Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
Erik Moeller wrote: > 2009/9/8 Gregory Maxwell : >> As such, it's time to try something different. > > What do you suggest? Are there models from other mailing list > communities that we should experiment with to create a healthier, more > productive discussion culture? What, based on your own experience of > this list, would you like to see change? I think we should stop using this outdated technology altogether and instead switch to a web-based forum, where comments can be postmoderated (i.e. removed after posting), and unproductive threads can be moved or locked. Mailing lists, by their nature, have a large potential for abuse by trolls and spammers. It's trivial to impersonate another user, or to continue posting indefinitely despite being blocked. We're lucky that the behaviour we've seen here has been merely inconsiderate, rather than malicious. Discussion on the English Wikipedia continues to function despite hateful users who try every dirty trick they can think of to disrupt the community. We're lucky that foundation-l has only seen the merest hint of a reflection of that turmoil, because the tools we have to deal with abusive behaviour on mailing lists are far less capable than those that have been developed for Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
David Gerard wrote: > wine-users - http://forum.winehq.org/ > > It started as a mailing list, then the forum was set up with a two-way > gateway. The forum is where most of the posters actually post from, > but so far it works ... surprisingly well! If you allow posting via email, then you lose the ability to properly authenticate those posts. If you allow receiving of the full content via email, then you lose the ability to postmoderate. Maybe it would be useful as a temporary migration measure, but it wouldn't solve any abuse problem until you removed those features. > The main thing Wine found is that the forum promptly had 10x the traffic! There's a chance we would see that aspect of it. The mailing lists have a different readership to the on-wiki discussion pages, and that's because of the technical barrier, which works in both directions. Some people prefer the interoperable nature of mail and don't bother reading the wikis, and some people like web pages and find the mailing lists strange, and the subscription process onerous. Because I know that this mailing list is mainly populated with the former kind of person, I know that my desire for a web-only interface is wishful thinking. A properly advertised bidirectional gateway might go some distance towards healing the split in the community that we currently have. But then we would run the risk of losing the people who contribute via mail, on small screens or non-threading clients, who already complain that foundation-l traffic is getting too high. A lower barrier to entry, with a continuing lack of postmoderation, would only make the traffic higher. I'm not opposed to bidirectional gateways, but I do think we should move carefully. If the software is not up to scratch, we could lose what productive public discussion we have, and increase our reliance on private mailing lists. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
Austin Hair wrote: > My ideal, personally, is something more like nntp--and while I'm > perfectly happy to turn over the list to some other technology, I > don't know that this is the magic solution, and I agree with Tim that > it risks killing what good we do have with the existing methods. I like NNTP too. It has postmoderation, so while you might not be able to authenticate posts, you can at least cancel any that fall outside the rules. It's an open standard which predates the web, and lots of tools and clients have been developed over the years to make use of its many features. It has built-in support for distribution and mirroring. It integrates well with email and lots of organisations run bidirectional gateways. However, it has largely been forgotten. Most internet users have never heard of it and they don't know how to read it, except when they're shown a web gateway. Mobile developers have apparently never heard of it either, despite the fact that its lightweight nature and time-worn support for low-memory systems should make it a perfect fit. For postmoderation to work, most people would have to be using NNTP directly, or a web gateway, instead of an email gateway. We'd have to evangelise the clients, say in a footer in outgoing emails. A quick google search turns up the following NNTP clients for mobile platforms: Java: http://mobilenews.sourceforge.net/ iPhone: http://inewsgroup.googlecode.com/ Windows: http://www.qusnetsoft.ru/ -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Recent firing?
wjhon...@aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 11/2/2009 10:59:23 AM Pacific Standard Time, > thomas.dal...@gmail.com writes: > > >> Why can't people use email clients that don't break threads? ;) >>> > > AOL = Satan > They are out to destroy all life and light. Last time I checked, you could use any email client you liked when connected to AOL, you only have to use the broken one they supply if you don't understand how to use computers. <http://help.aol.com/help/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=217449> -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Everything okay?
Austin Hair wrote: > On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 9:18 PM, MZMcBride wrote: >> No posts in over half a day. Is everyone simply scared? > > The list is open for traffic, and there are no pending moderation > requests. I think everyone's simply respecting the now more > heavily-enforced atmosphere of only posting when you have something > good to say. Internal-l is pretty active, with 5 posts in the same period, and there's been a few topics on wikien-l in the last few days which might have been posted here instead if they came up a week ago. I think we're seeing more of a choice of forum than respect for the moderators. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Teofilo wrote: > You have probably heard about CO2 and the conference being held these > days in Copenhagen (1). > > You have probably heard about the goal of carbon neutrality at the > Wikimania conference in Gdansk in July 2010 (2). > > You may want to discuss the basic and perhaps naive wishes I have > written down on the strategy wiki about paper consumption (3). Paper production has a net negative impact on atmospheric CO2 concentration if the wood comes from a sustainably managed forest or plantation. As long as people keep their PediaPress books for a long time, or dispose of them in a way that does not produce methane, then I don't see a problem. > Do we have an idea of the energy consumption related to the online > access to a Wikipedia article ? Some people say that a few minutes > long search on a search engine costs as much energy as boiling water > for a cup of tea : is that story true in the case of Wikipedia (4) ? No, it is not true, which makes what I'm about to suggest somewhat more affordable. Given the lack of political will to make deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, and the pitiful excuses politicians make for inaction; given the present nature of the debate, where special interests fund campaigns aimed at stalling any progress by appealing to the ignorance of the public; given the nature of the Foundation, an organisation which raises its funds and conducts most of its activities in the richest and most polluting country in the world: I think there is an argument for voluntary reduction of emissions by the Foundation. I don't mean by buying tree-planting or efficiency offsets, of which I am deeply skeptical. I think the best way for Wikimedia to take action on climate change would be by buying renewable energy certificates (RECs). Buying RECs from new wind and solar electricity generators is a robust way to reduce CO2 emissions, with minimal danger of double-counting, forward-selling, outright fraud, etc., problems which plague the offset industry. If Domas's figure of 100 kW is correct, then buying a matching number of RECs would be a small portion of our hosting budget. If funding is nevertheless a problem, then we could have a restricted donation drive, and thereby get a clear mandate from our reader community. Our colocation facilities would not need to do anything, such as changing their electricity provider. We would, however, need monitoring of our total electricity usage, so that we would know how many RECs to buy. I'm not appealing to the PR benefits here, or to the way this action would promote the climate change cause in general. I'm just saying that as an organisation composed of rational, moral people, Wikimedia has as much responsibility to act as does any other organisation or individual. Ultimately, the US will need to reduce its per-capita emissions by around 90% by 2050 to have any hope of avoiding catastrophe (see e.g. [1]). Nature doesn't have exemptions or loopholes, we can't continue emitting by moving economic activity from corporations to charities. [1] <http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp9.htm#tab9_3>, and see chapter 4.3 for the impacts of 550 case. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Tim Starling wrote: >> I'm not appealing to the PR benefits here, or to the way this action >> would promote the climate change cause in general. I'm just saying >> that as an organisation composed of rational, moral people, Wikimedia >> has as much responsibility to act as does any other organisation or >> individual. > > Even accepting the premise that subsidizing renewable energy is a > moral duty, that doesn't mean Wikimedia should fund it, any more than > it should be spending its budget on feeding starving children. > Wikimedia should not be spending any significant amount of donated > money on things that do not directly advance its mission, because > people donate to fund its mission, not unrelated causes (however > important). It's very different from a private individual or company > in this respect -- Wikimedia has a duty to spend its money on the > things it's accepting donations for. While the major program spending that Wikimedia performs should be defined by its mission, I think small spending decisions, relating to day-to-day operations, can be made without recourse to our mission. For instance, the office staff should be able use recycled paper without there being a Board resolution to put it in the mission statement. In terms of the ethics, there's a big difference between inaction on an issue, say poverty in Africa, and taking direct action in order to make things worse. Wikimedia is not paying people to take food from children's mouths, but it is paying people to burn coal for electricity. I don't think we can claim to be mere bystanders. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Aryeh Gregor wrote: > In contrast, by emitting > carbon dioxide, you're contributing to an effect that won't be a big > deal for at least a few more decades. It's a big deal already, and by the time it becomes an even bigger deal, it will be too late to act. The global climate takes decades to respond to changes in forcing factors. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions now, the earth would continue to warm for decades because the heat capacity of the ocean slows down the lower atmosphere's response to increased radiation. > And that will probably become > no big deal again a few decades after that when everyone's adapted to > it. Increased temperatures will cause a drop in rainfall and thus a reduction in food generating capacity in Australia, the Mediterranean, Mexico, and north-west and south-west Africa. High temperatures also damage crops directly. In the no-mitigation case, the Garnaut Review (which I've recently been reading and linked to earlier) projects a loss of half of Australia's agricultural capacity by around 2050. Also in Australia, species will be lost as cooler mountain habitats disappear from the continent, the Great Barrier Reef will be destroyed, and significant freshwater coastal wetlands will be inundated by the sea. > And that won't directly kill anyone in any event, mainly just > cause economic harm. The World Health Organisation disagrees: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/ <http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2007/9789241595674_eng.pdf> You just sound gullible when you recycle such claims without showing any awareness the opposing viewpoint. > And that might not happen anyway if some clever > soul comes up with a good enough fossil fuel replacement at any point > in the next thirty years. Like what? Nuclear fusion? Talk about pie in the sky. > Or if it becomes economical to pump > greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. The Garnaut Review suggests that it may well become economical in a few decades, but only because mandatory targets will raise the price of carbon to several times its current value. This will happen when cheaper measures, like shutting down fossil fuel power stations, are exhausted. Economical doesn't mean cheap. > Or if some cheap scheme is > devised to reduce warming some other way, like releasing particles to > block sunlight. And cause famine due to a reduction in tropical rainfall? http://edoc.mpg.de/376757 > Or if some unforeseen negative feedback causes > warming to not get too bad after all. The other side of that probability distribution, of course, is that positive feedback will cause it to be even worse than the high-end IPCC predictions and that the sea level will rise by tens of metres. There are studies on which of these two outcomes is more likely. Some of us do not want to roll the dice. > And of course maybe we've > already hit a critical threshold and cutting emissions is pointless by > now. There isn't such a threshold. The more you emit, the hotter it gets. As the temperature rises, the outcomes for both humans and for biodiversity become steadily worse. > Plus you can add the fact that Wikimedia's contribution to the affair > isn't likely to be even measurable, especially if the major damage is > from catastrophic changes (e.g., ice caps melting) rather than > incremental ones. How much money do you owe for increasing mean > global temperature by a billionth of a degree fifty years from now? The cost per capita can be derived from the total cost using a complex mathematical process known as "division". Maybe you've heard of it? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
Aryeh Gregor wrote: > I said "directly". Militaries kill people directly. Global warming > kills people indirectly. I'll take my reply offlist. I have a blog post at tstarling.com where I've been canvassing this issue, I think that would be a better home for this debate than private email, since other people will be able to read it and comment. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Case Study: Fan History's Propo sal For Being Acquired by the WMF
Tomasz Ganicz wrote: > 2009/12/20 Laura Hale : >> This was posted to the Strategy wiki but I don't think I ever mentioned it >> on list. The case study itself can be found at >> http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf . The blog entry about the case >> study can be found at http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1103 . >> > > I think the study shows the old problems, which mainly comes from > Wikimedia/Wikipedia history. > > Meta wiki was first created as a place for meta-cross-project > discussions including strategy planning as well. Then there was an > assumption (IMHO false) that there is some sort of > meta-cross-language-cross-projects-community which is allowed to make > vital decisions by the system of consensus process mixed with voting > system.It was soon found silly and many decisions were moved to > Wikimedia committees that theoretically were created just as > "advisory bodies" for Wikimedia Board of Trustees, but in fact the > advice given by the committees was usually accepted by the Board. Note that Meta was founded in 2001, so it significantly predates the Foundation and the non-Wikipedia projects. So the idea that decision-making there was "soon found silly" is a bit of an exaggeration. It predates the namespace feature in MediaWiki; it originally had a role similar to the Help and Wikipedia namespaces on the English Wikipedia today. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Boing Boing applauds stats.grok.se!
