[Foundation-l] Board elections candidacy period time change
Ladies and Gentlemen, As you may be aware, there is concern that the sitenotices regarding submission of candidacy for the Board of Trustees election were not seen anywhere but Meta after the 11th of this month. Because of the potentially massive consequence of this, and to encourage a full and active election, the election committee has determined that: - Candidacies will be accepted through July 27th at 23:59 (UTC) - The period for questioning candidates begins immediately. Candidates that are late to the party will, no doubt, be scrutinized by the community. The Committee hopes that the community will work to actively ensure that all candidates receive equivalent questioning. - The dates of election will not change. The election will begin on 28 July and end on 10 August. Please know that we recognize the radical nature of altering the schedule in the midst of the election and would not do it if we did not absolutely believe that there was a possibility that others may be interested and qualified and may not have known about the key dates. For the committee, Philippe (in my capacity as a volunteer, and not as an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announcing Philippe Beaudette as the Strategy Project Facilitator
Please allow me to me too! what Sue said. As she said, she and I have talked about this. I really AM sensitive to it, and fully disclosed the situation to the election committee when my hire was announced. I'm happy to work with anyone who wants to in identifying conflicts and finding ways to mitigate them. For now, though, please know that the election committee is aware of the situation and is actively monitoring it, and both Sue and I are paying a lot of attention and are willing to further discuss. If you have a specific concern, please email me, or (if you're not comfortable emailing me), I'm sure that any other member of the election committee would be happy to talk to you about it. Philippe Just to make it clear, I am fully satisfied by the replies by Sue and Philippe, and do not consider situation as problematic. Sorry for the delay, my mail server was down until today. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery
2009/7/18 John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no: Imagine this, if a gallery or museum has a painting of some Leonard van der Olsen-Mozart (he don't exist, hopefully..) then this museum should make sure there is a bio for the person and of his painting of The fallen Madonna with the big bottom, and those should link back to the galleries own pages. At those pages the gallery should make available any high res copies, uv-scans, scientific works, etc, about the painting and the painter. We should be the yellow pages for the GLAM-institutions. It should be so important for them to have a presence on Wikipedia that it should raise questions from the government if they don't have a sufficient presence. Giving galleries lots of links to their pages is something we should be happy to do, as it's informative, educational and helps the reader. One of the many Freedom Of Information requests people have filed with the NPG in the past week (since this storm broke) is: what proportion of their web hits are from Wikipedia/Wikimedia? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] RE; Announcing Philippe Beaudette as the Strategy Project Facilitator
Thanks, Jaroslav - I'm really glad (truly) that there are people like you who think through those issues of values. I want to reinforce that my offer to resign was the very first email that I sent after accepting the job. I think enough of the folks with the Really Big Brains got together and the rest, as they say, is history. But please, please, please, continue to question. More important than getting our process right is getting our ethics right. Philippe Beaudette Facilitator, Strategic Plan Wikimedia Foundation pbeaude...@wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate Just to make it clear, I am fully satisfied by the replies by Sue and Philippe, and do not consider situation as problematic. Sorry for the delay, my mail server was down until today. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RE; Announcing Philippe Beaudette as the Strategy Project Facilitator
2009/7/19 Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org: Thanks, Jaroslav - I'm really glad (truly) that there are people like you who think through those issues of values. I want to reinforce that my offer to resign was the very first email that I sent after accepting the job. I think enough of the folks with the Really Big Brains got together and the rest, as they say, is history. But please, please, please, continue to question. More important than getting our process right is getting our ethics right. The extension of the time in which candidates can nominate themselves is not under the control of a third party. Something that so clearly has the potential to influence the candidate pool presents a conflict of interest. Sue's claim it would be hard to find a replacement is not credible considering the number of OTRS, Checkusers and others who have identified themselves to the foundation. When you made the decision not th resign I doubt you could have foreseen the extension issue coming up but it does suggest that conflict of interest resignations should probably be a matter of course rather than debate or convince. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery
IANAL, but I don't think I need to be to say the The Foundation is not in legal jeopardy here unless it chooses to be. It's protected by a four-thousand-mile moat, a war of independence, several layers of legal code and a US Supreme Court decision. It doesn't have any assets in the UK as far as I'm aware; there is absolutely nothing a UK court could punish them with. That's not the same as saying that a UK court case couldn't result in a judgment that was disadvantageous to the Foundation. For instance, I *believe* from the same set of legal issues as those surrounding peer-to-peer filesharing, that if the images were unequivocally found to be copyright violations in the UK, then any UK reader or editor who accessed them could be exposed to some sort of legal nastiness. I agree that any comment, however informal, from someone who *is* an English lawyer, would be very useful. --HM peter boelens pb...@xs4all.nl wrote in message news:cf6dc9a6b75e4d7583ccdca394fc6...@cc1070822a... I probably missed a few posts, but the way this is going raises some serious questions. It would be helpfull if someone with good knowledge of English Law would explain the risks of going trough the English Courts. I am a lawyer, but not an English one. What I do know of the English Legal system is that losing a lawsuit there is a very expensive excercise. And if this thing goes to court there is a real chance that the Foundation will loose. So a deal with NPG would be the sensible thing, and if a deal is not possible deleting seems the better option. Peter b. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices andsystems
We need to think a little bit outside the box, here; this domain should really be available, and make sense to use, for *all* WMF sites. http://www.wm.org is only occupied by a websquatter at the moment, AFAICT; I think a schema like http://wm.org/wiki_code/article_title or http://wm.org/wiki_code/?oldid=oldid would be cleanest. For enwiki it would be http://wm.org/enwiki/Foo; the worst-case scenario is AFAIK http://wm.org/mediawikiwiki/Foo; still only 28 characters plus the title. Use one of the qqx reserved codes for stuff like copyright, and you have a complete service. --HM Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote in message news:5924f50a0907170633ofbf108al8b2486ae889cc...@mail.gmail.com... On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Grayandrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/7/17 Harald Krichel harald.kric...@googlemail.com: Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. eg.: http://wp.cx/3tT5u7Z redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=302589573 I discovered yesterday that: enwp.org/Article redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article Sadly, it doesn't work with revision IDs, but it's a start! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Yes it does, enwp.org/?oldid=60372135 should redirect you to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=60372135 which is a 2006 revision of [[Old-Timers' Day]] (thanks Special:Random). -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] new list summaries
Dear all, New list summaries for the past month: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_June_15-30 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_July_1-15 I swear I'll try to get back on a bi-weekly schedule. Note: If anyone wants to try their hand at summarizing some of the other lists, there are lots of low-traffic project lists that could gain a bigger audience if summarized. Summary of the summary: * license changes rolled out across all projects end of June; * discussions about what Commons and Wikisource should be, as projects; * two strategic planning hires (and a new open job) announced; * new grant for Commons, new WMF financial plan and 3 new chapters; * Wikitech discussions: templates, video codecs and browsers; * lots of discussion about the NPG and GLAMs issues -- a special section in this month's summary; * miscellaneous: new sidebar donation buttons; grammar; Google translate and image search; Wikipedians are grumpy; new Wikipedia language; new PhD thesis on WP; WP NIH workshop; Wikimania flu; how do you fully consult the community, anyway? -- -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] EN Wikizine - Year: 2009 Week: 30 Number: 112
** ____ _ __ _ / / /\ \ (_) | _(_)___(_)_ __ ___ \ \/ \/ / | |/ / |_ / | '_ \ / _ \ \ /\ /| | | |/ /| | | | | __/ \/ \/ |_|_|\_\_/___|_|_| |_|\___| .org Year: 2009 Week: 30 Number: 112 ** An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community // === Technical news === [Media server problems] - there were some media load problems on all the sites, which caused extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility. The sysadmins took advantage of this downtime to redo the way we access media files internally which will help reduce the impact on the rest of the site when load problems on the file servers occur, and also spreads out the load among multiple servers to improve things even more. They had to shut off all uploads for a while to get this done! http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/intermittent-media-server-load-problems/ http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/uploads-temporarily-offline-for-site-fix/ [Wikipedia Weekly interviews the Usability Team] - Wikipedia Weekly, a podcast for and by Wikimedians, interviewed the Usability team. