Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Commons Force

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> The Commons Force proposal represents a clear and present danger, both for 
> whoever hosts it and participates in it. It is not for a third party to 
> intervene in a contract between two people and only two people.

This kind of attitude seems to me to be a byproduct of the fact that,
despite being intended to help fix the flaws in the copyright system,
Creative Commons and other free licenses are "hacks" that are built on
top of copyright.  The construction of CC licenses as contracts
between copyright owner and user is part of the hack, but not
necessarily ideal for promoting a robust creative commons (in the
lower case, general sense).

If a copyleft license is being violated, that is potentially of
concern beyond the two legal parties, since properly using the license
would mean that derivative works are also part of the commons and
available for others to use and adapt.  And more broadly, a society
that values the commons and with effective norms for following CC
licenses properly is better for everyone who contributes to and
partakes in the commons.  Widespread awareness of the costs and
benefits of joining the commons versus cutting oneself off from it is
a prerequisite for copyleft to work properly (i.e., to incentivize
further contributions to the commons).

Some recent related reading I found interesting:
http://www.copycense.com/2009/08/is_creative_commons_good_for_copyright.html

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Commons Force

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 6:10 PM,  wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>>
>> If a copyleft license is being violated, that is potentially of
>> concern beyond the two legal parties, since properly using the license
>> would mean that derivative works are also part of the commons and
>> available for others to use and adapt.
>
>
> The problem is that YOU have no knowledge whether a copyleft license is
> being violated or not. It is a gross arrogance on your part presume that
> because it is CC-BY-SA in one context that all such uses must be CC-BY-SA.
>
> If someone write a piece of music and releases it under a CC-BY-SA
> license, they can also allow uses under other conditions. Now assume
> that you hear that music in some TV advert is the advert CC-BY-SA? Not
> if the creator of the music relicensed it to the advertizer minus the
> copyleft requirement. Being an outsider to the agreement between the two
> parties you simple do not know.
>

In many cases it's very obvious.  If an image credit says "Sage
Ross/Creative Commons" (with no link or no indication of which CC
license), it's clear that it's not being used properly.  If the image
credit says merely "Wikipedia" and you know that the version on
Wikipedia is under a copyleft license, it's again clear.

Yes, there are some situations where you can't know (without asking
the creator) that an image wasn't separately licensed.  But there are
a lot of times when you can know.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] WMF seeking to sub-lease office space?

[Sage Ross]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 4:05 AM, Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Gerard,
>
>> Remember, the Signpost is an en.wp publication. It is not really the
>> place
>> to announce such things.
>
> it is up for Signpost editors if they want to include it or not. Not
> your business :)
>
> BR,

I guess I shouldn't have stopped reading this thread so early on.

I wrote "News and notes" this week but I didn't end up mentioning the
sub-lease/move in this week's Signpost because it just didn't seem
very important. But I do consider it part of the Signpost's mission to
report on Foundation matters, and more than that, to help push for WMF
transparency and accountability to the community.

I don't like the idea that what the Signpost does is "our" business
and not "your" business, for various intracommunity values of us and
you.  Despite being based on en.wp, we're trying to become more useful
to the broader Wikimedia community/communities.  (To that end,
OhanaUnited is reviving the Sister Project Interviews series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:OhanaUnited/Sister_Projects_Interview
.  And both news reports from other projects and reflective pieces
about what it's like to work on individual non-English projects versus
their English counterparts are very welcome.)

The "we" of the Signpost is anyone from the Wikimedia community who
wants to contribute.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Commons Force

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:07 AM,  wrote:

>
> The last time someone just said 'Creative Commons license' on one of my
> pics they were linking back to the flickr page which has the CC license
> link. Now most dont bother saying CC though they do link back to the
> flickr photopage, the information is available you just have to go look
> for it a bit. Does that count in your world?

I generally try to enforce the spirit, rather the the letter, of
licenses.  If someone links back to the source, that's generally good
enough for me because someone who sees it has a practical way of
finding out the license and reusing it themselves if they want to.

The exception to that is when they are using it in a way that should
trigger the viral aspect of the copyleft license.  In that case, it's
important for them to acknowledge that in order to use my work they
have to free their own, and to notify others that their work as well
as mine if freely licensed.

