011 16:11, hett Arlen Beiler schreven: Or boycott their translations and start a WMF transwiki. That seems sensible! *eyeroll* If you look in the archives of this mailing list, you'll notice that the Translatewiki guys asked Wikimedia to host the wiki more than once. They would have been happy to join and be part of the official Wikimedia universe. But Wikimedia didn't get its ass off the ground and nothing happened. If you people really worry about undemocratic regimes overtaking Translatewiki and other evil stuff then direct your efforts against Wikimedia (which never bothered to provide a sensible way for localisation) and not against the guys who actually fixed the shortcomings. I guess, they would still be willing to settle under the Wikimedia roof, or am I wrong? (@Gerard Meijssen and the other Translatewiki guys) Marcus Buck User:Slomox (both on Wikimedia and on Translatewiki) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is there a good reason to delete the Burj Al Arab?
Am 13.03.2011 13:01, schrieb Peter Carney: Validly licenced images of this building and thousands of others are routinely deleted due to Wikimedia Commons' 'FoP' policy. Clearly this damages our educational mission and impacts many projects. One proposed remedy is a tweak to the policy on the lines of that arising from the National Portrait Gallery dispute. Opponents of change say things like Commons only accepts free content which was never strictly true even before the NPG/PD-art policy change. The question which I'd like to hear your views on is: Can you think of any valid arguments to the effect that deleting these images has an upside - a benefit to our mission? P Carney The upside is, that we won't get sued by copyright holders, I guess. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] wiki for interwiki (was: Foundation too passive)
An'n 21.03.2011 09:27, hett Andre Engels schreven: On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Ashar Voultoizhashar+...@free.fr wrote: You do have the power! The world as immensely changed in the last few years thanks to the internet. Internet is just about connecting people and every little step is a change. Get an idea, get community members sharing it then you can markets it, find developers and get it applied to the live site. I guess I'm awfully inadequate at that then... Moving interwikis to a separate site is something that I first proposed back in 2002 (although then saying it was 'something for the (far?) future'), that has many community members and I think also developers behind it, and yet it's 2011 now, and it still seems that it will not be there in the near future. Peter17 had a Google Summer of Code project in which he developed code that allows interwiki transclusion. And Nikola Smolenski's Interlanguage extension is developed since 2008. So it's not the volunteers who lack. Apparently the main problem is get it applied to the live site. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...
An'n 23.05.2011 17:37, hett Ziko van Dijk schreven: I am even more pessimistic. Of course, Wikipedia exits in many languages, but many Wikipedia language versions are still quite small and of low quality, typical encyclopedias-to-become, but still no really useful encyclopedias by now. If we consider the extent of old pre-internet paper encyclopedias as the threshold between encyclopedia-to-become and encyclopedia and if we don't aim at the top-tier encyclopedias, but at the middle-tier which was not as complete as the top-tier works but affordable, we are at about 150,000 entries, I guess. From my experience at the German Wikipedia it was at about 200,000 articles when the last articles were created where I had the feeling that no serious encyclopedia could do without them. For a naturally grown and not bot-fueled Wikipedia that should roughly be the number of articles to become indeed useful ... in coverage of topics relevant to the readers, quality is another issue. But I guess the quality of the Wikipedias is better than the quality of the big Wikipedias back then when they were the same size, because the smaller Wikipedias nowadays can draw from the bigger Wikipedias, an sourced information pool that was not available before. Looking at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias we have 17 Wikipedias that have more than 200,000 articles. Among them none that haven't had encyclopedias before the internet age. Actually there are no languages anywhere in the top group where we could really prove our mission of bringing knowledge to people who before had no chance to obtain it in their native languages. All of them are either strong languages that have supporting national states and had decent encyclopedias before or they are bot fueled (Esperanto is neither, but it's also no language to reach people unreached by education). Galician with 71,000 articles is the first language that has no strong supporting state/territory and is not mainly build by bots, where we serve an outstanding service to the language community. But they are of course reached by Spanish/Portuguese education. Telugu with almost 48,000 articles seems to be the biggest wikipedia in a language where we serve the language community with things that wouldn't exist otherwise. Yes, I think we are far away from being a useful and important encyclopedia except for the national languages of the first and second world. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language