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode76 http://wikipediaweekly.org/2009/07/09/episode-76-usability/ [MediaWiki:Sharedupload change] - MediaWiki:Sharedupload became MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here. Admins in other projects should rename the first one to the second in order to customize messages for images from Commons. (That's the text shown when a Commons image is shown on another project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doorknob_buddhist_temple_detail_amk.jpg ) === Request for help === [Translation of the week] -- the Translation of the Week needs help! If you speak another language and would like to translate History of pizza into your language, TOTW is for you. ;-) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_of_the_week === Foundation === [Board elections] - the candidate deadline for the elections to the Board of Trustees has been extended to July 27 due to some technical issues for which the CentralNotice had to be turned off. The questioning of the candidates has also begun and translation is ongoing. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates -- candidates http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates/Questions -- questions http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation [New Strategic Planning Staff] - the Foundation announced that they filled two positions for their Strategic Planning project. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053165.html -- project manager http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053168.html -- facilitator [National Portrait Gallery] - the English National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London (UK) has threatened to sue a U.S. citizen, Derrick Coetzee. The legal letter followed claims that he had breached the Gallery's copyright in several thousand photographs of works of art uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, a free online media repository. More information in the extremely detailed Wikinews article. *Update*: The WMF and NPG have entered into good-faith negotiations, according to Erik Moeller. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/U.K._National_Portrait_Gallery_threatens_U.S._citizen_with_legal_action_over_Wikimedia_images http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/16/protecting-the-public-domain-and-sharing-our-cultural-heritage/ -- WMF blog post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-13/Copyright_threat -- summary by the signpost [Academy: NIH] - the Wikimedia Foundation announced and had its first Wikipedia Academy (outreach event to teach people to become contributors) in the United States this week. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_first_WP_Academy_July_2009 -- press release http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nihwiki -- twitter coverage from the event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/NIH_2009 -- project writeup [Advisory Board changes] - Angela, chair of the Advisory Board, has updated the Advisory Board page to show that 8 members have left, bringing the current total to 15 advisory board members. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/?diff=39660 [Fundraising 2008: Post-Mortem] - Rand Montoya, the Foundation's Head of Community Giving, has posed a post-mortem (basically what went wrong, what went right and what can we do better?) on the 2008 Fundraising Drive. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2008#Post_Mortem_for_the_2008_Annual_Fundraiser === Community === [Board elections: Inspiration] - some Wikimedians suggested that it might be better if prospective candidates knew *why* they should run for board member; what's it
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices andsystems
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Tim Landscheidt t...@tim-landscheidt.dewrote: Happy-melon happy-me...@live.com wrote: We need to think a little bit outside the box, here; this domain should really be available, and make sense to use, for *all* WMF sites. http://www.wm.org is only occupied by a websquatter at the moment, AFAICT; I think a schema like http://wm.org/wiki_code/article_title or http://wm.org/wiki_code/?oldid=oldid would be cleanest. For enwiki it would be http://wm.org/enwiki/Foo; the worst-case scenario is AFAIK http://wm.org/mediawikiwiki/Foo; still only 28 characters plus the title. Use one of the qqx reserved codes for stuff like copyright, and you have a complete service. [...] To think outside the box would be to apply for a URN scheme and have popular browsers implement it (like wp: in Kon- queror for example). It cannot get cleaner than that, and we would not have to worry about operations issues either :-). Tim Even better, you could have the most popular search engines rank many Wikipedia articles as the first result for their titles and have the most popular browsers automatically search for whatever keywords you type into the address bar. (Astute readers will note this is already the case). Of course, this doesn't get around the CC URL license terms (neither does the URI solution, AFAICT), but it points out the sillyness in requiring a URL in the first place. In my opinion the requirement that you link to the CC license is simply to raise awareness of CC itself and has nothing to do with usability. Finding the source and stable copy of the content you are looking at is trivial, and thus so is finding its license. This true with only keywords and without URLs/URIs. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] new list summaries