-Sage

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[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Italia being sued

[Sage Ross]

Italian Wikimedians are reporting that Wikimedia Italia (the Italian
local chapter) and former chapter president (and former Wikimedia
board member) Frieda Brioschi are being sued for an outrageous sum
over alleged defamation in a (now-deleted) biography on Italian
Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gianfranco/Wikimedia_Italia_sued_for_20,000,000_%E2%82%AC

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedian image restorations exploited on eBay

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Cary Bass  wrote:

> These works are Public Domain. Anyone can use them without credit. Since
> your restoration work did not add any additional copyright, there is no
> requirement even to credit Wikimedia Commons.
>
> While the project can request that reusers credit you for these works,
> we certainly cannot demand it.
>

With most of the restorations we have, including Durova's, there isn't
any indication on the file page that the restorationist would like
credit, or even that the restoration was done by the uploader.  One
way to give a strong hint to those who want to use or sell the images
would be to add a note about the restoration in either the source or
author field.  "Author: Unknown.  Restoration by Durova" or like.  If
I came to one of the restorations and wasn't familiar with how commons
works already, I would have no clue that anyone would expect or want
me to credit the restorationist.

If someone really, really wants credit, then depending on what an
individual restoration entails and how much subjective judgment goes
into it, it might even be plausible to classify restorations as
derivative works and say "Original is PD, restoration is a derivative
work released under CC-by".  Although that would likely be a bad
precedent that blurs the lines between derivative works and
"sweat-of-the-brow" copyright.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedian image restorations exploited on eBay

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 1:51 AM, Robert Rohde  wrote:
>
> It is settled case law in the US that restorations are not
> copyrightable as they lack sufficient originality.  The intent is to
> create a slavish copy of the original work.  Even if it takes a great
> deal of skill and judgment to do that, there are insufficient grounds
> for copyright in the US system.
>
> This may not be the case in other jurisdictions (such as the UK) which
> place a greater emphasis on effort in determining eligibility for
> copyright.
>
> -Robert Rohde

What case(s) settled this issue?  I haven't been able to find anything
credible one way or the other, but a number of organizations without
an obvious financial interest in the issue seem to assume that
restorations do create new copyrights.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Mohamed Magdy  wrote:

> This really sucks.
>

As Kat Walsh alluded to on ... Facebook?!?... free/libre real-time
services are more important than a lot of Wikimedians think (because
we've spent so long pushing back against "merely" social uses of our
wikis?).  In the grand scheme of the things we care about, development
in that area may be a more critical immediate need than continued work
on MediaWiki.  Brion put it perfectly:

"People need the ability to control their own presence on the web
instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you
want."

Wikipedia has had enough success that it's bought some time in terms
of establishing the ability (and right) of people to control and use
educational material how they want.  There's still a lot to do, but
the free culture approach is starting to pick up momentum.  For
so-called social networking services, it's still an uphill battle.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Laura Hale  wrote:

> Fan History would be a good fit for helping the Wikimedia Foundation in
> terms of helping the Foundation meet some of its goals towards providing
> information, helping establish credibility and gaining a more female
> contributor base.

I for one think Fan History is a great project, and an example of the
kinds of areas Wikimedia should be branching out towards.

A related issue worth thinking about...

Laura has blogged earlier about why Fan History wouldn't join Wikia:
http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=963

Obviously one of the core reasons ("Fan History is a business") must
have changed between when Laura wrote that (September 20) and now.
And (without knowing anything about how discussions with Wikia went
beyond that blog post) I presume the possibility of joining Wikia is
still open.

So the question is, what difference does it make for a wiki and its
community to be part of a non-profit set of projects versus an
ad-supported for-profit one?  Quite a bit, I would say, in the
long-term strategic sense of spreading a free culture movement based
on sharing and collaboration.  If Fan History became part of
Wikimedia, it would be time to admit that, in some ways, Wikia and WMF
are now competitors.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: Fan History joining the WMF family

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Jon Davis  wrote:
> I don't think that the WMF "acquiring" FanHistory would make them a
> competitor with Wikia, after all, Meta already has a propsosal for a
> "Wikitainment" ( http://wmf4.me/EFf2D ) which goes to show that the WMF
> community wants something like this.

