[Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Hi

A few things I can share from openZIM/Kiwix perspective on this:
* This, special:book feature, was a good tool 10 years ago
* This would have deserved to be improved/maintained/developed over years
* Today it looks abandoned and I hardly see how we could live a revival 
from the Wikimedia side
* We, at openZIM/Kiwix, have been doing Wikipedia selections since 15 
years for the WP1 project
* This is something we want to improve and we want to allow more people 
to do their own selections automatically, half-automatically or even 
manually.
* We even have a stub at https://wp1.openzim.org/ (not really usable, 
but the software foundations are there).
* We believe we could provide something even better than what the 
Collection extension was.
* Basic Idea is to make a clear separation between (1) selection 
platform providing an API (2) Mediawiki Gadget for manual selection on 
the Mediawiki instance (3) external rendering platforms... and we are 
interested in the ZIM rendering of course but we could think of 
enrolling any compatible with the API.


A bit of technical insight can be found here 
https://github.com/openzim/wp1/issues?q=is%3Aissue++label%3Aselections+ 
with these tickets around selection of latest Google Summer of Code.


If someone is interested to have a talk on this topic, feel free to 
contact me.


Regards
Kelson

On 17.04.22 18:12, Tito Dutta wrote:

Hello,
This was a very useful tool for the readers. I used it a lot when it was 
working.
User namespace books page category shows 50,000 subpages: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_namespace_book_pages 


(Please see language sidebar for other languages)
Regards.


রবি, ১৭ এপ্রিল, ২০২২ তারিখে ৯:১৮ PM টায় তারিখে Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga 
mailto:galder...@hotmail.com>> লিখেছেন:


No one or very few use it, because you can't save a book. I had some
teachers in our university courses who used it to download what
their students did, but since the WMF decided to break it, evidently
they are not using it anymore. I repeat: it worked and it was broken
in purpose. So now we have an option to create a book but no actual
book can be created, besides printing it with PediaPress.

2022(e)ko api. 17(a) 09:59 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du ("Amir E.
Aharoni" mailto:amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>>):

 > On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu mailto:strain...@gmail.com>> wrote:
 > >
 > > The correct question is: does it still do anything of value?
 > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 17 באפר׳ 2022 ב-10:42 מאת ‪Jan Ainali‬‏
<‪ainali@gmail.com ‬‏>:‬
 >
 > Even with all output options broken it is still a decent user
interface for creating and organizing collections of articles.

This may well be true, but I'm wondering how much is it
*actually* used. I know I never use it, but it's possible that
thousand of other people do. If it's true, then everything is
fine. I can't find a log of its usage, or a statistics page that
shows how often do people use this feature.

It currently appears in at least two prominent places:
1. "Create a book" link in the desktop sidebar (in some wikis; I
don't see it in the English Wikipedia, but I do see it in
Swedish and Basque).
2. "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Main" group in
translatewiki.net , which means that
volunteer localizers are asked to translate it with (relatively)
high priority.

If only, say, five people use it in the whole Wikimedia
universe, then perhaps someone should consider downgrading its
prominence or maybe removing it entirely.

On translatewiki, I can move it from "Extensions used by
Wikimedia - Main" to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Advanced"
or even to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Legacy", but again,
before I do this, I'd like to make sure that it's not actually
used by a lot of people.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com 
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement representation vs WMF board reform

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 28.02.2016 15:53, Brion Vibber wrote:
> I just want to split out a concept that came up in the big threads of the
> last few days:
> 
> Some members of the WMF Board of Trustees are giving strong signals (like,
> saying it outright) that the BoT can't fully take on the role of movement
> leadership or community representation. Not because they think it shouldn't
> happen, but because structurally and legally and practically the board of
> Wikimedia Foundation Inc has different roles to fill.
> 
> I think we should consider what roles and structures we *do* want as
> members of the Wikimedia movement community. And I think we should think
> about that and talk about that carefully before rushing into details like
> board reform.
> 
> Perhaps we should explicitly accept WMF as a "first among equals" org
> within the movement, with specific roles like tech development and
> fundraising (or other emphases as well) while other orgs concentrate on
> different specific issues. Or even just "one among equals" that happens to
> have specialized in those roles.
> 
> This probably means we should think about "umbrella" structures to
> coordinate and represent and look forward.
> 
> And that's something we should *definitely* not rush into. If a mismatch in
> hopes for what the WMF BoT can and should do has been a factor in
> communication and leadership issues in the past, then it's very important
> we not make the same kinds of mistakes in any new structures that might be
> needed.

