[Wikimedia-l] Re: Outcomes from the March Meeting for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 1:51 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> I wanted to clarify that it is not 3% of all donors that go on to make an
>> unreverted edit.  All donors are directed to a “Thank You” page after their
>> donations, which includes several calls-to-action.  This year, we included
>> a call to “Try editing Wikipedia”. Due to the way that we restrict tracking
>> due to user privacy, the chart representing the editing funnel
>> 
>> actually starts once a donor has clicked that call to create an account. In
>> other words, of the people who donated during the Big English banner
>> campaign, only 12,005 actually clicked through from the donor Thank You
>> page to create an account. From those who click through, about 3.7% of
>> people end up completing an unreverted edit.
>>
> I see, that explains why this wasn't more than a footnote.  :)   Someone
> who just donated is unlikely to be a bot or spammer, so not surprising
> their edit quality is higher.
>
> Once someone decides to try editing, ideally almost all of them would make
> an edit, without needing to make an account.  Perhaps: "Try editing" -->
> simple interface for easy edits --> make a few edits -->  see a few edits
> by others to review  (or offer the same edits to a few people) --> only
> then make an account via simple creation popup...
>

We actually have tried something similar years ago (asking unregistered
editors to sign up after editing or even as a part of saving) and it didn’t
really work. The thing is that we’ve never really explained why there’s a
compelling reason to have an account to edit I think.

The Growth team has done a good job though in recent years with recommended
tasks for new editors. It’s not perfect but once you sign up there is a
pretty good onboarding path. One thing I’d love to see is testing more of a
focus on joining WikiProjects. Generic mentorship and tasks are good, but
connecting with a group of people also interested in your topic of choice
is cooler. It’s why social products like Reddit, Facebook Groups, etc are
so sticky.

The truth is with any engagement, reading or editing, there will be a steep
drop off rate in many (if not most) steps in a process. It’s still very
nice to see edits happen as a part of the fundraising campaigns. The call
to participate has no downside even if the impact is relatively small.



> Thank you for clarifying and updating the report.  I left a few comments
> on that talk page
> 
> .
>
> SJ
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Launch of Justapedia

[Steven Walling]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 4:04 PM James Heilman  wrote:

> There are Wikis that have "succeeded" with IP editing turned off with
> some being WikEM and Eyewiki
>
> Additionally PT Wikipedia banned IP editing in 2020
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-11-01/News_and_notes
>
> Not sure how the later is going.
>
> James


These are all good examples of how we can’t take a “one size fits all”
approach when thinking about editing policies and features. The study of
the effects of no IP editing strongly reiterated this conclusion based on
the data:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancement_and_Abuse_Mitigation/IP_Editing_Restriction_Study/Portuguese_Wikipedia

Portuguese Wikipedia is largely dominated by Brazilians. Brazil has some of
the highest social media use per capital in the world, so part of the
underlying reality is that PT Wikipedia users are probably unusually
willing to sign up for new services. This probably explains why in
Portuguese making people sign up didn’t result in fewer unreverted edits,
whereas when we tried even *suggesting* IP editors should sign up in other
wikis, it didn’t work:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Value_of_IP_Editing#Past_trials_of_this_idea_were_damaging

For starting a new general knowledge wiki, it’s a terrible idea to require
registration if you want to actually grow.


>
> On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 11:52 PM WereSpielChequers
>  wrote:
> >
> > Yesterday they had less than a hundred edits from just 6 individuals.
> The English language Wikipedia had around 150,000 edits. Justapedia needs a
> much bigger community for it to become more than a mirror.
> >
> > They've switched off IP editing, one of the mistakes citizendium made,
> so unless they relaunch themselves as the home of alternative medicine and
> alternative facts, I agree with Galder, they are unlikely to succeed.
> >
> >
> >
> > WSC
> >
> >
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Il giorno mar 12 set 2023 alle ore 08:15 Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
> galder...@hotmail.com> ha scritto:
> >>
> >> The logo is quite funny. According to that Information + Disinformation
> = Facts. It might be that they don't know what a Venn diagram is, or simply
> that they actually think that.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Don't worry, this is just one more project that will fall into oblivion.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Galder
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > ___
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>
>
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Sharing an update on the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund’s grantees

[Steven Walling]

 very long,
but maybe that's okay.

I’m also sharing details about the relationships that we’re building in the
> movement with some of our other new grantee.
>

I do not agree that generically "building relationships" is worth funding
$4.5 million of grants. I think Erik makes some really good points
previously that if we funded specific Wikimedian in residence / fellowship
type programs that were more akin to the GLAM movement or related movement
work on Art+Feminism then we could get both relationship building with
sister organizations *and* some kind of clear direct impact on Wikimedia
projects.


> Black Cultural Archives <https://blackculturalarchives.org/>: Given BCA’s
> focus, we have connected them with Wikimedia UK, Wiki Library User Group
> and Whose Knowledge to help them better understand how to connect their
> work and archives with the Wikimedia projects.
>
> Create Caribbean Research Institute <https://createcaribbean.org/create/>:
> As the first digital humanities centre in the Caribbean, Create Caribbean
> has natural alignment with Wiki Cari UG, as well as Noircir, Whose
> Knowledge, Projet:Université de Guyane, and WikiMujeres. We also plan to
> connect them to present or speak at Wiki Con North America.
>
> Criola <https://criola.org.br/>
>
> Criola is a civil society organization dedicated to advocating for the
> rights of Black women in Brazilian society. We have connected them with Whose
> Knowledge, WikiMujeres, Mujeres (mulheres) latino americanas in Wikimedia,
> and we will be connecting them with Mais_Teoria_da_Historia Na Brasil.
>
> Data for Black Lives <https://d4bl.org/>
>
> Given D4BL’s focus in the US, we have connected them with AfroCROWD and
> Black Lunch Table.
>
> Filipino American National Historical Society
> <http://fanhs-national.org/filam/>: FANHS is focused on Filipino American
> heritage, and as members of the diaspora we are connecting them with the
> PhilWiki Community, Wiki Advocates of Philippines and Wiki Libraries User
> Group.
>
> If you have other ideas for how we can improve, please reach out and let
> us know. Our email is equityf...@wikimedia.org.
>
> Best,
>
> Biyanto Rebin
>
> (committee member, Knowledge Equity Fund)
>
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 09:01, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> ++.  Anything we can learn + apply from Outreachy (and their own
>> community of mentors, alums, and practitioners!) would be wonderful.
>> Their impact per unit of funding seems, at very casual inspection, well
>> ahead of all comparable initiatives.  And we could even fund them directly,
>> who have often helped us in turn. ;)
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 12:13 AM Erik Moeller 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 10:23 PM Steven Walling
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> > With the money allocated to Knowledge Equity in the last couple years,
>>> we could have hired
>>> > at least a couple more software engineers to do work like fulfill
>>> community wishlist requests.
>>>
>>> I disagree with that framing. Wikimedia Foundation, even with reduced
>>> fundraising goals, is a very well-endowed organization that can easily
>>> shift more of its existing effort towards community wishlist requests.
>>> _All_ areas in which it spends money are deserving of healthy
>>> scrutiny, not just this new program. I feel it's best to evaluate this
>>> program on its own merits -- and to make a separate argument regarding
>>> the community wishlist & prioritization of software engineering
>>> ventures.
>>>
>>> To me, the question with these grants is whether there's a plausible
>>> theory of change that ties them back to the Wikimedia mission and
>>> movement. I share some skepticism about broad objectives around
>>> "improving quality of sources about X" without any _obvious and
>>> direct_ connection to the movement's work (i.e. concrete commitments
>>> about licensing and availability of information, or collaboration with
>>> Wikimedians). The Borealis Journalism Fund grant report [1] explicitly
>>> states:
>>>
>>> # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages: 0
>>> # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects: 0
>>> Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects: 0
>>>
>>> (There are qualifiers in the report, but frankly, they're not very
>>> plausible ones.)
>>>
>>> I see a lot of value in WMF having new connections with these grantees
>>> -- these are organizations Wikimedia _should_ have a relationship
>&g

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Sharing an update on the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund’s grantees

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 8:44 PM effe iets anders 
wrote:

> I'm very interested to see this develop further, and can understand some
> of the tensions that Steven has articulated. It's tricky to experience that
> we can't fund everything we want to do that has direct impact on our own
> work, and yet fund projects that don't feel like they directly support
> other activities our movement is deploying.
>

This last point—that we can’t fund everything we directly need but are
giving funds to only tangentially related special interest groups—hits home
for me.

With the money allocated to Knowledge Equity in the last couple years, we
could have hired at least a couple more software engineers to do work like
fulfill community wishlist requests. Especially in the context that we have
had to slow growth in the overall WMF budget and hiring, this program feels
particularly absurd.

The simple fact is that this program is being pointed to within the
community (at least on English Wikipedia) as a key example of how some
believe the annual fundraising campaigns are misleading to donors and
collecting funds that go to waste. There are editors gearing up yet again
to potentially run RFCs and pick a fight, despite thoughtful, diligent work
by the fundraising team to do outreach early and work collaboratively with
the community.

It will be sad if we end up having to scale back our primary fundraising
campaign a second year in a row, particularly if it’s over one relatively
small grant program. We should have just stopped this after a first pilot
year and moved on to try less controversial methods to improve knowledge
equity.

There is one analogy that comes to mind, and I'm not sure how accurate it
> is, but I wanted to share it as a thought experiment. In the 20th century,
> there was a range of technology companies that depended on scientific
> progress. Some of these companies, like IBM and Philips, then started to
> support also more fundamental research that did not necessarily always have
> a direct feed into their product pipeline. In a way, this kind of program
> has the same vibe to me: we're supporting a broader knowledge ecosystem to
> develop areas that we know are underserved (which may well be an
> understatement), without always having a direct connection to how that will
> feed into our projects, into our activities or communities. There is little
> doubt in my mind though, that in the long run the ecosystem will benefit
> from it, and we depend on that ecosystem for our work in turn.
>
> So honestly, I don't see this program much in the context of 'we need to
> help society' but rather an indirect selfish attempt to help improve the
> ecosystem that we're operating in. The conversation 'what are donors
> donating for' is equally a tricky one: I like to believe that they donate
> to us to help achieve the mission and trust us to make the choices that
> best serve this big picture.
>
> We can have long discussions whether we're the organization or funder best
> situated to fund these activities - but given the large backlog that we're
> dealing with in knowledge equity, I'm not very afraid that we'll have to
> worry about overcrowding in this space for a while. I personally think we
> may be reasonably well located for this - maybe not to be the most
> important funder, but we will have the chance to make a difference. I am
> however convinced that where it comes to climate change there are many
> other organizations that are much better positioned. Of course, this is
> likely very subjective :)
>
> Warmly,
> Lodewijk
>
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 6:39 AM Christophe Henner <
> christophe.hen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That would be a great discussion indeed to set the line.
>>
>> But it?s the different from what you started the discussion with where
>> you were saying ?we all should want?.
>>
>> I want us to make things that move the needle regarding knowledge equity
>> and that probably require outside of the projects programs.
>>
>> As to where we draw the line, that would be a terrific strategic
>> discussion but I don?t find where we had it.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Aug 16, 2023, at 7:07 PM, Steven Walling 
>> wrote:
>>
>> ?
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 12:34?AM Christophe Henner <
>> christophe.hen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Steven,
>>>
>>> If I may, I have a different reading on the topic. Knowledge Equity is a
>>> topic because for centuries knowledges have been destroyed, banned, etc? as
>>> such, and with our current rules with written sources, funding any
>>> organisation empowering marginalised communities is critical.
>>>
>>> If we were funding on

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Sharing an update on the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund’s grantees

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 12:34 AM Christophe Henner <
christophe.hen...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Steven,
>
> If I may, I have a different reading on the topic. Knowledge Equity is a
> topic because for centuries knowledges have been destroyed, banned, etc? as
> such, and with our current rules with written sources, funding any
> organisation empowering marginalised communities is critical.
>
> If we were funding only direct integration of marginalised knowledges into
> the project we would actually be missing so much.
>
> I actually appreciate the Movement funding initiatives outside the
> Movement.
>
> As Nadee said in her email, and I get a feeling it also is partly your
> point, what would be critical here would be to ensure the grantees are
> supported and encouraged in working with local or thematic Wikimedia
> Organisations.
>
> @Nadee out of curiosity, is there any staff in the Knowledge Equity Fund
> project in charge of working with grantees to increase their relationships
> with us?
>
> Thanks a lot :)
>
> Christophe
>

Christophe,

Thanks for your thoughts. I think the problem with "I actually appreciate
the Movement funding initiatives outside the Movement." is where does the
boundary of acceptable initiatives end?

For instance, should we feel comfortable creating a grants program to fight
climate change? Extreme weather events obviously threaten the stability of
the projects, and might disrupt editors from volunteering their time.
Solving world hunger and global health issues would increase the pool of
potential volunteers. We could also fund a non-profit alternative to
Starlink, to increase global Internet access to make it possible for more
people to edit the projects.

The problem is that none of these things are what donors believe they are
funding when they give us $5 from a banner on Wikipedia asking them to
support the projects.


>
> On Aug 16, 2023, at 8:36 AM, Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>
> ?
> This is really really disappointing to see. The lessons noted in the blog
> post totally miss the point as to why the Wikimedia community has objected
> to Knowledge Equity Fund. The issue is not community oversight via
> committees or visibility into the work. It?s that the work had no
> demonstrable impact on Wikimedia projects whatsoever. We all should want
> the projects to be more equitable when it comes to representing
> knowledge?it's perfectly aligned with the Wikimedia mission. This program
> is doing absolutely nothing to accomplish that.
>
> If we want to impact knowledge equity, why not say, let people working on
> underserved languages and topics apply for expense reimbursement when
> they've bought access to sources or equipment to create media for Commons?
> Or fund a huge series of edit-a-thons on BIPOC topics?
>
> If we want free knowledge created by and for people with less systemic
> privilege in the world, direct grants (given to actual Wikimedians) is
> something that the Foundation is uniquely placed to do, as opposed to
> generic lump sum grants for addressing the root causes of social injustice
> and inequity. While those are laudable problems to solve, they are not in
> fact our organization?s mission and what donors think they are funding when
> they give us money.
>
> A second Knowledge Equity round that fails to specifically address how
> each grantee and their work is going to help Wikimedia projects accomplish
> our mission is a huge misstep and a violation of the trust that the
> community and donors place in the Foundation to disburse funds. I fully
> agree that we should find ways to correct for the fact that Wikimedia
> content tends to reflect the unjust past and present of the world. We want
> the sum of *all* knowledge, not just knowledge from/for people with money
> and privilege, but this is not the way.
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 9:25 AM Nadee Gunasena 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As part of the Wikimedia Foundation?s Annual Plan goal around supporting
>> knowledge equity
>> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Goals/Equity#Equity_Fund>
>> by supporting regional and thematic strategies, and helping close
>> knowledge gaps, I wanted to share an update on the Knowledge Equity Fund.
>> Earlier this year, the Foundation shared learnings from the first year
>> <https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/04/12/what-weve-learned-from-the-equity-funds-first-round/>
>> of the Knowledge Equity Fund pilot, as well as reports from our first year
>> grantees. These learnings include how we can increase visibility into the
>> work of the grantees, and also connect the grantees with Wikimedians and
>> local communities to enable greater underst

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Sharing an update on the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund’s grantees

[Steven Walling]

This is really really disappointing to see. The lessons noted in the blog
post totally miss the point as to why the Wikimedia community has objected
to Knowledge Equity Fund. The issue is not community oversight via
committees or visibility into the work. It’s that the work had no
demonstrable impact on Wikimedia projects whatsoever. We all should want
the projects to be more equitable when it comes to representing
knowledge—it's perfectly aligned with the Wikimedia mission. This program
is doing absolutely nothing to accomplish that.

If we want to impact knowledge equity, why not say, let people working on
underserved languages and topics apply for expense reimbursement when
they've bought access to sources or equipment to create media for Commons?
Or fund a huge series of edit-a-thons on BIPOC topics?

If we want free knowledge created by and for people with less systemic
privilege in the world, direct grants (given to actual Wikimedians) is
something that the Foundation is uniquely placed to do, as opposed to
generic lump sum grants for addressing the root causes of social injustice
and inequity. While those are laudable problems to solve, they are not in
fact our organization’s mission and what donors think they are funding when
they give us money.

A second Knowledge Equity round that fails to specifically address how each
grantee and their work is going to help Wikimedia projects accomplish our
mission is a huge misstep and a violation of the trust that the community
and donors place in the Foundation to disburse funds. I fully agree that we
should find ways to correct for the fact that Wikimedia content tends to
reflect the unjust past and present of the world. We want the sum of *all*
knowledge, not just knowledge from/for people with money and privilege, but
this is not the way.

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 9:25 AM Nadee Gunasena 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan goal around supporting
> knowledge equity
> 
> by supporting regional and thematic strategies, and helping close
> knowledge gaps, I wanted to share an update on the Knowledge Equity Fund.
> Earlier this year, the Foundation shared learnings from the first year
> 
> of the Knowledge Equity Fund pilot, as well as reports from our first year
> grantees. These learnings include how we can increase visibility into the
> work of the grantees, and also connect the grantees with Wikimedians and
> local communities to enable greater understanding and more ties to the work
> of free knowledge on the Wikimedia projects.
>
> With these learnings in mind, today we are announcing the second round of
> grantees
> 
> from the Knowledge Equity Fund. This second round includes seven grantees
> that span five regions, including the Fund’s first-ever grantees in Asia.
> This diverse group of grantees was chosen from an initial pool of 42
> nominations, which were received from across the Wikimedia movement through
> an open survey in 2022 and 2023. Each grantee aligns with one of Fund’s five
> focus areas
> ,
> identified to address persistent structural barriers experienced by
> communities of color that prevent equitable access and participation in
> open knowledge. They are also recognized nonprofits with a proven track
> record of impact in their region. The grantees include:
>
> Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, Indonesia: The Aliansi Masyarakat Adat
> Nusantara , or the Alliance of the Indigenous
> Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN for short), is a non-profit organization
> based in Indonesia that works on human rights, journalism, and advocacy
> issues for indigenous people.
>
> Black Cultural Archives, United Kingdom: Black Cultural Archives
>  is a Black-led archive and heritage
> center that preserves and gives access to the histories of African and
> Caribbean people in the UK.
>
> Create Caribbean Research Institute, Commonwealth of Dominica: Create
> Caribbean Research Institute is the
> first digital humanities center in the Caribbean.
>
> Criola, Brazil: Criola  is a civil society
> organization, based in Rio de Janeiro, dedicated to advocating for the
> rights of Black women in Brazilian society.
>
> Data for Black Lives, United States: Data for Black Lives
>  is a movement of activists, organizers, and
> scientists committed to the mission of using data to create concrete and
> measurable change in the lives of Black people.
>
> Filipino American National Historical Society, 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikianswers Proposal

[Steven Walling]

We don’t really need to test the idea that people want to ask
factual questions in natural language. The question is: what’s the best way
to serve people who want to ask a normal human question and get an answer?

The definitive truth is that people want to search this way in the same
place they search for everything else. This is why Google and ChatGPT are
so massive while dedicated Q platforms like Quora and Yahoo Answers
haven’t done so well. (Trust me, I actually wasted a couple years working
at Quora and was a Top Writer there along with Jimmy and some other
Wikipedians. As a Quora shareholder I wish it wasn’t true, but Q sites
will never be as big as Wikipedia.)

Starting an entirely new portal for natural language questions and answers
could be a good way to experiment with Wikipedia-backed natural language
search but our ultimate goal should be to integrate it directly in
Wikipedia as soon as it moves past beta testing. Otherwise it’s just going
to end up like projects basically no normal readers directly search. Even
Commons and Wikidata are arguably total failures in this regard given how
little direct search and browse activity happens there. Starting a separate
domain and wiki is pretty much a terrible idea.