If there are projects that are potentially in the scope of both the
WMF and Wikia, how are they not in competition (for mind-share and for
userbase)?  Obviously in many respects, the relationship between WMF
and Wikia is mutually beneficial, particularly in terms of building
interoperable free software and freely licensed cultural works.  But
Wikia benefits much more from the existence of WMF projects than
vice-versa, and Wikia has tried aggressively to become the
(ad-bearing) host for wikis on the periphery of Wikimedia's scope.

I see part of Wikimedia's mission (as part of the free culture
movement) as helping to give people sense of ownership in their
culture(s), as something they participate in versue something they
merely consume.  And there is some attenuation of that ownership when
collaborative projects take place in highly commercialized contexts;
there is a sense that, rather than working solely for the fun of it
and for the benefit of other members of your society, you are working
for the financial benefit of a company.  Many people are fine with
that, but as the WMF community reactions to the possibility of ads has
shown in the past, some are not fine with that.  So I think the more
free culture that takes place outside of commercial contexts, the more
successful it will be in the long run.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Open Wiki Blog Planet

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Gregory Kohs  wrote:
> David Gerard says:
>
> +
>
> 2009/12/15 Steven Walling  >:
>
>>* Have you added your new blog to Open Wiki Blog Planet and the Wikimedia
> *>* aggregator?
> *
>
> The en:wp arbcom have started messing with the Open Wiki Blog Planet,
> on the pretext that if the control page is on en:wp then they must own
> it. Suggest moving control page to Meta.
>
>
> - d.
>
> +
>
> David, could you please provide more detail to your characterization that
> ArbCom is "messing with" this aggregator?
>

He must have been talking about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ANickj%2Fopen-wikiblogplanet-config.ini&action=historysubmit&diff=330197740&oldid=325150787

John Vandenberg removed David Shankbone's blog, with the comment
"remove Shankbone's blog; feel free to add if it can be filtered to
exclude posts that attack BLPs".

For what it's worth, I agree with David Gerard that Open Wiki Blog
Planet is not properly subject to Wikipedia policies; David Shankbone
and other bloggers have a responsibility to own their own words and
deal with any consequences, but (unlike Planet Wikimedia, perhaps) I
don't see any formal connection between Wikipedia and the aggregator
except that the feed list happens to be hosted on en.wp.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Open Wiki Blog Planet

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Anthony  wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Sage Ross
> 
>> wrote:
>
>> For what it's worth, I agree with David Gerard that Open Wiki Blog
>> Planet is not properly subject to Wikipedia policies;
>
>
> Not even the policies at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_page ?
> How's that going to work?

I don't see anything there that applies to the way the Open Wiki Blog
Planet feed list is done, and if it did conflict, as David suggested,
the way to resolve it would be to move the page to another wiki rather
than censor bloggers.

But as John Vandenberg points out in the other thread, the removal had
nothing to do with ArbCom, and we are of course free to decide which
blogs we as a community do and don't want as part of the feed.  It's
my view, though, that we shouldn't feel compelled to remove a blog
because of the policies of English Wikipedia.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Creating articles in small wikipedias based on user requirement

[Sage Ross]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 6:54 AM, Shiju Alex  wrote:

[snip]

> Some feature is required in the MediaWiki software that enable us to see a
> list of keywords used most frequently by the users to search for non-exist
> articles. If we get such a list then some users like him can concentrate on
> creating articles using that key words.
>
> Of course, I know that this feature may not be helpful for big wikis like
> English. But for small wikis (especially small non-Latin language wikis),
> this will be of great help. It is almost like* creating wiki articles based
> on user requirement*.
>

Actually, this kind of tool is very helpful for big wikis as well.  We
had some manually-updated data for English Wikipedia in past years,
and it revealed some interesting things, especially in terms of needed
redirects, where people were searching for an article that exists but
didn't have quite the right name for it.  Many of these terms were
getting hundreds of hits per day.

Making such data more easily available for all projects would be a
great boon, I think.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] en.wp HACKED?