Delighting to read this. That said, the path to achieve this looks
pretty challenging. Would the WMF be able to organize such a move and
"give-up" parts of its duties/activities to better focus on core business?

Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Message from Arnnon Geshuri to the Wikimedia Community

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 26.01.2016 21:54, Fæ wrote:
> Press coverage like the BBC's this evening which leads with Jimmy
> Wales' face, have damaged the WMF's reputation and our projects that
> rely on "Wikimedia" remaining a trusted name.[1][2]

Published today on numerama.com, top digital news web site (2 millions
visitors/month and primary information source for people interested in
digital liberties, net neutrality, etc.) in France:
http://www.numerama.com/business/141371-wikipedia-secoue-par-une-nomination-contestee.html

If I remember how WMUK was "treated" by a few WMF representatives during
the Bamkin's controversy I can only state that their is a two-tiers
evaluation system of this kind or crisis.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Beyond the Board (was: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google)

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Thank you Milos for pointing here what seems to me the most fundamental
flaw of our current organisation.

The WMF as organisation was created to bring stability and assure that
the daily business is done: keep the platform online, deal with legal
cases and keep a positive financial balance. This is not the same as
leading "in a political manner" the movement. But the WMF tends
meanwhile to do both.

The political history show us that this is not going to work well that
way because both duties are in essence pretty different and have
internal contradictions. As a consequence, the WMF focuses (with
success) on what it was made for: administrative work and is not is
position to do the other part correctly.

As a consequence we indeed face a serious lack of democracy in the way
we are organized and this weak "quality loopback" leads us, as movement,
to regular awkward situations. This is an instability factor.

Back in 2006, I heard for the first time the idea of a democratic
assembly "Wikimedia international" and was sceptical about it. Seeing
how things have evolved, an approach including two organisations, one
political to lead the movement and one administrative to keep core
things running & stability, looks really appealing.

Emmanuel

On 09.01.2016 20:37, Milos Rancic wrote:
> Forking the issue of Board composition.
> 
> We tend to think of Board as the governing body of the movement, not just
> WMF. Board members tend to think of themselves as the governing body of
> WMF, with shiny cool movement supporting it.
> 
> We tend to discuss of community representation, they tend to assimilate
> anyone who joins them. While "trust and honesty" are noble words, they tend
> to be the words of excuse, covering forced imposition of the dominant
> position over everybody inside of the group.
> 
> The Board composed as it is now has no capacity to overcome this problem. I
> am not talking about particular persons inside of the Board, but about the
> culture of assimilation, which usually ends in assimilation, but, as we
> could see now, it could end in removal of a Board member.
> 
> I see two options to overcome this problem and both of them require wide
> consensus, including the present Board.
> 
> One option is to restructure the Board itself, the other one is to create
> new cover organization, with WMF as one of its institutions.
> 
> It's obvious to me that Wikimedia is not an ordinary organization or even
> an ordinary movement. The importance of Wikimedia movement is on the level
> of smaller country. Our needs are on the level of a city-sized society. And
> our governance should be so.
> 
> At the moment, we have a kind of a mix which works because of that culture
> of assimilation and because WMF makes enough money. Destroying any of those
> corruptive powers would destroy WMF itself. So, if we want to change
> something, we have to reorganize the structure, not to fix it.
> 
> What every organized social group? Yes, assembly (or whatever the name is
> inside of the particular structure). If it's about business, it's the
> assembly of shareholders. If it's about democratic institutions, it's about
> the assembly which represents all members of the society.
> 
> WMF Board is quasi-assembly, quasi-government. It will always has partial
> excuse that it's about community-elected members, but also that it needs
> "an expertise" as a governing body. It's no surprise that the turnover on
> the best elections (the last one) was around 10%. Not a lot of Wikimedians
> think they are able to change anything and they are right.
> 
> I suggested few times that we should create assembly as a real democratic
> institution. Such assembly could then appoint the Board as a governing body
> or leave to ED and staff to be executive body of the movement.
> 
> The other option is to create assembly outside of WMF and make the relation
> between them later.
> 
> As long as we don't talk about this issue, we will have the same stories
> again and again. The set of mistakes Board could make is not finite. And
> whenever something odd or harmful happens, we will be talking the same
> stories.
> 
> By moving it into openly political discourse, we will avoid secrecy and
> Wikimedians will be able to influence decisions, outside of closed groups
> and personal connections.
> 
> (At the end, I am wondering why I am repeating this, as nobody responded to
> this idea previous few times. Not even with "this is bad idea because
> of...".)
> 
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: "Todd Allen" 
> Date: Jan 9, 2016 19:34
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in
> anticompetitive agreements in Google
> To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" 
> Cc:
> 
>> There is still a significant problem the Board does have, though.
>> "Chapter/thorg selected seats" are not community seats. And we've recently
>> found out that none of the seats at all are actually 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Dear Patricio, Dear Board members