phoebe ayers wrote: > On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Bod Notbod wrote: >> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, David Gerard wrote: >> >>> But then, who isn't a contributor since 2004 these days? >> Is there something special about 2004? That's when I became a volunteer. >> >> Is that recognised as the year things reached critical mass? > > No. But there is something special about 2003, when I started :D > > In seriousness, I usually think of mid-late 2003 as our [[Eternal > September]] date. What do others think? I'll resist the temptation to declare the day I joined as the "day Wikipedia really took off". Actually, I think it was already doing pretty well by then. Maybe the day Wikipedia really took off was the day of the first slashdotting: March 5, 2001. That's what our announcements page says anyway: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements_2001#March_6.2C_2001> "The Slashdot interview just now appeared on Slashdot.org, but the link to this site is buried fairly deeply. So we may not have the massive influx that I had hoped and feared. :-) --Jimbo Wales" "Jimbo was wrong! We have had a massive influx of people writing a lot of interesting, good articles. Nothing to fear, it seems! March 5 really was a sort of banner day--probably set a record in terms of number of edits and number of new articles." http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244 "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?" "Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows... " -- Tim Starling ___ 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
Andrew Garrett wrote: > It's possible for system administrators to delete files entirely from > the servers for legal reasons, but because it is quite > labour-intensive, I for one have only ever performed such a deletion > when it is real child pornography (hint: a 16-year-old masturbating is > not "real" child pornography, and is in fact legal, though explicit, > in New South Wales, Australia). That may be true, but if the subject is or appears to be 15.5 years old instead of 16, then that would indeed count as child pornography, even in NSW, and disseminating such material would be a crime, with a maximum penalty of 10 years jail. <http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/fragview/inforce/act+40+1900+pt.3-div.15a+0+N?> It's a fine line to walk. Given the current climate you can expect a broad interpretation of "appears to be". In any case, part of the job of a sysadmin is to help the Foundation comply with whatever local laws they wish to comply with. If Mike asked me to help him comply with a local law in Angola, I wouldn't complain that the law isn't the same in Congo or wherever I happen to be at the time, I would try to help him out. If there was some issue of conscience, I could consider resigning, but obviously that wouldn't come up if I'm being asked to remove some rubbish cameraphone home video from the deletion archive. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Mediawiki to C++ , here we go
David Gerard wrote: > On 3 February 2010 00:15, Domas Mituzas wrote: > >> Do note that this is translation of dynamic language code, it doesn't >> make it as efficient as code written for native compilation. > > > OTOH, given that wikitext is defined as "what the parser does", it's > the only current realistic prospect for something faster ... > > Wonder how it does at parser-function-laden nested templates. The template part of the parser is defined by: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Preprocessor_ABNF Not by "what the parser does". It can easily be ported from PHP to C++, since that was a design goal when I rewrote it for MW 1.12. In fact, the Preprocessor_Hash implementation was meant as a model for a C++ port, not as a permanent and useful part of MediaWiki. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Amir E. Aharoni wrote: > On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 01:40, Brian J Mingus > wrote: > >> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Thomas Dalton >> wrote: >>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8560469.stm >>> >>> We're the biggest non-profit website in the world. That sounds like >>> argument for us to get the prize money to me. >>> >> The Internet is definitely worthy of the prize as a whole but I'm not >> following the logic that for-profit websites are more deserving. Google, >> for >> example, is a major force for peace. In fact it is the biggest popularizer >> of Wikimedia content. >> >> > Yes, but Google doesn't really need the prize money. > > Although giving it all to Wikimedia is probably not quite right either. Give the Nobel Peace Prize to DARPA for designing the Internet. And they've made so many other excellent contributions to peace, like unmanned bombers and anti-missile lasers. Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would choose "the internet" as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even more bizarre choice than last year. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Marc Riddell wrote: >> Tim Starling wrote: > >> Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would >> choose "the internet" as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even >> more bizarre choice than last year. >> >> -- Tim Starling >> > "Bizarre"? See beyond the visible, Tim. I'll try not to bait a further continuation. I'll just say that I've now read the Wikipedia article [[2009 Nobel Peace Prize]] and a linked reference, and I'm satisfied that my view is sufficiently well-informed and that I'm in good company. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's authority (on "global bans")
Gregory Kohs wrote: > Point of clarification... does Jimmy Wales have the authority to > impose a "global ban" on a user? Yes, Jimmy has always had such rights, and he continues to enjoy broad community support. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's authority (on "global bans")
Gerard Meijssen wrote: > Hoi, > Your video is only viewable in Australia.. Aparantly filtering / censoring > works in two directions; not only to keep things out but also to keep things > in. The video is just an animated version of the slideshow that they put up on flickr, with a voiceover that's a summary of the text on that page. So you're not missing much. Or to put it another way, you're not missing anything which might be on-topic for foundation-l. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to reply to a mailing list thread
Chad wrote: > On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:41 PM, MZMcBride wrote: >> Hello -- >> >> Some of the people posting to this mailing list don't seem to understand how >> to write a decent, readable reply to a mailing list thread... >> > > What possible good did you see coming from this thread? You > /knew/ it would produce a bunch of "I agree"s and "I'll post how > I want"s and go nowhere useful at all. > > Lame. Maybe he was not aware of how this subject turned out last time around: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/042321.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/042359.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-May/042399.html -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia
Milos Rancic wrote: > The MMORPG Ryzom goes Free Software [1]. Although it was just a matter > of time, this event is very important for shaping our future. MMORPG > is virtual reality and VR worlds will be [a significant part of] our > future. Nice to see our resident futurist making some more predictions. This reminds me, we're almost halfway to May 29, 2011, the date by which the Google Wave client will be the basic component of a modern operating system, replacing the web browser. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/39129 I don't suppose you'd like to put a date on this one as well? By what date will VR be a significant part of our lives? And will Google Wave be embedded in VR, or will VR be embedded in Google Wave? -- Tim Starling ___ 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
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. > They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke > the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event > it was misused? As a non-membership non-profit corporation, federal law dictates that it must have a Board and that the Board has final responsibility. The Articles of Incorporation could have specified means for oversight of the Board, say by the community, but this was not done. They simply say that the Board will make its own rules for how its members are replaced. The law gives us some protection, in that it prevents Board members from running the Foundation for their own personal gain (aside from reasonable salaries and expenses). However, it's still very important that we pick Board members carefully when we have community elections, and that we encourage the existing Board to make good choices for appointments. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] What Wikipedia owes to Jimbo (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)
On 10/05/10 20:51, Delirium wrote: > That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise > of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit > promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he > had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles > recruiting volunteers. Perhaps, but the lack of a free license didn't stop IMDB or Yahoo Answers, did it? > You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to > serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them > enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia > that their efforts would be redundant? No, I remember that GNUpedia was a tiny non-wiki encyclopedia project, I don't remember it gearing up to be a competitor. But I'll admit that the content license was the most essential to Wikipedia's success of the three elements I'm talking about. I think the case is much stronger that it could have succeeded with a for-profit stance, and with a closed-source software stack. Even the bulk of the open-source community doesn't mind contributing to websites that run on a closed-source stack, look at Sourceforge or GitHub. And for-profit organisations which commercialise community-developed open-source projects have become the norm. > In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture > route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a > project with no contributors. Wikipedia collected thousands of articles while it had an FAQ that read: "Q. Why is wikipedia.org redirected to wikipedia.com and not the other way around?" "A. I'm afraid it's for precisely the reason you fear: the people who are organizing this view it partly, from their point of view, as a business. They hope to recoup their costs, at the very least (certain Wikipedia members are actually paid to help!)--by placing unobtrusive ads, someday in the possibly-distant future. It would, thus, be dishonest of them to use .org. Of course, if you don't like this, it will be possible to export all the contents of Wikipedia for use elsewhere, since the contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License." It's complete nonsense to claim that with a for-profit stance, Wikipedia would have been "more pitiful than Citizendium". It was bigger than Citizendium while it *had* a for-profit stance. Of course some contributors would have left, that's partly my point. The policies Jimmy imposed on Wikipedia caused an accumulation of like-minded people, and that's why Wikipedia's culture today is what it is. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On 11/05/10 05:34, Mike Godwin wrote: > I just had a thought -- what if it were possible for a user to categorically > block views of any images that are not linked to in any project's article > pages? Presumably, those Commons images that are found in articles are > relevant and appropriately encyclopedic (speaking generally -- I also assume > there are some exceptions). Images that were just "dumped" to Commons > without being associated with any particular article would still be > available to those who were looking for them -- perhaps to complement a > particular article that needs illustration -- but the umpteenth superfluous > porn shot (or unconnected Muhammed image) would be invisible to those who > chose this option. > > Obviously, this notion is too cute to actually be helpful, but I thought I'd > share it. It's a proposal which only really makes sense when analysed from the libertarian end of this debate. It's not a compromise with the rest of the spectrum. The debate on this issue has been organised along predictable lines, dividing neatly into libertarians, moderates and conservatives. I'm not sure if I'm using the word "libertarian" accurately, but it will do as a label. To summarise: Libertarians want all information to be available to everyone. Some say all adults, some say children too should be included. Their principles allow for individuals to choose for themselves to avoid seeing that which offends them, which leaves the problem of how the reader is meant to tell in advance whether a given picture might offend them, before they have actually seen it. Their ideology does not allow them to consider any solution which involves one person making a decision on behalf of another, and all the reasonable solutions seem to involve some element of this. So they are left with no option but to downplay the impact of seeing offensive content. Religious conservatives think that seeing certain images, or reading certain text, is morally dangerous. Seeing these images, they believe, may lead the person into sin, and thus jeopardise their eternal soul. Whereas the libertarian finds it difficult to classify and rank different moral hazards, the religious conservative can simply cite an authority. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, gives us this handy list, from most to least grievous: 1. Bestiality 2. Sodomy 3. Incest 4. Rape of a virgin 5. Rape of a wife 6. Adultery 7. Seduction 8. Simple fornication 9. "Uncleanness" (presumably masturbation) (Summarised from <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3154.htm#article12>. The ranking of adultery and rape is unclear, but I think I have them right way around.) Thus, religious conservatives can pick a point on that list where they'd like to draw the line, and demand that any material that encourages behaviour higher up the list be suppressed, on the basis that to allow this material to be distributed jeopardises the soul of the recipient, regardless of their consent. (Fox News appears to put the line at the bottom, but I find it interesting that putting the line between 5 and 6 almost exactly matches Australia's "RC" category and proposed internet censorship regime, especially if you count BDSM as wife-rape, and indeed Australian law seems to characterise it as such.) Moderates tolerate both views. They may have a moral relativist outlook, or they may simply wish to avoid or defuse conflict. Thus they are in the unenviable position of trying to find compromises between two radically different ideologies, which have almost no common ground. On foundation-l we are divided between moderates and libertarians. The libertarians are more strident in their views, so the debate can seem one-sided at times, but there is a substantial moderate contingent, and I count myself among them. Conservatives have no direct voice here, but they are conceptually represented by Fox News and its audience. So to return to Mike's proposal: it's only the libertarians who value educational value above moral hazard, and they're not the ones you've got to compromise with. To a conservative, a claim of educational value does not negate a risk of moral turpitude. By optionally hiding images which have a claim of educational value, however dubious the claim, you please nobody. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On 11/05/10 23:06, Anthony wrote: > I assume here you're talking about choosing what images to allow on the > websites. I wouldn't call that "making a decision on behalf of another", > but I assume that's what you're referring to. If I'm wrong, please correct > me. I'm including: Solution 1: Exercise editorial control to remove particularly offensive images from the site. Standard answer 1: Some people may wish to see that content, it would be wrong for us to stop them. Solution 2: Tag images with an audience-specific rating system, like movie classifications. Then enable client-side filtering. Standard answer 2: This could potentially enable censorship which is wrong as per answer 1. Also, we cannot determine what set of content is right for a given audience. By encouraging people to filter, say, R-rated content, we risk inadvertently witholding information that they would have consented to see, had they been fully informed about its nature. Solution 3: Tag images with objective descriptors, chosen to be useful for the purposes of determining offensive character by the reader. The reader may then choose a policy for what kinds of images they wish to filter. Standard answer 3: This also enables censorship, which is wrong as per answer 1. Also, tagging images with morally-relevant descriptors involves a value judgement by us, when we determine which descriptors to use. It is wrong for us to impose our moral values on readers in this way. The fundamental principle of libertarianism is that the individual should have freedom of thought and action, and that it is wrong for some other party to infringe that freedom. I've attempted to structure the standard answers above in a way that shows how they are connected to this principle. > Religious conservatives think that seeing certain images, or reading >> certain text, is morally dangerous. Seeing these images, they believe, >> may lead the person into sin, and thus jeopardise their eternal soul. >> > > I think you've overstated that position. Would you include Larry Sanger in > this category? He doesn't seem to be in either of the other two. I think it's difficult to distinguish Larry's own views from the show he puts on for the media. But more generally, yes I suppose I may be overstating. Studying religious views on sex and pornography is interesting, because those views align closely with the laws and norms of wider society. Unlike wider society, religious conservatives can give a detailed, consistent and complete justification for their views. In terms of history and influence, the religious connection is plain. But I'll admit that not every anti-pornography campaigner today is a religious conservative. [...] > I wouldn't call them moderates. They are most certainly not moral > relativist, and they have no desire to find compromises between the other > two/three terrible positions. Let's add a fourth faction, the "educators". Suit yourself. But I think it's more worthwhile to classify the ideologues than it is to classify the pragmatists. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On 11/05/10 23:56, Mike Godwin wrote: > That's a feature, not a bug. If there is a compromise that "pleases" some > factions but not others, it's not exactly a compromise, is it? The trick is to find a compromise which pleases both factions, or at least upsets both equally. In particular, I think there is potential for some very shaky and tentative common ground, in the area of parental control over young children. Libertarians might be convinced to make an exception to their principles for that case, which would open up room for small but valuable concessions to conservatives. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: SignWriting Encyclopedia Projects...new SignWriting Wiki
On 29/05/10 23:43, Gerard Meijssen wrote: > What I am looking for is agreement what technical issues need to be solved > before a sign language can become a Wikipedia. Compatible policies are not > an issue. I am thinking of being able to include images in the text and > having wiki links. What else is absolutely required before we can move > forward once there are sufficient articles ? Well, you could start a wiki right now, but obviously it wouldn't be very functional. You only need to glance at the wiki at signbank.org to see that. Pretty much any MediaWiki feature you can think of would be broken. Things like: * In-place editing. It currently requires going to an external server, writing what you want to write, encoding it to binary and pasting the unreadable encoded form into the article. * SignWriting page titles (and interlanguage links from other projects) * SignWriting edit summaries * Readable diffs * Links There is also the issue of its unauthorised use of an unallocated part of the Unicode code space. The UTF-8 decoding feature of the MediaWiki extension should probably be disabled to avoid conflicts with future official Unicode allocations. You could go ahead right now with an inherently bilingual wiki: with things like page titles and edit summaries in some common language, like Danish for DSL or English for ASL. But without in-place editing, it seems unlikely that it would advance the SignWriting cause very far. What I'd like to see in a SignWriting wiki is a feature to encode SignWriting to video, showing a computer-generated figure acting out the text. Then those who do not know SignWriting (which includes the vast majority of the deaf community) would benefit from it. Just an idea. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: WikiLeaks inspired "New media haven" proposal passes Parliament
On 17/06/10 06:55, Michael Snow wrote: > If it's in the US, wouldn't it be a data center? (I'm mildly > disappointed to discover that the Meta pages on the "guerilla UK > spelling campaign" and the "gorilla US spelling campaign" were deleted > some time ago. Though honestly, Noah Webster should have finished the > job and made it "campain".) For people lucky enough to be able to view the treasure trove of Wikimedia history that is the meta deletion archive, here is the version I prefer: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=Guerilla+UK+spelling+campaign×tamp=20050608022530> Click "show preview" to see it with formatting. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?
On 29/06/10 09:11, Martin Maurer wrote: > The question is, what level of self-determination do the 260 language > versions of Wikipedia have as to the design of their user interfaces > (skins)? Can individual wikis choose independently modifications of > their skins, and which of the available skins to use as the default > for unregistered users, or is this controlled centrally by the > Foundation? [...] > The question seems to be a very fundamental one and I would also > appreciate insights into the big picture. How independent are the > language versions? To what degree can they govern themselves and to > what degree are they bound by decisions made centrally by the > Foundation? Editor communities do not have any fundamental rights to choose how MediaWiki is configured. However, the Foundation's goals are closely aligned with those of the communities, and the Foundation respects the central role communities play in the success of the projects, and so the Foundation has usually honoured such configuration requests. In this case, I would recommend a process of negotiation. Detail your concerns in Bugzilla, and give the developers time to respond to them. A premature vote on the issue would make compromise difficult. The Foundation has spent a lot of time and money on the Vector skin, and it would be a pity to see it thrown away. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stewards acting locally
On 09/08/10 03:17, James Alexander wrote: > Global locking does not have any autoblock like feature and we have a large > portion of our xwiki abusers (and even a growing number of those who only > attack only one or two sites and have figured out the global login system) > who will take advantage of this and go to another wiki, create the account > and SUL over to whatever project they want to attack. Is there a request in Bugzilla to fix this? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" English Wikipedia's featured article today
On 07/02/12 22:13, Svip wrote: > On 7 February 2012 04:49, MZMcBride wrote: > >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Bad_choice_of_featured_article >> is pretty good reading. > > The complaints usually sums as 'hey, great work on that article, > unfortunately, I am a bit uncomfortable with subject at hand, so let's > best not celebrate your contributions'. Some FAs should never be shown on the main page. Nothing in the FA criteria says anything about the subject of the article: such as whether the subject is of broad interest or has educational merit. Such criteria should be considered for choosing articles to show on the main page. The main page should show the best of Wikipedia, not the ugliest loopholes in its inclusion criteria. I was involved in some deletion debates in 2002 and 2003. Nobody knew at the time that if we said "OK, let's allow this" then some day the fancruft we were allowing would be featured on the main page, with the only criteria being that a fan puts enough effort into their style and citations. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" English Wikipedia's featured article today
On 08/02/12 09:09, K. Peachey wrote: > On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:51 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: >> Casting aside the infantile slogan, "Wikipedia is not censored", I think >> having the pilot of South Park on the Main Page is quite appropriate; the >> subject is significant. >> >> Fred > > Really, It's not that much different than the Simpson episodes there > have been on the MP, Just this one has a more "adult"ish name attached > to it... I also opposed the Simpsons features, for much the same reason. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 14/02/12 02:39, Achal Prabhala wrote: > The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia > > By Timothy Messer-Kruse > [...] > My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I > hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, > such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say > that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write > 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky > was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of > weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write." There are lots of places on Wikipedia where misconceptions have been summarily dealt with, respectable sources criticised and facts brought to light. Unfortunately, most academics don't have time for the edit wars, lengthy talk page discussions and RFCs that are sometimes required to overcome inertia. The text of Messer-Kruse's article doesn't show much understanding of this aspect of Wikipedia. But publishing it could be seen as canny. It should be effective at recruiting new editors and bringing more attention to the primary sources in question. The article is being actively edited along those lines. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books
On 14/03/12 11:22, phoebe ayers wrote: > I've been asked to write a short editorial about this development from > a Wikipedian's perspective and am curious about (and would love to > include) other Wikimedian experiences -- did you use print > encyclopedias as a kid? Was a love of print encyclopedias part of your > motivation or interest in becoming a Wikipedian? Is there any value in > them still? Will you miss it? We didn't have an Encyclopedia Britannica at home, it would have been much too expensive. However, we did have a 20-year-old copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, which was a hand-me-down from relatives whose children had left home. I used to take a random volume to my room for a week at a time, and leaf through the pages, looking for interesting articles. I wouldn't say that the print encyclopedia was part of my motivation for becoming a Wikipedian. I just have an appetite for general knowledge that was served by both. I don't miss print encyclopedias: today's internet is far better for satisfying my curiosity than any encyclopedia. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates
On 22/03/12 19:37, En Pine wrote: > I have two suggestions about templates. I don’t know if Steven’s > the right person to ask about these particular ideas so I’m sending > this email to him and CCing it to Foundation-l. > > First, has anyone thought about automatically adding a welcome > message to the user’s talk page when they first register, not only > for EN but also for Commons, Simple, and other projects? Currently > we require a human to do this, which means that lots of people seem > not to get welcome messages which could contain useful information, > and perhaps a link to the Teahouse for EN users. Could we implement > an automated post to a user’s talk page that gives the user links > to WP:WELCOME, WP:HELP, the Teahouse, and/or other similar > resources as soon as the user has registered? > > Second, has anyone looked at non-English Wikipedias, especially any > that show better editor retention than EN’s, to check for best > practices regarding the languages used on templates? There's an extension called NewUserMessage that does this. It's enabled on 22 Wikimedia wikis, including Commons. It can be enabled on en.wikipedia.org also if there's enough support for it. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EFF & Bitcoins
On 23/06/11 10:18, Alec Conroy wrote: > On Bitcoin-- we (and the web in general) desperately need a > zero-overhead micropayment system of some kind. I can't help but > think our fundraising efforts would be helped if people would able to, > on impulse and without premeditation, donate $1 to WMF in thanks for > particular articles and have the full $1 actually get sent, without > transactions fees. You need a massive distributed GPU processing cluster to verify bitcoin transactions. Because massive computing clusters are not free, the bitcoin protocol includes the ability to pay a transaction fee to the cluster that verifies the transaction. If bitcoin is still in use after the minting reward dries up, we will have a situation where ever larger pools of GPUs will compete for tranasction fees. So I don't think it can be called "zero-overhead". https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fee -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
On 12/08/11 20:55, David Gerard wrote: > THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to make it easy to > fork the projects, so as to preserve them. I must have missed the place where you actually made this case. I tried reading your blog posts but I didn't see it there. In 2005 you said that the point is to insure the data against the financial collapse of the Foundation. But the chance of that appears to be vanishingly small, and shrinking as the Foundation gets larger. If there was some financial problem, then we would have plenty of warning and plenty of time to plan an exit strategy. The technical risks (meteorite strike etc.) are also receding as we grow larger. Also, you seem to be conflating forking with mirroring. If the Foundation did get into trouble in say 2030, then presumably the community would want a copy of the whole site as it is in 2030, not a content fork from 2011. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