[Sage Ross]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Casey Brown  wrote:

> Yeah, that does happen sometimes.  The cause is usually "template
> vandalism", where a vandal adds some content to an unprotected
> template that's used in a few pages.  This makes it difficult for new
> users to find out what happened and usually freaks people out. :-)

Which template did this happen on? I didn't notice any on-wiki
discussions pointing to it.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] en.wp HACKED?

[Sage Ross]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 1:37 PM, Ryan Lomonaco  wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Risker  wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what kind of on-wiki discussions you might expect to see,
>> Sage.
>>
>
> I think he might have been going with Chris' assertation that every page was
> affected, which doesn't appear to be true - the template's transcluded on
> just under 1,000 pages.  My guess is that all of the pages Chris saw were
> affected, but the vast majority of articles weren't, meaning that it's not
> anything new.
>

Yep, I was assuming that it actually was vandalism that appeared on
every page or a huge number of pages, and thus either some admin
account had been compromised or something else went a lot more wrong
than the typical template vandalism.

Thanks, Max and Casey, for the diffs.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Like button

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Orionist  wrote:
> We do have a great substitute for the like button which is barnstars and
> other awards.

Maybe a version of WikiLove could be built for Commons that leaves a
barnstar or similar for the creator of a file, without leaving the
file page.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:35 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:

>
> Sage Ross once discussed with me the idea of having Wikinews be foremost a
> source of news about the Internet. It could report on news and goings-on on
> various Web sites. The idea made the idea of Wikinews almost seem redeemable
> to me, though I'm not sure how much it falls within Wikimedia's scope.
> Perhaps he'll chime in here to elaborate, as I'm surely not doing the
> concept justice.
>
> If Wikinews had started as a site with news about the Internet and
> particularly online communities, I think it would've grown into a proper
> project over time.

That's basically the idea... until Wikinews is strong enough in one
particular area that it becomes worthwhile to readers (because they
get stories they are likely to care about that don't show up on the
rest of the news sites out there), it can't reach critical mass. (Sue
explains the problem concisely in her post.) The area Wikimedians have
the largest pool of common expertise in and access to is the internet
and online culture. Covering emerging memes and the 4chan and
Anonymous shenanigans and cool and terrible things happening all over
the internet... that's an area where there's still not a great go-to
source for, at least that has anything like an NPOV approach. Wikinews
could have been (and maybe could be still) "local news for people from
the internet". But I think the project has been too limited by trying
to be like a traditional news organization to take that kind of
reporting seriously or encourage it.

The other route to critical mass would be syndication.  Even if volume
started out small, if high-quality pieces occasionally got syndicated
by mainstream news, that could gradually attract more attention and
contribution to Wikinews. That's what the CC-BY license is supposed to
encourage, but it seems that's not enough. A person (or several
people) devoted to outreach / business development who spent a lot of
time reaching out to traditional news orgs to let them know about
specific high-quality pieces that they could syndicate (for free!)
might set the stage for Wikinews (or the new fork) to really succeed.
Maybe that could make a good Wikimedia Fellowship project for an
ambitious Wikinewsie.

(Sorry, I'm a bit late to this thread.)

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Tom Morris  wrote:

> I'm not sure this analysis is correct. A lot of people now don't get news by
> going directly to the site but on social media platforms like Twitter and
> Facebook. Of course, for that to work, we need to publish stories quickly.
>
> When stories hit those sites, they have the potential to start rolling very
> quickly as people retweet them.

I don't see that as much of a way forward for Wikinews, without a
niche that will really draw people. What makes @en_wikinews worth
following as a news source, as opposed to the many other feeds that do
similar things? To be an attractive Twitter / Facebook general news
source, the feed would need to publish at a much higher volume than it
does, with more consistency in terms of what should be pushed out and
what shouldn't.

> For instance, last night when the Troy Davis execution was going on, the
> @en_wikinews feed had damn near live updates from the televised stream from
> Democracy Now and other sources. I had a wiki story written up specifically
> to try and get it published at the time of execution. It's now still
> languishing in the review pile.