On 29.12.2015 00:29, Patricio Lorente wrote:
> Today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees voted to remove one of the
> Trustees, Dr. James Heilman, from the Board. His term ended effective
> immediately.

This is not how a democratic system works. James' legitimacy and power
came from the community, only the community should be in position to
take it back. If he broke a rule, made a fault, this should be examined
by a third part. Anyway, this should never be the duty of board members
to judge each others.

Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Free Bassel

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 24.11.2015 08:22, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> We need to do much better than this. This is a Wikipedian. It is a notable
> person in his own right and we sit on our hands?

Yes. The movement needs to free resources quickly to campaign
efficiently on this.

Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] internet-in-a-boxs to the refugee camps?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 08.09.2015 20:37, Leinonen Teemu wrote:
> On 8.9.2015, at 20.04, Keegan Peterzell  wrote:
>> However, before we get all excited with plans, it might be important for
>> someone who is interested to contact the project lead and see if
>> internet-in-a-box is even still active. The website hasn't been regularly
>> updated since April of 2013. If there are no resources available from the
>> project still then it's back to square one.​
> 
> Right. I think we should not go with the internet-in-a-box, but rather with 
> the Kiwix. See: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-plug 

Side information: Projects like internet-in-a-box (merged meanwhile with
xsce school server) or Ideas Box use anyway Kiwix and ZIM files to
provide Wikipedia (and also other content) offline.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] internet-in-a-boxs to the refugee camps?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 08.09.2015 21:47, Tito Dutta wrote:
>> If so, perhaps it is worth co-ordinating with some disaster
>> relief NGOs such as MSF, Red Cross and Oxfam?

This is the point. Concerning offline, the technology works. The problem
is definitively the lack of advertisement/awareness/coordination with
NGOs which are on the field.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] internet-in-a-boxs to the refugee camps?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 08.09.2015 11:52, Stevie Benton wrote:

I think in some situations Kiwix  can
be a really good option. This might be one of them.


Yes, this has already been done a few times in the past with Kiwix-plug, 
a small device you just need to plug and you get a whole offline library 
(with Wikipedia, Gutenberg library, youtube videos, etc...). See: 
http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-plug.


Wikimedia CH prepares Kiwix-Plugs to NGOs which need it.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Listen Button

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 24.01.2015 23:21, James Heilman wrote:

While human read articles are great they quickly become out of date and are
available for only a fraction of our articles.

Why don't we have a Listen button beside our read button that when
clicked will read the article for the person in question?

There are 37 open source text-to-speech listed here
http://www.findbestopensource.com/tagged/text-to-speech. Some of them
support up to 50 languages. This of course would require the support of the
Wikimedia Foundation.