On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:24 PM Risker  wrote:

> I note that there are discussions going on in the Technology stream that
> very definitely touch on this topic.
>
> The first I noticed is a discussion on Wikitech-L entitled "Word
> embeddings / vector search".  The second one is a discussion point on this
> week's Tech News:   There is a recently formed team at the Wikimedia
> Foundation which will be focusing on experimenting with new tools.
> Currently they are building a prototype ChatGPT plugin that allows
> information generated by ChatGPT to be properly attributed
> 
> to the Wikimedia projects.
>
> These may be good starting points to discover what is already happening
> within the technical space, and what the thinking is on the likelihood of
> it filling the need of the proposed project. Regardless, since the project
> being proposed will require a lot of technical/developer/engineer work, it
> would be very useful to talk to the people who already have been working
> and researching in this topic area to determine if the proposed project is
> viable.
>
> Risker/Anne
>
> On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 20:41, Adam Sobieski 
> wrote:
>
>> I would share that I don't fully understand the current WMF procedure for
>> project proposals. I noticed an April 14 email in this mailing list about
>> forming a new taskforce on these topics (
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/ZRV7MGHF4IH6LCN3DF6FF6IFMHXJTXZO/).
>> So, when it comes to expectations for a project proposal, the current WMF
>> process, procedure, and related definitions of success for a proposal, I
>> have more questions than answers.
>>
>> James, thank you. I see your points and, as envisioned, teambuilding for
>> the Wikianswers project would welcome participants from both within and
>> outside of the WMF movement. I anticipate a considerable excitement with
>> respect to combinations of AI and Wiki platforms, infrastructure, and
>> search. Hopefully the Wikianswers proposal indicates some of the
>> possibilities and opportunities in these regards to interested researchers
>> and developers (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikianswers).
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Adam
>>
>> P.S.: Thank you for the discussion thus far. I'm still considering the
>> epistemology of which AI-generated multimodal answers would be cacheable,
>> editable, and thus correctable by a community of editors.
>>
>> --
>> *From:* James Heilman 
>> *Sent:* Monday, May 15, 2023 6:28 PM
>> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
>> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikianswers Proposal
>>
>> Setting up a project outside the WMF would be much easier to start with.
>> One can then trial the idea and if successful the movement may then be
>> willing to have the WMF take it on.
>>
>> WikiVoyage started outside the WMF by a small group in Germany (after
>> they split from WikiTravel). They had an active community and simply
>> migrated to WMF servers.
>>
>> Similarly we at Wiki Project Med have started NC Commons
>> https://nccommons.org/wiki/Main_Page Will the movement be interested in
>> this project at some point? I guess we will see.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 3:16 AM Risker  wrote:
>>
>> My plate is full at the moment, and project creation is not a specific
>> interest of mine.  I hope that Adam does not see things as demotivating;
>> creating a new project type *should* be a big challenge. I do think that
>> those standards need to be significantly revised.  They were all written at
>> a time when the WMF had no problems at all just raising the target for
>> fundraising, 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Bing-ChatGPT

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 3:49 PM Erik Moeller  wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 7:05 PM Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>
> > IANAL of course, but to me this implies that responsibility for the
> *egregious* lack
> > of attribution in models that rely substantially on Wikipedia is
> violating the Attribution
> > requirements of CC licenses.
>
> Morally, I agree that companies like OpenAI would do well to recognize
> and nurture the sources they rely upon in training their models.
> Especially as the web becomes polluted with low quality AI-generated
> content, it would seem in everybody's best interest to sustain the
> communities and services that make and keep high quality information
> available. Not just Wikimedia, but also the Internet Archive, open
> access journals and preprint servers, etc.
>
> Legally, it seems a lot murkier. OpenAI in particular does not
> distribute any of its GPT models. You can feed them prompts by various
> means, and get responses back. Do those responses plagiarize
> Wikipedia?
>
> With image-generating models like Stable Diffusion, it's been found
> that the models sometimes generate output nearly indistinguishable
> from source material [1]. I don't know if similar studies have been
> undertaken for text-generating models yet. You can certainly ask GPT-4
> to generate something that looks like a Wikipedia article -- here are
> example results for generating a random Wikipedia article:
>
> Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley_(film)
> GPT-4 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley_(film)GPT-4>
> run 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/1
> (cut off at the ChatGPT generation limit)
> GPT-4 run 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/2
> GPT-4 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/2GPT-4>
> run 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/3
>
> It imitates the form of a Wikipedia article & mixes up / makes up
> assertions, but I don't know that any of its generations would meet
> the standard of infringing on the Wikipedia article's copyright. IANAL
> either, and as you say, the legal landscape is evolving rapidly.
>
> Warmly,
> Erik


The whole thing is definitely a hot mess. If the remixing/transformation by
the model is a derivative work, it means OpenAI is potentially violating
the ShareAlike requirement by not distributing the text output as CC. But
on other hand the nature of the model means they’re combining CC and non
free works freely / at random, unless a court would interpret whatever % of
training data comes from us as the direct degree to which the model output
is derived from Wikipedia. Either way it’s going to be up to some legal
representation of copyright holders to test the boundaries here.


> [1]
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/researchers-extract-training-images-from-stable-diffusion-but-its-difficult/
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Bing-ChatGPT

[Steven Walling]

requirements
>>
>>- Running LLaMA 7B and 13B on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro with llama.cpp
>><https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llama-7b-m2>
>>- Github: bloomz.cpp <https://github.com/NouamaneTazi/bloomz.cpp> &
>>llama.cpp <https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp> (C++ only versions)
>>- Int-4 LLaMa is not enough - Int-3 and beyond
>><https://nolanoorg.substack.com/p/int-4-llama-is-not-enough-int-3-and>
>>- How is LLaMa.cpp possible?
>><https://finbarrtimbers.substack.com/p/how-is-llamacpp-possible>
>>
>>
>> 4.) Easy-to-use interfaces
>>
>>- Transformer.js <https://xenova.github.io/transformers.js/> (WebAssembly
>>libraries to run LLM models in the browser)
>>- Dalai <https://github.com/cocktailpeanut/dalai>  ( run LLaMA and
>>Alpaca in own computer as Node.js web service)
>>- web-stable-diffusion
>><https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-stable-diffusion> (stable diffusion
>>image generation in browser)
>>
>>
>> Br,
>> -- Kimmo Virtanen
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 1:53 PM Kimmo Virtanen 
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The development of open-source large language models is going forward.
>> The GPT-4 was released and it seems that it passed the Bar exam and tried
>> to hire humans to solve catchpas which were too complex to it. However, the
>> development in open source and hacking side has been pretty fast and it
>> seems that there is all the pieces for running LLM models in personal
>> hardware (and in web browser). Biggest missing piece is fine tuning of
>> open source model such as Neox for english language. For multilingual and
>> multimodal (for example images+text) the model is also needed.
>>
>>
>> So this is kind of link dump for relevant things for creation of open
>> source LLM model and service and also recap where hacker community is now.
>>
>>
>> 1.) Creation of an initial unaligned model.
>>
>>- Possible models
>>   - 20b Neo(X) <https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox> by
>>   EleutherAI (Apache 2.0)
>>   - Fairseq Dense <https://huggingface.co/KoboldAI/fairseq-dense-13B> by
>>   Facebook (MIT-licence)
>>   - LLaMa
>>   <https://ai.facebook.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/> by
>>   Facebook (custom license, leaked research use only)
>>   - Bloom <https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom> by Bigscience (custom
>>   license <https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience/license>. open,
>>   non-commercial)
>>
>>
>> 2.) Fine-tuning or align
>>
>>- Example: Standford Alpaca is ChatGPT fine-tuned LLaMa
>>   - Alpaca: A Strong, Replicable Instruction-Following Model
>>   <https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html>
>>   - Train and run Stanford Alpaca on your own machine
>>   <https://replicate.com/blog/replicate-alpaca>
>>   - Github: Alpaca-LoRA: Low-Rank LLaMA Instruct-Tuning
>>   <https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora>
>>
>>
>> 3.) 8,4,3 bit-quantization of model for reduced hardware requirements
>>
>>- Running LLaMA 7B and 13B on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro with llama.cpp
>><https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llama-7b-m2>
>>- Github: bloomz.cpp <https://github.com/NouamaneTazi/bloomz.cpp> &
>>llama.cpp <https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp> (C++ only versions)
>>- Int-4 LLaMa is not enough - Int-3 and beyond
>><https://nolanoorg.substack.com/p/int-4-llama-is-not-enough-int-3-and>
>>- How is LLaMa.cpp possible?
>><https://finbarrtimbers.substack.com/p/how-is-llamacpp-possible>
>>
>>
>> 4.) Easy-to-use interfaces
>>
>>- Transformer.js <https://xenova.github.io/transformers.js/> (WebAssembly
>>libraries to run LLM models in the browser)
>>- Dalai <https://github.com/cocktailpeanut/dalai>  ( run LLaMA and
>>Alpaca in own computer as Node.js web service)
>>- web-stable-diffusion
>><https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-stable-diffusion> (stable diffusion
>>image generation in browser)
>>
>>
>> Br,
>> -- Kimmo Virtanen
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 6, 2023 at 6:50 AM Steven Walling 
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 5, 2023 at 8:39 PM Luis (lu.is)  wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 22, 2023 at 9:28 AM -0800, Sage Ross ,
>> wrote:
>>
>> Luis,
>&

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Bing-ChatGPT

[Steven Walling]

On Sun, Mar 5, 2023 at 8:39 PM Luis (lu.is)  wrote:

> On Feb 22, 2023 at 9:28 AM -0800, Sage Ross ,
> wrote:
>
> Luis,
>
> OpenAI researchers have released some info about data sources that
> trained GPT-3 (and hence ChatGPT): https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
>
> See section 2.2, starting on page 8 of the PDF.
>
> The full text of English Wikipedia is one of five sources, the others
> being CommonCrawl, a smaller subset of scraped websites based on
> upvoted reddit links, and two unrevealed datasets of scanned books.
> (I've read speculation that one of these datasets is basically the
> Library Genesis archive.) Wikipedia is much smaller than the other
> datasets, although they did weight it somewhat more heavily than any
> other dataset. With the extra weighting, they say Wikipedia accounts
> for 3% of the total training.
>
>
> Thanks, Sage. Facebook’s recently-released LLaMa also shares some of their
> training sources, it turns out, with similar weighting for Wikipedia - only
> 4.5% of training text, but more heavily weighted than most other sources:
>
> https://twitter.com/GuillaumeLample/status/1629151234597740550
>

Those stats are undercounting, since the top source (CommonCrawl) also
itself includes Wikipedia as its third largest source.

https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/domains


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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Chat GPT

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 9:47 PM Gergő Tisza  wrote:

> Just to give a sense of scale: OpenAI started with a $1 billion donation,
> got another $1B as investment, and is now getting a larger investment from
> Microsoft (undisclosed but rumored to be $10B). Assuming they spent most of
> their previous funding, which seems likely, their operational costs are in
> the ballpark of $300 million per year. The idea that the WMF could just
> choose to create conversational software of a similar quality if it wanted
> seems detached from reality to me.
>

Without spending billions on LLM development to aim for a
conversational chatbot trying to pass a Turing test, we could definitely
try to catch up to the state of the art in search results. Our search
currently does a pretty bad job (in terms of recall especially). Today's
featured article in English is the Hot Chip album "Made in the Dark", and
if I enter anything but the exact article title the typeahead results are
woefully incomplete or wrong. If I ask an actual question, good luck.

Google is feeling vulnerable to OpenAI here in part because everyone can
see that their results are often full of low quality junk created for SEO,
while ChatGPT just gives a concise answer right there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menu_(2022_film) is one of the top
viewed English articles. If I search "The Menu reviews" the Google results
are noisy and not so great. ChatGPT actually gives you nothing relevant
because it doesn't know anything from 2022. If we could just manage to
display the three sentence snippet of our article about the critical
response section of the article, it would be awesome. It's too bad that the
whole "knowledge engine" debacle poisoned the well when it comes to a
Wikipedia search engine, because we could definitely do a lot to learn from
what people like about ChatGPT and apply to Wikipedia search.

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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Chat GPT

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 4:09 PM Victoria Coleman <
vstavridoucole...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone. I have seen some of the reactions to the narratives generated
> by Chat GPT. There is an obvious question (to me at least) as to whether a
> Wikipedia chat bot would be a legitimate UI for some users. To that end, I
> would have hoped that it would have been developed by the WMF but the
> Foundation has historically massively underinvested in AI. That said, and
> assuming that GPT Open source licensing is compatible with the movement
> norms, should the WMF include that UI in the product?


This is a cool idea but what would the goals of developing a
Wikipedia-specific generative AI be? IMO it would be nice to have a natural
language search right in Wikipedia that could return factual answers not
just links to our (often too long) articles.

OpenAI models aren’t open source btw. Some of the products are free to use
right now, but their business model is to charge for API use etc. so
including it directly in Wikipedia is pretty much a non-starter.

My other question is around the corpus that Open AI is using to train the
> bot. It is creating very fluid narratives that are massively false in many
> cases. Are they training on Wikipedia? Something else?


They’re almost certainly using Wikipedia. The answer from ChatGPT is:

“ChatGPT is a chatbot model developed by OpenAI. It was trained on a
dataset of human-generated text, including data from a variety of sources
such as books, articles, and websites. It is possible that some of the data
used to train ChatGPT may have come from Wikipedia, as Wikipedia is a
widely-used source of information and is likely to be included in many
datasets of human-generated text.”

And to my earlier question, if GPT were to be trained on Wikipedia
> exclusively would that help abate the false narratives


Who knows but we would have to develop our own models to test this idea.

>
This is a significant matter for the  community and seeing us step to it
> would be very encouraging.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Victoria Coleman
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: WMF financial statements for 2021-2022 published

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2022 at 10:37 AM Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> Dear WMF Finance staff,
>
> I inquired over a week ago on Meta-Wiki why the WMF is reporting a
> negative investment income (–$12 million). There has been no answer to
> date.[1]
>
> I am a layperson, but how can an investment income be negative? Would you
> mind sharing what this is about?
>

You probably didn't get a prompt answer because "how can investment income
be negative" is something you could have Googled before asking the finance
team.

Investments can lose value.* The US stock market has lost a tremendous
amount of value over the last year, so it would not be surprising that most
investments would have a negative return recently.

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/negative-return.asp
https://www.finra.org/investors/investing/investing-basics/risk

I was also surprised to find that the reported increase in net assets for
> the 2021–2022 financial year was "only" $8.2 million. The third-quarter F
> tuning session published in May (based on data as of March 31) forecast a
> far higher surplus, with an increase in net assets of $25.9 million.[2]
>
> Would you mind sharing what happened in the fourth quarter to reduce the
> surplus by so much?
>
> Best wishes,
> Andreas
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2021-2022_-_frequently_asked_questions
> [2]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AF%26A_Tuning_Session_FY21-22_Q3.pdf=5
>
> On Tue, Nov 1, 2022 at 3:45 PM Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> The WMF's audited financial statements are now available here:
>>
>>
>> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf
>>
>> Some key figures from the page numbered 4 (page 6 in the pdf):
>>
>> – Net invest income was negative: –$12M (down $16M)
>> – Total support and revenue was $155M (down $8M due to that negative
>> investment income)
>> – Total expenses were $146M (up $34M)
>> – Salaries and wages were $88M (up $20M)
>> – Net assets at end of year increased by $8M
>>
>> For reference, the end-of-year increase in net assets forecast in the
>> third-quarter Finance & Administration tuning session deck published in May
>> 2022 was $25.9M:
>>
>>
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AF%26A_Tuning_Session_FY21-22_Q3.pdf=5
>>
>> Best,
>> Andreas
>>
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Simplifying governance processes

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 6:25 PM effe iets anders 
wrote:

> The proposals that you list are a bit double edged. It may be necessary,
> but they have downsides. For example, there are in a few cases very good
> reasons to go back to the drawing board when we're talking about
> foundational documents. It is annoying that it takes so long, but with time
> we also should see increased ownership and an increased support base.
> Having a single phase reduces the number of messages and time spent, but it
> also reduces the process to a single point of failure, making it much
> higher stakes. If you don't participate, you're too late. It would be nice
> if we can somehow still lower the stakes by making processes more
> iterative, and accepting that the outcome does not have to be the same for
> a long period of time. But there is a fundamental tension between speed and
> perceived pressure.
>

Do we really think that the dramatic increase in process has resulted in
commensurately better community participation and buy-in? Doesn’t seem like
it. Seems like we still get the same relatively tiny number voices who care
a lot about global governance structure, and everyone else in the community
mostly just votes when advertised to.

In any case, taking multiple years to do things like even outline what say,
a code of conduct committee or global council (I still have no clue WTF
that really is) will even look like and do is egregiously slow by any
standard.

I'm less concerned about elections, if only one of these rounds involves
> the community. If having an additional round of filtering helps to make the
> ballot easier to digest (reduced to six candidates for three positions
> sounds great to me!) that also means less mental effort for voters. The
> real question is: how much cumulative time are we spending on this process
> (or rather: should we be spending on this, if we want a good outcome). If
> 100 people spend an extra 2 hour to trim down from 30 to 6 candidates, that
> is worth it, because 10,000 people don't have to read 30 statements, bio's,
> Q's etc. If we go from 7 to 6 candidates, maybe less so.
> If doing another drafting round means 30 people spend an extra 10 hours
> drafting, that may be worth it, if it means that 1000 people don't have to
> be frustrated for a year because they constantly run into consequences of
> the policy and have to go through protests to get it changed. If the
> iteration for things that don't work is more lightweight, maybe we can just
> try it for a year, and evaluate after that.
>
> Maybe it's worth it to sometimes take a napkin and do the math: how much
> collective time are we going to spend on this?
>
> Best,
> Lodewijk
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:12 PM Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 4:35 PM Nathan  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:38 PM Steven Walling 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 10:27 AM Evelin Heidel 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> +1 to this, my perception is that we're wasting a lot of volunteer's +
>>>>> staff time + resources into complex governance processes without clear
>>>>> results. In theory, the reason why you want this much transparency &
>>>>> process is to make sure decision making (and in turn resources) are
>>>>> allocated fairly, but in practice so much bureaucracy makes it very hard
>>>>> for people to participate, leading to even more inequality.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's a complex balance to strike but definitely the current
>>>>> initiatives are not even a good aim to begin with.
>>>>>
>>>>> cheers,
>>>>> scann
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 100% this.
>>>>
>>>> The intentions behind the complex governance processes are good in that
>>>> they intend to increase inclusivity. But it’s easy to forget the most
>>>> limited resource we have is the attention of volunteers. The groups we
>>>> include the least today have the least free time and money. Longer,
>>>> multi-step processes to form and elect committees to set up committees to
>>>> review processes to inform a decision then has exactly the opposite of the
>>>> intended effect because it reduces participation to the slim group of
>>>> people who have the time and patience for such a process. The CIA wrote a
>>>> manual about how to sabotage organizations, and it’s like they wrote a
>>>> perfect description of exactly how things operate right now: "When
>>>

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Simplifying governance processes

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 4:35 PM Nathan  wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 5:38 PM Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 10:27 AM Evelin Heidel 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> +1 to this, my perception is that we're wasting a lot of volunteer's +
>>> staff time + resources into complex governance processes without clear
>>> results. In theory, the reason why you want this much transparency &
>>> process is to make sure decision making (and in turn resources) are
>>> allocated fairly, but in practice so much bureaucracy makes it very hard
>>> for people to participate, leading to even more inequality.
>>>
>>> It's a complex balance to strike but definitely the current initiatives
>>> are not even a good aim to begin with.
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> scann
>>
>>
>> 100% this.
>>
>> The intentions behind the complex governance processes are good in that
>> they intend to increase inclusivity. But it’s easy to forget the most
>> limited resource we have is the attention of volunteers. The groups we
>> include the least today have the least free time and money. Longer,
>> multi-step processes to form and elect committees to set up committees to
>> review processes to inform a decision then has exactly the opposite of the
>> intended effect because it reduces participation to the slim group of
>> people who have the time and patience for such a process. The CIA wrote a
>> manual about how to sabotage organizations, and it’s like they wrote a
>> perfect description of exactly how things operate right now: "When
>> possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and
>> consideration. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible–never
>> less than five."[1]
>>
>> The other reason we ended up in this situation is simply a lack of strong
>> leadership. People feel like they don't have the permission or safety to do
>> things unless they've done the maximum amount of consultations possible.
>> This is why decisions flounder in limbo for a long time, with no one really
>> knowing if they are happening or not happening. We're stuck because we're
>> trying to reset our governance to solve the problem where it's unclear who
>> is able to decide what and when... but we're trying to solve that by
>> perpetually punting a decision to some other committee or council of
>> people. It's turtles all the way down.
>>
>> 1:
>> https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sabotage-field-manual.html
>>
>>
> I think that means we need to acknowledge some culpability for this
> phenomena - in environments like this list, folks learn that no decision is
> too benign to spark controversy and any actually controversial decision is
> guaranteed to garner a vitriolic backlash.
>
> Combine that with the normal tendencies of bureaucracies, magnified by the
> special nature of the WMF, and the result is explosive growth in
> distributed decision-making organs.
>
> Accurate insights from SJ and others, if not necessarily new, but unlikely
> to lead to change because all the incentives that led to this place remain.
>

Yes completely true.

Some of the other bullet points in that guide to sabotage are things like
“argue over precise wordings of things” that are endemic to the culture of
the projects for reasons that may be  unfixable.

Coming back to SJ’s original point, the tangible immediate kind of changes
the Board and Maryana could enforce are:

- Set more aggressive deadlines for forming new governance bodies and
policies. None of these processes should take multiple years to get
running.
- Reduce the number of pre-planned stages of duplicative feedback /
drafting periods.
- Where elections are necessary just do a single round of ranked choice
voting after an open call for candidates.

What else?

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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Simplifying governance processes

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 10:27 AM Evelin Heidel 
wrote:

> +1 to this, my perception is that we're wasting a lot of volunteer's +
> staff time + resources into complex governance processes without clear
> results. In theory, the reason why you want this much transparency &
> process is to make sure decision making (and in turn resources) are
> allocated fairly, but in practice so much bureaucracy makes it very hard
> for people to participate, leading to even more inequality.
>
> It's a complex balance to strike but definitely the current initiatives
> are not even a good aim to begin with.
>
> cheers,
> scann


100% this.

The intentions behind the complex governance processes are good in that
they intend to increase inclusivity. But it’s easy to forget the most
limited resource we have is the attention of volunteers. The groups we
include the least today have the least free time and money. Longer,
multi-step processes to form and elect committees to set up committees to
review processes to inform a decision then has exactly the opposite of the
intended effect because it reduces participation to the slim group of
people who have the time and patience for such a process. The CIA wrote a
manual about how to sabotage organizations, and it’s like they wrote a
perfect description of exactly how things operate right now: "When
possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and
consideration. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible–never
less than five."[1]

The other reason we ended up in this situation is simply a lack of strong
leadership. People feel like they don't have the permission or safety to do
things unless they've done the maximum amount of consultations possible.
This is why decisions flounder in limbo for a long time, with no one really
knowing if they are happening or not happening. We're stuck because we're
trying to reset our governance to solve the problem where it's unclear who
is able to decide what and when... but we're trying to solve that by
perpetually punting a decision to some other committee or council of
people. It's turtles all the way down.

1:
https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/read-the-cias-simple-sabotage-field-manual.html



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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Open proxies and IP blocking

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 12:37 AM effe iets anders 
wrote:

> Hi Danny,
>
> this is great thinking. There's one more angle that I'd like to offer, but
> it would come with plenty of risks and downsides, so I'm not sure if it is
> actually viable (I guess it falls in the 'mitigate harm' category). But
> just to put it out there:
>
> One of the main reasons that we block open proxies, is because of
> sockpuppets and block evaders. What if we would somehow expose to admins
> which edits are made by open proxy? That way they can consider the entire
> picture (including a history of good faith edits) before blocking their
> edits. Down the road, that flag could become more nuanced (open proxy vs
> shared connection) but obviously it would have to remain pretty broad
> categories. There are plenty of downsides (WMF would need to keep a
> database of open proxies for one, but it would also share a small piece of
> private information about the user - we could warn them about that as they
> are saving their edit).
>
> If we are afraid primarily for rapid open proxy edits, we could use a
> tactic that is used by some social media tech companies in other settings:
> slow them down when using an identified open proxy. If we build in a 30s
> throttle or even wait time before the edit can be saved, or a 5 minute
> delay before the edit can become visible, that would take the fun out of it
> possibly. Obvious downside is that this is still annoying as hell for good
> faith users, but at least they can now request exceptions on-wiki.
>
> This family of methods risks a two class community, but I'm not sure if
> that is worse than the current situation. I'm not sure what would be the
> 'right' path either.
>
> Lodewijk
>

A throttle plus flagging proxy edits to admins are really good ideas.
Creating visibility for functionaries and ways to dial down volume without
blocking everyone entirely are the right way to allow more openness
balanced with control.