These are fabulous - thank you! I absolutely agree that smaller (but interesting) lists would attract more people if they saw what sorts of discussions happen there.[the technical dump-processing list is one example...] Sj On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 4:00 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Dear all, New list summaries for the past month: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_June_15-30 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_July_1-15 I swear I'll try to get back on a bi-weekly schedule. Note: If anyone wants to try their hand at summarizing some of the other lists, there are lots of low-traffic project lists that could gain a bigger audience if summarized. Summary of the summary: * license changes rolled out across all projects end of June; * discussions about what Commons and Wikisource should be, as projects; * two strategic planning hires (and a new open job) announced; * new grant for Commons, new WMF financial plan and 3 new chapters; * Wikitech discussions: templates, video codecs and browsers; * lots of discussion about the NPG and GLAMs issues -- a special section in this month's summary; * miscellaneous: new sidebar donation buttons; grammar; Google translate and image search; Wikipedians are grumpy; new Wikipedia language; new PhD thesis on WP; WP NIH workshop; Wikimania flu; how do you fully consult the community, anyway? -- -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for volunteers: 2009-2010 Audit Committee
Just a quick follow-up note to thank everyone who expressed interest in serving on the Foundation's Audit Committee. I'm pleased to announced the following membership of the 2009-2010 Audit Committee, which represents a mix of four community members with financial backgrounds and two San Francisco-area business people who can help provide local oversight: * Matt Bisanz -- Matt was founding treasurer of the Wikimedia New York chapter and is an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (User:MBisanz). His past experience includes exempt organization tax compliance with a Big Four accounting firm and federal grants reporting compliance in an educational setting. He holds an MBA in accounting from Hofstra University and a graduate certificate in strategy and leadership from NYU. * Ad Huikeshoven -- Ad Huikeshoven lives in the Hague, the Netherlands. He is an economist and a professional auditor, a long time trusted editor (User:Dedalus since 2005) and the longest server member on the Audit Committee (since 2007). * Renata Stasaityte -- Renata has been working as a tax accountant at a mid-size accounting firm in New York City since 2006. She has BBA in Accounting and MS in Taxation. She is an editor (since 2005) and an administrator (since 2006) on English Wikipedia (User:Renata3). * Anders Wennersten -- Anders lives in Stockholm and is now retired after a career including being senior manager at Ericsson and with an university degree in mathematics and economics. He is Treasurer of Wikimedia Sverige, a member of the Chapters Committee, and an active Wikipedian (User:Anders_Wennersten), doing over 30,000 edits a year mainly as patroller on the Swedish Wikipedia reviewing and fixing all new articles. * Alan Bauer -- Alan was most recently a Group President at Progressive Insurance, where he was responsible for $4 billion in revenue and took car insurance online in 1997. His non-profit experience includes serving on the Board of Trustees and Finance/Planning Committee of Carlton College. He has a BA in Math and Philosophy from Carlton and an MBA from the Univ of Chicago. * Sandy Gallanter -- Sandy is CEO of the Aspen Group, a real-estate development company that focuses on low-income housing. His non-profit experience includes serving as an officer and on the Boards of the New Israel Fund and the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. He earned both a BS and JD from Rutgers, and is an attorney and Certified Public Accountant. * Myself * Executive Director Sue Gardner, and Foundation Chair Michael Snow, both as observers On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Stu West s...@wikimedia.org wrote: As many of you know, the Foundation has an Audit Committee which represents the Board in oversight of financial and accounting issues, including planning, reporting, audits, and internal controls (see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_committee for details). The Committee typically serves for one year, starting in May/June and ending a year later when the Foundation files its annual tax return in the U.S. (the IRS Form 990). For the past year, the committee has consisted of two Board members (Michael Snow and me as Committee chair) and one long-serving and incredibly helpful community member, Ad Huikeshoven. We've recently started forming the 2009-2010 Audit Committee, and the current team has generously agreed to serve another year. We are keenly interested in increasing community participation. The time commitment is modest, as far as Wikimedia goes: review the Foundation's general financial practices and draft financial statements/filings, and then participate in three or four conference calls during the year with the staff and our independent auditors, KPMG. The one requirement for membership is financial literacy, usually some kind of professional experience with finance, accounting or audit. If you're interested in serving on the Committee, please email us at audit-l at lists.wikimedia.org and let us know how you think you could contribute. Thanks. -s === Stu West Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Board Treasurer stu mailto:s...@wikimedia.org at wikimedia.org [User:Stu] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