On 15/08/11 16:30, David Gerard wrote: > 2011/8/15 David Richfield : >> It's not just financial collapse. When Sun was acquired by Oracle and >> they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork >> the project - take the codebase and run with it. It's not that easy >> for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or >> else the Foundation has too much power over the content community. >> Let me make it clear that I currently am happy with the Foundation, >> and don't see a fork as necessary. If the community has a problem >> with the board at any point, we can elect a new one. If things >> change, however, and it becomes clear that the project is being >> jeopardised by the management, we need a plan C. > > > Pretty much. It's not urgent - I do understand we're chronically > underresourced - but I think it's fairly obvious it's a Right Thing, > and at the very least something to keep in the back of one's mind. So you're worried about a policy change? What sort of policy change specifically would necessitate forking the project? Is there any such policy change which could plausibly be implemented by the Foundation while it remains a charity? I'm just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the risk. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave
On 15/08/11 18:14, Fred Bauder wrote: >> I'm just trying to evaluate the scale of the risk here. The amount of >> resources that we need to spend on this should be proportional to the >> risk. >> >> -- Tim Starling > > That technical staff have effective power to decide whether a fork is > justified is reason enough. I'm not in a position to actually allocate resources to this or to decide whether it's justified. I'm asking these questions mostly for my own curiosity, and in case someone seeks my opinion on it in the future. When you launched Internet-Encyclopedia, I was very positive about its utility. Brion and I gave it all the support it needed. The "green link" feature in particular required Wikinfo to be whitelisted in the server configuration so that it didn't get blocked for its high request rate. I reviewed Proteus's fork of MediaWiki to see if there were any changes that we could reincorporate. So it's not like I'm staunchly anti-fork. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 16/08/11 20:11, David Gerard wrote: > Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try > to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back), > they leave faster and take others with them. > > This is what I mean when I say "forkability will keep us honest." I think that we should have some other reason for being attractive to our editors apart from fear of forking. Say, some sort of goal or mission statement, which is helped by having a strong WMF. One problem with using fear of forking as your primary motivation for doing things well is that forking is not as bad as some other scenarios. For example, our editor community could go back to playing computer games and watching TV, instead of doing something useful, and people could pay for their encyclopedias. Indeed, it's hard to understand why you want us to simultaneously be afraid of it and to make it easier. Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 04/09/11 14:33, Philippe Beaudette wrote: > Please note that the results are not final: although the vote count > is, and has been finalized, the analysis of comments is ongoing. It would be nice to see a correlation analysis of some kind. For example, it would be interesting to know whether those who support the filter have differing views on cultural neutrality to those who oppose it. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 06/09/11 19:22, Oliver Moran wrote: > I think the most important line from the analysis is the question, "What > comes next?" As there was no question that asked the community if this > feature was desirable or wanted, what does come next? Will this feature be > implemented? If so, is it being implemented with community assent? What was > the purpose of this "referendum" and what decision was arrived at through > it? There's a Board resolution that says "implement it", so I suppose it will be implemented. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content However, the editor community could sabotage it in various ways. For example, there's no guarantee that anyone will tag any images, or that tagged images won't be untagged by bots run by administrators. If the Board really does want a useful image-hiding feature, then it's essential that the community be persuaded that it is a good idea. Personally, I think the filter will be mostly harmless, and that it's not worth the effort to rail against it. It will be useful for PR -- it will seem as if we are trying to accomodate all points of view even if the feature is not particularly useful for parents. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 06/09/11 22:56, Milos Rancic wrote: > On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 14:33, Tim Starling wrote: >> Personally, I think the filter will be mostly harmless, and that it's >> not worth the effort to rail against it. It will be useful for PR -- >> it will seem as if we are trying to accomodate all points of view even >> if the feature is not particularly useful for parents. > > I suppose that you know that WMF did PR research if you claim that it > will be useful for that purpose. If so, please refer to it. If not, > it's just about dilettantism, as usual. Just dilettanteism. I thought I made that clear by starting with "personally, I think". -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is random article truly random
On 19/10/11 02:15, Domas Mituzas wrote: > Short answer: no > > Long answer: > > we have uneven chances for different pages to show up. It is based > on the idea that every page gets inserted into discreetly random > position in a certain linear space, so you end up with [[Poisson > distribution]], which from a distance seems to return stuff > randomly enough, but one page can have 1000x higher chance to be > returned than other. There's no bias towards or away from porn, however. The distributions of page_random gaps are independent of any variable you might want to study, like quality or age. If you try to get a lot of random pages from Special:Random, eventually you will notice that some pages are missing and some pages come up more often. But if you are only fetching a small fraction of the total number of articles, then the statistics of the returned sample will look more or less the same as a true random sample. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] just wondering, are we going to take down en.wikipedia.org?
On 28/10/11 01:43, emijrp wrote: > Obvious sarcasm is obvious. But people think you are serious. > > I'm not sure who is more dangerous, stupid politicians speaking about > closing sites or stupid wikipedians closing Wikipedia sites when politicians > speak about closing sites. About 90% of everything that comes out of Domas's mouth is sarcasm. So if you don't know whether he's being sarcastic about something, you can assume that he is and get it right 90% of the time. Domas probably had the same reaction to the Italian Wikipedia protest as I did. We both spend a lot of time making sure Wikipedia is always up and available for people to read, so it's painful to see a small proportion of a wiki's users decide to take a whole wiki offline for everyone. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Error message
On 29/11/11 14:27, Tomasz Finc wrote: > On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 11:38 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > >> 2011/11/28 Dirk Franke : >>> Seriously: Could we please create something like the Twitter Fail Whale? >>> Maybe a Sad Jimbo? Could help fundraising as well.. >> >> Scattered pieces of the puzzle globe. > > > We've talked this exact idea at length in the office .. I'd love to see it > happen. Maybe someone could create it if the 3D model used to create the current logo were released to the public. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On 13/12/11 01:36, Teofilo wrote: > Let us stop asking users to individually tag every wrong picture! Let > us have some developers create a tool to find wrong pictures and > rotate them back to their original orientation! We could make a list of all images with EXIF rotation. I'm not sure how you would separate that into correctly-rotated and incorrectly-rotated images. There's not any simple way to tell whether a picture is sideways. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On 13/12/11 02:55, David Gerard wrote: > On 12 December 2011 15:26, K. Peachey wrote: > >> It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally got around >> to writing it (I believe it needed the Improved metadata handling >> backend first) and implementing it, It wasn't a sudden "oh lets write >> this and enable it in one day thing", a lot of work went into it and >> subsequent testing. > > > * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously > wrongly rotated and were fixed by the feature? > * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously > correctly rotated and were messed up by the feature? > > i.e., was there strong reason to apply it to past images, not just new ones? Such statistics were never gathered. I was told by the developers involved that existing images with EXIF rotation would be very rare and that most of them would be fixed by this feature, and I didn't challenge that. I think it's too early to focus on recriminations, we risk distracting people from actually fixing the issue. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug
On 13/12/11 06:22, Möller, Carsten wrote: >> i.e., was there strong reason to apply it to past images, not >> just new ones? > > Don't ask, you need no reason if you work directly with the WMF. The main developer for this project was a volunteer, and it was requested by Commons users. If the WMF was at fault, it was only at the review stage. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On 20/12/11 12:50, Kim Bruning wrote: > On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 11:35:24AM +1100, Tim Starling wrote: >> On 13/12/11 01:36, Teofilo wrote: >>> Let us stop asking users to individually tag every wrong picture! Let >>> us have some developers create a tool to find wrong pictures and >>> rotate them back to their original orientation! >> >> We could make a list of all images with EXIF rotation. I'm not sure >> how you would separate that into correctly-rotated and >> incorrectly-rotated images. There's not any simple way to tell whether >> a picture is sideways. > > I wonder... if we run/simulate the old routine vs the new routine, and we > notice that there > is a difference in outcome between the two, we could add a "check me" > template. head> Every image with EXIF rotation will be different between the old and the new version of MediaWiki. A Commons user (Umherirrender) already generated a list of such images, using the Toolserver database, and thousands of incorrect images were tagged for rotation. The rate at which images were tagged was far in excess of the rate at which RotateBot was able to rotate them, so Sam Reed did some work on optimising it. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing wikis now redirect to Incubator
On 23/12/11 09:44, Milos Rancic wrote: > This is great news! In the sense of software implementation, we are > just a step behind the implementation of the initial spirit of > Wikipedia: If you know this language, you can start free encyclopedia > now! (Though, there are some organizational issues to be resolved.) We did have a "create this wiki" button on the missing wiki page for a while. I set it up with a cron job to automatically clear the request queue. Hundreds of wikis were created that way. Eventually the community was overwhelmed with a desire for bureaucracy and I was asked to disable it, in favour of a meta.wikimedia.org request process. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia domains at GoDaddy
On 24/12/11 06:25, Platonides wrote: > On 23/12/11 16:30, John Du Hart wrote: >> This is currently on the reddit front page >> http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/nnv9l/wikipediaorg_is_with_godaddy_jimmy_if_youre/ > > Everybody there seem to know whatever evil thoughts GoDaddy said, but > there's no reference supporting that. Try this: <http://www.thedomains.com/2011/11/15/here-is-godaddys-statement-in-support-of-the-stop-online-privacy-act-house-hearing-tomorrow/> -- Tim Starling ___ 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
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 ___ 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
Marcus Buck wrote: > 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? Specifically the nature of the difference between Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. > 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. Arabic may have spread from Morocco to Malaysia, but Cairo is quite close to the Arabian peninsula, so I wonder if you're not overgeneralising. An attendee at Wikimania 2008 compared the difference between Egyptian Arabic and Standard Arabic to the difference between written English and spoken English, or written and spoken French, which seems to me to be somewhat different to the difference between French and Latin. It is, of course, a matter of degree. > 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). I'm not really interested in your back-of-the-envelope calculations. I was hoping that you might have some more detailed study that you can point me to. Quoting again: > There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects > or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. You seem to be preparing the ground to dismiss any kind of study which contradicts your opinion. Linguistics might be hard work, and fraught with subjectivity, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole field out of hand. -- Tim Starling ___ 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
Mark Williamson wrote: > Most of the grammatical features you cited are shared with Standard > Arabic... that's not a list of differences, it's a general description > of Egyptian Arabic with a couple of differences noted. Written in > Arabic script, short vowels aren't distinguished most of the time, so > that's irrelevant anyhow. That may be so, but the rest of the linked page, and some other pages on that site, did answer most of my questions. The fact that MSA exists as a spoken form, and that standard written Arabic is an accurate rendering of it, certainly puts to rest my comparison with historical spelling in English. Also the fact that it has a different word order (SVO vs VSO) suggests that characterising the differences as "spelling" is not accurate. The section on literacy was also relevant. So my thanks to Milos for pointing it out. I think it sorts out most of the linguistic questions for me, so that just leaves the political ones, which as always are more complex and emotionally charged. -- Tim Starling ___ 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
Platonides wrote: > Mohamed Magdy wrote: >> * I think it would be doable to make a tab that Egyptianizes (or any other >> dialect) the Arabic article, that is, if we have some sort of conversion >> memory, that is if the dialect is stable (or standard), the dialect differs >> from a place to another, from a muhafazah to another ( >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhafazah). if anyone knows the technical >> method we could make a trial instead of the great mess of dialect >> Wikipedias. I'm not too sure about this compromise yet. > > If there're clear (algoritmic) rules for that, it can be done. > See at http://zh.wikipedia.org/ how it can be viewed on seven! different > variants. The Chinese variants just use conversion tables, not an algorithm. That's the only kind of conversion that can be done by the current software. If literacy is the aim of this Egyptian Arabic project, then perhaps a useful first step would be to implement a de-vocalising filter. That should be possible with the current software. Then, with the filter on by default, editors can add vocalic marking in the edit box without annoying too many people. That's the approach that seems to be indicated by pages 7-12 of this paper: http://papers.ldc.upenn.edu/EALL/ArabicLiteracy.pdf Like zh-min-nan, we'd probably be accused of encouraging baby-talk, but if the community was behind it then it could go ahead. -- Tim Starling ___ 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?