Thanks for hopping in the conversation Danny, glad to know the team is
thinking on this. The poorly designed way that proxy blocks and requesting
IPBE are communicated feels like low hanging fruit that the Foundation
design and product teams could tackle here?

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 5:03 PM  wrote:
>
>> (cross-posted from
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:No_open_proxies/Unfair_blocking#Help_from_WMF
>> )
>>
>> Hi folks, I'm DannyH from the Wikimedia Foundation. I manage the product
>> teams that build Contributor Tools -- Community Tech, Campaigns, CheckUser
>> improvements and sockpuppet detection, moderator tools on mobile web, and
>> the new incident reporting system.
>>
>> I've been reading all of these conversations, and I'm concerned about the
>> people on both sides of the issue -- the admins working to keep the
>> projects safe from bad-faith people, and the good-faith people who are
>> being blocked because of someone else's rangeblock, or because they're
>> using default network proxy features that they're not aware of.
>>
>> This problem is getting attention within the WMF. Foundation folks are
>> really concerned about what we're hearing on Wikimedia-L and in this
>> discussion, especially because there seem to be systemic issues that are
>> specifically making things harder for new users in Africa. I've got the
>> opportunity right now to assign people to make software changes to help
>> solve this problem, which is great. But now I'm trying to figure out what
>> those software changes could be, and I don't have a clear answer yet for
>> what that should be.
>>
>> So if you don't mind, I'd like to run through what I think the main
>> points are, and a list of possible directions that a solution could take,
>> and then I would love it if you could help me figure this out.
>>
>> Here's what I understand about the problem:
>>
>> * Open proxies are a vector for harassment and vandalism. Bad-faith long
>> term abusers use them to disguise their IP and evade detection. The
>> projects automatically block open proxies that they know about, to
>> discourage the bad-faith vandals.
>>
>> * There's been a big increase in proxy blocks since July 2021 on English
>> Wikipedia (and Oct 2021 on Spanish WP), because ST47ProxyBot has been
>> getting trustworthy outside data to help identify open proxies.
>>
>> * The use of open proxies on the internet is rising, partly because
>> people are becoming more concerned about their privacy. Apple has
>> introduced iCloud Private Relay, which is disguising people's IP — this is
>> currently in beta, but will probably become the default. Google is working
>> on a similar project. Our system of using IPs to identify block vandals is
>> gradually breaking down, and there will probably be a point when IPs just
>> won't be useful anymore.
>>
>> * There are a lot of good-faith users, including first-time contributors,
>> who are getting caught in these blocks. For some people, that's an annoying
>> inconvenience; for many others, 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Open proxies and IP blocking

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 5:24 PM Risker  wrote:

>
> I'm less concerned about the "protected page" issue raised by SJ.  There
> are generally good reasons why those pages are protected.  They have either
> been the long- or short-term target of repeated vandalism (e.g.,
> biographical articles of controversial people, pages where disruptive
> editing has required the application of Arbcom or other discretionary
> sanctions, articles about today's news or are being discussed in the dark
> corners of social media, articles that have been subject to significant
> disinformation).  In almost all cases, the person trying to edit is
> directed to the talk page.
>

Yes and also at this point, the problem is not that people are generally
unaware that Wikipedia is editable by anyone. Anyway this issue is solvable
by design changes that direct anonymous or new editors to how they can
contribute to protected pages (either by registering or the Talk page as
appropriate). Proxy blocking on the other hand is entirely in the hands of
the community to fix.


>
> Risker/Anne
>
>
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 at 18:53, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> Thanks for mentioning this Florence.  It's affected me lately too.
>> I'm not sure the Wikipedia we love is still accessible as a project to
>> most of the world, including most of us.
>>
>> -- Blocking mobile users:  I was blocked from editing on mobile twice in
>> the past two weeks.  No solution I could find to make a new account and
>> leave a comment.  No way to contact the blocking admin w/o logging in,
>> either.
>> -- Permablocked IPs.  A friend told me they were permablocked from WP.
>> looking into it, they were covered by a small IP range that had
>> been blocked for a decade.
>> -- Blocking VPNs, with large unhelpful banners.  I was just on the phone
>> an hour ago w/ someone who maintains another online encyclopedia
>> , and their normal internet access [VPN] was
>> blocked.  It took them a minute to realize they could get access by turning
>> it off.  Then the first three pages they thought to visit were protected
>> against editing. (some time ago, 14%
>>  of
>> pageviews were to protected pages; may have increased since then)
>> -- Getting an IP block exemption for people trying to avoid surveillance
>> is not easy. in theory email-for-access could work, in practice most people
>> who reasonably an exemption may not end up getting one or even hearing
>> back. A softer-security approach would be better.
>>
>> Benjamin writes:
>> > We would do well to remember that it was the incredibly low barrier to
>> entry that was the key to Wikipedia's early success.
>>
>> +++.  We are raising these barriers to [apparently] try to stave off
>> vandalism and spam.  But hard security like this can put an end to the
>> projects, for good.  There is no more definitive end than one that seems
>> mandated from within.  We need better automation, MLl models, sandboxing,
>> and triage to help us *increase* the number of people who can edit, and
>> can propose edits to protected pages, while decreasing the amount of
>> vandalism and spam that is visible to the world.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 4:22 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Also relevant:
>>> 
>>> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences
>>>
>>> We would do well to remember that it was the incredibly low barrier to
>>> entry that was the key to Wikipedia's early success.
>>>
>>> I expect that even IF there's some legitimate (perhaps not unreasonably
>>> difficult, even!) way around the block, it will still discourage editing to
>>> a significant, but hard to measure, degree.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 20, 2022, at 3:59 PM, Bence Damokos  wrote:
>>>
>>> Beyond the mentioned countries, this is also affecting those who have
>>> opted in to Apple’s Private Relay, which I expect will be somewhat
>>> popular/default once out of beta status. I myself am unable to edit for
>>> example - and half the time I am not bothered to workaround the issue and
>>> just give up the edit.
>>>
>>> Also, annoyingly, the block message only shows up when I try to save the
>>> page (at least on mobile), not when I start the edit, again, leading to
>>> unnecessary frustration.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Bence
>>> On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 at 20:42, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <
>>> wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>
 Yes, it's getting frequent and not only from people in Africa.

 I ended up to trouble-shoot these problems by mails or direct messaging
 on Facebook more and and more frequently, maybe with simple users who just
 know me or have my contact. Sometimes it looks like sharing the duties of a
 sysop or a steward with no power.

 It's getting less and less clear how pros and cons are calculated

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Open proxies and IP blocking

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 1:04 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
wrote:

>
>
> I've always thought this justification fraught with bias.
>
> Vandalism is highly visible: you can point to it and say it's a problem.
> And it's true!
>
> But the *lack* of contributions is of course, by nature, invisible.
>

This 100%

Do we need to start an RFC on Meta to change the proxy policy globally?


>
>
> On Apr 20, 2022, at 2:33 PM, "Amir E. Aharoni" <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
> I don't have a solution, but I just wanted to confirm that I agree fully
> with the description of the problem. I hear that this happens to people
> from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and some other countries almost every day.
>
> The first time I heard about it was actually around 2018 or so, but during
> the last year it has become unbearably frequent.
>
> A smarter solution is needed. I tried talking to stewards about this
> several times, and they always say something like "we know that this
> affects certain countries badly, and we know that the technology has
> changed since the mid-2000s, but we absolutely cannot allow open proxies
> because it would immediately unleash horrible vandalism on all the wikis".
> I'm sure they mean well, but this is not sustainable.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
>
> ‫בתאריך יום ד׳, 20 באפר׳ 2022 ב-21:21 מאת ‪Florence Devouard‬‏ <‪
> fdevou...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
>
>> Hello friends
>>
>> Short version : We need to find solutions to avoid so many africans being
>> globally IP blocked due to our No Open Proxies policy.
>> *
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/No_open_proxies/Unfair_blocking
>> *
>>
>>
>> Long version :
>>
>> I'd like to raise attention on an issue, which has been getting worse in
>> the past couple of weeks/months.
>>
>> Increasing number of editors getting blocked due to the No Open Proxies
>> policy [1]
>> In particular africans.
>>
>> In February 2004, the decision was made to block open proxies on Meta and
>> all other Wikimedia projects.
>>
>> According to the no open proxies policy : Publicly available proxies
>> (including paid proxies) may be blocked for any period at any time. While
>> this may affect legitimate users, they are not the intended targets and may
>> freely use proxies until those are blocked [...]
>>
>> Non-static IP addresses or hosts that are otherwise not permanent proxies
>> should typically be blocked for a shorter period of time, as it is likely
>> the IP address will eventually be transferred or dynamically reassigned, or
>> the open proxy closed. Once closed, the IP address should be unblocked.
>>
>> According to the policy page, « the Editors can be permitted to edit by
>> way of an open proxy with the IP block exempt flag. This is granted on
>> local projects by administrators and globally by stewards. »
>>
>>
>> I repeat -> ... legitimate users... may freely use proxies until
>> those are blocked. the Editors can be permitted to edit by way of an open
>> proxy with the IP block exempt flag <-- it is not illegal to edit using
>> an open proxy
>>
>>
>> Most editors though... have no idea whatsoever what an open proxy is.
>> They do not understand well what to do when they are blocked.
>>
>> In the past few weeks, the number of African editors reporting being
>> blocked due to open proxy has been VERY significantly increasing.
>> New editors just as old timers.
>> Unexperienced editors but also staff members, president of usergroups,
>> organizers of edit-a-thons and various wikimedia initiatives.
>> At home, but also during events organized with usergroup members or
>> trainees, during edit-a-thons, photo uploads sessions etc.
>>
>> It is NOT the occasional highly unlikely situation. This has become a
>> regular occurence.
>> There are cases and complains every week. Not one complaint per week.
>> Several complaints per week.
>> *This is irritating. This is offending. This is stressful. This is
>> disrupting activities organized in good faith by good people, activities
>> set-up with our donors funds. **And the disruption** is primarlly taking
>> place in a geographical region supposingly to be nurtured (per our strategy
>> for diversity, equity, inclusion blahblahblah). *
>>
>>
>> The open proxy policy page suggests that, should a person be unfairly
>> blocked, it is recommended
>>
>>- * to privately email stewards[image: (_AT_)] 
>>wikimedia.org.
>>- * or alternatively, to post a request (if able to edit, if the
>>editor doesn't mind sharing their IP for global blocks or their reasons to
>>desire privacy (for Tor usage)).
>>- * the current message displayed to the blocked editor also suggest
>>contacting User:Tks4Fish. This editor 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Give WMF feedback on model cards

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 3:50 PM Hal Triedman 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The WMF Privacy and Machine Learning Platform teams are developing model
> cards to increase visibility, transparency, and accountability of
> algorithmic decision-making on WMF platforms. The broad goal is for every
> ML model hosted by WMF to have a model card for the community and public to
> understand, discuss, and govern that model.
>
> We would love for you to give some feedback on the talk page of our
> prototype:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:HTriedman_(WMF)/Language_Agnostic_Link-Based_Article_Topic_Model_Card
>
> Thanks so much!
> Hal
>

This is awesome. With all of us living our digital lives subject to so many
invisible filter bubbles this is a great approach to ensuring a good
outcome for Wikimedia readers, editors, and developers. Thanks for the work
the team is doing here!

Steven

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[Wikimedia-l] Re: The Wikipedia Library: Accessing free reliable sources is now easier than ever

[Steven Walling]

+1 to The Cunctator, this is wonderful. I used it thanks to the invite
notification you sent to eligible users and it was super fast to get going.
Kudos!

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 12:20 PM The Cunctator  wrote:

> This is really well done. One suggestion that's probably already been made
> and may have various reasons for not including would be to add some of the
> non-paywalled libraries (like HathiTrust and the Federal Register) as
> searchable options.
>
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 12:10 PM Sam Walton  wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We've just published a blog post summarising the new features and
>> functionality available to active Wikipedia editors in The Wikipedia
>> Library:
>> https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/19/the-wikipedia-library-accessing-free-reliable-sources-is-now-easier-than-ever/
>>
>> The Wikipedia Library is a tool providing active Wikipedia editors with
>> free access to otherwise-paywalled resources, including journals, books,
>> newspapers, magazines, and databases. Over the past 5-10 years the library
>> has built up a large collection of content from a wide range of publishers.
>>
>> In the past couple of years we've been finalising the centralised
>> Wikipedia Library tool used for accessing all this content:
>> https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/. I'm really pleased to announce
>> that we've finished work on some long-requested and planned features which
>> make it really simple to use!
>>
>> The library now has:
>>
>>- Proxy-based authentication for direct access of resources without a
>>secondary login
>>- A centralised search feature for browsing multiple collections from
>>one place
>>- An on-wiki notification to let editors know about the library when
>>they have crossed the eligibility threshold (rolling out in stages
>>throughout January)
>>
>> As the project I first joined the Wikimedia Foundation to work on years
>> ago I'm personally thrilled that we've finally been able to deploy all
>> these features!
>>
>> If you're eligible to use the library (500+ edits, 6+ months editing) you
>> can jump in and start using the library straight away. We're now working on
>> expanding and diversifying the content available in the library, so let us
>> know on the suggestions page if there are collections you want us to make
>> available: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/suggest/
>>
>> If the tool isn't currently localised into your language, you can
>> translate it on TranslateWiki:
>> https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Wikipedia_Library_Card_Platform
>>
>> We're planning to host some Office Hours, which will be a chance to get a
>> walkthrough of how to use the library, as well as discuss your research
>> needs and requests for new collections with the team. Look out for more on
>> that in the coming weeks.
>>
>> --
>> Sam Walton
>> Product Manager, The Wikipedia Library
>>
>> swal...@wikimedia.org
>>
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Luis Bitencourt-Emilio Joins Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 7:40 AM Guettarda  wrote:

> Crypto + NFTs + {tech startup + disrupt + housing market} sounds like
> *just* the kind of person WMF needs on its board!
>
> Luis Bitencourt-Emilio might be a great person, and just who we need on
> the Board right now, but the optics seem terrible. Maybe I've been spending
> too much time in the wrong parts of the internet, but this collection of
> attributes seems like a cherry-picked collection of what's wrong with the
> world.
>
> Ian
>

This kind of community reaction to a board appointment from the tech sector
has happened before with Arnnon Geshuri. We should have looked at that
history and treaded more carefully.

The community has always been super skeptical of the tech industry and
people associated with it, and we should have been able to anticipate that,
and develop a communication plan to show everyone what a new board member’s
values and mindset are by having them, like… send an introductory email
immediately after their announcement? Otherwise all we have is their
twitter. Maryana’s  hiring as CEO was a good example of a positive
introductory approach that has helped the community assume good faith about
her, for instance.

If we are having trouble retaining CTOs and CPOs, the first people for the
Board and CEO to ask about why are *not* outside tech execs from
venture-backed companies. It’s the tech employees of the Foundation (those
past leaders in those roles and their entire reporting chain), community
software contributors, other leaders of influential projects like Mozilla
that have similar struggles, and potential candidates we liked for
leadership roles who declined their offers. If we need advisors with tech
skills for our incoming CEO, we have dozens of people (remember our long
defunct advisory board? Or perhaps the long-tenured technical staff who
have both expertise and Wikimedia values embedded in their bones?)

None of that work to strengthen our tech organization can be done by a
single Board member alone and it most certainly doesn’t require giving
someone a voting seat on our governing legal body. If we wanted someone so
high profile and crunched for time that they need the board seat to justify
the time spent on advising us, this guy is not it. You could find a lot of
people who—from looking at his LinkedIn—spent two years at Reddit or ran an
engineering team at MSFT who would gladly help us without being on the
board.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:05 AM GorillaWarfare <
> gorillawarfarewikipe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thank you for the further details, Dariusz. What is his experience with
>> free software or open knowledge communities such as ours?
>>
>> I would also love to hear from him directly to know more about whether he
>> feels cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and such technologies have a place in the
>> Wikimedia mission. Do you know if he plans to join the conversation?
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Molly White (User:GorillaWarfare)
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare
>> she/her
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 8:41 AM Dariusz Jemielniak 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Dan,
>>>
>>> Thank you for the feedback!
>>>
>>> The search for a trustee with an expertise in product and technology
>>> began a few months ago. One of the problems we identified was that the
>>> Wikimedia Foundation CTOs (Chief Technology Officer) are usually not
>>> staying for a long period of time, and then there was also a CPO (Chief
>>> Product Officer) transition. It was also important that the new CEO (Chief
>>> Executive Officer) would like to have a trustee with relevant experience
>>> and leadership in the tech world (as would the Board itself), but also with
>>> the understanding and experience of how technology and communities can work
>>> together, so, as you said, Reddit experience is very relevant.
>>>
>>> The other critical factor was diversity – the search was prioritizing
>>> candidates with experience outside of Silicon Valley, in non-English
>>> speaking countries, preferably from the Global South.
>>>
>>> And, of course, we also needed a commitment to spend enough time on the
>>> Board work – to be engaged and present. For example, Luis met online and
>>> offline with Wikimedia volunteers from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking
>>> communities, he is eager to help us with his knowledge and experience.
>>> Cryptocurrency and blockchains were not a factor here – the Governance
>>> Committee, and then the Board, were considering other things Luis brings to
>>> the table, the needed expertise, diversity and commitment.
>>>
>>> I personally am not particularly fond of cryptocurrencies, even though I
>>> appreciate blockchain as a technology, and support e.g. decentralized
>>> science (https://decentralized.science/). We as a movement have not had
>>> a uniform stand on this, and I’m not sure if we should, though.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Dariusz (chair of the BGC)
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 1:40 PM Dan Garry (Deskana) 
>>> wrote:
>>>

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Welcoming the new Wikimedia Foundation CEO

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 11:30 AM Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> Hi Maryana,
>
> Welcome, great opening letter.
>
> You mention that you want to do some of your own volunteer editing in the
> months before you officially start, which is great.
>
> Here is an idea: between now and then, tell absolutely no one what your
> user account is called, and what articles, projects or language versions
> you are working on. I think you might find the experience invaluable.
>

This is a great suggestion. The average Wikipedia editor starts their
editing anonymously or pseudonymously with no reputation attached to their
contributions. Doing the same would give you an honest perspective on the
new contributor experience.

Good luck,
>
> Andreas
>
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 4:36 PM Maryana Iskander 
> wrote:
>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> Thank you for this opportunity to introduce myself to you.
>>
>> When I read the job position [1] for the next leader of Wikimedia
>> Foundation, I noticed that it opened with a seemingly simple statement:
>> “Knowledge belongs to all of us.” Does it, really? It’s a striking
>> statement. In an increasingly unequal and polarizing world, one in which
>> almost nothing belongs to all of us, the idea that knowledge *must *belong
>> to all is enough to capture anyone’s attention and imagination – certainly
>> mine.
>>
>> My story is shaped by a twin belief that knowledge can also set us free.
>> Shortly after I was born in Cairo, Egypt, my parents left for the United
>> States. During my time at university, graduate school, and law school, I
>> was consistently pulled towards some of society’s toughest issues – women’s
>> rights, civil rights, and the rights of prisoners. I was equally pulled by
>> the need to be effective in making change – seeking out leadership
>> positions and raising my hand and voice to change the institutions of
>> power, not just protest against them. I learned that the opportunity to
>> make meaningful impact often sits ‘in-between’ traditional spheres:
>> in-between research and teaching at Rice University, in-between healthcare
>> delivery and advocacy at Planned Parenthood, and in-between government and
>> the private sector at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. My time at all
>> of these organisations required listening to and learning from many diverse
>> stakeholders – including volunteers – and using my position of leadership
>> to champion often unheard voices.
>>
>>
>>
>> In 2012, I followed my heart to South Africa and its very complicated
>> society – a legacy of apartheid perpetuating deep inequality despite the
>> resilience of communities full of potential and hope, and a country with
>> one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. A new
>> organisation had just been formed with a big vision to close this
>> opportunity gap. I signed up, first as an unpaid volunteer, and then for
>> many years as the CEO. My job has been to cultivate a common space of trust
>> for the collective assets of the society – from government, the private
>> sector, civil society, and millions of young people – to work in a
>> coalition to tackle one of the most daunting challenges of our time. To do
>> this, we relied on an inclusive, multi-channel platform that leverages all
>> forms of technology as a way to serve communities still riddled by a basic
>> lack of access. Our successes came from the power of connection,
>> partnership, and a collective belief that young people are the solution,
>> not the problem. As I began my tenth year, I felt it was time to make space
>> for new leaders.
>>
>>
>>
>> Why am I joining the Wikimedia Foundation at this moment? There are many
>> reasons: (1) this collective of projects is growing what is perhaps the
>> most important commons infrastructure of our modern world. I am excited to
>> add my time and talents to this vision. What will it take to create – not
>> just imagine – a world in which every single human being can freely share
>> in the sum of all knowledge? (2) I have experienced first-hand that
>> distributed leadership models can usually achieve more than any group of
>> people can do on their own. I am eager to support processes that will make
>> this even more true for our movement; and (3) I am drawn to working with
>> people of integrity and commitment, who also appreciate humor and joy. I
>> can already see that I will meet new colleagues like this from all over the
>> world.
>>
>>
>>
>> My former colleagues will say that I believe progress is enabled by
>> culture: one that is founded on accountability, diversity and inclusion in
>> all its forms, and a way of working led by values. It has informed an
>> organisational humility in working with others and a relentless focus on
>> getting things done the right way – while doing the right thing.
>>
>>
>>
>> During the recruitment process, I met with a leading academic in the
>> United States named Rebecca. She told me a story of her primary school
>> teacher asking the 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Paid editing dashboard and metrics?

[Steven Walling]

Given that it’s completely trivial to make new pseudonymous accounts how
would you propose even remotely accurate data collection to measure paid
editing?

If we are worried about the impact of paid editors on the integrity of
content, we are much better served investing even more in efforts to
dramatically strengthen our volunteer community’s ability to defend the
projects. That means better software to help each editor do more, making it
fun, easy and welcoming for new contributors, and fighting the attrition in
admins and other functionaries. If our volunteer community was larger and
healthier, the threat of paid interference would be less scary.