FYI, we have published yesterday Kiwix for Android 1.92 which proposes 
for the first time TTS. Here is the release note:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/offline-l/2015-January/001296.html

We would be happy to propose this feature to the desktop version too, 
but AFAIK none of the open source text-to-speech solution is good enough 
for that. This might be a reason to not have one on the online web site too.


Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Offline-l] Bug day: Book tool/Collection/PDF, 2014-10-08, 14–22 UTC

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 09.10.2014 00:35, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

And it's over! We reached our immediate goal, closing all the lost
PediaPress tickets (80 before the bug day); and about 40 new bugzilla
reports were filed, including some tricky ones about language support.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/201410 has a dump
from the etherpad and will be updated with more precise information.
Give a look at the bugzilla reports!

Thanks to all the participants: Andre Klapper, Anomie, Azitrex, bawolff,
Helder, John Vandenberg, Kelson, Nemo, Raymond, Reedy, Rupert, saper,
Steinsplitter, csteipp, ebraminio, jem, josu, kepper, valhallasw`cloud.
(And probably someone else in bugzilla at the same time.)


Thank you Nemo for having organised this!

Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The tragedy of Commons

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 17.06.2014 17:26, George William Herbert wrote:

We need an Uncommons, where the strict open license / PD rules are abandoned 
and we accept images as long as their fair use can be established.  And don't 
delete unless that fair use is credibly questioned.

Conflating and comingling our educational role with open content advocacy was 
always risky and is proving impossible.  Without devaluing open content, we 
need to separately support fair use for educational purposes, and stop letting 
cross-project advocacy games screw with our educational mission.

Third parties may or may not be able to re-redistribute, but we simply put it up with an 
explicit reuse at your own risk.


reuse at your own risk = risky = no reuse for most actors
Well done!

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Documentation of the Wikimedia Conference 2014

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

On 15.04.2014 19:12, Cornelius Kibelka wrote:

on behalf of the Documentation Team of the Wikimedia Conference 2014 I'm
happy to announce that we published all the minutes and photos of all
sessions, as far as they were available and ready. Check them out on https
://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2014/Documentation.

We tried to summarise the sessions (too long, didn't read). However,
sometimes this was not possible due to the most different opinions.
Furthermore, you find most of the presentation slides and photos of the
Conference on Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki
/Category:Wikimedia_Conference_2014)

Any comments, any questions, drop me a line.


Thank you very much for your invitation and all the hard work.

Emmanuel


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] extend mediawiki software to allow append a group, and COI to an edit

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

I don't know if this is a broadly shared opinion, but like Rupert, I
think this is too difficult to step-in as an organisation. This is in
particular true if you want to do it on an international/multi-language
level.

GLAMs, which are the organisations we want to treasure, are impacted
among others. Read this report from Switzerland for example:
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/January_2014/Contents/Switzerland_report

This is of course the duty of each language community to decide how to
deal with this thematic. However, Mediawiki can play a role by helping
to achieve as much as possible transparency. That the reason why I think
these concrete propositions are discussion worth.

I strongly believe that if the tool allows us to better take in
consideration and track Corporate personhood contributions then the
whole debate will be far less passionate, easier to conduct, and at the
end better solutions will emerge.

Emmanuel

Le 22/02/2014 16:25, rupert THURNER a écrit :
 could wmf please extend the mediawiki software in the following way:
 1. it should knows groups
 2. allow users to store an arbitrary number of groups with their profile
 3. allow to select one of the groups joined to an edit when saving
 4. add a checkbox COI to an edit, meaning potential conflict of interest
 5. display and filter edits marked with COI in a different color in history
 views
 6. display and filter edits done for a group in a different color in
 history views
 7. allow members of a group to receive notifications done on the group page,
or when a group is mentioned in an edit/comment/talk page.
 
 reason:
 currently it is quite cumbersome to participate as an organisation. it is
 quite cumbersome for people as well to detect COI edits. the most prominent
 examples are employees of the wikimedia foundation, and GLAMs. users tend
 to create multiple accounts, and try to create company accounts. the main
 reason for this behaviour are (examples, but of course valid general):
 * have a feedback page / notification page for the swiss federal archive
 for other users
 * make clear that an edit is done private or as wmf employee
 
 this then would allow the community to create new policies, e.g. the german
 community might cease using company accounts, and switch over to this
 system. this proposal is purely technical. current policies can still be
 applied if people do not need something else, e.g. wmf employees may
 continue to use sue gardner (wmf) accounts.
 
 what you think?