e tree production from a language like wikitext. It's trivial to invent irregular grammars which can be nonetheless processed in linear time. My aims for wikitext, namely that it be easy for humans to write but fast to convert to HTML, do not coincide well with the taxonomy of formal grammars. Secondly, there are practical problems. Past projects attempting to parse wikitext using flex/bison or similar schemes have failed to achieve the performance of the present parser, which is surprising because I didn't think I was setting the bar very high. You can bet that if I ever rewrote it in C++ myself, it would be much faster. The PHP compiler community is currently migrating away from LALR towards a regex-based parser called re2c, mostly for performance reasons. Thirdly, there is the fact that certain phases of MediaWiki's parser are already very similar to the textbook parsers and can be analysed in those terms. The main difference is that our parser is better optimised. For example, the preprocessor acts like a recursive descent parser, but with a non-recursive frontend (using an internal stack), a caching phase, and a parse tree expansion phase with special-case recursive to iterative transformations to minimise stack depth. Yet another post: > I don't believe a computer scientist would have a huge problem writing > a proper parser. Are any of the core developers computer scientists? Frankly, as an ex-physicist, I don't find the field of computer science particularly impressive, either in terms of academic rigour or practical applications. I think my time would be best spent working as a software engineer for a cause that I believe in, rather than going back to university and studying another socially-disconnected field. -- Tim Starling ___ 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?
geni wrote:
> 2009/1/13 Tim Starling :
>> I believe that the solution to this problem lies in borrowing concepts
>> from software engineering, such as variables, functions, minimally
>> parenthesized programming languages, libraries, objects, etc. I know that
>> many template programmers cannot program in a traditional programming
>> language, but I have a feeling they could if they wanted to.
>
> How well do those concepts stand up when you have a lot of people
> copying and pasting code they don't really understand (writing an
> infobox from scratch is hard modifying an existing one less so)?
Copying is an exceedingly common practice in software engineering. If I
replaced "infobox" with "feature" in your comment then you'd sound like a
software engineer. The answer is that it will work just fine, the copier
only has to have the vaguest familiarity with the language to be able to
do it.
However, it's generally discouraged, because the widely copied code
becomes difficult to edit. If a bug is found in it, for instance, it will
be necessary to find all instances of the code and to change them. The
process of merging common code to a library of functions is called
refactoring (during maintenance) or abstraction (during design), and is a
common task for more experienced programmers. The aim of refactoring is to
keep the boilerplate text that is copied as small and elegant as possible,
to minimise the number of things that can go wrong with it.
The template equivalent to refactoring is the introduction of
meta-templates, such as {{infobox}}.
-- Tim Starling
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Gerard Meijssen wrote: > Hoi, > A conspiracy is wilful. I doubt that this is the case. If anything there is > neglect. Other languages are just not given the same priority. There's no language-dependence in our priorities here, except for Robert's initial decision, back in October, to pilot the new software on the largest wikis. The smaller wikis haven't been neglected since then, rather, the search engine has been neglected. The English Wikipedia has often been left out of toolserver replication, and it could have easily been the case this time around. > What you hope > for is that over time a language community will include developers that will > take care for its language issues. In the mean time the Betawiki developers > do what they can and I think they do a pretty good job. The Betawiki developers, as I believe you yourself have pointed out, are part of the community. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis
Gerard Meijssen wrote: > I will be indeed the last to say that the Betawiki developers are not part > of the community of MediaWiki developers. The point that I tried to make > here is that when the Lingala community produces its *own *developer, they > will have a better grasp of the issues with the Lingala language. There are > no Betawiki developers who know about the needs of African languages. I > know I can find such developers through people like Don Osborne and Martin > Benjamin. They are programmers that are for hire. If we want a more complete > solution, language needs to be given a priority and the many issues need to > be identified first and addressed later. It is not only about Lingala. There's no doubt it's useful to have programmers who speak the language. They often come with the motivation to work on language-related problems, an understanding of the wiki community, and familiarity with the linguistics and data sources. Our Chinese variant feature, for instance, has benefited greatly from work by Chinese-speaking developers. But results can certainly be achieved if you have a bilingual community member with no knowledge of programming, and a programmer willing to work with them. We've even done language-related features with no help from speakers whatsoever, just using online linguistics resources. So I don't think the lack of a Lingala-speaking developer should be considered a roadblock for the development of Lingala-related features. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frustration with the conversion engines issue
> == What do we need? == > > Actually, we don't need a lot to solve this problem. I have the > solution for the most important part of the problem, the linguistic > one. Even if I don't have enough of time to deal with all cases, I am > able to find students or professors of linguists who are willing to > work on those issues for free (they would have scientific papers after > the work is done). We need "just" a PHP programmer who is willing to > work on this problem. And for a couple of years I didn't find any > (even I know a lot of PHP programmers). It sounds like a good project for a directed grant. Have you tried contacting potential grant-making organisations? I imagine some awesome things could be done with as little as $100K. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PGP-keysign at the tech/chapter-meeting
DaB. wrote: > Hello all, > > I think that when such a number of people come together it would be nice to > have a key-signing in Berlin. If you have no idea, what a key-signing is, > look > at the wikipedia-article [[en:Key_signing_party]]. Private keys can be compromised by anyone with a whim and a few thousand dollars, either physically by compromise of the device, or remotely by social engineering or zero-day exploit. Key signing parties are premised on the idea that private keys are really private. Since they aren't, the additional security of a real-life meeting is somewhat farcical. Maybe in the crypto-anarchist fantasy future, filled with hostile corporations and goverments, it would make sense. But in the real world, I think the SSL hierarchy provides a better model. It has a central authority with some competence in identity verification and security, which can issue a revocation certificate even if someone burns your house down. And you can verify the authenticity of a public key even if you don't have any friends. My vote is for a Guitar Hero party instead. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frustration with the conversion engines issue
Ziko van Dijk wrote: > Dear Aryeh, > > Your idea of "converting on the fly" would not work in many cases. Take for > example the ß in German WP. Swiss (registered) readers can decide via their > Preferences to see only ss and never ß, because the Swiss do not use ß. > That's ok. But vice versa, not every ss is to be converted to ß. > > The Germany-Germans write for example "Masse" (a mass, with a short "a") and > "Maße" (measures, with a long "a"). The Swiss write "Masse" and "Masse" for > both. Now, imagine that a Swiss editor writes "Masse", the conversion engine > would not know whether this should be converted to "Maße" or not. Only a > person who knows German is capable to decide. There's no reason in principle why a computer can't be as good at making that decision as a human. Such ambiguities are what makes the field of computational linguistics interesting, they're not a reason to be dismissive. We need to find out what is possible with state-of-the-art research systems, and then negotiate, or develop software, to bring that technology to Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] South Korean Government's regulations on real name for Internet
RYU Cheol wrote: > We have some servers in Seoul, Korea, which are donated by Yahoo, > right? (I'm not sure, let me know) Then it's a web site in South > Korea. Those servers are no longer being used to serve the website, they're just being used for a few miscellaneous tasks. We're planning to move all remaining operations in Korea to Florida, and to return the servers to Yahoo. These plans can be hurried up if it's necessary for legal reasons. Is there an English translation of the law in question, available on the web? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] South Korean Government's regulations on real name for Internet
Tim Starling wrote: > RYU Cheol wrote: >> We have some servers in Seoul, Korea, which are donated by Yahoo, >> right? (I'm not sure, let me know) Then it's a web site in South >> Korea. > > Those servers are no longer being used to serve the website, they're > just being used for a few miscellaneous tasks. We're planning to move > all remaining operations in Korea to Florida, and to return the > servers to Yahoo. These plans can be hurried up if it's necessary for > legal reasons. > > Is there an English translation of the law in question, available on > the web? Answering my own question: http://www.worldlii.org/int/other/PrivLRes/2005/2.html Article 55 appears to be relevant: (1) The Minister of Information and Communication may request the information and communications service providers, etc. (in this Article, including any person falling under a case where the provisions of Article 58 apply mutatis mutandis) to submit related goods and documents, etc., if it is necessary to enforce this Act. >From Article 2: 3. "Information and communications service providers" shall mean the operators of telecommunications as prescribed in Article 2 (1) 1 of the Telecommunications Business Act and other persons who provide information or intermediate information services for profit utilizing the services rendered by the telecommunications service providers; >From the Telecommunications Business Act: <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/treg/Legislation/Korea/BusinessAct.htm> 1.the term "telecommunications business operator" means a person who provides telecommunications service with holding the relevant license or making a registration or report under this Act" Article 58: (1) The provisions of Articles 22 through 32 shall apply mutatis mutandis where any person prescribed by the Presidential Decree, from among other persons than the information and communications service provider, who provides goods or services, collects, utilizes or provides the personal information of customers of his/her goods or services. In this case, the "information and communications service provider" and the "information and communications service providers, etc." shall be deemed the "providers of goods or services," and the "user" shall be deemed the "customer of goods or services," respectively. So I guess the question is then, whether Wikimedia is prescribed by the Presidential Decree. Google would qualify under the definition in article 2, since they are for-profit. We would need to come under article 58 if we were to be subject to this legislation. In any case, there are the usual difficulties of international jurisdiction, as amply demonstrated by the court cases against us in Germany. Unlike Google, Wikimedia would have the option of ignoring any decision by the Korean courts. But the government could easily retaliate by DNS poisoning if it came to that. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Business Partnership with Orange
Kul Takanao Wadhwa wrote: > Hi All, > > I am spreading the news around (I just posted to the internal list) > about a new announcement going out in a couple hours. For the past few > months I have been working on a deal with Orange (France Telecom) on a > new kind of multi-platform (web, mobile, IPTV) partnership for the > Wikimedia Foundation. This partnership will extend co-branding > opportunities and have Wikipedia's knowledge brought to some new > audiences. It will also allow for us to experiment with new technologies > to improve the functionality and delivery of our content. Furthermore, > this is an additional revenue stream to build on our most important > revenue stream - our successful fundraising campaigns. My congratulations to Kul, and thanks for his hard work over the last few months to mould this deal into a form which is both lucrative for Wikimedia and likely to be acceptable to the community. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
Samuel Klein wrote: > They wouldn't take up proportionally more space in etching than they > do on screen. So an extra 10-20% overall. They would probably make > the process a bit more expensive, but still to this scale. an > illustrated encyclo may well be worth twice as much. > > Let's see what the Rosetta folks have to say. I can think of a lot > of people, not least those who have one of the early Rosetta disks, > who would love an archival etched copy of Wikipedia + Commons thumbs, > which might cover some of the early costs of trying this out. I can tell you what the Rosetta folks would say: they would say that they paid $125k to Norsam for 5 prototype discs, and that we are free to do the same. Norsam have developed this technology at great cost and expect a commercial return, regardless of who's paying them. <http://www.internetnews.com/storage/article.php/3771051/Storage+That+Really+Lasts.htm> Personally I think it would be a waste of general funds, since I don't expect we'll see the end of civilisation any time in the next year or two. Maybe if there was a directed grant, it would be appropriate. Or we could have a small investment fund aimed at paying for such an archive in 20 years or so, when the process will be cheaper. By the way, it's FIB etching, not laser etching, and the discs are nickel-coated silicon, not plain nickel. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