On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 7:20 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Aha -- I was pointed to en:wp's List of paid editing companies
> .
> (thanks!)  This is a great resource and deserves to be better linked.   The
> page is semi-active - 4 additions in the last month, including the Olaf
> case. I've cleaned it up a bit and linked it to the German page. This
> really needs some automated scripting and tracking, at the scale of ORES...
>
> Is there any routine analysis / stats compiled of edits associated with
> these orgs, or of their activity online?
>
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 2:19 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> Jan Böhmermann 
>> published an amazing expose on political WP editing in Germany; it gets
>> good around 15 minutes in
>> . In the video he
>> exposed the workings of a paid editing farm run (by Olaf Kosinsky (
>> Wikidata ; CheckUser discussion
>> 
>> ; archived PR-services site
>> ), an
>> excellent long-time editor with over 3 million edits.
>>
>> *We need to distinguish paid editing from general COI editing*.  Paid
>> editing is COI editing by professionals, who have strong external
>> incentives to persist, no leeway in the outcome they are aiming
>> for, experience in doing this in dozens of cases, and may have colleagues
>> who can drop in as 'uninvolved' editors to forge consensus or social
>> proof.[1]
>>
>> This is one of our great recurring challenges, siphoning off both our
>> reputation and our community.  There are many things we can do about paid
>> editing, starting with maintaining *paid-editing metrics and a dashboard*
>> of known and estimated paid editing.  We can estimate its prevalence by the
>> availabiity of services online[2]; and look for patterns of such editing on
>> wiki.  Even with large error margins, this would be a step above simply
>> waiting for outbreaks to be discovered and reacting to the visible bits of
>> the iceberg.
>>
>> What sort of metrics like this do we have already?  Who is working on
>> such things?
>> Since the above video came out, de:wp started a table of WP editing
>> services
>> .
>> It currently includes an initial dozen examples, with no estimate of
>> activity (the 1 account known to be associated with each is in most cases
>> blocked; but most have active websites soliciting work) This would be
>> useful in all languages.
>>
>> SJ
>>
>>  [1] as Melmann wrote
>> 
>>  recently:
>> "*in my experience, **all the most difficult edits are WP:PAID
>> **. Most non-paid COI
>> comes from a place of desire to make things better, and often can be
>> relatively easily guided towards a better place... [or] it is relatively
>> easy to use existing enforcement mechanisms to to correct and ultimately
>> control their behaviours. PR professionals, on the other hand, are subtle
>> and sometimes downright deceptive, and it takes lots of effort to check
>> their edits when most of the time you lack context and expertise and you
>> really have to research in depth to see their edits for what they really
>> are. I think that one of the fundamental mistakes of the current policy is
>> lumping paid editors with general COI editing as paid editors are
>> fundamentally playing on a different level in terms of PR expertise and
>> incentives*"
>>
>> [2] Just searching for this online led to ads from dozens of services.
>> The first 10 below seem to be clones of the same service (perhaps run by
>> the same farm)
>>  Elite Wiki Writers
>>  Wiki Curators
>>  Wiki Genies
>>  Wikipedia Legends
>>  Wiki Page Writing
>>  Wiki Page Creator
>>  WikiProfs
>>  Wiki Specialist LLC
>>  Wiki Writers Workshop
>>  Wikipedia Publisher
>>  Wikipedia Services
>>  360 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Resolution about the upcoming Board elections

[Steven Walling]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 12:47 PM Erik Moeller  wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 10:35 AM Steven Walling
>  wrote:
> > So I don’t think your point is the highest priority item compared to
> deciding the
> > election / appointment for all the rest of the seats.
>
> I agree that's the more important question. Regarding the founder
> seat, I do think it would be good governance to eventually find a way
> to solve the problem it solves (preserving long term institutional
> memory & wisdom on the Board) in a manner that generalizes beyond
> Jimmy's involvement. Not only because Jimmy won't be around forever,
> but also to draw from a more diverse set of voices. That could be done
> through non-voting observers (for which there is precedent), advisors,
> the council, or some other mechanism.


Great point. This definitely makes me think about our underutilized
advisory board. There were a lot of smart people who’ve been on that board
who it seems like we never fully leveraged.

Warmly,
> Erik
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Resolution about the upcoming Board elections

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 4:24 PM Luis Villa  wrote:

> This looks like a very thoughtful start on a very thorny problem, well
> done.
>
> Given that we’re trying to diversify the board, and that Jimmy has
> recently criticized FSF for having lifetime board appointments for
> founders,* I was surprised not to see any mention in this document of
> sunsetting Jimmy’s founder seat. Making him a peer of the rest of the
> board, subject to the same terms, selection process, and requalification
> standards, rather than a first-among-equals, would potentially free up an
> additional seat to improve global board diversity and definitely be
> consistent with general best practices for non-profit governance.
>
> Has the board discussed that?
>
> Thanks-
> Luis
>
> P.S. the links on the last page of
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/8/83/BGC_Community_Trustee_Selection_Proposal_April_2021.pdf
> are broken.
>
> * well, he criticized them for _secretive_ board appointments, but from a
> governance perspective a lifetime founder seat is problematic regardless of
> whether it is secret/defacto (FSF) or public/de jure (WMF).
>

There’s one huge unspoken difference between the FSF and WMF that needs
acknowledgment. When you’re talking about a seat designated for a single
founder, their character, morals, and personality matters. Jimmy is not
Richard Stallman, whose bizarre behavior is more or less legendary.

I think a lot of editors look at the composition of the board (today and
historically) and are super uncomfortable with the number of expert board
members who have pretty much zero idea how the projects actually operate.
In theory the elected community seats are a check on this, but those people
are often very new to board governance.

Jimmy’s combination of deep trust with the community and his perpetual
tenure are a unique asset that far outweighs the risk he does crazy Richard
Stallman public gaffes like eat his foot cheese or defend rapists on
mailing lists. So I don’t think your point is the highest priority item
compared to deciding the election / appointment for all the rest of the
seats.

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 1:45 PM Jackie Koerner 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met last week to decide on a
>> plan for the 2021 Board elections. The Board Governance Committee created
>> this proposal, based on the Call for Feedback about Community Board
>> Seats.[1] Please check the related announcement for details.[2]
>>
>> The Board wants to thank the more than 800 volunteers that participated
>> in the Call for Feedback in one way or another.[3] There were almost a
>> hundred conversations in multiple languages and in multiple regions. There
>> was additional discussion on Meta, Telegram, and other channels used by
>> local communities. Three new ideas were presented by volunteers during the
>> Call. It has been very difficult to decide on every open question
>> considering the quantity and diversity of opinions received. We hope this
>> resolution feels sensible to everybody.
>>
>> In the upcoming days, the Board elections facilitation team will share
>> their ideas to support candidates and voters. Let's work together on
>> elections with high and very diverse participation!
>>
>> [1] Call for Feedback Community Board Seats
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees/Call_for_feedback:_Community_Board_seats/Main_report
>>
>> [2] Announcement of Board Governance Committee proposal
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/2021-04-15_Resolution_about_the_upcoming_Board_elections
>>
>> [3] Call for Feedback Community Board seats metrics
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees/Call_for_feedback:_Community_Board_seats/Main_report#Metrics
>>
>>
>> --
>> *Jackie Koerner*
>>
>> *she/her*
>> Board Governance Facilitator
>> *English language and Meta-Wiki*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Moving the technical infrastructure out of the US

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 12:22 PM Nathan  wrote:

> Well, to Steven's point that you might need a jurisdiction where corporate
> officers and employees aren't subject to extradition... I believe Germany
> does in fact have an extradition treaty with the United States.
>

The chapters do seem like the obvious potentially viable easy
solution here, if WMF set up that contingency plan.

For instance, if WMDE did take over in an emergency, then the critical
difference is that Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens to the US. So
there'd just have to be a complete handoff of primary hosting to outside
the US and some kind of agreement for WMDE (or pick your chapter) to take
over operational control. There's probably a lot that real lawyers, of
which I am not one, would know better here.


> So far the criteria I'm hearing from the comments here:
>
> 1) Politically stable
> 2) Liberal political environment
> 3) Strong protections against government interference in relevant
> operations
> 4) Section 230-like protection against liability for user content
> 5) No natural disasters like fires, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, etc.
> 6) Strong technological sophistication - preferably a robust technology
> industry that can supply local talent for WMF needs
> 7) Protections in the law for data privacy
> 8) Availability of renewable energy sources and other resources that allow
> for operation of the WMF with a low climate impact
> 9) Tax exemption or beneficial tax structure for receiving international
> fundings by donation
> 10) Clear and reliable regulatory framework for a charitable organization
> 11) Safe - low crime, low-risk of violence for WMF stakeholders and
> community
> 12) Free from risk of extradition to the U.S. or other jurisdictions where
> criminal or civil law might be used against WMF officers or employees
>
> I would guess the list of countries that meet all of these criteria might
> be short. Norway might hit most of these except the last.
>

The only item that seems more or less impossible is preventing 5 in light
of the impacts of climate change. There is no locale on the planet that
won't suffer from severe weather and natural disasters, just some (like the
poorer countries and anywhere in the tropics) that will see worse impacts.
So the only nuance is aiming for more like "Prepared for the event of
severe weather and natural disasters" not "none".

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 2:44 PM Michael Peel  wrote:
>
> > … hence the existence of Wikimedia chapters? I suspect at least WMDE
> could
> > take this on if it becomes necessary, although other chapters aren’t as
> > technologically developed as I’d have liked to have seen.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Mike
> >
> > > On 30 Sep 2020, at 19:35, Steven Walling 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > SJ hinted at a related problem which is that we'd also need a backup
> > > organizational structure to run things operationally and legally. If
> the
> > US
> > > becomes so politically unstable that hosting Wikimedia data is under
> > threat
> > > there, just moving the data would not be enough. You'd also have to
> > include
> > > a contingency plan that foresaw the need to legally operate the
> > Foundation
> > > (or an equivalent organization anyway) under a different jurisdiction
> > > with corporate officers not subject to US law or extradition. If the
> > > servers are hosted in the EU but the legally controlling body and its
> > > employees are within the US, you could still see them legally forced to
> > > comply with an order, just like companies are forced to do so in
> > > other countries with censorious regimes today.
> > >
> > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 8:59 AM Samuel Klein 
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We should have technical partners in multiple other jurisdictions that
> > >> could help in a crisis, and load bearing infrastructure in at least
> one
> > of
> > >> them, and a plan for how and when to switch. (The walkthrough of what
> > would
> > >> be needed for a smooth transfer send most important, and useful for
> > general
> > >> reliability planning)
> > >>
> > >> We should also fully support and realize Wikimedia-on-ipfs, similar to
> > what
> > >> the internet archive had been doing. (Santhosh has some excellent
> ideas
> > >> there)
> > >>
> > >> 
> > >>
> > >> On Wed., Sep. 30, 2020, 5:35 a.m. Dan Garry (Deskana), <
> > djgw...@gmail.com>
> > >> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 09:49,

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Moving the technical infrastructure out of the US

[Steven Walling]

SJ hinted at a related problem which is that we'd also need a backup
organizational structure to run things operationally and legally. If the US
becomes so politically unstable that hosting Wikimedia data is under threat
there, just moving the data would not be enough. You'd also have to include
a contingency plan that foresaw the need to legally operate the Foundation
(or an equivalent organization anyway) under a different jurisdiction
with corporate officers not subject to US law or extradition. If the
servers are hosted in the EU but the legally controlling body and its
employees are within the US, you could still see them legally forced to
comply with an order, just like companies are forced to do so in
other countries with censorious regimes today.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 8:59 AM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> We should have technical partners in multiple other jurisdictions that
> could help in a crisis, and load bearing infrastructure in at least one of
> them, and a plan for how and when to switch. (The walkthrough of what would
> be needed for a smooth transfer send most important, and useful for general
> reliability planning)
>
> We should also fully support and realize Wikimedia-on-ipfs, similar to what
> the internet archive had been doing. (Santhosh has some excellent ideas
> there)
>
> 
>
> On Wed., Sep. 30, 2020, 5:35 a.m. Dan Garry (Deskana), 
> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 09:49, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> >
> > > I hope that some preliminary contingency plans exist or are being
> > > developed, and I'm sure that the movement-wide debate will widen if
> > > the US continues its downward slide into authoritarianism.
> > >
> >
> > I agree with Erik. Even under the Obama administration, there were
> threats
> > to the existence of the movement, such as SOPA [1] which lead to a
> blackout
> > [2]. One can extrapolate from current events that these threats could
> well
> > get larger and more frequent, rather than smaller and less frequent,
> should
> > someone in the US Government decide to focus their attention on attacking
> > Wikipedia and free knowledge. It would be prudent to create a contingency
> > plan which includes an exploration of other options for a location of
> > operation for the Wikimedia Foundation and/or its servers, with their
> > advantages and disadvantages. I personally wouldn't necessarily advocate
> > for making the plan public; that would be ideal, but I'd be comforted
> > merely to know it exists.
> >
> > On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 23:36, Joseph Seddon 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I believe options are going to be explored for sustainability but right
> > now
> > > legally speaking the US is the best jurisdiction for hosting us now and
> > the
> > > foreseeable future.
> > >
> >
> > I agree with this too. For now, the United States remains the best place
> > for the organisation to operate out of, and a move should not be actively
> > considered.
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
> > [2]:
> >
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA#Wikimedia_community
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Summary of the Brand Project presentation

[Steven Walling]

I can't believe I'm saying this but I agree with Fæ as well.

Having been on the inside at some companies that underwent controversial
rebrands, I can see how this might be a very early stage thing to help
guide and shape thinking about how to approach a rebrand by unifying around
a high level concept. I can see how in the name of transparency the team
might be sharing very early stage work like that with the community, but if
that's truly what it is (early exploratory thinking, not finished work) it
would probably help to explain that this is not anywhere close to finalized
work. People who don't do brand design tend to have little patience or
interest in hand-wavy concepts without a concrete expression, Wikipedians
maybe least of all.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 2:30 AM Chris Gates via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

> As it appears my earlier email was not approved by the moderators:
>
> I'm in agreement with Fæ on this.
>
> The text and videos given on the subject of the new "interconnection" focus
> is all extremely vague. I don't see how this is a change from previous
> branding, or how the idea of "interconnection" will change anything.
> Specifically in regard to the video, I was surprised by the vagueness.
> Obviously, everything is connected. We are all humans with a majority of
> similar characteristics and a high potential for similar experiences.
> Putting together a few videos of people from different cultures
> collaborating and some videos of nature doesn't make a branding strategy.
>
> I am very happy that, in the presentation, a timeline was addressed and
> that there will be ample time for feedback on the proposed naming
> conventions. I am looking forward to that; this project has been quite
> vague for a while, and I hope there's some great ideas we can, as a
> community, discuss.
>
> Best regards,
> Chris Gates
> (User:Vermont)
>
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 1:44 PM Anders Wennersten <
> m...@anderswennersten.se>
> wrote:
>
> > I have a background in a telecom supplier, and we were proud to talk of
> > us "connecting people" and with 5G (where things also gets connected)
> > "interconenctivity" would be a great brand concept for that company.
> >
> > But for Wikimedia I have never felt this as a relevant brandconcept. To
> > "share and spread knowledge"is the core word as far as I see it and have
> > been all the time.
> >
> > Anders
> >
> >
> > Den 2020-04-18 kl. 18:44, skrev Peter Southwood:
> > > I agree. It did not seem to say anything much.
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Fæ
> > > Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 3:06 PM
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Summary of the Brand Project presentation
> > >
> > > Have now watched "interconnection". It did not seem to say anything
> > > tangible apart from stuff like you find 'interconnection in nature' in
> > > the 2 minutes. It was produced to a good standard.
> > >
> > > Sorry, it was not encouraging. The question remains of how much this
> > > is costing the movement in WMF funding and valuable Wikimedia
> > > community time without any clear outcomes being defined that the
> > > Wikimedia community wants or could use to benefit the core value of
> > > adding to the sum of human knowledge. Why the "rebranding" project
> > > continues at this time remains an enigma.
> > >
> > > We have gone ahead and added the video to Commons. If superseded it
> > > will remain useful as a snapshot as of 16 April.
> > >
> >
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Our_unified_concept_interconnection.webm
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Fae
> > >
> > > On Fri, 17 Apr 2020 at 09:57, Samir Elsharbaty
> > >  wrote:
> > >> Hi everyone,
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Yesterday, the 2030 Brand Movement Project presented the unified
> concept
> > >> that will guide the upcoming branding proposals. Thanks to the 224
> > >> attendees who watched the presentation live! Participants brought a
> > great
> > >> stream of comments and questions (averaging 8 per minute!) that helped
> > >> clarify important points.
> > >>
> > >> The unified concept, “interconnection”, was arrived at after many
> > community
> > >> workshops, exercises, and conversations. “Interconnection” distills
> the
> > 23
> > >> distinct concepts generated in workshops into a single word that links
> > >> together the insights and definitions from the participants, and at
> the
> > >> same time adds more meaning to the answer to the question who are we?
> > This
> > >> concept will not be a public or visible part of branding, but rather a
> > >> guiding idea.
> > >>
> > >> Take a look at the video explaining interconnection as a unified
> concept
> > >> [1].
> > >>
> > >> You can watch the full presentation video, together with the lively
> > >> discussion that accompanied it [2]. Most of the questions were
> answered
> > >> during the 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Partial blocks update

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 5:09 PM Sydney Poore  wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation Anti-Harassment Tools team is wrapping up
> improvements
> to Special:Block that added the ability to set a Partial block
> <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Per_user_page,_namespace,_category,_and_upload_blocking
> >
> .
>
> While no functionality has changed for sitewide blocks, Special:Block now
> allows for the ability to block a named user account or ip address from:
>
>1.
>
>Editing one or more specific page(s)
>2.
>
>Editing all pages within one or more namespace(s)
>3.
>
>Emailing other users
>
>
> Administrators on all Wikimedia projects are invited to test this new way
> of doing blocks on testwiki. Admins can reply off list to this email to
> request access to test.
>
> Administrators on wikis where partial blocks are deployed are invited to
> share with other Wikimedia administrators examples of the way that partial
> blocks are being used.
>

This is so great. Kudos to the team for adding tools to prevent abuse and
harassment that allow for more targeted policy enforcement.

How do we see which wikis have partial blocks deployed already / are
planning to have it deployed? And is there any way administrators can
request deployment?


>
>-
>
>Share on meta
>
>-
>
>Share in google form
><
> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PTGNGhYvMgXMdR5gfle67ojzK23EabV3Ch0FRmaNejs/edit
> >
>
> Other feedback can be left on Meta
> <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Partial_blocks/Feedback
> >
> or
> by email .
>
> For the Anti-Harassment Tools team.
> Sydney
> --
> Sydney Poore (she/her)
> Strategist, socio-technical
> Wikimedia Foundation
> Trust and Safety team;
> Anti-harassment tools team
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] America may go bizarro, but Wikipedia has a choice to make

[Steven Walling]

Great question to think about for our long term sustainability. I think we
already have a universal "plan B" however? It's providing all content under
free licenses and regularly distributing complete dumps of our content.

Many larger and more well-funded technology organizations (Google,
Facebook, etc.) regularly do disaster recovery scenarios that account for
not just governmental disruption or civil unrest but events such as a major
earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. The movement doesn't really have
the resources to do this effectively in the same manner.

It seems like decentralizing our ability to recover from a disruption is
the most effective defense we have, *especially *in the scenario involving
government intervention because the Foundation's infrastructural and legal
presence in the United States is actually one of the more brittle pieces
within our movement.

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 9:18 AM Fæ  wrote:

> Dear fellow Wikimedians, please sit back for a moment and ponder the
> following,
>
> For those of us not resident in the US, it has been genuinely alarming
> to see highly respected US government archives vanish overnight,
> reference websites go down, and US legislation appear to drift to
> whatever commercial interests have the loudest current political
> voices. Sadly "populism" is happening now, and dominates American
> politics, driving changes of all sorts in response to politically
> inflated and vague rhetoric about "security" and "fakenews". It is not
> inconceivable that a popularist current or future US Government could
> decide to introduce emergency controls over websites like Wikipedia,
> virtually overnight.[1][2][3][4]
>
> The question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation should have a hot
> switch option, so that if a "disaster" strikes in America, we could
> continue running Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from other countries
> has been raised on this list several times over many years. The WMF
> and its employees are heavily invested in staying in Silicon Valley,
> and that will stay true unless external risks become extreme.
>
> However, there has never been a rationale to avoid investing in a Plan
> B. A robust plan, where the WMF can switch operations over to a
> hosting country with a sufficiently welcoming with stable national
> government and legislation, that our projects could continue to meet
> our open knowledge goals virtually uninterrupted and without risk of
> political control. A Plan B would ensure that if the US Government
> started to discuss controlling Wikipedia, then at least that published
> plan would be a realistic response. If they tried doing it, we could
> simply power off our servers in the USA, rather than compromise our
> content.
>
> If anyone knows of committed investment in a practical WMF Plan B, it
> would be reassuring to share it more widely at this time. If not, more
> of us should be asking about it, politely, persistently but perhaps
> less patiently than indefinitely. :-)
>
> Links:
> 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46739180
> 2. http://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/research/updates/populism
> 3.
> https://www.cnet.com/news/obama-signs-order-outlining-emergency-internet-control
> "... this order was designed to empower certain governmental agencies
> with control over telecommunications and the Web during natural
> disasters and security emergencies."
> 4.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency-powers/576418
> "The president could seize control of U.S. internet traffic, impeding
> access to certain websites and ensuring that internet searches return
> pro-Trump content as the top results."
> 5. Bizarro, as used in the title of this email:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World
>
> Thanks,
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Apple Pay donations

[Steven Walling]

Thanks Lisa!
On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 7:57 AM Lisa Gruwell <lgruw...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi Steven-
>
> Yes, we are excited about Apple Pay's new ability to accept donations. It
> is on our product roadmap, but we are not certain yet when we will be
> rolling it out.
>
> And thanks, Amir, for selecting us for Amazon Smile!
>
> Best,
>
> Lisa Gruwell
>
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 4:06 AM, Antoine Musso <hashar+...@free.fr> wrote:
>
> > On 15/11/16 02:12, Steven Walling wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>  Given that payments on mobile are such a huge headache and
> >> declining desktop traffic to Wikimedia properties, it might be an
> >> interesting pilot to explore nonetheless.
> >>
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Going out of topic sorry. Regarding mobile and desktop traffic declining,
> > according to https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/
> >
> > * Overall page views is about the same since 2013.
> > * Mobile traffic quickly raised until reaching a plateau in 2015.
> >
> > Surely one can say that traffic shifted to mobile, but for the last two
> > years the desktop/mobile ratio seems fairly stable.
> >
> >
> > The Fundraising team might have some data regarding donations made
> through
> > desktop vs mobile and their evolution though.  Maybe mobile has a better
> > engagement rate, then the mobile app is only a drop of our traffic.
> >
> > --
> > Antoine "hashar" Musso
> >
> >
> >
> > ___
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> > i/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
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> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
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[Wikimedia-l] Apple Pay donations

[Steven Walling]

Hey all,

Today Apple announced a bunch of 501(c)3 partners which now can use Apple
Pay to make instant donations. Announcement at:
http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/11/a-touch-of-giving-with-apple-pay.html

Does WMF fundraising have plans to integrate with Apple Pay, especially on
mobile devices? I understand that right now it's limited to the US and the
team has been focusing a ton on international payment providers (which is
great). Given that payments on mobile are such a huge headache and
declining desktop traffic to Wikimedia properties, it might be an
interesting pilot to explore nonetheless.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] With my thanks to everyone ...