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Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 16/01/2014 20:13, geni a écrit :
 On 16 January 2014 13:02, Emmanuel Engelhart kel...@kiwix.org wrote:
 
 Dirac, a free codec developed by the BBC, seems to be a good solution.
 Do people have some experiences with Dirac?


 No. BBC managed to get it working dedicated machines a few years back and I
 think there is an alpha trans-coder out there but people have lost
 interest.

Indeed, it seems the development of Dirac is pretty slow/frozen :(
But, I have tested it with ffmpeg: the lossless compression seems to work.

 Theora is good enough for the no compromise on freedom mob and
 development interest is moving towards webM.

Please refer to the original question, we speak here about lossless
codecs and AFAIK neither VP8 nor Theora are lossless (or have lossless
options).

But it seems that VP9 has one and that last month ffmpeg has started to
merge patches to support lossless VP9 transcoding... This might be the
best approach to deal with raw video material on Commons:
https://lists.ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2013-November/150547.html

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 16/01/2014 12:54, Manuel Schneider a écrit :
 The reason this idea was dismissed is the core of this RfC: patent
 trolling etc. on H.264 codecs etc. which we would need to allow as raw
 material.

We have now a pretty good support of TIFF for pictures and FLAC for
audio streams; but there is still no solution to store lossless (raw)
video material. This problem is a real one like have underlined Manuel.

The following Wikipedia article proposes a list of lossless video codecs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs#Lossless_compression_2

Dirac, a free codec developed by the BBC, seems to be a good solution.
Do people have some experiences with Dirac?

Regards
Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Basic income Wikimedians

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 09/01/2014 10:59, Seb35 a écrit :
 For a TL;DR about the concept, the idea of an (unconditionnal) basic
 income is to give each citizen of a country a sum of money in order to
 fullfill their basic needs: lodging, eat, be healthy. To give an idea of
 the amount, one hears often 800-1000 € in France and I heard 2500 CHF in
 Switzerland. If people want to earn more, their work income will be in
 addition of this basic income. You can read more on the Wikipedia articles
 ([1] and other languages). Be aware, this idea is as strange as Wikipedia
 when one discovers it.
 
 As a Wikipmedian, I dream of such a basic income: it would empower the
 people to edit the Wikimedia projects by giving them libre time (libre as
 free speech). I don’t think Wikimedia itself should support this to avoid
 being involved in politics, but probably many Wikipmedians could be
 interested in this idea.
 
 For the European citizens, there is currently an official call (an ECI
 [2]) to support this idea at the European level, see [3] ; this call ends
 in one week (yes, the 200,000 signatures is a bit far of the million
 signatures needed). In Switzerland, a popular legislative initiative
 collected more than the 100,000 needed signatures in September 2013, and
 this will lead to a nationwide referendum about the basic income there.

I personally support the vision of the basic income. Such a move would
be extremely encouraging for our projects, for our societies. Thank you
Seb35 for advertising this European call.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Basic income Wikimedians

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 09/01/2014 13:36, Fæ a écrit :
 ​The WMF has recently clarified that they frown upon paid editing.
 Presumably offering basic wage for people to edit Wikipedia is still paid
 editing?

The answer is no, because the basic income is *unconditional*.
This is an income, not at wage.

Definition from Wikipedia:
A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, unconditional basic
income, universal basic income, universal demogrant,[1] or citizen’s
income) is a proposed system[2] of social security in which citizens or
residents of a country regularly receive a sum of money unconditionally,
either from a government or some other institution able to ensure an
equitable distribution of common wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Emmanuel


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Basic income Wikimedians

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 09/01/2014 20:50, Balázs Viczián a écrit :
 I like such proposals (sarcasm).
 
 where do you get the money from, what you wish to distribute?
 