Brian wrote: > Wouldn't the most cost effective solution to be to first fund research in > compression so fewer bits have to be etched out? > In that case these guys are already on the job: http://prize.hutter1.net/ The obvious reply to that is that the Rosetta project aims to make an archive readable with 17th century technology, which digital information compressed with advanced algorithms is not. They try to make an issue out of the obsolescence of digital technology, which I think is overwrought. Just because I don't have a slot in my computer where I can insert a 1970s era magnetic tape doesn't mean it's unreadable. I don't have a 750x optical microscope lying around either. Both media are readable using extant technology. There have been some problems with restoration of data where the decoding software has been lost. But the popular, well-documented digital formats of the past are as readable as ever: I have a program on my computer called groff which is largely backwards-compatible with runoff, one of the earliest digital typesetting formats, dating back to the 1960s. There is still a great deal of extant text dating to ancient times, despite the fact that copying was fantastically expensive, and that everything was written on flammable materials in a time when flame was the only artificial light source. Maybe the future will be more like Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series than the dark ages: a future with such a weight of carefully recorded and preserved history that studying it, even in overview, becomes the work of a lifetime. Anyone who claims to know what the far future will be like is a charlatan. But I think it would be foolish to assume that it will be anything like the past. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
Aryeh Gregor wrote: > Yeah, I'm still going to say the entire idea is ridiculous. I wouldn't go quite that far. The idea of doing it (or having done it) makes people feel good, due to the collective sci-fi-like fantasy implicitly promulgated by the project itself -- a future world of poverty and decay, saved by the serendipitous discovery of a time-capsule sent from the past. It's a spectacle, a stunt, and it has PR value. I certainly don't begrudge the Long Now Foundation for having done this with the Rosetta Project, since their primary goal is to encourage long-term thinking, and expensive stunts are obviously a key part of that. But Wikimedia's goals are somewhat different, and we could probably find some stunts which are more relevant to our mission. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
Milos Rancic wrote: > Probably, some of you already saw that Google made something for which > I think that it will be the new form of the mainstream Internet > perception. You may read Slashdot article [1], a good description at > the blog "Google Operating System" [2] (not officially connected with > Google) and, of course, you may see the official site with more than > one hour of presentation [3]. > > I expected such kind of tool (a client connected with others via P2P > XML-based protocol; with servers for identification). However, I > didn't expect that i will come so soon, that it will be done by one > large corporation and that it will be done at the right way: open > protocol, free software referent implementation. It's not free software. The blog post says they "intend to open source the code". That generally means the code quality is so bad that they'd be embarrassed to make it public, and would like to clean it up to the point where humans can understand it, but currently they have more important development priorities and no schedule to do such a thing. > At the official site they said that it will start to work during this > year. As one large corporation is behind the project, as well as free > and open source community is able to participate, I have no doubts > that it will be implemented all over the Internet (and not just > Internet) very quickly. Probably, in two years the basic component of > one modern operating system will not be a Web browser, but a Wave > client. Probably, Web will become a storage system, while all of the > interaction will be done via Waves. Yeah, sure. Like the way Jabber killed proprietary protocols like MSN and AIM, right? It's been 9 years since the first release now. The proprietary IM networks will steal the best ideas from Wave and add their own bit of marketing spin, which somehow, to the hoards of faithful users, will seem even cooler than what Google Wave can do. That's assuming they even perceive a threat. Anyway, I'm putting two years from today into my calendar. We'll see then whether Wave has taken over the world. I'll post a followup. > This development of Internet is very strongly related to the Wikimedia > projects: > * I want to be able to edit Wikipedia through the Wave client. > * I want to add my own notes to articles, history of articles etc. > * I want to have collection of my knowledge at one place, including > Wikipedia articles and my notes. > * I want to be able to make a program which would analyze articles on > Wikipedia and to give program and/or analysis to my friends. > * I want many more things to be browsable or editable or whatever from > a Wave client... > > All of those my (but, in one year, not just my) wishes may be > fulfilled just through work on MediaWiki and Pywikipediabot. So, I am > calling all of you who are willing to think about it or who are at the > position to think about it -- to start with thinking :) You're assuming that they'll be easier to implement using Wave than just starting from scratch. Note that their widget things are HTML, and browsers already have rich text editors. An interactive editor targeting Wave would be quite similar to an interactive editor targeting the browser. Browsers are something Microsoft actually supports and packages with their OS, unlike federated, open-protocol IM clients, which as we've seen over the past 9 years, they are not interested in. They've even discontinued their IRC client. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
Milos Rancic wrote: > On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Tim Starling wrote: >> It's not free software. The blog post says they "intend to open source >> the code". That generally means the code quality is so bad that they'd >> be embarrassed to make it public, and would like to clean it up to the >> point where humans can understand it, but currently they have more >> important development priorities and no schedule to do such a thing. > > This is why that (very long) presentation is important. They clearly > said that they want to make their implementation as the referent open > source implementation. Funny, that's exactly what the blog post said, which I just quoted. I guess I was right not to waste an hour of my Saturday watching that presentation. Wanting it to be free software does not make it free software. The code has to actually be published with a permissive license. Until then, it is proprietary software. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects
Robert Rohde wrote: > Assuming Google is intending to be "not evil" about this, I would > guess the point of the intellectual property (e.g. patents and > trademarks) is to prevent people from creating things that are called > and/or identify themselves as Wave servers and yet don't conform to > the communications protocol. And there is a reasonable point there. > Regardless of what features and services a server might offer, it is > still important that the underlying communications protocol be > something that all parties can make sense of, otherwise your network > gets bogged down in gibberish. > > Anyway, that's the optimistic interpretation. The optimistic interpretation is that it is what is called a "defensive patent", and that they don't intend to enforce it at all. The USPTO is notoriously bad at finding related work that doesn't come up when they search their own patent database, so a defensive patent can be useful to prevent similar patents being registered by competitors. It may also be useful to strike down future patents in court. Red Hat, for instance, have taken this approach: https://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html Some people have suggested that Wikimedia should register some defensive patents, although they probably didn't realise how much time and money is involved in registering and maintaining the things. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?
David Gerard wrote: > It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that > allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them > as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. It would greatly add to how much stuff we > get, as it would save the user the trouble of re-encoding, or > installing Firefogg, or whatever. > > So why don't we do this? Has it been officially assessed as a legal > risk * (and I mean more than people saying it might be on a mailing > list **), has no-one really bothered, or what? It's been discussed since OggHandler was invented in 2007, and I've always been in favour of it. But the code hasn't materialised, despite a Google Summer of Code project come and gone that was meant to implement a transcoding queue. The transcoding queue project was meant to allow transformations in quality and size, but it would also allow format changes without much trouble. Personally, I think we should do whatever we need to do to be able to transcode popular video formats, even if that means paying license fees. Others in the organisation might not have the same view, but I'm sure there's space for compromise. I did a brief review of both MPEG LA and Windows Media license terms a few months ago. Both seemed to exclude web-based content providers from the need to pay patent licensing fees. If we bought commercial transcoding software, there might be a small patent fee embedded in the price, but there's no scheme in place to allow users to pay for FFmpeg. MPEG LA only deals with software distributors, not software users. Some people in the community take the view that supporting proprietary standards, as an option alongside free standards, weakens the ability of the free standards to compete for mindshare and client support, and thus that it shouldn't be done. We would have to have that discussion, and possibly a vote on the issue, before deployment of any software solution. But the software should come first, at the very least it will be useful to support alternate free formats such as Dirac, Speex and FLAC. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?
Peter Gervai wrote: > On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 17:26, David Gerard wrote: >> It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that >> allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them >> as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. > > As a technical sidenote, it should be mentioned that recoding a lossy > format to another lossy format results _always_ a worse quality output > than the source lossy format. The amount of quality loss depends on > countless factors and usually do not render the result useless, but > the quality difference may be still audible/visible. But if we can do resizing and quality conversion post-upload, then we can encourage users to upload their videos with the best possible quality, they won't be forced to upload at a quality suitable for web download. We can store the source video unconverted for archival purposes. When we reduce the quality of a video for a web user, the process will be under server control and can be incrementally improved, instead of using whatever outdated software the user has on their computer. So the net effect of the feature should be a significant improvement in video quality. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Stevertigo
I'm taking Stevertigo off moderation. He has agreed by private email not to continue the dispute resolution mailing list thread. Stevertigo is a long-serving and trusted (if passionate) member of the community. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The end of donations
stevertigo wrote: > It occurs to me that when people donate money to something, it is to > some degree with an expectation that the recipient entity grows to > eventually gain a certain kind of financial self-sufficiency. Is this > not also the case with Wikimedia and many charitable donations to it? Do you mean building an endowment? Because the Foundation management believes that donors expect their money to be spent on charitable activities, and that reserves should only be sufficient to cover income fluctuations over the next few years. I'm told that this is the prevailing wisdom in the non-profit world. However, the reserve is enough that if one income source were to stop, others could be developed before money to pay the fundraising staff dried up. So it's self-sufficient in that way. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stevertigo
I wrote: > I'm taking Stevertigo off moderation. He has agreed by private email > not to continue the dispute resolution mailing list thread. I also asked him to not make me immediately regret my decision, and to let this thing with Austin drop. I repeated this request in a second private email when he started posting in this thread, and he has ignored it. Cary has contacted me expressing an interest in adjudicating this case, and he is the relevant authority on this kind of thing. Thus I have put Stevertigo back on moderation pending his decision. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes
Gregory Maxwell wrote: > I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is > the key to avoidance in the future!) It was my fault, and it was pretty much identical to the error I made in 2007, where certain kinds of edits were double-counted and so the effective edit count threshold was lower than it should have been. Avoiding it in the future remains basically the same as it was in 2007, either: * Stop changing the voting rules every year so that I don't have to keep rewriting the scripts. Obviously I can change the numbers and dates, but the CentralAuth integration this year required a whole new architecture. * Assign someone to do this who doesn't have a hundred other responsibilities and can afford the time to do rigorous testing of every critical component. * Have someone review critical parts of SecurePoll instead of just trusting me to write perfect code. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report