[Steven Walling]

Congrats on the new role Geoff, and thank you so much for your leadership
over the last half-decade. You have been a huge asset to the movement, and
will be sorely missed.
On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 3:29 PM Olatunde Isaac 
wrote:

> Thanks for your impeccable service,  Geoff. Wishing you all the best in
> your future endeavors.
>
> Isaac
> Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Pine W 
> Sender: "Wikimedia-l" Date: Wed,
> 13 Jul 2016 14:32:29
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] With my thanks to everyone ...
>
> Thank you for your service, Geoff. I hope that we will still see you
> around. Good luck with the new gig. :)
>
> Regards,
>
> Pine
>
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Geoff Brigham 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Over the past five years, I’ve been honored to serve as the General
> Counsel
> > and Secretary of the Wikimedia Foundation. This job has been amazing, and
> > I’m grateful to everyone who has made it so rewarding. It's now time for
> my
> > next step, so, in the coming days, I will be leaving the Foundation to
> > pursue a new career opportunity.
> >
> > I depart with such love for the mission, the Foundation, the Wikimedia
> > communities, and my colleagues at work. I thank my past and present
> bosses
> > as well as the Board for their support and guidance. I stand in awe of
> the
> > volunteer writers, editors, and photographers who contribute every day to
> > the Wikimedia projects. And I will hold special to my heart my past and
> > current teams, including legal and community advocacy. :) You have
> taught,
> > given, and enriched me so much.
> >
> > After my departure, Michelle Paulson will serve as interim head of Legal,
> > and, subject to Board approval, Stephen LaPorte will serve as interim
> > Secretary to the Board. I can happily report that they have the
> experience
> > and expertise to ensure a smooth and professional transition.
> >
> > The future of the Foundation under Katherine's leadership is exciting.
> > Having had the pleasure of working for her, I know Katherine will take
> the
> > Foundation to its next level in promoting and defending the outstanding
> > mission and values of the Wikimedia movement. Although I'm delighted
> about
> > my next opportunity, I will miss this new chapter in the Foundation's
> > story.
> >
> > My last day at the Foundation will be July 18th. After that, I will take
> a
> > month off to recharge my batteries, and then I start my new gig at
> YouTube
> > in the Bay Area. There, I will serve as Director of YouTube Trust &
> Safety,
> > managing global teams for policy, legal, and anti-abuse operations. As
> with
> > Wikimedia, I look forward to learning from those teams and tackling
> > together a new set of exciting, novel challenges.
> >
> > For those who want to stay in touch, please do! My personal email is:
> > geoffrey.r.brig...@gmail.com.
> >
> > With respect, admiration, and gratitude,
> >
> > Geoff
> > ___
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> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Campaigns extension / ServerSideAccountCreation log - does anyone still use it?

[Steven Walling]

Hey Brad,

That sounds fine to me.

We previously used the loginCTA campaign to measure the value of that
secondary button on the login page (
ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/graphs/enwiki_campaigns) but it doesn't need to
happen on an ongoing basis.

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 11:31 AM Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 
wrote:

> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <
> bjor...@wikimedia.org
> > wrote:
>
> > Question 1: Would anyone care if we kill the "loginCTA" campaign, which
> > tracks when people use the link at the bottom of Special:UserLogin to get
> > to the account creation page?
> >
> > Question 2: Would anyone care if we remove the extension entirely from
> > Wikimedia wikis? Wikiapiary seems to show only one user outside of
> > Wikimedia.
> >
>
> Following up on this: Since the answer to Question 2 was yes, we've done
> the necessary update to Campaigns so it will continue working with
> AuthManager.[1] Since no one answered Question 1, the loginCTA campaign has
> been removed. It will stop showing up in 1.28.0-wmf.4, which rolls out this
> week.
>
>  [1]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/291280/
>
>
> --
> Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
> Senior Software Engineer
> Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [WikimediaMobile] "Among mobile sites, Wikipedia reigns in terms of popularity"

[Steven Walling]

It's really great to see Wikipedia highlighted as a source for news and
current events. It's rare that people fully recognize the degree to which
the "encyclopedia" is actually very good at trending news information. That
said, the report paints a rosy picture that, strategically speaking, may
not be cause for celebration.

Remember that, when looking at pageviews, we're a little over 40% mobile.
Most other major Internet properties are now primarily mobile, and that's
where most media consumption is even in once desktop-centric markets like
the US.(1)

Has Dario or anyone done an update on the traffic analysis from 2014,(2)
where we concluded that declining desktop traffic in mature markets like
the US was not being offset by mobile web? What's the current state of the
world when it comes to Wikipedia mobile traffic, overall and broken down by
app vs. mobile web?

It seems obvious that part of the reason Wikipedia is so popular on mobile
web is because we're an odd duck -- Wikimedia is one of the only top media
orgs not doing any kind of app upsell at all on mobile web. The vast
majority of major Internet properties heavily push app installs and usage
to varying degrees of aggressiveness. This directly sacrifices mobile web
traffic for a longterm gain in reader retention.

The linked report shows that Wikipedia app users are much more engaged --
avg time spent per person in the Wikipedia app is more than double that of
mobile web, according to their data -- but the number of app users is
ridiculously tiny, relatively speaking.(3) In commercial apps, prioritizing
long term retention of app users is good for a business. They can then be
converted to subscribers, purchase in-app upgrades, or click on ads. In the
Wikimedia context, greater mobile retention and time spent could be used to
teach people to contribute, and to facilitate less aggressive forms of
mobile fundraising than we've previously had to do. Not to mention
providing readers with faster direct access to knowledge, and doing a
better job of teaching mobile-first US in emerging markets what Wikipedia
is.

Neglecting to show people the value of the apps will help grow mobile web
traffic in the short term, but in the long run may leave us entirely
dependent on search (i.e. Google) or simply not growing readers, despite
millions of people still coming online via mobile. In the report data you
can see that most of the US news sites mentioned are dependent on Facebook,
even if they have an app. Unlike them, Wikipedia has an opportunity to get
away from being dependent on another source for readers, and be one of the
primary apps that every person on the planet uses, alongside Facebook,
messaging tools, and similar. Right now, we're squandering that
opportunity, and it's going to get harder to change as time goes on.

1.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/majority-of-digital-media-consumption-now-takes-place-in-mobile-apps/
2.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Readership_Update,_WMF_Metrics_Meeting,_December.pdf
3.
https://medium.com/mobile-first-news-how-people-use-smartphones-to/news-goes-mobile-how-people-use-smartphones-to-access-information-53ccb850d80a#.ofpb8txup

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 12:50 PM Michael Peel  wrote:

> Isn't it time to start moving to responsive mediawiki templates (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design), rather than having
> a separate mobile interface/URL?
>
> For a practical example, see the BBC News website (
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news), which is the same website on all devices, it
> just rescales the content/navigation/layout to suit the device. (Try
> resizing your web browser on your computer to the size of a mobile web
> browser to see what I mean.)
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
> > On 11 May 2016, at 20:36, Gerard Meijssen 
> wrote:
> >
> > Hoi,
> > It is wonderful to see how we have evolved.. Does anyone remember the
> good
> > old days when it was an application totally and utterly outside of
> > MediaWiki?
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
> >
> > On 11 May 2016 at 20:33, Pine W  wrote:
> >
> >> Forwarding since this may be of general interest regarding Wikipedia
> >> readership.
> >>
> >> Thanks Tilman!
> >>
> >> Pine
> >>
> >> -- Forwarded message --
> >> From: Tilman Bayer 
> >> Date: Wed, May 11, 2016 at 10:23 AM
> >> Subject: [WikimediaMobile] "Among mobile sites, Wikipedia reigns in
> terms
> >> of popularity"
> >> To: mobile-l 
> >> Cc: Wikimedia developers , Analytics
> Team
> >> -
> >> Internal 
> >>
> >>
> >> New study (US only) by the Knight Foundation:
> >> https://medium.com/mobile-first-news-how-people-use-smartphones-to ,
> >> summarized here:
> >>
> >>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/people-love-wikipedia/482268/
> >>
> >> "People spent more time on Wikipedia’s 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thank you, Jan-Bart and Stu

[Steven Walling]

Thanks for starting this thread Lodewijk.

Jan-Bart and Stu: Wikimedia has been lucky to have your participation over
these years.

Stu, thank you in particular for helping steer the financial governance of
the Wikimedia movement. Your expertise and professionalism have been deeply
important to making sure Wikimedia is a good steward of the money entrusted
to us by donors.

Jan-Bart, my friend, you are a force to be reckoned with. It is difficult
to sum up the total impact of your leadership in the movement. I find
myself falling back on memories not just of your formal role on the board,
but of your warmth and generosity of spirit. I hope leaving the board (this
time) doesn't mean your Wikimania streak will be broken. ;-)

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 11:11 PM Lodewijk 
wrote:

> While we have long discussions on this list about board composition, we
> seem to almost ignore the fact that two long time veterans are leaving the
> Wikimedia Foundation board, as scheduled. Jan-Bart de Vreede and Stu West
> have been around longer than many regular editors nowadays, and I think
> there are not many people who can recall the days that the board didn't
> have them on it. I have never had the pleasure to serve on the board with
> them, but a little thank-you from our community side, would seem in place.
>
> Stu joined the board already in 2008 (filling Michael Davis' seat), and has
> been a solid power on the board's audit responsibilities (I believe he
> chaired the audit committee for quite a while) and was a force behind the
> accountability of movement affiliates. While we often strongly disagreed on
> affiliate issues, I appreciate the fact that he always remained
> constructive and wanted to think about solutions rather than problems. He
> served both as treasurer and vice chair.
>
> Jan-Bart was on the board even longer, since early 2007, and I recall
> already working with him through Kennisnet (a Dutch foundation for
> education and IT) before that. Jan-Bart is one of those rare people who
> went to ALL wikimania conferences, and can be easily recognised there with
> his big smile. I can't remember a theme Jan-Bart didn't work on in the past
> years (Affiliates, HR, searching a new Executive Director) and he served
> the board in many positions, including as chair.
>
> I'm sure that the WMF communications staff and/or board has a nice thankyou
> coming up - with a more accurate description of the awesome work they did,
> that I now made up from the top of my head. But in the mean time, I'd like
> to do it myself: Thank you Jan-Bart and Stu for all the time, energy and
> effort that you poured into our movement. I know that not all of us
> appreciate this as much as we perhaps should, and sometimes you may even
> have perceived us as hostile. I do sincerely hope that you had fun with us
> though, and I'm confident that you made a big dent in our impossible
> mission of sharing the sum of all knowledge with everyone.
>
> I hope to meet you again soon, at least in Italy at Wikimania, and I hope
> to see you around in our movement in many different ways.
>
> Best,
>
> Lodewijk
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Steven Walling]

Pine,

Given that the way James and the Board should relate to staff was one issue
that lead to his removal, the situation in the wider WMF as an organization
is highly relevant here.

Under normal, smoothly-functioning circumstances (and most of my 4 year
tenure at WMF) there was little reason for non-executive staff to interact
with the Board in a professional capacity. If that isn't the case and staff
are trying to communicate with the Board directly a lot, it is smoke
pointing to a burning fire somewhere.

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 10:57 PM Pine W  wrote:

> I agree that the turnover issue is a matter that needs some consideration.
> But I think that issue is more relevant to the ED rather than the Board. I
> would appreciate it if we could keep that issue separate from the murky
> circumstances of James' departure and the conflicting testimony that has
> been given in public, the *possible* official misconduct with regards to
> improper withholding of financial information from James, the community's
> desire for significantly more transparency and openness from the Board, and
> the credibility of the Board's leadership.
>
> Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Revision scoring as a service launched

[Steven Walling]

This is really cool! Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 7:51 PM Dario Taraborelli <
dtarabore...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> (cross-posting from wikitech-l)
>
> Today we published an announcement on the Wikimedia blog marking the
> official launch of revision scoring as a service <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service>
> and I wanted to say a few words about this project:
>
> Blog post:
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/
> <
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/
> >
> Docs on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES>
>
> First off: what’s revision scoring <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service#Rationale>?
> On the surface, it’s a set of open APIs allowing you to automatically
> “score” any edit and measure their probability of being damaging or
> good-faith contributions. The real goal behind this project, though, is to
> fix the damage indirectly caused by vandal-fighting bots and tools on
> good-faith contributors and to bring back a collaborative dimension to how
> we do quality control on Wikipedia. I invite you to read the whole blog
> post <
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/>
> if you want to know more about the motivations and expected outcome of this
> project.
>
> I am thrilled this project is coming to fruition and I’d like to
> congratulate Aaron Halfaker <
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Ahalfaker> and all the project
> contributors <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service#Team>
> on hitting this big milestone: revision scoring started as Aaron’s side
> project well over a year ago and it has been co-designed (as in – literally
> – conceived, implemented, tested, improved and finally adopted) by a
> distributed team of volunteer developers, editors, and researchers. We
> worked with volunteers in 14 different Wikipedia language editions and as
> of today revision scores are integrated <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service#Tools_that_use_ORES>
> in the workflow of several quality control interfaces, WikiProjects and 3rd
> party tools. The project would not have seen the light without the
> technical support provided by the TechOps team (Yuvi in particular) and
> seminal funding provided by the WMF IEG program and Wikimedia Germany.
>
> So, here you go: the next time someone tells you that LLAMAS GROW ON TREES
>  you can
> confidently tell them they should stop damaging <
> http://ores.wmflabs.org/scores/enwiki/damaging/642215410/> Wikipedia.
>
> Dario
>
>
> Dario Taraborelli  Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
> wikimediafoundation.org  • nitens.org <
> http://nitens.org/> • @readermeter 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] internet-in-a-boxs to the refugee camps?

[Steven Walling]

Offline access is a nice idea, but the logistics of delivery seem daunting.
Thankfully, a large number of refugees and migrants have smartphones.[1]

Probably the biggest ways we could help refugees are really to:

A) make Wikipedia super performant on mobile, particularly for low-end
Android devices

B) make Wikipedia free via mobile programs like Zero or SMS gateways, so
people who can't pay for data can access it

C) get more relevant, updated content in Arabic. Articles on relevant
subjects are much shorter than in English, etc.[2]

1.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/europe/a-21st-century-migrants-checklist-water-shelter-smartphone.html
2.
https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D8%B2%D9%85%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%86_%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89_%D8%A3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A8%D8%A7

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 11:00 PM Neil P. Quinn  wrote:

> This reminds me of several conversations I had with Barbara Schack of
> Libraries Without Borders [1] at the Lyon hackathon (I've copied her on
> this email).
>
> They've developed the Ideas Box [2], a portable media center intended for
> locations like refugee camps. It's similar to the Internet-in-a-Box,
> although it takes the concept further by including client devices, toys,
> and furniture as well as an offline content server (it's really quite
> cool). As you'd imagine, the Ideas Box includes read access to downloaded
> Wikipedia content; however, Barbara told me she wanted Ideas Box users to
> have the opportunity to contribute as well as simply read, and asked us
> what it would take to make that possible.
>
> We talked about it a good deal and had a brainstorming workshop on the
> subject; I recorded many of the ideas in Phabricator [3]. The technical
> challenges are significant, so I don't think anybody has pursued the
> project since then. However, if anyone out there wants to work on bridging
> this aspect of the digital divide, I'm sure Barbara would be excited to
> work with you!
>
> [1]: http://www.librarieswithoutborders.org/
> [2]: http://www.ideas-box.org/en/
> [3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100154
>
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Comet styles  wrote
>
> > contrary to the name, it doesn't actually have 'internet access'
> > ..they can read, but not contribute..
> >
> > On 9/8/15, Jane Darnell  wrote:
> > > Good idea. I watched a report on TV where they said some refugees have
> > been
> > > waiting for years for processing. It would be nice for them to be able
> to
> > > use and maybe contribute to Wikipedia while they are waiting. Maybe we
> > > should set up edit-a-thons and wikiclasses about life in Europe and the
> > > politics of the crisis, for the refugees and the Europeans both!
> > >
> > > On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Leinonen Teemu <
> teemu.leino...@aalto.fi>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hello people,
> > >>
> > >> Just an idea. Number of Syrian refugees is over 4,000,000 people,
> mostly
> > >> residing in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.[1] Refugee camps are set
> > in
> > >> all in these countries.[2]
> > >>
> > >> Internet-in-a-Box[3] is a a WiFI-device with "Wikipedia in 37
> > languages, a
> > >> library of 40,000 e-books, most of the world's open source software
> and
> > >> source code, hundreds of hours of instructional videos, and world-wide
> > >> mapping down to street level.”
> > >>
> > >> Could we as a movement get the internet-in-a-box to the refugee camps?
> > >>
> > >> - Teemu
> > >>
> > >> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War
> > >> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_refugee_camps
> > >> [3] http://internet-in-a-box.org
> > >>
> > >> --
> > >> Teemu Leinonen
> > >> http://teemuleinonen.fi
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> >
> > --
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF office location and remodel

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:58 PM Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 Questions:

 What happens to the remodel expenses that WMF is paying for at its current
 location? If WMF vacates the premesis, will it be compensated for the
 remodel by the building owner?

 I hope that WMF is contemplating fully exiting the San Francisco market
 area in order to economize, get better value for our donors' funds, have
 less competition for talent, and lower costs of living for staff. Is this
 being considered?


Keep in mind that the WMF already mitigates the cost and competition of the
San Francisco Bay Area market by recruiting remote employees.

According to the recent report (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.pdf)
a large number are based either in other U.S. states or internationally.
Out of 202 employees, 77% are US-based in 19 states and 23% are based
abroad in 19 countries.

Combine the remote employees in the U.S. and abroad, I wouldn't be
surprised if close to half of staff are based remotely. On engineering
teams especially, it's not uncommon for a majority of employees to be
remote.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement: WMF to file suit against the NSA

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:00 AM Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 Steven Walling has written an interesting answer on Quora about one aspect
 of the New York Times op-ed, i.e. the threat NSA surveillance supposedly
 poses to Wikipedians living under oppressive regimes:

 https://www.quora.com/Would-stopping-NSA-surveillance-
 really-make-Wikipedia-editors-living-under-repressive-
 governments-safer/answer/Steven-Walling


Chiming in since this is my answer... Keep in mind questions on Quora are
pretty tightly scoped, i.e. this isn't necessarily an indictment of the
rationale for suing NSA overall. It's an answer to a specific aspect of the
arguments. If we want to argue about whether NSA dragnet surveillance is
overall a threat to Wikipedia as an educational project, there's a whole
other set of arguments that I think potentially support this action,
including the fact that a complete lack of privacy has a chilling effect on
editing regardless of what country you reside in, and that we promise
readers that their reading activity isn't tracked.**

The big tradeoff for me as a Wikipedian is whether this suit takes time,
attention, and funds away from tackling core challenges like the decline in
readership, editor recruitment/retention, and modernizing our software
platform. I think the fact that this is being led by ACLU, and that the
main cost to WMF seems to be in some time/attention of legal, comms, etc.
makes me feel a bit more comfortable. I do worry about dragging away Lila's
attention from these deep intractable problems with the ecosystem, but I'm
not really comfortable standing up to say this whole endeavor is a waste of
time or a bad use of the brand. We also don't really know how this is
dominating her or any other staffer's time, because we're not their bosses.
(Thankfully for them.)

** If anyone here wants to add their 2 cents, please do. There's also a
question at
https://www.quora.com/Wikimedia-Lawsuit-Against-the-NSA-2015/How-do-Wikipedia-editors-feel-about-the-lawsuit-against-NSA
which is relevant.



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[Wikimedia-l] Commons copyright extremism

[Steven Walling]

I just noticed a disturbing trend on Commons that highlights a general
issue with its use as the media repository for our projects.

I recently had an image nominated for deletion under Commons policy against
photos of packaging: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:PACKAGING.
It was of some Japanese candy that someone brought back.

The first issue here is one of demotivating contributors. I took a photo of
an object I owned, and gave it away to be used in Wikipedia. The only
interaction I ever get on Commons about my photos is a notification of when
some fussy neckbeard wants to delete them. No thanks for thousands of
uploads. No notification of how many views they produce for our projects.
No message about downloads for free reuse.

The second issue is what this policy implicates for the scope of Commons. A
huge part of modern life includes things that have logos, artwork, jingles,
etc. This policy seems to imply to me that not just food packaging, but any
photo of a physical or digital product cannot be freely licensed even if
you own it. This covers a huge swath of knowledge to share which by
definition can't be on Commons anymore because we decided to take a very
conservative position on licensing. We are taking away useful photos from
our readers, which basically every other media repository that allows
CC/public domain licensing would allow.

We currently push users to upload to Commons when they want to give photos
to Wikipedia, and I have long done the same. I also used to be a Commons
admin. But this makes me think twice about ever uploading anything to
Commons, since even what seems like photos I own get subjected to an
extremely hardline copyright regime that no other site (say like Flickr)
would ever reasonably enforce on contributors. I'm also not going to bother
uploading to Wikipedia a simple photo of food products if I have to fill
out a form for fair use rationales.