An'n 24.05.2011 19:13, hett Ilario Valdelli schreven: On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:47 PM,m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: A single dedicated person could be enough to put a project in motion. A dean of a Nigerian college who integrates Wikipedia article creation in the instruction plan (if you create 200 Nigerian pidgin Wikipedia articles this semester you'll get X extra credit points for your degree) could be enough to get the project to 100,000 articles in a year (200 articles*2 semesters*250 students = 100,000 articles in a year). I don't agree. Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, it's not an encyclopedia. It means that one person cannot drive the project because he will impose a single point of view. I didn't say anything about a single person somehow taking control. I just said that a single person is enough to kickstart a Wikipedia into vivid activity. It makes sense where there are no encyclopedia in this language and Wikipedia can be the first one, but it should be interesting to analyze why there were no encyclopedias before. I have experienced this solution in some minor languages and it doesn't work. Feel free to share links so others can learn from it. It's difficult to aggregate people around a small core of articles because they are attracted by more active languages or because they don't have sufficient knowledge of their daily language to put their ideas in written sentences. It seems strange, but if someone should use their daily language (technically it's a change of linguistic register) to write something, they like to switch language and to use English or Hindi or Chinese. Some languages don't have a literature, don't have words to translate technical words of legal words, don't have a dictionary or a formal grammar. It means that the community should build their written language around Wikipedia in order to start to contribute. It's another project. There's hardly any language in the world with a sizable number of speakers that hasn't ever been written. All languages have something to build on. Of course you won't be able to write about quantum physics in Nigerian pidgin without importing terms from English. The solution: start with writing articles about topics that are relevant to the community. If it's relevant to the community they will have words for it. If the language lacks a write dictionary: collect the words in Wiktionary. The problems you name are challenges that need to be addressed while building the project but they are certainly no showstoppers. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter
Zitat von Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl: On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 02:03:00PM +0200, m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: I think the same is happening here. The majority of people probably think that an optional opt-in filter is a thing that does no harm to non-users and has advantages for those who choose to use it. (Ask your gramma whether You can hide pictures if you don't want to see them sounds like a threatening thing to her.) But the scepticists voice their opinions loudly and point out every single imaginable problem. However, poll data suggests otherwise (taking the de.wikipedia sample). AFAIK it's a minority that want filters, with a majority that doesn't. I don't want to engage in long arguments, because I know you have your opinion made and I have too and none of us is probable to change them. But one more comment: I think there's a heavy bias at work. When I spoke of majority I meant people in general (like if you were going to a mall, pedestrian area, market or similar and asking for people's opinions there). The 300 participants of the Meinungsbild are a small, heavily self-selected group. People participating in Wikipedia are usually well-educated, liberty-loving, censorship-hating, altruistic etc. Even among Wikipedians only a small group is committed enough to participate in such polls. And the whole poll was an action dedicated to stop the filter. So the result is just another form of expression of the phenomenon I sketched in my original post of this thread. People who self-selected themselves to fight for the cause of the minority of scepticists. Of course you'll have a good argument with saying that the opinion of people who spent much reflection on the topic is more relevant than the gut opinion of random people. But there are also good arguments for it and people who have reflected about them and liked them. Oliver Koslowski said something I found interesting: Are we really likely to get more readers, more donations and - much more importantly - more authors? These are all community-focussed goals. But the image filter is not for the benefit of the community. The image filter is for the readers. So they can avoid looking at images that repel them. That's just a nice thing to do. Or to use a word more serious word than nice: an ethical thing to do. Not shoving down things people's throats when people have chosen not to get them shoved down their throat. The arguments that the filter could aid in censorship for evil governments or organizations seems a bit overinflated looking at the advanced methods of censorship they've already developed. And the selection process the community has to do feels not to be much different than what the community already does now. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