As a volunteer project, I think Wikinews has an inherent tension
between being timely and having a solid review process. Volunteers
work at their own pace. Professionals have both writers and editors
working on deadline, and are always going to be able to be more
immediate.  Live updates and even a quick publication of a full
write-up of a big news story that everyone is reading and writing and
talking about already... I don't see that as an area where a wiki
journalism project has a lot of value to add to the news ecosystem.

> Another thing Wikinews could be doing better is original, data-based
> journalism.

Definitely. This is an area that plays to the strengths of our
community: the sources are online and deep, and under-utilized by
traditional media, and there's a lot of potential for collaboration on
sifting through data in teams looking for interesting nuggets.

I don't think there's much potential for reaching critical mass with
Wikinews except through original reporting on areas that provide
common ground to a large set of Wikimedians -- both in terms of
interest, and in terms of access to sources.

-Sage

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[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2012 now accepting scholarship applications

[Sage Ross]

Greetings all and sundry!

Scholarship applications are now being accepted for Wikimania 2012 in
Washington, D.C.  The application window will be one month (through
February 16). To learn more about Wikimania scholarships, see
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships

To apply for a scholarship, you can fill out the application form
here: https://secure.wikidc.org/wm/schols/

Good luck!

Sage Ross
Wikimedia DC

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Re: [Foundation-l] Flagged Revisions, Report on german WP

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
 So IPs can create articles on de?

>>> Yes, I think this is switched off on en: only.
>>>
>> That's something I've wanted to see change for a long time.
>>
>
> In which direction?
>

The direction of (once again) allowing anonymous page creation on
English Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure he means.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: Davos

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
 wrote:
> Sue Gardner wrote:
>> Interestingly, a number of people complained to me about their
>> articles being overly negative.  Obviously Jimmy gets this all the
>> time, but I was surprised how often it was the first thing a person
>> would say to me. All my conversations about Wikipedia were warm and
>> friendly and positive, with the exception of people's pain/anger about
>> BLP issues.
>>
>>
>
> What you need to remember is that all the people who are
> secretly satisfied their article is remarkably fair to them, or
> even greatly relieved how merciful their article is about their
> various foibles; never mind those who won't say publicly they
> think their article is even far too laudatory ... well, those
> people won't be the first in line to talk about it to you, will
> they. Try to focus on that; when you get in those situations.
>

>From my experience talking with people (mostly academics) who have
Wikipedia articles, they are often unhappy with their articles but
also either don't want to interfere in a community they aren't part
of, or don't want to be seen as complaining on their own behalf and
thus risk seeming vain.  Most often it's not that there is something
really wrong or negative, it's just that the article is so incomplete
or imbalanced that it gives a misleading impression of who they are
and what they do.  I'd go so far as to say that the significant
majority of BLPs for academics (at least) are not appreciated by their
subjects.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Chad  wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Mike Linksvayer  
> wrote:
>> p.s. Personally, discussions of "offline" here and everywhere (say,
>> accessibility of educational materials) are absurdly myopic.
>> Consideration of offline use is about as relevant now as consideration
>> of horse stables in urban planning 100 years ago.
>>
>
> One would argue that putting in horse stables 100 years ago was a smart
> move, as people use horses. You can't know that someone's going to up
> and invent the car.
>

Furthermore, horse populations continued to grow well into the 20th
century.  Horses peaked in the US in the 1910s, and in Finland in the
1950s, and horse-drawn equipment was the core transportation
technology of World War I and played a key role even in World War II.

This is a typical pattern when a complex technology is introduced in
the presence of a simpler one; it's not a simple matter of
replacement, and old technologies (where the infrastructure is easy to
maintain) can stick around and even become more significant, even
while a complex technology spreads as well.  (See David Edgerton, The
Shock of the Old.)

I'm speculating here, but it would not surprise me at all if amount of
print publishing is still growing, and could continue to do so for a
few more decades at least.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>> This is a typical pattern when a complex technology is introduced in
>> the presence of a simpler one; it's not a simple matter of
>> replacement, and old technologies (where the infrastructure is easy to
>> maintain) can stick around and even become more significant, even
>> while a complex technology spreads as well.  (See David Edgerton, The
>> Shock of the Old.)
>>
>
> Results vary.  Slide-rules were replaced by electronic calculators very
> quickly.