In the long run, I think this kind of thing is yet more evidence that it
was a huge mistake to create a sub-community within Wikimedia that cares
more about strict free licensing than it does about utility to people who
need knowledge. Commons should really just have stayed a database shared
among projects, not been made into a wiki where all our more important
projects are subject to the rules mongering of a tiny broken community.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons copyright extremism

[Steven Walling]

This kind of response is case in point on why people find Commons toxic.
On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:44 AM Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Steven,

 Quite seriously, if you can't understand the concept of copyright and
 derivative works, then perhaps this is not the project for you.

 There's nothing more to say.

 Russavia


 On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Steven Walling
 steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote:
  I just noticed a disturbing trend on Commons that highlights a general
  issue with its use as the media repository for our projects.
 
  I recently had an image nominated for deletion under Commons policy
 against
  photos of packaging: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
 wiki/Commons:PACKAGING.
  It was of some Japanese candy that someone brought back.
 
  The first issue here is one of demotivating contributors. I took a photo
 of
  an object I owned, and gave it away to be used in Wikipedia. The only
  interaction I ever get on Commons about my photos is a notification of
 when
  some fussy neckbeard wants to delete them. No thanks for thousands of
  uploads. No notification of how many views they produce for our projects.
  No message about downloads for free reuse.
 
  The second issue is what this policy implicates for the scope of
 Commons. A
  huge part of modern life includes things that have logos, artwork,
 jingles,
  etc. This policy seems to imply to me that not just food packaging, but
 any
  photo of a physical or digital product cannot be freely licensed even if
  you own it. This covers a huge swath of knowledge to share which by
  definition can't be on Commons anymore because we decided to take a very
  conservative position on licensing. We are taking away useful photos from
  our readers, which basically every other media repository that allows
  CC/public domain licensing would allow.
 
  We currently push users to upload to Commons when they want to give
 photos
  to Wikipedia, and I have long done the same. I also used to be a Commons
  admin. But this makes me think twice about ever uploading anything to
  Commons, since even what seems like photos I own get subjected to an
  extremely hardline copyright regime that no other site (say like Flickr)
  would ever reasonably enforce on contributors. I'm also not going to
 bother
  uploading to Wikipedia a simple photo of food products if I have to fill
  out a form for fair use rationales.
 
  In the long run, I think this kind of thing is yet more evidence that it
  was a huge mistake to create a sub-community within Wikimedia that cares
  more about strict free licensing than it does about utility to people who
  need knowledge. Commons should really just have stayed a database shared
  among projects, not been made into a wiki where all our more important
  projects are subject to the rules mongering of a tiny broken community.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons copyright extremism

[Steven Walling]

On Thu Dec 11 2014 at 12:40:09 PM Pipo Le Clown plecl...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm on the road every two weekends, and processing pictures the rest of the
 time on my free time. I've provided around 8000 pictures to Commons, and
 helped to have pictures for articles like Cristiano Ronaldo, Roy Hogdson or
 Greig Laidlaw...

 Just to read that I'm a fascist and an anal retentive because someone
 proposed a fucking picture of KitKat for deletion ? It was not even
 deleted, the discussion is still going on. And even if it was, the right
 place to go would have been COM:UDR, with a strong rationale, where people
 would have discuss it in a civilised manner. Not in this echo chamber...

 So yes, one could say that the thread was accusatory from the start, and
 quickly went to vicious. One could also say that this is a fucking
 disgrace.

 Pleclown


To be crystal clear: I didn't link to the DR or mention the nominator
because I don't actually care much about the individual instance.
Commons is going to do what it's going to do, and whomever nominated it or
comments in support of deletion is just doing what the policies of Commons
is telling them to do.

The problem is a general one with the goals of Commons, what the community
focuses (and doesn't focus on), as I said. I think it should be clear that
the purpose of discussing it on Wikimedia-l as opposed to Commons is talk
about whether Commons is doing a good job of serving as the media
repository for other projects. Not about whether the nominator was correct
in this individual case or something like that.



 On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 7:51 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote:

  Okay, guys, let's all take a step back and remember [[WP:Civility]].
  (Yeah, I know that's a Wikipedia pillar, but can't we all at least get
  on board with that one?)
 
  The tone of this thread was accusatory from the start, and quickly
  went to vicious. Maybe everyone can try it again with a bit of AGF.
 
  Austin
 
 
  On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 7:30 PM, James Alexander jameso...@gmail.com
  wrote:
   On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote:
  
   P.S. Stephen, you are young and handsome, in fact rather dishy to my
   ageing eyes. Good for you. Keep in mind that your fellow volunteers
   might not have been born so lucky, and that being young and pretty all
   too soon passes into memory, sigh.
  
  
   Fæ, this is not acceptable for the list (or for that matter on wiki).
   Stephen's neckbeard comment certainly wasn't helpful either but it's no
   excuse.
  
   James
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] thank vs. like

[Steven Walling]

On Sun Oct 26 2014 at 12:45:55 PM Amir E. Aharoni 
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

 In the Hebrew Wikipedia there's a discussion about the Thanks feature,
 which raises the following confusion among other things: Why does the
 person who is sending the thank-you gets a message saying $1 was notified
 that you liked his/her edit., and the person who receives the thank-you
 notification sees a message that uses the verb thank?


So this message, called thanks-thanked-notice in the code, appears to
have been added awhile back without sufficient design review or
input.[1][2] It's not part of the original design requirements for Thanks.

It's unclear from the bug or commit that added it exactly why we need this
message, or where it appears. Do you get this via your notifications tray?

I'd support simply removing this notification. The UI already makes clear
in-line when a thanks was sent. Unless people really requested a read
status notification and find it valuable, we should just defer to keeping
notifications volume low.

1.
https://git.wikimedia.org/commitdiff/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FThanks/ab8b7847c36bf0b053a397ec5689c6a9b9615bd5
2. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63509
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Endless drama around solutions to non-problems as misdirection

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 1:54 AM, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote:

 Steven Walling wrote:
 ...
  We practically can't and don't take on initiatives that directly
  try to provide more free time or money to editors

 That is absolutely false. Individual Engagement Grants have recently
 been proven to be substantially more cost-effective in achieving the
 Foundation's stated goals than any other form of grant spending, on a
 per-dollar basis. Is there any evidence that any Foundation
 engineering effort of the past five years has done as well? I haven't
 seen any.


Individual engagement grants are not a monetary reward for contributing
content. They are, just like larger programs internally at WMF or in a
chapter, intended to produce another outcome which has a wider and more
sustainable impact. Suggesting that the success of IEG is evidence we
should/could just pay editors directly in some way is quite the stretch.

Providing cash on a large scale to motivate contributors has diminishing
returns as an alternative strategy to usability improvements, when you
consider that the software platform which enables content creation will
continue to show its age. Even if we lived in a parallel universe where
every editor of Wikipedia was paid for their work, we'd still need to
continually improve the platform they used to make the encyclopedia.

It's interesting you bring up IEG though. If you're not talking about 1:1
alternatives to software improvements, but instead you want us to consider
potentially complementary new ideas to motivate people to edit... go for
it. No one can deny the positive impact of initiatives like The Core
Contest on English Wikipedia (I've been a contestant myself).[1] Piloting a
larger scale set of contests where there are rewards or prizes for winners
might be a pretty cool IEG project that could prove your theory.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Core_Contest
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 1:48 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com
wrote:

 IMO the WMF should stop focusing on English Wikipedia as a target
 deploy site, and stop allowing its product management team and WMF
 staff in general to be salesman for it - it is scaring the community
 that all WMF staff seem to be so heavily vested in this 'product' as
 the salvation of the wikis.


This is rank hyperbole.

The MediaWiki deployment train delivers new software to all projects every
week. One stage is to non-Wikipedia projects, which actually get new
software *first.* Then in a second stage is for all Wikipedias
simultaneously. So the default behavior for rollouts, if all you do is
merge your code and wait, is that English Wikipedia gets basically no
special treatment..[1]

Now, for larger feature rollouts like VisualEditor or MediaViewer, the
testing stage and eventual launch set their own special schedule. We have
used English Wikipedia as a testing ground a lot in the past, which is
natural when you consider a variety of factors.[2] That doesn't mean we
haven't worked hard to test things out with non-English projects. Some
examples:

-- MediaViewer spent a long time being tested outside English Wikipedia
before it ever touched that project. It started with pilots in non-English
Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage.[3]
-- Flow is currently soliciting editors on non-English projects to test it
out voluntarily on a sub-set of pages. Any projects that want to help shape
the future of this software should pick a discussion space they want to use
for testing and speak up.
-- My team (Growth) has begun waiting for translations of experimental
interfaces, so we can A/B test in many languages simultaneously. We're
about to do this again in this month, by testing task recommendations in 12
languages right from the start.[4] We've done with other projects as well,
like A/B testing changes aimed at anonymous editors in four languages.
-- The Content Translation project is starting with Spanish and Catalan
Wikipedias.[5]

After we get past the testing stage, none of this erases the fact that
English Wikipedia is still the largest project by far, and is a major
problem spot to be dealt with regarding issues related to new editor
acquisition and retention. The data clearly suggests that it's a project we
should be focusing on if we want to fix these problems, but we're certainly
not ignoring others.

1). wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Deployments
2). All technical staff and community contributors share English as their
working language. Software gets built in English first obviously, so we
don't have to wait on translations as a blocker for deployment. English
Wikipedia is also our largest project, so we can get larger randomized
samples during A/B tests. Making A/B tests shorter while also retaining
accuracy is good.
3). https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Release_Plan
4).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Task_recommendations/Experiment_one
5). https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Roadmap
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] editor retention initiatives

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 6:55 PM, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote:

 Is there a list somewhere of all currently active Foundation
 initiatives for attracting and retaining active editors?  I am only
 aware of the one project, Task Recommendations, to try to encourage
 editors who have made a few edits to make more, described starting at
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbZ1uWoKEgt=60m20s


Task recommendations is one nascent initiative that my team is working
on.[1] We're still in the very early prototyping and testing stages. (BTW,
the whole video segment starts two minutes earlier at about the 58:00
mark.)

Task recommendations is far from the only thing we're doing to attract and
retain active editors. Pretty much the entirety of the features development
roadmap for desktop and mobile is focused on this problem. VisualEditor,
Flow, mobile web and apps work, and more all address this problem from
different angles. You can keep up with what the Foundation is doing by
checking out the monthly engineering reports.[2]


 Is there any evidence at all that anyone in the Foundation is
 interested in any kind of change which would make non-editors more
 inclined to edit, or empower editors with social factors which might
 provide more time, economic power, or other means to enable them to
 edit more?


We practically can't and don't take on initiatives that directly try to
provide more free time or money to editors. We can, however, help people do
more with the free time they have, and ask new people to become
contributors. Both of those are things we're tackling. A central goal of
improving the usability of the core editing experience across devices is to
save people time and energy. My team's also trying other things to attract
new community members, such as actually inviting people to sign up.[3]

1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Task_recommendations
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/latest
3.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition#Invite_users_to_sign_up
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The reader, who doesn't exist

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 Or, have them filled from Wikidata. Then, {{Infobox}} would be all the
 wikitext you need. This could also help to abstract infoboxes to load a
 placeholder/hint on mobile, then loading the box on request (click).

 Well, one can dream...


This would be ideal I think, since it would allow for more responsive
styling without resorting to ugly hacks specific to infobox markup.

So far as I can tell though, there is one major blocker to this: edibility.
People need to be able to update the infobox data without leaving Wikipedia
and being sent to Yet Another Wiki. This is potentially doable in
VisualEditor I think, but is hard or maybe impossible to do with any
elegance in wikitext.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering community team! (brainstorming)

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hm. Garfield is the closest person I know in the Foundation to the FDC in
 its role of evaluating the Foundation's Annual Plan for the entire
 organization. The only other people I can think of who might be able to
 comment for the whole org are Gayle and Lila.


You don't need to go through the FDC to talk to teams about their goals.
You can just go talk to them via the wiki, or a mailing list.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering community team! (brainstorming)

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 1:53 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:

 Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of Community Liaison,
 Product Development and Strategic Change Management, a title Orwell would
 be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The
 current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked
 with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these
 roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their
 role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person.


You're being a jerk in this paragraph, Max. There is a huge difference in
attitude, skills, and experience between marketers/PR people and the
Wikimedians that work in the community liason role. The community liasons
put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to advocate not only *to *the
community, but *for it* within the Foundation. They do this quietly, often
behind the scenes, and with little praise. If you know and respect these
people, the respectful thing would not be to reduce their very hard jobs to
a pithy but inaccurate summary for your rhetorical purposes.

To come back to the proposal: there's a lot of merit to the idea of a
formal community group not paid by the WMF to get deeply involved in
understanding the engineering roadmap and advising the Foundation. The list
of potential tasks Gryllida made is pretty good.

There are certainly staffers who've seriously considered trying to set this
up. The only barrier has been time and energy. It's probably best if the
community just goes ahead and elects a volunteer group, and then proposes
that it work with WMF engineering and product teams. TL;DR: be bold. If
you're not proposing setting up something involving money, the only barrier
is finding the right people, which will just take time. A gesture of good
faith might be to involve one relevant WMF person, like Rachel diCerbo (the
new director of the community liasons in product). She's been doing this
kind of thing a long time.

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering community team! (brainstorming)

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:09 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 MzMcbride, I'm not sure that WMF is overstaffed, but I would like to see
 more specific performance metrics for some groups. The FDC commented on
 this as well and I hope WMF is taking that to heart. I'm pinging Garfield
 for comment on that portion of this discussion.


Garfield is not really the right person to ask about this. A CFO (or at
least, our CFO) doesn't set or monitor performance metrics for individual
teams other than his own.

Regardless, I think it's an important topic Pete. Having more community
members comment on and question the yearly or quarterly goals for teams in
general would be step toward the kind of feedback Gryllida mentioned in the
start of the topic. If anyone is interested in digging in to this more,
there's a thread on the Talk page of the WMF engineering goals for 2014-15
document, which is at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals. (There
are also goals for other teams of course, but since this is an
engineering-related thread I wanted to focus on just that.)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Bitcoin now accepted, but there are privacy concerns

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 There is a post on the blog saying that bitcoin is accepted but there are
 several questions about why WMF is asking for contact info. Is that an IRS
 requirement? Might want to post the reason in the blog entry. AFAIK with
 the nonprofits I donate to none require personal info for small
 contributions.

 Thanks,
 Pine


The relevant blog post, for context:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/30/wikimedia-foundation-now-accepts-bitcoin/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board approval of the FDC's 2013-2014 Round 2 recommendations

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Patricio Lorente 
patricio.lore...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear friends in the Wikimedia community,


 After meeting face-to-face in May to deliberate on the four proposals
 they received for the 2013-2014 Round 2 annual plan grants, the Funds
 Dissemination Committee (FDC) posted their funding recommendations to
 the WMF Board of Trustees. [1]

 Four proposals were submitted in this round, and one of them (the
 Wikimedia Foundation) did not receive a dollar allocation. Funding
 requests from the three other organizations (Centre for Internet and
 Society, Wikimédia France and Wikimedia Norge) this round totaled
 US$1,555,953.

 The funds available for movement entities through the FDC process in
 2013–2014 was US$6,000,000. Of this, $4,432,000 was allocated in Round
 1, leaving $1,568,000 for Round 2. In this round, the FDC has
 recommended funding allocations totaling approximately $1,235,062. The
 remaining approximately $332,938 will be returned to the Wikimedia
 Foundation's reserves. The recommended allocation for the WMF is
 excluded from this, as it includes the next year's budget for the
 Wikimedia movement as a whole.

 I am pleased to share with you the news that the Board of Trustees has
 made the decision to approve the FDC's 2013-2014 Round 2 funding
 recommendations in full. [2] These funding recommendations will now be
 implemented by the Foundation.

 Many people have put in significant work to make this process a
 success. As the Board Representatives to the FDC, we would like to
 thank the Round 2 applicants themselves, the Funds Dissemination
 Committee members and staff, and the members of the community who
 participated in the community review period. We congratulate the
 applicants and look forward to learning more about how their annual
 plans progress.

 Best,

 Patricio Lorente and Bishakha Datta, Board Representatives to the FDC

 [1]
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2013-2014_round2

 [2]
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/Board_decisions/2013-2014_round2

 --
 Patricio Lorente


Hi Patricio,

I have a question about something in the software development portion of
the FDC recommendations regarding the Wikimedia Foundation proposal.

In that, it says The effectiveness of persona-based strategy for the
identification of user needs and prioritization is not clear, as no
evaluation of this has been done after the roll-out of Mobile apps.  It is
suggested that the software team assesses the effectiveness of its
processes, tools, team by an appropriate mix of surveys, and use of experts
in the field and take corrective action to address the gaps.

Which mobile apps are you referring to?

This passage seemed to lack sufficient detail to explain what was being
commented on, and why. Many teams have used user-centered design tools like
personas, user stories, and usability testing. Not all of them are used in
the same way, and we don't use a single one size fits all approach to
gathering user needs since every product tends to target different kinds of
users (mobile vs desktop, readers vs new editors vs existing editors, and
so on). In this regard, the feedback is somewhat confusing and not very
actionable.

Steven



  Blog: http://www.patriciolorente.com.ar
 Identi.ca // Twitter: @patriciolorente

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board approval of the FDC's 2013-2014 Round 2 recommendations

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Hi Patricio,

 I have a question about something in the software development portion of
 the FDC recommendations regarding the Wikimedia Foundation proposal.

 In that, it says The effectiveness of persona-based strategy for the
 identification of user needs and prioritization is not clear, as no
 evaluation of this has been done after the roll-out of Mobile apps.  It is
 suggested that the software team assesses the effectiveness of its
 processes, tools, team by an appropriate mix of surveys, and use of experts
 in the field and take corrective action to address the gaps.

 Which mobile apps are you referring to?

 This passage seemed to lack sufficient detail to explain what was being
 commented on, and why. Many teams have used user-centered design tools like
 personas, user stories, and usability testing. Not all of them are used in
 the same way, and we don't use a single one size fits all approach to
 gathering user needs since every product tends to target different kinds of
 users (mobile vs desktop, readers vs new editors vs existing editors, and
 so on). In this regard, the feedback is somewhat confusing and not very
 actionable.


Phoebe reminded me off list (thanks!) that the FDC recommendation link has
actually been posted before, and as the Board liason Patricio can't
necessarily answer this question. I'll just post this on the Talk page.
Sorry for any confusion. :)

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Please be considerate of everyone's time.

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 6:22 AM, edward edw...@logicmuseum.com wrote:

 Could I ask if there are any plans by WMF to address some of the content
 problems in Wikipedia?  Pretty much any article in my specialist area
 (which is actually not all that specialist) has serious problems - gross
 factual errors, omissions, bias and so on.  I know from other specialists
 that this is not just restricted to my area: economics, sociology, many
 areas of the arts and humanities have similar problems.

 This is not just a Wikimedia issue, it's a public interest issue.
 Wikipedia is now the go-to place for knowledge for pretty much everyone in
 the world. I don't see how WMF is fulfilling its mission (empowering people
 to collect and develop and disseminate educational content under a free
 license) when the content isn't actually educational.


Hi Ed,

The Wikimedia Foundation does not write nor edit content on Wikipedia, nor
does it dictate editorial policy. All of the content is written, edited,
and controlled by whomever would like to volunteer their time to improve
it.

As such, this is often why the response to a statement like Pretty much
any article in my specialist area (which is actually not all that
specialist) has serious problems is to invite you to edit it.[1] :-) If
you need help, there are forums like the Teahouse,[2] where you can get
answers from friendly, experienced Wikipedia editors. If you simply don't
have the time to volunteer on improving any content, you can of course
always leave suggestions on the Talk page associated with any article.

Steven

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold_in_updating_pages
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 Is there any thought of making metrics updates more machine-readable,
 exposing data/metrics/timelines?  Right now the excellent data is
 flattened into slides, and then further flattened into a single pdf.


If anyone is seeking more data on the project-wide or feature-related
metrics we typically discuss, there are several tools available. Other than
the Report Card [1] and stats.wikimedia.org, probably the best resource is
our extensive list of dashboards on Meta.[2] Those provide a lot of
structured data over time. The format for the Reviews are slides since the
primary intended audience of the Quarterly Reviews is still
internal-facing.

Steven

1. http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data/Dashboards
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Participating on Wikipediocracy

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote:

 Thanks, Edward! I was starting to worry that no one would ask.

 I participate on WO because I think every voice deserves to be heard.
 And I will go wherever people feel comfortable speaking freely to hear
 them. Some of us feel comfortable on this list; others are more
 comfortable on a criticism-oriented site like WO. That social pattern
 is not uncommon, and in these situations I usually feel comfortable in
 both environments.

 The trash talk. . . Most of the concerns I've heard about WO involve
 the snarky, personal comments that are front and center in the forums.
 I know this makes it very difficult for many people to listen to
 anything else they have to say. I've called them out on this a few
 times, but I was reminded that everyone is there for different reasons
 and the trash talk somehow works for a few of them. What can I say?
 The great thing about free speech is that everyone is free to say
 anything. The only thing I can think of that might be better is that
 everyone is free to ignore anything. ;)

 Beyond the trash talk are some very real concerns from some very
 insightful people. If you're concerned about whether I'm getting
 accurate information, I don't take for granted anything said there
 without a secondary source- just like anything said here. Some of the
 concerns I've heard there seem to be taboo in the mainstream WP
 community. It's very interesting that WO was brought up when I asked
 about Child Protection Policies, for example. Harassment Policy is
 another issue that seems to be unwelcome in some forums. But there are
 also concerns that I've seen come up in this forum, too, like how to
 improve the quality of articles. That's not too surprising, since I'm
 not the only person who is active in both communities. There are more
 concerns than I can go through here, but I started a relatively
 trash-free thread there to get an understanding of their concerns:
 http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14t=4531. Maybe it
 would help others, too. If it would be welcome here, I'd pose the same
 question to understand the greatest concerns in this community.