I thought I'd better write up a report about the conference I went to last week, to justify the time I spent there. I'll give some general observations followed by some technical ones. GLAM-WIKI was a two-day conference billed as a meeting between Australia's GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and Wikimedians. GLAM representatives outnumbered Wikimedians, but we had enough people there to make sure our point of view was heard both inside and outside of the formal program. Many of the talks were from people in the GLAM sector who were already converted to our way of thinking, and who endeavoured to convert the rest of the GLAM audience by speaking in their language. The GLAM representatives were generally very receptive. When dissenting questions came up, they were often answered in our favour by another GLAM representative. I asked one of the delegates about this favourable mood, and he said that the delegates were generally self-selected people who had a favourable opinion of Wikimedia and free content, and that the skeptics did not attend. However, the discussions had at the conference would provide valuable ammunition against those skeptics back in the office. As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council. He said, in essence, that institutions need to prevent reuse or modification of the content they hold in order to preserve its purity, which risks sullied by the cumulative distortions of the general public. This was passionately countered by Jessica Coates during question time, with some success judging by nearby whisperings. MacDonald also warned the audience about evil Wikimedians like the one who "hacked into" the NPG (UK) website and stole a million pounds worth of images. The factual errors in this statement were briefly addressed during question time. I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage. A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet, the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed. There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large scale. Special:BookSources came up a couple of times. The libraries would love to see software improvements, such as geolocation giving the ability to present the nearest few libraries at the top of the page, without the user having to click on the world map. Liam mentioned the geolocation projects based on detecting nearby 802.11 access points. I think MaxMind's GeoIP City would be a better as a software development starting point. Delegates from the National Library of Australia reported that they have an ongoing project to collate collection metadata from all libraries in Australia. It may be possible to replicate this data to Wikimedia servers, or otherwise make it available. This would enable a feature whereby the user is told which libraries have the book being searched for, in the requested edition or a different edition. It may even be possible to report whether the book is on the shelf or not. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report
Kat Walsh wrote: > Thanks for the recap; sounds like the conference went pretty well. > > I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I > can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't > want to let the point slip by. A few: > > 1. What about our mirrors and forks and reusers; do they get the same > rights? How about users who want to download media dumps? > > 2. What about when they decide to change around their naming > schemes/take works offline/otherwise restructure their websites, and > us with millions of links? Any change of theirs would cause serious > disruption. > > I don't think it is a waste for us to mirror those images unless you > want to call all redundancy a waste--but if it's really a concern, > from my perspective I'd far rather have them hotlink from us! I think > it is fine to provide links to the institutions' own sites where the > highest-resolution images are available for purchase, but I think we > must host the other images ourselves. I do want to see Wikimedia > collaborate and reach understanding with cultural institutions. But I > think it needs to be on the level of how we share their mission of > preserving and disseminating cultural knowledge, and showing them how > much more can happen when we are able to use that material > independently on the Wikimedia projects. I would add further reasons against hotlinking or caching: * The difficulty of providing good performance and high availability 24/7: the institutions usually run their own server rooms * The low cost to us of mirroring a collection, up to a scale of hundreds of gigabytes * The bandwidth cost to them could potentially be high * The software development cost Brianna Laugher wrote: > Re GLAM repositories as a MediaWiki repo, I don't know enough on the > tech side to know if it is even a remotely feasible idea. But on the > 'social' side it did make me think about our insistence (currently > technically necessary) that everything is in MediaWiki format, > essentially under the Wikimedia branding somewhere, before we will > effectively work with it. We want the GLAMs to let up some control, > but essentially so material can come under our control. A different > kind of control, certainly, but definitely control. Let's not kid > ourselves - not a neutral ground. Maybe it is not a bad idea for us to > think about how we can embrace collaboration or resource sharing that > might wear someone else's badging. Well, if it's about branding, then maybe we can think of ways to do repositories that are mirrored in our data centres but look more like a separate branded collection as presented in MediaWiki. But the Wikimedia community might have trouble with that. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report
Brianna Laugher wrote: > The suggestion was also made that Wikimedia should revisit its > restriction on NC material, and it was written down too, although I > think I was thinking the same thing as every other Wikimedian in the > room... For Wikimedia I think the lack of non-commercial material is relatively arbitrary. For open source software development, developers have it in their interests to allow commercial use since they usually end up getting paid by the companies that use their free software. And for the GLAM sector, a non-commercial restriction makes sense because they want to encourage dissemination in the cultural sphere, while recovering some costs from the commercial sphere, which is more able to afford it and has a sense of reciprocity or corporate social responsibility. Wikimedia's justifications seem weaker to me. We say that commercial dissemination will aid our mission, but so far, such commercial use has been underdeveloped. The only kind of commercial reuse that is fully developed is the thousands of out-of-date mirrors run by SEO professionals, who make little contribution to our wider goals. But I think there is a value in consistency. Now that we have this vast encyclopedia illustrated with images that are free for commercial use, it would be a pity to destroy that potential benefit by adding a handful of images that are non-commercial only, with commercial use to be negotiated directly with the institution. That would create a landmine for commercial reusers and would discourage them disproportionately. So I think we should continue to negotiate with our content sources to have them release their content without a non-commercial restriction. And I think we should try to be more effective at encouraging commercial use which supports their goals and ours, so that we have a better answer to the question when it inevitably comes up. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?
Waldir Pimenta wrote: > I understand why it was chosen not to always run bleeding edge versions of > the software on the live Wikimedia wikis. But the LocalisationUpdate was > created precisely as a workaround to this, i.e, to allow updating the > localisation > without needing to update the software. > > So my question is: why is it not enabled yet on most Wikimedia wikis? The LocalisationUpdate extension is slow, with a significant performance loss per page view due to DB queries, and it's unnecessary, because the same effect can be had with a script that runs svn up periodically. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?
Roan Kattouw wrote: > Tim Starling writes: >> The LocalisationUpdate extension is slow, with a significant >> performance loss per page view due to DB queries, > I can't reproduce that locally. After installing LocalisationUpdate and > visiting > a few pages, I get: > > LocalisationCache::isExpired(en): cache for en expired due to GlobalDependency > LocalisationCache::recache: got localisation for en from source > SQL: BEGIN > DatabaseBase::query: Writes done: DELETE FROM `l10n_cache` WHERE lc_lang = > 'en' > SQL: DELETE /* LCStore_DB::startWrite Catrope */ FROM `l10n_cache` WHERE > lc_lang > = 'en' > SQL: INSERT /* LCStore_DB::set Catrope */ INTO `l10n_cache` ... > > Presumably this is LU invalidating the l10ncache. This does not happen on a > second or subsequent page view, though. Instead, I get > > MessageCache::load: Loading en... got from global cache > > and I see messages being pulled from the l10n_cache table. I don't think those queries have anything to do with LocalisationUpdate. > If you can reproduce these extra queries locally, please tell me how. I removed the hook LocalisationUpdate used in r52503, so it doesn't do anything at all. You can reproduce it by reverting to MediaWiki 1.15. I've now committed the rewrite of LocalisationUpdate I promised in the commit message of r52503. I held off on it because I wasn't convinced that it's a useful solution for anything. > > It's true that there's a known issue with the update script being slow, but > that > shouldn't be too bad since it's only supposed to be run once every 6, 12 or 24 > hours or something. > >> and it's >> unnecessary, because the same effect can be had with a script that >> runs svn up periodically. I'm not talking about the update script speed, I'm talking about the MessageNotInMwNs, which was (before r52503) called from a common case of wfMsg() and typically did a DB query. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?
Gerard Meijssen wrote: > Hoi, > The problem with svn up is that it does not take into account that the > software run in production is not the same version that exists in SVN. > Consequently you could update messages that are no longer the same. What > LocalisationUpdate does is verify if the message in English in SVN is the > same as the one that is currently running. When the messages are exactly the > same, it follows that the localised messages are also the same. Apparently that's not a problem for the release branches, which often receive backported message updates from translatewiki.net. Why can't the same backporting be done for the wmf-deployment branch? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why hasn't the LocalisationUpdate extension been enabled?
Gerard Meijssen wrote: > Hoi, > When a back port is created, There is *a lot of manual work* involved in > preparing the messages that are relevant to a specific release. As it is, > translatewiki.net localises the latest development versions of software and > this is not what runs in production. The key functionality of > LocalisationUpdate is that it ensures that the messages it imports are > compatible with the version of MediaWiki that runs in that instance of the > software, including extensions. Wouldn't the release branches be improved if you ported that functionality from LocalisationUpdate to the backport automation scripts run on translatewiki.net? And then we'd be able to get translation updates with a simple "svn up" instead of adding a complex, tightly-integrated extension to the main MediaWiki instance on Wikimedia. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter. In 2008 the unencrypted votes were rapidly released, but I was not involved in that decision. This year, I don't think I have been asked directly to provide this data, but it seems that the Board and election committee is in favour of it being released, and nobody else has offerred to produce the data. So I just wrote the relevant script, and am now testing it, so the results will be available to the committee and the Board shortly. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
Brian wrote: > On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Tim Starling wrote: > >> Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data >> being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given >> by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same >> rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible >> orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of >> voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific >> ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if >> that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract >> was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter. [...] > > This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members of > the community to vote. You'd rather spread FUD about vote buying than design > a system that allows the largest number of community members to vote. My hope is that the opposite is true. I'm interested in building protections against attacks such as vote-buying into our software, so that we can have wider participation in elections without leaving the system open to subversion. Ultimately the decision is not up to me, but I don't want technical deficiencies to be used as arguments against wider participation. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
Stephen Bain wrote: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote: >> I'm inclined to agree. I just don't see any sufficient benefit to >> releasing the data to make it worth the risk. Why do people want this >> information? Is it just because they don't trust the vote count? > > Because they know in their hearts that the Schulze method is stupid, > and their heads just want to make sure. Note that it's possible to run a number of different voting methods on the election just from the pairwise defeats matrix, which was released from the start. I can release results aggregated in a few other ways, if that would make people happier, especially if someone is prepared to write the code. Also, it's possible to set up a web page which lets you check if a given encrypted record (receipt) was included in the final count. From a vote-buying prevention perspective, we can't automatically confirm to the voter what the contents of that vote was, but we can do some random spot checks. The Schulze method is indeed non-ideal for a multi-winner election, I don't think anyone who understands the cloneproof property disputes that. Multi-winner elections should use a proportional method such as STV. Markus Schulze himself has been developing a multi-winner election method which combines STV with Condorcet winner concepts. But that's a discussion for the next election, what's done is done. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF seeking to sub-lease office space?