 In general free money - less people will work (why to work if I still get
 money? - see the masses living on unemployment benefits - libre time :) )
 - less people working - higher taxes - people will be :( on both ends.
 Higher minimum! Lower taxes! Down with the government! Yay.
 
 Printing money would lead to inflation - more money worth less.
 
 And these are the basic, most visible IRL effects.
 
 Pls forget these economical nonsenses.

For people urgently needing to read more about the basic income:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
* 5 years long experiment in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
* Experiment in Namibia: http://www.bignam.org/

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] First Wikimedia-related contributor Kickstarter?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 02/11/2013 00:51, Tomasz Finc a écrit :
 Does anyone know if I can have echo notify me when a new upload by a
 particular users occurs? Effectively I'd like to a notification and/or
 stream of users I've followed on Commons so that I can then take those
 images and use them on articles. If not maybe it'll be a fun side project
 for me.

We should have a feed for this. Something like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles/Evan-Amosfeed=atom

The best we can have currently is a filtered contribution feed, but this
is not the same:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedcontributionsuser=Evan-Amosfeedformat=atomnamespace=6

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia and the politics of encryption

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 31/08/2013 07:17, Erik Moeller a écrit :
 We can, of course, ask users in the affected countries. Given that
 this may lead to degradation or loss of access, users are likely to be
 opposed, and indeed, when plans to expand HTTPS usage were announced,
 a group of Chinese Wikipedians published an open letter asking for
 exemptions to be implemented:
 
 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E5%BC%BA%E5%88%B6%E5%8A%A0%E5%AF%86%E7%99%BB%E5%BD%95/openletter
 
 This was a big part of what drove the decision to implement exemptions.

This attitude seems to be, on a first look, the most logical and
respectful one.

But, I want to be remember, that the risk perception is often not
proportional *at all* to the risk itself. In daily life, many risks are
suppressed because the imagination of a constant threat would paralyse
all activities. So, this feedback from the Chinese community should be
handled carefully.

I tend myself to think that deploying HTTPS everywhere and force its
usage is the best long term approach.

However, this is without any doubt, a difficult dilemma.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Internet.org and Wikipedia Zero ?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

I'm maybe too pessimistic, but I would be really surprised if this
project, at any time, really helps to provide an access (neutral) to the
Internet.

More probable: They will try to give a free/cheap access to a set of
their online services and so one do the same like AOL or MSN have tried
to do 15 years ago.

... or like we do with Wikipedia zero... but, to the contrary to this
alliance, Wikimedia has never claimed that they wanted to give access to
the Internet.

So, IMO, this whole story about internet.org stinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oFXCXQpJXI

Emmanuel

Le 23/08/2013 10:25, Leinonen Teemu a écrit :
 Hi, 
 
 Have you noticed the new internet.org initiative by Facebook, Samsung, Nokia, 
 Qualcomm, Ericsson and MediaTek? 
 
 Internet.org is a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, 
 local communities and experts who are working together to bring the internet 
 to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.[1, 2] 
 
 Would it make sense for the WMF's Wikipedia Zero program to collaborate with 
 this? 
 
 Any comments?
 
 Best regards, 
 
   - Teemu 
 
 [1] http://www.internet.org
 [2] 
 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/technology/facebook-leads-an-effort-to-lower-barriers-to-internet-access.html

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Internet.org and Wikipedia Zero ?

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 23/08/2013 10:59, Kul Wadhwa a écrit :
 I have my concerns as well so we're watching how things unfold for now.
 Perhaps to add to Teemu's question (If I could be so bold) how would
 internet.org need to evolve to make it worth our time and effort to be
 involved?

If what I fear becomes real, then I would be sad that our movement joins
such a dishonest project.

If they want to give access to a subset of Internet services and adapt
their communication (honesty about the product), then we face a dilemma.
A dilemna between our wish to give access to our content (tactical move)
and the one of having a free, neutral and un-clustered Internet
(strategical view)... Big discussions in view, but we already have done
it with Wikipedia zero and I know the WMF tends to be pragmatic in such
situations ;)

If they really want to help to give a neutral access to internet... then
this is really a dream we should be part of!