 Finally, I ask everyone to respect my own right to free speech. I am
 not just Lila's partner; I am a person with my own opinions, my own
 motives, my own interests, and my own needs. I have no professional
 affiliation with WMF, and Lila and I have gotten pretty good at
 keeping our professional lives to ourselves at home. For those of you
 who work at the WMF and have voiced concern over my participation on
 WO, you can rest assured that I have absolutely no influence over your
 professional lives. For everyone in the WP community, I'd like you to
 know that I form my personal opinions of people on my direct
 interactions with them- not what someone says on a forum somewhere.
 Please, feel free to interact with me. :) There were also some
 concerns about my mentioning that I communicate with some of the
 people at the WMF about WP stuff. I stopped mentioning any employees
 of the WMF- including those in my immediate family- and I've come to
 the conclusion that it isn't in anyone's best interests to discuss
 anything related to WP in private with WMF employees. I'm kinda
 learning as we go here, so I apologize for any brainfarts like that.
 Ultimately, I'm asking you to treat me as you would any new WP
 contributor, because, at the end of the day, that is all I am.

 I'm hoping to get to know all of the people in this forum better. It's
 harder for me to follow along here because a lot of the stuff is very
 specific and often discussed with little context. I'll catch up. In
 the meantime, I'll continue asking questions, some of which may be
 inconvenient. Like I said, I am not Lila; I'm that guy who asks stuff
 while everyone else is hoping he just keeps his mouth shut. :P Please
 respect my right to free speech; I'll be respecting your right to
 ignore me.


I don't think you're going to find that anyone thinks you don't have a
right to free speech. For historical context here: on this mailing list
very very few people have ever been banned or put on moderation. It takes a
huge amount of bad behavior to get moderated on Wikimedia mailing lists.

The same culture persists on Wikipedia and most other Wikimedia projects.
The many Wikipedia discussion spaces and the many Wikimedia mailing lists
are extremely open environments where you can see people expressing a wide
variety of perspectives and ideas on how to run the projects. We often get
criticized for not strictly enforcing our civility guidelines/policies.
Many might say we swing too far toward tolerating blatantly rude but
otherwise intelligent/insightful participation.

I figure since you're new it bears repeating: Wikipediocracy isn't really
the go-to general purpose discussion forum for Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself
is the place contributors in good standing talk about the future of the

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement regarding Host for Wikimania 2015

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Ellie Young eyo...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On the recommendation of the Wikimania 2015 selection Jury Committee, we
 have accepted the proposal from Mexico DF to host. The proposal will be
 further vetted by the WMF staff in the coming month, after which time we
 hope to confirm the award.


Congrats to Wikimedia Mexico. :)

I have only one concern about possibly attending a Mexico City Wikimania,
which is safety. The bid on Meta sort of acknowledges this by saying
Safety is like any big city, some areas are unsafe at night.

I feel a bit like a dumb, xenophobic American bringing this up, but I have
to be honest and say Mexico tends to have a reputation for violent
crime.[1] Sources do seem to suggest Mexico City proper may be
better,[2][3] but it would be comforting to hear how we've assessed the bid
regarding the safety issue, and how we're going to be prepared in case the
worst (robberies, kidnappings) do happen.

1.
http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/alertswarnings/mexico-travel-warning.html
2.
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mexico/mexico-city/practical-information/health
3.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g150800-s206/Mexico-City:Mexico:Health.And.Safety.html
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Sponsorship/donations to other organizations

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to
 Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached
 / Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2],
 infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of
 these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and
 support, some don't.

 One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on
 server-side to client-side open source applications used by our
 community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice
 (used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on,
 like OpenStreetMap.


Speaking personally, I think we should consider doing this kind of thing on
rare occasions and where there is a critical dependency. There are two
questions that I think are relevant:

1). Do they *really *need our help?

Organizations like Ubuntu and Puppet are in fact supported by for-profit
companies as well as through a FOSS community. There are other examples
here, like Redis and Vagrant. They surely do not need our money to survive.
However, something like MariaDB might, since they're in fact asking us.

2). Would Wikimedia projects be fine, if these other organizations/products
perished?

Seems like we really depend on MariaDB having strong support in the future,
as an open source infrastructure requirement. We moved to Maria in part
because Oracle is a terrible terrible steward of open source, including
MySQL. There are other great FOSS databases out there, but switching to
something like PostgreSQL or a non-relational database (I troll) would be
infinitely more painful. It's in our self-interest as an organization and
for the survival of Wikimedia projects that our database engine is a
healthy open source product.

Products you mentioned which don't pass this test include things like GIMP,
Inkscape, and LibreOffice. It feels like it would be wasteful of donor
money to support something most of our users don't really depend on/we
don't depend on internally at the WMF. We'd essentially be making an
investment in these open source products, not ensuring a critical piece of
our toolkit survives.

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] neologisms

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:35 PM, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote:

 What does productize mean in the context of

 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Growth_Quarterly_Review_(February_2014).pdf
 ?


Sorry for the jargon. We try to avoid tech industry terminology in public
communication but sometimes when we publish an internal document it slips
out.

Wiktionary defines productize as make something a commericial product.[1]
Productization is defined as The act of modifying something, such as a
concept or a tool internal to an organization, to make it suitable as a
commercial product.[2]

Remove the commercial part of that, which implies selling, and it basically
applies. In software development and in the Wikimedia context, it basically
means to take something that is an experimental concept and make it a
permanent part of the site for users -- whether that's readers, editors or
donors depends on the software in question.

The word product is used not to strictly clarify that something is not a
service. On the Web, the line between products and services is decidedly
fuzzy, at least when you talk to people who work in the tech industry. In
reality people when people say a product they really just mean a thing
people use or buy.

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/productize
2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/productization
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[Wikimedia-l] Updating the typography on all Wikimedia sites

[Steven Walling]

Hi all,

I wanted to give people an extra notice that we're updating the default
typography across all Wikimedia sites, for users of the Vector skin. This
was mentioned in the last Tech News edition that goes out to all local
wikis, and also announced by our Release Manager, Greg Grossmeier, as part
of the software deployment roadmap.

This will happen in the following order:

   1. Test wikis and mediawiki.org tomorrow. That's Thursday, March 27th.
   2. Non-Wikipedia projects on Tuesday, April 1th.
   3. All Wikipedias on Thursday April 3rd.

If people have questions, there is a summary of the changes and an
extensive FAQ at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh. There
will also be a post at blog.wikimedia.org tomorrow morning.

For a bit more backstory, this is the first time we're graduating something
from the opt-in beta features framework to the stable version of
Wikimedia sites. This has been in beta for desktop users since November
2013,[1] and has been tested by more than 10,000 registered users across
Wikimedia communities.

Thanks to the many editors and readers who took time to send us comments or
questions. This feature went through several major iterations based on
community feedback -- there were 100+ discussion threads on the Talk page,
in addition to mailing list discussions. We're really lucky to have so many
Wikimedians willing to get their hands dirty when it comes to the dark art
of web typography. ;-) Congrats to the designers, engineers, and others who
volunteered their time to help make this ready to release as new default
typography.

P.S. Apologies for cross-posting this and spamming your inbox, if you're
also on wikitech-l or other technical mailing lists.

1. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/07/introducing-beta-features/

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More new editors?

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Charles Andrès 
charles.andres.w...@gmail.com wrote:

 TLDR:transform the thank you campaign after the fundraising  in a Thank
 you campaign: became an editor


We've tried this before and so far it hasn't worked very well. See results
from 2012-13 at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Donor_engagement/Thank_You_campaign

Generally speaking, we're moving away from trying to use banners to blast
lots of readers with the same messages. That's true in both fundraising
(where they've learned to only show someone a donation request 1-2 times)
and in editor engagement work. Our next work trying to convert unregistered
people to become editors is going to be focusing on targeting anonymous
editors, asking them to signup, and teaching them about the benefits of
having an account so they can make an informed choice. See draft docs at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition

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

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 7:25 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.comwrote:

 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.


[With my WMF product manager hat on...]

This a big request with many moving parts. We should probably try to
separate them out and simplify where we can. I'd recommend filing bugs for
structured information about groups, profiles, the ability to join/leave
groups, activity feeds per group, and more. This is something that is of
general interest, and is not specific to COI-related issues at all.

Gryllida's comment was a bit abrasive but is a correct understanding of the
challenge here I think, in terms of creating richer kinds of information
about types of edits/editors without making a user do unnecessary extra
work. Imagine if there is essentially as many group types as there are
categories, for instance. It probably makes more sense to have collections
of pages associated with a group, so that we can generate a feed of group
activity not by making the user select a group when saving, but
automatically. So for example: I'm in Group:Beer and I edit the article
on Pilsner, so my edits show in a feed of edits by Group:Beer members to
articles in that subject.

In the long run, we should start creating structured information about
topical groups, and let people access it both through a group page as well
as some kind of editor profile. However, it's not going to happen in the
next calendar year, so I'm not sure it's a good interim solution to the
problem of how to make COI disclosures easier. AbuseFilter also is honestly
probably not the right solution, even if self-tagging existed.

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Reasonator use in Wikipedias

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 7:26 AM, Daniel Mietchen 
daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com wrote:

 What about having the Reasonator sit in the Draft namespace, with a
 link from the search results or the text preloaded for non-existing
 pages in the main namespace?

 Daniel


It is still far too early to do this. We still need to resolve a lot of
open questions around the Draft namespace. We don't advertise drafts on red
links or search yet, we haven't figured out how to deal with drafts for
articles that already exist, how to present a proper feed of drafts, and
lots more. Plus, it's only on English Wikipedia so you're not going to get
much bang for your buck working on implementing some kind of suggested
content via Wikidata.

We should put this idea in the list of future possible enhancements at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm not entirely certain it's a good idea to technologize such very basic
 user interactions.  It takes as much work to thank someone using
 notifications as it does to leave them a talk page message.


That's empirically not true.

If I am on a page history or list of user contributions, it's takes just
two clicks and you don't leave the page. To leave someone a Talk page
message takes several new page loads and steps.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:

 I dunno, guys.  I certainly would take a talk page message over a
 mechanical thank any day of the week.  More particularly, I notice a
 significant trend in using thank notifications to express agreement with
 people without having to actually say yeah, I agree somewhere.

 That the loss of human contact, replacing it with another technological
 whizbang, is considered a net positive...well, I guess that's what can be
 expected from Wikimedia.


I don't view Talk page messages and thanks notifications as competing or
detracting from each other, and I think pretty much everyone works on
Thanks would agree. They are additive. It's helpful to have different
levels and types of ways to engage with each other on the wiki.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[Steven Walling]

I really really wish we could thanks IPs too. It sucks to treat them like
second class citizens.

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Amir E. Aharoni 
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

 Something like the new message orange bar :)

 I guess that designers and Growth people may know an answer, but all
 thoughts are welcome.


With my product manager for Growth hat on... Like Kaldari said we can't
give people who aren't logged in Echo notifications at the moment. The only
alternative is to post to the IP talk page. This would require us to
basically build a user account, i.e. a bot, in to Thanks to deliver a Talk
page message for the IP. That's probably not going to happen, to be honest,
and there isn't the manpower behind Echo right now to design/build proper
anonymous notifications. If you're gung-ho about this idea I think Nemo is
right, just use the Talk page. :)

My instinct here is to try and use this as an experimental tool for showing
IPs the advantages of logging in. That is, show them an unclaimed account
with thank you or other notification, then prompt them to sign up after
they read it. This would give us temporary anonymous notifications and also
show people what they would get for taking a moment to sign up. This kind
of technique is extremely powerful for demonstrating the value in
registering for a site, and you can similar examples in many other places,
such as Twitter's log in and tweet flow that happens if you use one of
their share buttons on a news article etc.

If you look at our draft (emphasis on the draft) documentation at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition you will see us
mentioning ideas like the proto-account that Tim brought up as well.
(Just to poke at the technical issue Marc brought up... is there any reason
we wouldn't use Redis for this? It seems well suited to storing high
volumes of data we would intend to be temporary.)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF employee writing articles for $300

[Steven Walling]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.comwrote:

 Odder has published a fantastic blog piece at
 http://twkozlowski.net/paid-editing-thrives-in-the-heart-of-wikipedia/ in
 which it is revealed that a WMF employee is engaged in undeclared paid
 editing on English Wikipedia, and charging what it appears to be $300 per
 article.

 I have cc'ed both Sue and Jimmy in on this email, but also sending to this
 list as I know they, and other WMF employees, do use this list, and I think
 it would be pertinent that they respond publicly to the issues raised here.
 It is ever so more important given that the undeclared paid editing
 occurred AFTER the whole Wiki-PR debacle (Sue's press release, WMF's
 cease-and-desist, and of course the resultant media attention).

 What do Jimmy and Sue believe should occur given that such editing violates
 Wikipedia policies and also Jimmy's so-called Bright Line Rule. In relation
 to Jimmy's line, many are still clueless as to what exactly this Bright
 Line is (it's not very bright), and how it should be applied in practice,
 so Jimmy, if you are out there, your comment is requested on that.

 Cheers,

 Russavia


I'm with David and Nathan here.

The evidence presented is an anonymized oDesk account and a screenshot.
Screenshots are very easily doctored, and Wikipediocracy trolls have many
reasons to attack a Wikimedian like Sarah. I wouldn't be surprised if
they'd go so far as to set up a fake account using her picture and
information.

If you really cared about solving this, you could try emailing Sarah, her
superiors, and Sue directly. Considering many staff don't follow high
volume lists like Wikimedia-l, especially on the weekend, it's not exactly
the best way to get a response from the WMF. It is, however, a great way to
stir up bullshit drama.

I'll hold out for Sarah's comment, if she feels comfortable. Otherwise
smells like trolling.

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's accept Bitcoin as a donation method

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 8:17 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

 As Peter just said, there is no risk if WMF converts bitcoin donations to
 USD immediately.


Uh... except that because Bitcoin is not a regulated currency, it's value
has the potential to fluctuate wildly, and seems to have done so since it
attracts speculators of all crazy sorts. Seems pretty fuckin risky to me.

Who's to say if the work involved in accepting bitcoins, monitoring
transactions, converting them, etc. will be worth the actual donations we
receive in bitcoin? Developing and maintaining payments systems doesn't
come for free. Fundraising and finance staff at WMF work extremely hard to
keep these systems running smoothly, and I for one don't think it's worth
adding yet another potential system to build/maintain just to placate
bitcoin devotees who want us to help promote their libertarian fantasy
project.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's accept Bitcoin as a donation method

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Jake Orlowitz jorlow...@gmail.com wrote:

 * Our peers like EFF, and Internet archive accept it


To be totally honest, I think this is moot.

Support for bitcoin among these two organizations has hardly been a ringing
endorsement. In the past, EFF has rejected it for very practical reasons I
think still apply.[1] As for Internet Archive, I was literally in the room
when their fundraising staff announced they started accepting bitcoin, and
they actually said they didn't really understand what it was, other than
people requested they accept it.

In general, I would personally like it if the WMF avoided accepting
bitcoin. Today, bitcoin isn't really a functioning currency of exchange --
it's actually used more as an investment tool to create wealth that
naturally appreciates in value, like playing the stock market or buying
gold. Avoiding lots of risky investments is something our very competent
financial managers already steer clear of, and I see no reason to start
taking on more risk now.

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Which Wikipedias have had large scale bot creation of articles this year?

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 4:56 AM, Gryllida gryll...@fastmail.fm wrote:

 Hopefully your research does not conclude this is a good idea; I had been
 contacted to create such bots multiple times in the past. I had declined
 such queries, as the need in automating this means inefficiency in manual
 content creation. Such inefficiency should be addressed directly instead,
 in the wiki software.


No, we're not exploring doing bot article creation ourselves. I'm simply
trying to understand differences between projects when it comes to article
creation. There are some smaller communities that have relatively large
levels of daily/monthly article creation, and I want to identify which ones
are running bots.

[Using my personal email to follow up, since it's what I usually use on
mailing lists.]

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Which Wikipedias have had large scale bot creation of articles this year?

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 2:46 AM, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Steven,

 What qualifies as many? On ro.wp, Andrebot is creating sections of
 articles about the population of villages/communes in Bulgaria,
 Hungary and Croatia, also creating articles where they do not exist.
 That will probably amount to a few hundred articles by the end of the
 year.


This counts, since it seems that in 2012 and more recently in 2013, bot
article creation has exceeded manual creations. See:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ReportCardTopWikis.htm#lang_ro

Thanks for the info!
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[Wikimedia-l] Which Wikipedias have had large scale bot creation of articles this year?

[Steven Walling]

Hi all,

My team is doing some background research in to Wikipedia article creation
right now.[1] One question I'd like answer is which Wikipedias are
currently (i.e. this year) running bots to create many articles.

I know that Lsjbot has run (or is running) on Swedish (sv), Cebuano (ceb),
and Waray-Waray (war). It seems to me that, by looking at the stats for new
articles per day,[2] Dutch (nl) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias might have
also been running bots? Am I wrong?

I'll be posting more about our article creation research work soon. We'll
need feedback from non-English Wikipedians in particular, since as a team
we only have extensive experience creating articles on enwiki.

Many thanks,

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_article_creation
2. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM, WereSpielChequers 
werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:

 Typo correction and vandalism reversion are certainly both entries to
 editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have
 declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially in
 stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by checking
 new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our  5 edits a month editors are
 going to internal maintenance pages like that. I suspect they are readers
 who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a sample
 of them I suspect we'd find many who are reading Wikipedia just as much as
 they used to, but if they only edit when they spot a mistake then of course
 they will now be editing less frequently. And of course none of that is
 actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who
 used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in which
 they did their spree and were blocked..

 The difficulty of getting precise measurements of community health makes
 it a fascinating topic, and with many known factors altering edit levels in
 sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be wary of oversimplifications.
 No-one really knows what would have happened if the many edit filters
 installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti vandalism
 bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it would
 currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when the edit filters were
 introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of our
 anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits.
 However it isn't sensible to  benchmark community health against past edit
 levels, we should really be comparing community activity against readership
 levels. If we do that there is a disconnect between our readership which
 for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is
 broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for Vector
 and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
 optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels we
 always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
 Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device, especially
 amongst the young, is turning us from an interactive medium into more of a
 broadcast one. It is also likely to be contributing to the greying of the
 pedia.

 I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of the
 fall in the raw editing levels in a page on
 wiki
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F
 ,
 feedback welcome.


Holy smokes this thread has gotten off topic, but I'll bite. ;)

Making articles that need spelling and grammar fixes easily available to
new editors is precisely what we're doing with GettingStarted, our software
system for introducing newly-registered people to editing. (Docs at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted and
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians). We're currently
getting thousands of new people to make their first typo fix a month on
English Wikipedia, and we're moving to other Wikipedias soon.

In English Wikipedia it's quite easy for us to do so, since there's a large
category of articles needing copyediting. In other Wikipedias, it's not
easy, because there is no such category. If you want to help us help
newbies, the best thing you could do is create a copyediting category on
your Wikipedia and link it to the appropriate Wikidata item
(either Q8235695 or Q9137504).

As a side point: when we examine first-time editors contributions, these
days it's rare to find someone start out by correcting vandalism, probably
because now bots and users of tools like Huggle or Twinkle catch it all so
fast. It's so small a number that when we examine samples of new
contributors in our qualitative research,[1][2] we just put it in the Other
category of edit types.

Steven

1.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Qualitative_analysis
2.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6/Contribution_quality_and_type
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 11:40 PM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote:

 The Wikimedia Foundation needs to wake up and deal with the real tech
 elephant in the room. Our primary issue is not a lack of FLOW, a lack of a
 visual editor, or a lack of a rapidly expanding education program.

 Our biggest issue is copyright infringement. We have had the Indian
 program, we have had issues with the Education program, and I have today
 come across a user who has made nearly 20,000 edits to 1,742 article since
 2006 which appear to be nearly all copy and pasted from the sources he has
 used.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DrMicro#Copyright_infringement
 This
 has seriously shaken my faith in Wikipedia.

 This is especially devastating as there is a tech solution that would have
 prevented it. The efforts are being worked on by volunteers here
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Turnitin and has been since at
 least March of 2012. We NEED all tech resource at the foundation thrown at
 this project. Other less important project like FLOW and the visual editor
 need to be put on hold to develop this tool.


Relevant info on the subject of copyvio is the recent plagiarism study by
the Education Program team. They looked different types of users (students,
newbies, experienced editors, admins) and compared them. Results were
published on Meta at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Plagiarism_on_the_English_Wikipediaand
also discussed in the last WMF Metrics  Activities meeting:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-11-07

AFAIK this is the best data we have about how often different kinds of
editors close paraphrase or outright copy/paste.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia DC Annual Plan for 2013-14

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Kirill Lokshin 
kirill.loks...@wikimediadc.org wrote:

 Hello everyone,

 Wikimedia DC has released its Annual Plan for 2013-14.  The plan can be
 found on our wiki at http://wikimediadc.org/wiki/Annual_plan_(2013–2014);
 a
 copy will also be posted on meta shortly.

 As always, any comments or suggestions would be very welcome.

 Cheers,
 Kirill


Thanks for sharing this, and congrats on publishing what looks like a great
plan.

One part I think is a bit vague is the one about analytics development. At
the beginning, you give the example of using WikiMetrics to measure
outcomes of edit-a-thons and such, which is great. Then you take a second
tack later in the document, saying Wikimedia DC will support the
development and maintenance of a stable set of online tools that can be
used by partner institutions including creating a single analytics report
which will aggregate statistics from various existing tools.

Analytics tool development is a complex and difficult problem. In addition
to our technical challenges, there seems to always be many competing
priorities you have to balance, even if you just focus on one end user. If
Wikimedia DC is going to venture in to this territory, I think you could be
clearer about whether you're going to first focus on measurement of your
own programs, or if building a tool(s) for partner institutions is really
something you're best placed to do. These two things have very very
different requirements when it comes to how much money you'd need, people
resources, and so on.

If you're seriously considering building an analytics report of some kind,
I would highly encourage you to reach out the Analytics team at the WMF,
for technical advice and advice from the team of research analysts. (The
public analytics mailing list is a good place to start.) They can also help
you when it comes to figuring out stakeholder analysis and collecting
concise requirements from end users of any analytics tools, since it's
something they have to do inside the Foundation.

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

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:

 A post is live on Gizmodo today about a Commons contributor (Evan-Amos) who
 takes high quality photos of video game systems and hardware.[1] Towards
 the end it mentions that Evan started a Kickstarter to fund his efforts to
 buy and photograph more systems as part of an online museum.[2]

 Anyone know if this is the first Wikimedia-related Kickstarter campaign, or
 has it happened before? What do people think about someone raising ~$13k to
 contribute photos to Commons? How does that fit in the debate about paid
 editing? To me it has a very different feel than, say, Wiki-PR. But...