Anthony wrote: > On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Chad wrote: >> "Yes, as noted in our 09-10 plan, we are relocating to a new space, as >> a consequence of which the current satellite office will be re-merged >> into the new HQ. We're hoping to sublet the Stillman space..." >> >> This part was serious (I think). >> > > I think so too, but I'd rather hear it from Erik than hear your guess or > guess at it myself. > > >> "...once we've covered up the entrance to our secret underground lair >> of doom and >> despair, and removed all artifacts of alien technology." >> >> This part was a joke (I think). Specifically, he was joking about some >> people's >> tendencies to find conspiracy theories when none exist. > > > Right, yeah, that part was a joke, but does that mean the part about "hoping > to sublet the Stillman space" was, serious, a joke, something else? It was > an incredibly unprofessional answer. Unless the WMF's purpose is to confuse > the issue, it should come up with a serious response. Chad's analysis was correct. The SF staff have been looking for a new office for some time, and last I heard they were in the process of negotiating a lease on a prospective space. Subletting the old office will be desirable at least until the lease there expires. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
On 12/08/10 01:09, Harel Cain wrote: > If someone > doesn't want to come to Israel, well, then, we can only express our regret > at his choice (which we think is misinformed). I wish they could all come > here and change their minds about Israeli reality. I'd like to think I have an open mind, and always look forward to having it changed. I've heard that conditions in the West Bank are pretty bad, although the Israeli government disputes this. Maybe the Wikimania team could organise a day trip to a nearby border town like Baqa or Nazlat 'Isa, to change our minds about this. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
On 14/08/10 11:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: > I think that Tim's point was precisely to get to some non touristic-only > (i.e. often unreal) destination, to understand better the life of local > inhabitants and the conflict. > This is not part of Wikimania, obviously, but would be an interesting > possibility (e.g. more than beach, IMHO). Yes, that was the point, but when I read up on Harel's suggestion of Bethlehem, I realised that it would fit the bill well enough. It has a recent history of violence: the IDF invaded it in 2002, in Operation Defensive Shield. Part of the town was annexed to Israel by the construction of the West Bank barrier. On the south side of the town is one of the West Bank's many long-term refugee camps, established in 1949. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Kafkaesque story on the English Wikipedia
Ryan Lomonaco on behalf of KnownAs-79-181-9-231 wrote: > I was asked to explain them, and so I > did, in details, on the "Talk Page" affiliated with the article. This > explanations were contested in a lengthy discussions. Some of the comments > were good, and I addressed them. It's kind of hard to judge the case on its merits now that Supreme Deliciousness has made such a mess of the talk page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Golan_Heights&diff=381223125&oldid=381222989> and several other similar edits. The comments from 79.181 have been removed, but the responses remain. Presumably we're meant to guess what 79.181 said, like someone eavesdropping on one side of a phone conversation. It seems like a bizarre and inflammatory tactic to me, is it common practise? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On 06/09/10 20:33, Teofilo wrote: > During the past few years, the new softwares of the Wikimedia > Foundations have been developped in a too much anarchic way. > > * They are sometimes implemented as a whim of a few WMF big wheels, > without consulting the user communities. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3576 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15644 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18780 > * We are never shown specifications defining the goals of the planned > softwares, which makes me doubt such specifications are ever written. > With specifications being written and published, problems could be > talked in a proactive way. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bitfields_for_rev_deleted > * The developpers have enabled for every Admin of the French > Wikipedia, the possibility to mask (and exert acts of censorship) > without needing to be an oversighter (1) Which means that the policy > page at [[:fr:Wikipédia:Masqueur d'adresses IP]] (more or less the > same as [[:en:Wikipedia:Oversight]]) is a joke. Every single admin has > virtually the same power as an oversighter. If you don't like it, you can request that it be switched off, using Bugzilla. You will need to demonstrate that the community is in favour of such an action. > * The pdf tool is not fulfilling the licenses of images imported from > Flickr. This is typically a tool enabled on all projects without > consulting with the communities. That tool should be disabled at once > from all project, until it is repaired (which might mean redevelopped > from scratch). (2) Is there a bug report for this? -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On 07/09/10 20:01, Teofilo wrote: > 2010/9/7, Tim Starling : >> >> If you don't like it, you can request that it be switched off, using >> Bugzilla. You will need to demonstrate that the community is in favour >> of such an action. > > This is not proactive. Giving more power to the admins is a > constitutional change. Usually a constitutional change requires a > referendum beforehand (An amendment to the United States Constitution > must be ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures, WP says). You don't > simply switch to the new constitution and tell the people who are > unhappy with the new constitution that it is their burden to > demonstrate that the older constitution was better. And when a > constitutional change changes a democracy into a dictatorship without > the freedom of speech, it is too late to express yourself after you > have lost the freedom of speech. The feature has been under discussion since 2005. Maybe you should have exercised your freedom of speech some time during those 5 years, instead of waiting until 4 months after admins were given the right to use it before voicing your objection. It was not discussed solely by "WMF big wheels" as you put it earlier, it was requested, discussed and to some extent implemented by community members. >>> * The pdf tool is not fulfilling the licenses of images imported from >>> Flickr. This is typically a tool enabled on all projects without >>> consulting with the communities. That tool should be disabled at once >>> from all project, until it is repaired (which might mean redevelopped >>> from scratch). (2) >> >> Is there a bug report for this? > > No and there won't be (at least from me). Because I don't know if it > is a bug or a feature. Show me the specification of the pdf tool > first. I will see if the specification says that pictures' > photographers should be credited. If the specification says so, I will > report it as a bug. But if the specification does not say so, it > simply means that I disagree with the specification. And I don't think > bugzilla is the proper forum to discuss specifications. You should report it at Bugzilla if you want it to be fixed. Note that the extension in question was not developed by Wikimedia, it was developed by PediaPress. > I think it is partly thoughtlessness, partly an agenda to remove > contributor's names from wherever is possible, so that the WMF can > dominate the contents and do whatever it wants with them without the > contributors being able to control. An agenda to use the volunteers > not as partners, but as a pleb available for [[:en:corvée]] (3). > > The removal of the article's history tab from mobile.wikipedia.org > (merely linking to the main websites's history tab is not the same as > including it within the mobile.wikipedia.org website) sounds more like > an agenda than mere thoughtlessness. Presumably this conspiracy would have to extend beyond the WMF to PediaPress and Purodha Blissenbach, the developers of Collection and mobile.wikipedia.org respectively. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/11/10 19:47, MZMcBride wrote: > I don't understand why this specific company/organization has been given > special status (when there are surely thousands of companies looking to > partner with Wikimedia). They had a custom MediaWiki extension installed[2] > that has a very prominent place in the sidebar of one of the most popular > sites in the world. Why? > > I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia > article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation > of an online encyclopedia. These two paragraphs contradict each other. You say that there must be thousands of companies willing to do what PediaPress did, and then you say that their product is pointless and you don't see why anyone would buy it. PediaPress developed the PDF export system (Collection, mwlib) with their own money, and released them under an open source license. There was nobody else offering to do such a thing. They had no way to tell whether they would be able to recover this development cost, and their other startup costs, from book sales. But to give themselves a fighting chance, they negotiated with Wikimedia to get sidebar placement. >From Wikimedia's point of view, the proposition was hard to resist. Offline copies were always part of the Foundation's mission, and the Foundation has a history of partnering with commercial organisations to do distribution. For example, there was a CD of the German Wikipedia for sale in November 2004. This distribution concept predates the Foundation, and has been consistently supported by Jimmy and others. It's not antithetical to anything. See for instance from 2001: http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_FAQ "Q. What legalities must be considered in creating conventional printed snapshots of Wikipedia? Are there any plans for any?" "Re the second question: No specific plans on the part of Bomis yet, anyway (there has been vague talk and long-term dreams)--that doesn't mean someone else couldn't do it, even right now. This is open content, after all." >From January 2003: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Paper_Wikipedia >From August 2003: <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Pushing_to_1.0&oldid=1319379> -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote: > They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of > companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited > website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the > English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely > separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection extension. > That's worth a percentage of the book sales? Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were offering to do those two things. Note that PediaPress's software is useful even if you don't want to buy a book. It offers free PDF downloads, generated by mwlib. It would have been a useful thing to have in the sidebar, even without the print-on-demand feature. If PediaPress goes out of business, the sidebar link will stay there. So I think it would be more accurate to say that PediaPress are getting a box on [[Special:Book]], not a sidebar link. > I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia > articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. You're entitled to your opinion, but this is not the Foundation's position. Print versions have always been supported by both the community and the Foundation. > I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I > still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a > for-profit company. It says it's a "startup", which means a startup company, i.e. for-profit. > I think there's a large distinction between the > Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit > company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a > custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute > free content. Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the non-profit sector working alone. The Foundation's mission is to educate, not "to educate as much as is possible without anyone making any money". >From another post: > There are a limited amount of resources available. In this case, as Tim > said, the resources (namely the extension development) were essentially > donated, but nothing in life is free. They were donated seemingly because > this company wanted to turn a profit. I don't think it's accurate to call it a donation. It was an investment. > There's nothing wrong with that and > PediaPress certainly isn't unique in wanting to monetize off of Wikipedia. > What does appear to be unique is that this particular company gets what I'd > describe as "star treatment." This includes having their custom code > enabled, a prominent section in the sidebar, and even blog posts on the > Wikimedia blog shilling for their products. The reason they are treated differently is that their activities further our mission. I understand that you don't agree with that part of our mission. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 12/11/10 17:55, MZMcBride wrote: > There are thousands of potential projects that > Wikimedia could engage in that would fit perfectly within the current > mission statement[1] and thousands more that would loosely fit in. I use the word mission in the broad sense, i.e. what we are trying to do as an organisation. I'm not referencing any particular tagline or mission statement. Defining our mission and interpreting our mission statement is the role of the Board, the executive and the strategy process. They have produced various documents and decisions which help to guide the staff. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual
On 10/12/10 07:36, KIZU Naoko wrote: > Hi, > I've got an error message in trying to access Japanese Wikipedia. It > seems long, but it's not my topic. > IIRC the message from server was multilingualized years ago and we > have offered the message with links to other lang > same messages. > > The message itself seems not changed from the past, but now it's in > English and only without any links to any other language. > > What happened? Who decided to remove lang links? And what is the idea > behind of this removal? I removed it, the decision was supported by Mark and Domas. Although it was very cool, serving a 65KB page as an error message was having some unintended consequences: * Every time there was a outage on the backend, our outgoing traffic would approximately triple, because the error page was so much larger than the average response size. The high outgoing bandwidth sometimes caused further overloads. This was the situation we were in when we decided to reduce the error message size. * The jump in traffic when the site was down or slow was making it difficult to interpret the traffic graphs. Normally, we would expect a lack of service to correspond to a drop in traffic. * If someone is sending us requests at an excessively high request rate, it would probably be cheaper for us to just process the requests than to serve a 65KB "access denied" message for every request. * The large error message was inconvenient for people using Wikimedia websites from clients other than modern web browsers, for instance command-line utilities that write the error message to the terminal. In principle, it would be possible to have a short error message with a
Re: [Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual
On 11/12/10 00:07, Austin Hair wrote: > On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Domas Mituzas > wrote: >>> Like you say, though, it's definitely a technical issue to be >>> taken up elsewhere. >> >> Where you will be told that this is 'working as intended'. & >> is usually sent in URLs by broken clients, so we block them as >> early as possible. > > With a "403 forbidden" error? Do you really think that's > semantically correct? I think that's the only possible error response that you can deliver from a Squid ACL. But a deny_info could be useful. Maybe Domas didn't get up to the deny_info section in the manual ;) -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost forever. I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in the past to locate such backups. I asked various people who might have had one. I had given up hope. The history of particularly old Wikipedia articles, as seen in the present Wikipedia database, is incomplete, due to Usemod's policy of deleting old revisions of pages after about a month. The script which Brion wrote to import the article histories from UseMod to MediaWiki only fetched those revisions which hadn't been purged yet. I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever, and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog. In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from January 15 to August 17, 2001. I've put the two log files up on the web, at: http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z The 7-zip archive is only 8.4MB -- much more manageable than today's backups. rclog contains IP addresses. The Usemod software made IP addresses of logged-in users public, so the people who made these edits had no expectation that their IP address would be kept private. That, coupled with the passage of time, makes me think that no harm to user privacy can come from releasing these files. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On 15/12/10 07:36, Henning Schlottmann wrote: > On 14.12.2010 16:54, Tim Starling wrote: >> I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I >> opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete >> backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! > > That's wonderful news. Is this for enWP only or were all languages in > one database back then? Just English, unfortuately. You may find this interesting: <http://web.archive.org/web/20030318055654/http://nupedia.com/pipermail/interpret-l.mbox/interpret-l.mbox> <http://web.archive.org/web/20020817032335/www.nupedia.com/pipermail/intlwiki-l.mbox/intlwiki-l.mbox> -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On 15/12/10 11:17, Brian J Mingus wrote: > Browsing through the earliest revisions in the revision index ( > http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/revisions.html) is rather > interesting and full of fodder for founder debates. Consider these very > early revisions: > > "[http://www.nupedia.com Nupedia.com] is an open content, international, > peer reviewed project run by LarrySanger, who got the idea of supplementing > NuPedia with a less formal "wiki" encyclopedia project. " - > http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979694938.txt > > "EditorInChief of NuPedia and instigator of Nupedia's wiki. " > http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979690096.txt > > Sanger's claims to coming up with the idea of adding the wiki concept to the > online encyclopedia concept clearly go all the way back to the beginning. Of > course, that doesn't speak to offline conversations that gave rise to the > idea. I've long suspected that the early FAQs and history pages gave Larry Sanger an exaggerated role because he wrote them himself. It will be interesting to see if any such conclusion can be drawn from the archives. Note that 979694938 was by dhcp058.246.lvcm.com, which appears to be Larry. By the way, the numbers in the revisions, e.g. 979694938, are UNIX timestamps. That one was 17 Jan 2001, 01:28:58 UTC. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