But, this is all about speculations...

I just wanted to explain why this launch doesn't sound well to my hears.
But I know nothing about their real intentions and concrete projects.
That's why, it's IMO urgent to wait... and see in which direction they
will make the next moves.

Emmanuel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia in jail!

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Dear Jane

Le 19/06/2013 10:37, Jane Darnell a écrit :
 The problem with static offline versions of Wikipedia is that it
 doesn't allow any interaction at all, so you are virtually cutting off
 the ability of the reader to become an editor. I am sure many people
 will feel that prisoners probably don't have a lot of positive
 information to contribute, or perhaps would not do this in good faith,
 but theoretically there should be some channel back for them to voice
 corrections or additions, possibly through some sort of local
 collaboration committee?
 
 I think this application of Wikipedia is great, but it is also
 crippled. If we had an incubator system where this type of offline
 application of Wikipedia could collect edits in a daily batch process
 for intermediate curation it would be good. Something like this might
 also useful for education programs with kindergartens or grade
 schools. We have claimed in the past that a 17-year-old can be smarter
 than a Ph.D. on any specific issue, but actually, age or environment
 is arbitrary, no?

I agree. The problem with life is that you will never get everything you
want. The good news is: You still have plenty of opportunities and this
is already a lot!

More seriously:
* We know this is used as an entry door for other cultural/educative
activities by part of the prisoners
* We will try to encourage prisoners to contribute and try to animate
Wikipedia centric activities - similar approach as in the Afripedia project.

Regarding the asynchronous contributions: This is a pretty complicated
topic which (often) deals with challenging technical and cultural
issues. But discussion if pretty open and new experimentations are welcome.

Join us at:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l

Kind regards
Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia in jail!

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 19/06/2013 15:23, JP Béland a écrit :
 Perhaps there is a better channel to discuss that, but why Kiwix is
 only Wikipedia especially since the French Wiktionary is one of the
 most developed?

Lack of time :(
On the agenda :)

Emmanuel

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Argentina Monthly Report, December 2012

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Le 05/01/2013 05:03, Osmar Valdebenito a écrit :
 == «Wikipedia in the classroom» in Guarani language ==
 
 On mid-December, Wikimedia Argentina published the first edition of its
 booklet “Wikipedia in the classroom” in an indigenous language, like
 Guarani. “Vikipetã mbo’eha kotýpe” is also the first publication about
 Wikipedia in Guarani language and any other American indigenous language.
 
 The goal of “Wikipedia in the classroom”, both in Spanish and Guarani, is
 to help teachers to understand what is Wikipedia, how it works and how they
 can use it in an useful way. Most students already use Wikipedia so it is
 really important that teachers know what to do.
 
 “Wikipedia in the classroom” is an initiative launched in 2010 by Wikimedia
 Argentina with the support of different institutions, including the
 Education portal of the Argentine government, educ.ar. They released an
 special website about the project. Wikimedia Argentina will print 500
 booklets of the Guarani edition to be distributed in schools and other
 educational institutions, and we expect to publish new editions in other
 indigenous languages in 2013.
 
 Guarani Wikipedia or Vikipetã was released in 2005, but lacks more active
 volunteers (currently, it has less than 20). Guaraní (avañe’ẽ) is spoken by
 8 million people and is the official language of Paraguay, Bolivia and
 Corrientes Province in Argentina, being one of the most used indigenous
 American languages currently. Wikimedia Argentina in the past years have
 started different projects to increase the usage and development of the
 Guarani Wikipedia, teaching its use to native speakers, something that was
 recognized by the Chamber of Deputies of the Province of Buenos Aires. We
 hope that this initiative can attract more speakers of that language to
 participate in projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I just created a first and fresh offline version of Wikipedia in
Guarani. You may find it at http://www.kiwix.org

The bundled version with Kiwix is available here:
http://download.kiwix.org/portable/wikipedia_gn_all.zip

Hope this can help.

Kind regards
Emamnuel




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