 [1]

 http://gizmodo.com/how-i-became-gamings-most-popular-and-anonymous-photog-1456749754
 [2]

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game-museum


This guy is a free culture badass. :-)

I wish more Commons contributors could promote and support their work like
this. This project makes me think about other high quality photo
collections, such as the many featured pictures of vintage computers or
rocks and minerals. The list goes on and on.

Like others have hinted at, both chapters and the WMF can potentially give
out grants to support photography projects like this. I wonder if Evan knew
that or considered it? I'd love to hear feedback from him about why he felt
Kickstarter was fruitful, and how it compares to our large grants
infrastructure in the Wikimedia movement.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Education] How to force to enable Visual Editor

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 5:01 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote:

 This is a really interesting idea - not just for VE but for other
 new-user tools as well.

 CCing to Steven, who's been doing some work with the signup interface
 - is this sort of hook technically practical?

 Andrew.


Yes, technically speaking it is probably not difficult to set VisualEditor
opt-in on the basis of a URL parameter. How/if we should implement it that
way, I leave up to James and the VE team.

To be honest, if we think VE is more advantageous for new editors, we
should be delivering by default for all of them, not selectively. The
design team has been working on concepts for a design where the switch
between wikitext and visual editing is done after hitting Edit, allowing us
to consolidate the current confusing situation with two buttons. This is
probably the most elegant solution. It makes room for individual users
potentially setting their default edit mode to one or the other, reduces
extra button clutter, etc.


-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] When was the first edit-a-thon(s)?

[Steven Walling]

On Wednesday, October 16, 2013, Sarah Stierch wrote:

 Hi everyone,

 I've asked a question on the new Program Evaluation  Design portal about
 when people think the first edit-a-thons took place. (Or the very first, if
 we know!)

 It would be great to have your input on meta:

 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Parlor/Questions

 Thank you and please spread the word!

 Sarah


Sarah,

Do you mean the first Wikimedia editathon, or the first editathon period?

Editathons predate Wikipedia by years, and are about as old as the wiki
itself. The old school name for them is barn raisings.

 http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising


 --
 --
 *Sarah Stierch*
 *Museumist, open culture advocate, and Wikimedian*
 *www.sarahstierch.com*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Mobile image upload

[Steven Walling]

On Sunday, August 25, 2013, James Heilman wrote:

 Mobile image upload is a huge plus thus thanks to all who made it
 happen. It is allowing those who might not otherwise have be able to
 get involved to do so. Just saw this image come in through the mobile
 site
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirty_white_pseudomembrane_classically_seen_in_diptheria_2013-07-06_11-07.jpg


Awesome! Maryana, Kenan, and the mobile team will be psyched to hear this.
:)


 I have never seen diphtheria as it is exceedingly rare in my area of
 the world. And technically this image is very hard to take. Look
 forwards to mobile editing arriving.


Mobile editing is here now, on the m.wikipedia.org mobile website. You
should see a pencil icon on every section. Feedback on how it works or
doesn't for you would be most welcome, since it's only been out of beta
since the end of July.



 --
 James Heilman
 MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

 The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
 www.opentextbookofmedicine.com

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[Wikimedia-l] Questions for the Board post-Wikimania

[Steven Walling]

Hey all,

During Wikimania's QA panel, the Board lamented that, as always, they did
not have enough time to answer all the questions from the audience and
posted beforehand on-wiki. They did say they were accessible to follow up
with on unanswered questions though, so I am taking this opportunity to
start an open thread.

The question I am personally interested in, I posted on the Wikimania wiki
page,[1] and it's...

The 2013-14 Annual Plan allocates 40% of the Wikimedia Foundation budget
and 59% of the staffing to engineering and product development. However, it
seems that few of Board members have professional expertise in theses areas
(compared to previous years and in general). Does the Board feel it has the
necessary expertise to lead the Foundation in this area? Would the Board
consider recruiting expert seats with more experience in engineering and
product development?

There are several other excellent questions posted on-wiki as well. I know
people are still traveling and likely jet-lagged even if they're home, so I
am in no huge hurry to get an answer. Thanks to the Board in advance. :-)

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

1. https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Board_Q%26A
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams 
kwwilli...@kwwilliams.com wrote:

 If you had followed that, and understood that the Minimum Viable Product
 included cut-and-paste, table editing, and maybe the ability to
 successfully and completely edit the hundred or so most edited articles out
 of all the millions, you wouldn't have hit the level of pushback you've
 encountered. You released a sub-viable product, which is what caused the
 storm you encountered.


Minimum viable product does not mean anything and everything works
perfectly just like you want right out of the box, and it definitely does
not mean feature parity with an existing product (i.e. wikitext editing).
The purpose is to release something that can help us gather feedback and
test the concept behind the product in the real world instead of in a
lab.[1] Table editing and other advanced markup is not really necessary to
test the concept with the target audience, and decide whether to move
forward.

We all know VE didn't and doesn't edit everything in a way that's perfectly
up to snuff. No one has been claiming it doesn't have warts. What the team
is pushing back against is the idea that they can just turn it off and
develop a great new editor in a vacuum, away from real use by a
representative swath of current editors (registered and anonymous, new and
old). The lack of use by a sufficiently large and representative group of
editors is a big part of why the _seven months_ of original opt-in use
didn't fix most issues.

Erik and James have clearly admitted we can achieve our goals while moving
at a slower pace than the initial rollout and making other concessions.
Despite this, the attitude of some seems to be that they should be
committing seppuku for daring to release something not 100% perfect
according to [insert personal criteria for editing perfection here]. That's
not the kind of reaction that drew me to Wikipedia back in 2006, not by a
long shot. Rather, most of us find Wikipedia so rewarding because there is
room to be bold in the name of helping the encyclopedia. Which is precisely
what the VE team has been attempting to do.

Do I really really wish editing references and tables and templates was
easier when I'm writing articles in my off hours? Holy smokes yes. Is it
helping us get there to be making bitter comments about how Erik or anybody
else at WMF doesn't care about editors? No.

Steven

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVR82uP_f6Q
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:13 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 de:wp convinced you. What would it take to convince you on en:wp? (I'm
 asking for a clear objective criterion here. If you can only offer a
 subjective one, please explain how de:wp convinced you when en:wp
 hasn't.)


[Speaking personally, not for the VE team in any way.]

Why should a consensus of any arbitrary number of power editors be allowed
to define the defaults for all editors, including anonymous and
newly-registered people? Anonymous edits make up about 1/3 of enwiki edits,
IIRC. Every day, 3,000-5,000 new accounts are registered on English
Wikipedia. These people are not even being asked to participate in these
RFCs. Even if they were, they typically don't know how to participate and
find it very intimidating.

This system of gauging the success of VE is heavily biased toward the
concerns of people most likely to dislike change in the software and
frankly, to not really need VE in its current state. That doesn't mean
they're wrong, just that they don't speak for everyone's perspective. The
sad fact is that the people who stand to benefit the most from continued
use and improvements to VE can't participate in an RFC about it, in part
because of wikitext's complexities and annoyances. It is a huge failure of
the consensus process and the Wikimedia movement if we pretend that it's
truly open, fair, and inclusive to make a decision about VE this way.

In WMF design and development, we work our butts off trying to do research,
design, and data analysis that guides us toward building for _all_ the
stakeholders in a feature. We're not perfect at it by a long shot, but I
don't see a good faith effort by English and German Wikipedians running
these RFCs to solicit and consider the opinions of the huge number of
new/anonymous editors. And why should they? That's not their job, they just
want to express their frustration and be listened to.

To answer David's question: I think we need a benchmark for making VE
opt-in again that legitimately represents the needs of _all the people_ who
stand to benefit from continuing the rapid pace of bug fixing and feature
additions. I don't think an on-wiki RFC is it.

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 2:27 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 OK - so why were those people listened to on de:wp? What happened
 there that they convinced you?


If you're replying to me... this is why I said I wasn't speaking for the VE
team. I didn't make that call. :)

Steven
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Updates on VE data analysis

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 5:52 PM, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote:

 Do you intend to measure the total number of edits per day prior to
 and after the visual editor roll-out?

 It appears that you have not analyzed or presented any data associated
 with those statistics.


We run A/B tests precisely so we don't need to rely on that kind of
analysis. Pre/post launch comparisons are notoriously subject to
confounding effects. I really wish we could just look at that kind of data,
because running properly designed and instrumented experiments is really
hard. But we can't, if we want to really know what caused an increase or
decrease in edits.

When you look at these kinds of numbers just on a pre/post basis, it's very
hard to discern what causes a drop or increase in any given metric. We
know, for instance, that as the summer progresses, editing activity drops
and climbs again in the fall. We also have no idea what the impact of other
deployments during that week might be (even small improvements or
regressions in performance have big effects, for example). The list of
unknown potential confounds go on.

For the interested: Dario covered why this kind of pre/post analysis is
faulty in his discussion of cohort analysis and analytics tools at a
Metrics  Activities meeting.[1][2]

Steven

1.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-03-07
2. Slides:
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/12HWRzf8XHsWC9zE3onyi6eeA_J98bPxoknLY_be-vUc/edit#slide=id.p
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] About the concentration of resources in SF (it was: Communication plans for community engagement

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.comwrote:

 Anyway, being able to disband the SF office as regards software
 development (and perhaps more), and switch to remote work only, would
 probably be the single most effective measure for enhancing communication
 and cooperation in the movement.


As someone who moved to SF to work here, I could not disagree more. The
amount of time and energy I save being near many of the people I work with
closely in the same space is enormous. Not to mention the fact that many of
us work better together with people we are able to see socially and so on.
I could go on, but the truth is I think no one actually responsible for
making such a decision is crazy enough to get rid of a central office.
(Move the office? Maybe someday if we really are forced to. We've done it
before. But get rid of a central office? No.)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Victor Grigas vgri...@wikimedia.orgwrote:

 In my view, this whole argument would provide reason to:
 1.) Only use a third party video option sparingly, as-needed until there
 are better open-source video options to use.
 2.) Put more resources into open source video.


On a positive note, it seems like progress on #2 is hopefully around the
corner, with the new Multimedia team being staffed.[1]

1.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/08/breaking-through-walls-of-text-richer-wikimedia-experience/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:
  On July 11th at the next WMF Metrics  Activities meeting, myself, Erik
  Möller, Howie Fung, Maryana Pinchuk, and Dario Taraborelli are going to
  deliver a short update on the state of Wikimedia editor communities. (For
  those not familiar:
  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings)

 This presentation will be at the meeting in 30 minutes. Don't worry if
 you're interested but can't make it; the meeting will be recorded.


The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALT8_Toyc0g now.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Denny Vrandečić 
denny.vrande...@wikimedia.de wrote:

 Wait - removing the captchas lead to a decrease of reverted edits in terms
 of absolute numbers? Woot? Anyone has an explanation for that?


I think the explanation is pretty clear from the numbers Nemo shared. This
CAPTCHA was annoying as hell, and was directed not just at people adding
links or hitting some kind of AbuseFilter, but everyone who was editing
anonymously or with a new account. It was literally throwing the baby out
with the bath water.

As someone who had to experience that CAPTCHA as a new user on ptwiki last
year, I am not surprised at all that we attracted many more positive
contributions just by removing it. Sadly, from looking at bug 49860 and
gerrit change 69982, it seems that this deeply annoying feature is going to
be put back in place.

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:47 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.comwrote:

 1) I'm confused: first you ask about community initiatives then you list
 activities by chapters and the like. Community initiative makes me think
 of edit drives, custom tools and scripts, processes, guidelines,
 configurations.


Sorry for the confusion. I'm open to hearing about any non-WMF activity,
but I assumed that people would be most knowledgeable
about initiatives that came from chapters or other parts of the community.


 2) Are you interested in last year or all our history?


Let's say since about 2011, with more recent being of primary interest.


  3) Is it really impossible to look for the impact on the statistics
 (assuming you're speaking of eiting activity) and then ask what caused the
 impact? How much big but indetected/undetectable impact is there? (There
 must be contrasting forces for that.) Are you interested in impact that
 can't be even seen in statistics?


We're also looking at which projects are growing, so as you say, looking at
the stats and then asking what caused it. If you are aware of a editor
recruitment or retention activity that measured, I'd also be interested in
hearing about that, even if it didn't necessarily make some kind of visible
 jump in the total active editors of a project.

Steven

P.S. Thanks to the folks who reached out off-list with examples.
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[Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Steven Walling]

Hi everyone,

On July 11th at the next WMF Metrics  Activities meeting, myself, Erik
Möller, Howie Fung, Maryana Pinchuk, and Dario Taraborelli are going to
deliver a short update on the state of Wikimedia editor communities. (For
those not familiar:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings)

This is the beginning of the new fiscal year for the WMF, and we'd like to
use this time to recap what we know about the decline or growth of
Wikimedia communities. We're focusing on the following set of questions...

* Are Wikimedia projects as a whole in decline?
* Is English Wikipedia in decline?
* Which WMF projects have been successful in driving growth?
* Which non-WMF trends have driven growth (e.g. community projects)?
* How does data/measurement enable us to drive growth?
* Which future changes are expected to drive growth?

I'm reaching out to this list on behalf of the team, so that we can get a
list of the non-WMF projects that have had a measurable impact on the size
or diversity of Wikimedia projects.

One obvious example that comes to mind is Wiki Loves Monuments. Others are
the Wikipedia Challenge in Kiswahili and Setswana, and edit-a-thons, such
as this year's fashion edit-a-thon put together by Wikimedia Sverige.

What am I missing from this list?

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Invitation to WMF May 2013 Metrics and Activities Meeting: Thursday, June 6, 18:00 UTC

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote:

 That's amazing!

 This is the now-closed office hours calendar, which I think was run by
 someone in WMF (but I could be wrong):


 https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=wikimedia.org_1co89h9c5s99d0jt9ld1tlsols%40group.calendar.google.com


Yes, I started this back when I was keeping tabs on office hours for Sue
and others. We replaced it with a calendar feeds generated off the Meta IRC
office hours page.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New designs for account creation and login rolling out gradually to all projects

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.orgwrote:

 The remaining projects we have held off on because there are localizations
 still to be completed (on translatewiki) or there are problems with
 localizations already finished. Since the work of localizations is never
 100% complete however, we are putting out a hard *deadline of June 5th*,
 after which we'll be turning on the forms for all projects, in all
 languages.  If you're interested in learning more about which wikis in
 particular need help, please email me off-list or get in touch via my user
 talk page anywhere.


Per my previous announcement and a note delivered more widely as a part of
Tech News (thanks Guillom, Odder and others for that), we're going to be
enabling the new design as default for all remaining Wikimedia projects
today. You should start seeing it visible after 22:00 UTC.

All of the top 10 language projects by size are complete and should have no
remaining issues, but the long tail of smaller wikis have not yet completed
translation [1]. The messages have been out for several weeks now, so if
you're like Turkish, Hindi, or Urdu and don't have the new login or signup
strings translated, now's your reason to get started. ;-)

Even if translations are complete, you might notice a few red links to be
tidied up. There's a list of these help links in our testing
documentation,[2] and I'll be going around trying to help do any final
customizations.

1. See a list sorted by completed translations for MediaWiki core at
https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special%3AMessageGroupStatsx=Dgroup=coresuppressempty=1language=#sortable:3=desc
2.
mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience/Testing#Providing_help_links

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New designs for account creation and login rolling out gradually to all projects

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.orgwrote:

- Wikipedia in 21 languages, including English, German, French, Italian,
Polish, Dutch, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Czech, Swedish, and
 others.
- In English: Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wiktionary,
and Wikiquote.
- Wikimedia Commons
- Wikidata
- Meta
- MediaWiki .org


Just a quick update: we enabled for most of these wikis this afternoon.

Sue: thanks for the kind words. I'm glad the combination of the redesign
and Getting Started worked out for the editathon!
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[Wikimedia-l] New designs for account creation and login rolling out gradually to all projects

[Steven Walling]

Hi everyone,

Per our blog post last month,[1] we've been testing redesigns for account
creation and login across the projects. We've been doing so on an opt-in
basis, but we've dealt with any major bugs and translations are complete
for quite a few languages.

Starting tomorrow and barring any last minute hiccups, we're going to start
rolling out the new designs. Right now we're limiting it to about 30
projects, including the following...

   - Wikipedia in 21 languages, including English, German, French, Italian,
   Polish, Dutch, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Czech, Swedish, and others.
   - In English: Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wiktionary,
   and Wikiquote.
   - Wikimedia Commons
   - Wikidata
   - Meta
   - MediaWiki .org

There are still local customizations that will need to be made in many of
these, but they are the kind of thing that doesn't require a developer to
do, just edits to the wiki. Look for announcements soon on your local
Village Pump equivalent for more info, or check out our
testing documentation.[2] I'll be around to help any of these wikis that
don't have an admin handy to make requested changes.

The remaining projects we have held off on because there are localizations
still to be completed (on translatewiki) or there are problems with
localizations already finished. Since the work of localizations is never
100% complete however, we are putting out a hard *deadline of June 5th*,
after which we'll be turning on the forms for all projects, in all
languages.  If you're interested in learning more about which wikis in
particular need help, please email me off-list or get in touch via my user
talk page anywhere.

Please speak up if you have any questions. You can still try these new
forms on any Wikimedia project via the method mentioned in the two links
below...

1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
2. mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience/Testing

--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

P.S. Sorry if there are odd linebreaks in this message. Has anyone figured
out how to avoid this in Gmail?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why not everyone have the right to vote in the Board FDC elections?

[Steven Walling]

On Sunday, April 28, 2013, Risker wrote:

 I'd actually suggest the opposite:  That the only people eligible to vote
 for the three elected seats be active participants within the Wikimedia
 projects.  That would drop the staff/contractor and advisory board
 eligibility.  Alternately, let's make everyone eligible, including chapter
 staffbut eliminate the chapter-appointed seats and have an election
 every year that involves the entire community.

 Risker


Speaking personally, I agree with Risker.






 On 28 April 2013 16:43, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:

  Interesting thread, Itzik --- to be honest, I had forgotten that staff
 had
  been granted the right to vote regardless of edit count. I wouldn't be
  surprised if the only staff members who do vote are those who would
 qualify
  under the edit count requirement anyway.
 
  Seems to me that rather than creating new exemptions from the edit count
  requirement, we might be better off to lower the number of edits required
  so that anybody who's demonstrated interest in the projects would
 qualify.
  If edits on meta, mediawiki, outreach, etc., qualify, and we were to
 lower
  the edit count requirement, then I think that would be inclusive of
  most/all contributors. Would something like that make sense?
 
  Thanks,
  Sue
  On Apr 28, 2013 1:26 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
 wrote:
 
   On 28 April 2013 06:15, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com
 wrote:
also agree to simplify the rules. what i'd really love would be to
better standardize and with it simplify volunteer community, for
 all
elections and votes. and at least my wish would be that people who
donate their time by sending code patches to software considered
essential to run the site are included.
  
   The first elections (in 2004) had a simple three months in the
   community rule. After that, we added edit count restrictions. The
   first election with any complicated rules - allowing people in
   without passing the edit count limits - was 2008, when WMF staff,
   ex-Board members, *and* Wikimedia server administrators with shell
   access were added. In 2011, this got extended to people who have
   commit access and have made at least one commit between 15 May 2010
   and 15 May 2011.
  
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/en
  
   So we've already got those in :-)
  
   I'm ambivalent about whether it's appropriate to have staff members
   (those who don't independently qualify as community members) voting
   or not, but I think in principle Itzik has a very good point - either
   *both* WMF and Chapter staff should be able to vote, or *neither*
   should. I can't see any reason that it's right for a staffer in San
   Francisco to participate in the election, but it isn't right for one
   in Berlin!
  
   (It may be too late to change anything for this time around, of
   course, but it would be great if we could ensure consistency in future
   elections)
  
   - Andrew.
  
  
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Asaf Bartov abar...@wikimedia.org
 
   wrote:
Also agree with Nathan.  Those chapter board members who are not
  active
   on
the projects already have a far greater relative weight in selecting
  the
chapter-selected board seats.
   
   A.
   
   
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) 
   nemow...@gmail.comwrote:
   
Nathan, 27/04/2013 21:34:
   
 I would go the other way, and limit the participants in the
 election
for the community seat to people who are members of the volunteer
community. Presumably that would include most members of most
organizational boards, but only include those staff and other paid
   
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[Wikimedia-l] New account creation and login ready for testing on all projects

[Steven Walling]

Hi all,

Today the Editor Engagement Experiments team has ported our new designs for
account creation and login to the current version of MediaWiki core,
meaning it is now available for testing on all Wikipedias and Wikimedia
projects.

The main purpose of starting with an opt-in testing period is to iron out
any last minute bugs and wait for localizations to catch up before we turn
it on by default. Testing instructions and background on this project are
available in our blog post,[1] and we're holding IRC office hours this
Saturday at 18:00 UTC to discuss things.[2]

I'm in the process of posting locally to Village Pumps as well, targeting
the top ten Wikipedias and the English version of all other projects. Help
spread the word if you can. :)

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New account creation and login ready for testing on all projects

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 That is looking really beautiful.  SJ


Thanks SJ!



 On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:40 PM, Matthew Roth mr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
  and here's Steven's blog post:
  http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
 
 
  On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:
 
  Hi all,
 
  Today the Editor Engagement Experiments team has ported our new designs
 for
  account creation and login to the current version of MediaWiki core,
  meaning it is now available for testing on all Wikipedias and Wikimedia
  projects.
 
  The main purpose of starting with an opt-in testing period is to iron
 out
  any last minute bugs and wait for localizations to catch up before we
 turn
  it on by default. Testing instructions and background on this project
 are
  available in our blog post,[1] and we're holding IRC office hours this
  Saturday at 18:00 UTC to discuss things.[2]
 
  I'm in the process of posting locally to Village Pumps as well,
 targeting
  the top ten Wikipedias and the English version of all other projects.
 Help
  spread the word if you can. :)
 
  --
  Steven Walling
  https://wikimediafoundation.org/
 
  1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
  2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
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  --
 
  Matthew Roth
  Global Communications Manager
  Wikimedia Foundation
  +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
  www.wikimediafoundation.org
  *https://donate.wikimedia.org*
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 --
 Samuel Klein  @metasj   w:user:sj  +1 617 529 4266

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