Certainly results vary.  Slide-rules, I suggest, do not make a good
...used as they were almost exclusively by the upper educational tiers
in developed countries.  For something broader that serves a more
fundamental role in society (like storage and transmission of
knowledge), old, easy to maintain technologies are likely to co-exist
and even thrive alongside higher-tech ones.

It's a whole lot easier to manufacture books in a poor country than to
maintain the infrastructure for robust Internet participation.  From
the perspectives of resources, required technical expertise,
infrastructure maintainability (shelves in a dry room vs. electricity
and continual replacement of short-lived hardware), there are
advantages to the older technology.

>> I'm speculating here, but it would not surprise me at all if amount of
>> print publishing is still growing, and could continue to do so for a
>> few more decades at least.
> I agree that it is probably still growing, but I would not measure its
> prognosis in decades.  That technology had a big boost in the 1830s when
> rag papers were replaced by the much cheaper wood-pulp papers.  Now the
> rapidly declining costs of electronic storage are in conflict with
> increasing costs of paper production and shipping.  When environmental
> factors are brought in the costs go up even more.  Perhaps the tipping
> point is reached when the new technology becomes accessible and
> affordable to a high percentage of the world's population.
>

Certainly, things are looking up for continued expansion of electronic
communication (dependent, of course, on economic developments).  But
with broad classes of technologies like printing and electronic
communication, I suggest that there are not global tipping points,
because of the drastic economic inequalities of the modern world.
Some or many cultures may reach a tipping point (even here, I'm
skeptical, given the widely acknowledge virtues of traditional print
even in rich cultures; the Internet has not brought a significant
decline in US printing, even though the Internet is now very widely
available to Americans).  But a global tipping point?  Globalization
is powerful, but not all-powerful.

Will poor countries develop electronic communication instead of
printing industries, or alongside them, or first print and only later
electronic?  The last two seem more likely, to me.  Print-on-demand,
especially, means that printed distribution of Wikimedia project
material is probably going to be on the rise for quite a while.

I don't think anyone can predict with certainty what the trajectory of
print vs. electronic communication will be.  But I do think it would
be myopic NOT to consider print among the likely significant ways
material will get reused.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:41 PM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
>
> Rich media (images, sound,
> video, etc.) that are the result of substantive collaborations between
> at least five people can be credited in the same fashion, but must
> otherwise be attributed in the manner specified by the uploader.

This is unclear.  "but must otherwise" can be read to apply only to
rich media that are 5+ collaborations and for which a reuser chooses
not to use the above "same fashion" author list.  But I assume
"attributed in the manner specified by the uploader" ought to apply
both in the 5+ cases where a "same fashion" list is not used and in
all cases with rich media made by 4 or fewer people.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Brian  wrote:
> Quite frankly the advice that you should only use five subjects makes no
> sense. The appeal to Nielsen's authority is not going to work on me or
> anyone else who understands why the scientific method exists. It's
> unscientific thinking and it's going cause to you waste money. You're going
> to draw conclusions based on results that simply aren't valid, and you won't
> know it until the study is over and you didn't make progress.
>
> Careful analysis of site data could allow you to draw some conclusions. I'm
> curious how you're planning to go about that. Dependent/independent
> variables?
>

An exercise in statistical thinking: when everyone or almost everyone
cites problem X, how many people does it take to reach statistical
significance that X is a problem worth addressing?  Even if the
results are a statistical fluke and in reality only 20% of new users
run into trouble with problem X, that's still a problem worth
addressing.

The fact that so many of the 15 people had the same problems, and
those problems also align with common sense, is a strong indication
that the study has found some things worth fixing.

There is more than one way to come to reliable conclusions.  Any time
I see someone invoking "the [singular] scientific method", as if there
is only one and it is set in stone and universally agreed upon by all
rational people, I have trouble taking them seriously.  See
[[Talk:Scientific method]].

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Murdoch newspaper websites to go paywall - opportunity for citizen journalism!

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 7:33 AM, David Gerard  wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites
>
> Time for Wikinews to get recruiting ...
>
>
> - d.
>

Maybe we should also try rethinking how Wikinews works, namely, by
following Clay Shirky's advice for social media and "go where people
are convening online, rather than starting a new place to convene".
Wikinews isn't new, per se, but it's new to the great majority of
established and potential citizen journalists out there.  We need to
find ways of bringing Wikinews--as an opportunity for collaboration,
rather than finished product--to the places where real and potential
citizen journalists convene.

I blogged my thoughts in this vein a few days ago,
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2009/05/rethinking-wikinews.html ,
but I'm sure there are lots of other potential ways to make Wikinews a
positive and significant force in this period of turmoil for
journalism.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Murdoch newspaper websites to go paywall -opportunity for citizen journalism!

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Nathan  wrote:
> The biggest problem for Wikinews in my mind is that delivering news is a
> competitive and innovative business. In the on-line and comprehensive
> encyclopedia vacuum, Wikipedia was able to be "get there first, with the
> most" and draw eyeballs and participants by being the leader. Wikinews, by
> contrast, is at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to online news
> reporting. There are hundreds of major news sites that offer content at no
> charge (although not "free" in the sense we usually mean), with the huge
> benefit of full time, paid reporting staff.

You're right about Wikinews as an all-purpose news source: the
commercial sites were there first and do it better.

But as a hub of citizen journalism, Wikinews does still have a chance
to be the first important site.  At this point, the world of citizen
journalism is extremely diffuse.  One route for getting Wikinews to
really work might involve two strategies: forming partnerships with
other non-profit news organizations to syndicate content, so that
Wikinews is a usable first-stop general news website; and focusing
volunteer (and possibly Foundation) resources on identifying reporting
opportunities and recruiting established amateur journalists to
contribute their work to Wikinews *in addition to* their normal
venues.

Maybe the Foundation could work with one of the journalism grant
sources (like the Knight Foundation) to design grants for professional
freelance journalists who want to work on big stories where a cadre of
web-savvy volunteers could usefully collaborate.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Robert Rohde  wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Brion Vibber  wrote:
>> IMHO any restriction that's not present in the default view isn't likely
>> to accomplish much. The answer an objecting parent wants to "my daughter
>> saw a lady with semen on her neck on your website" is *not* "you should
>> have told her to log in and check 'no sexual imagery' in her profile"!
> 
>
> I would suggest that a "child-safe" version of Wikipedia be cloaked
> with its own domain syntax in a way similar to secure.wikimedia.org.
> That would allow schools and parents to block the main site while
> providing access to an alternative that they might find more
> acceptable.
>
> Since domain level filtering is already commonly employed by many
> software packages I don't think that would be an unreasonable thing to
> ask.  Choosing what filtered views of Wikipedia to provide at a domain
> level would require some discussion of course as well as some form of
> social agreement about what content belongs behind the filter.  Not
> easy issues at all, but making a good faith effort to address them
> would be huge in my mind.
>
> -Robert Rohde

I don't have much to add, but I want to voice my strong agreement.
Some sort of serious effort to reach out to the many users who don't
share the outlook of our more-libertarian-than-the-general-population
community is long overdue.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:03 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
> Perhaps the problem is that the particular photograph sends a
> sex-positive, not a clinical message. Why shouldn't it? It's not a
> pathological state; it's not shameful. Using a clinical image
> indicates there is something about it that needs to be shown in a
> specially restrained manner. The picture  might be interpreted as
> implying that a woman as well as a man might enjoy the practice. When
> we show pictures of people engaging in recreation, we normally do show
> them enjoying it.  We do this even for dangerous sports. Our treatment
> of consensual sexual practices should be as for other non-harmful
> human activities: we present them as part of the normal world.  As far
> as children & sexuality go, I do not see the picture as harmful to any
> young person old enough to understand it. As far as sexual practices
> go, this one is from any point of view  quite innocuous.  If one wants
> to encourage young people to safe sex, this qualifies, though I'm
> aware it seems odd to some people.
>

I don't think it's so straightforward.  While I agree that a clinical
approach has drawbacks, the whole point of such an approach to, e.g.,
sexual content is to avoid implicit value judgments.  Compare the
pearl necklace photo with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Semfac01.png ; neither is clinical,
but either one, I would argue, has the potential to violate NPOV
unless properly contextualized and captioned.

In this case, having a single pearl necklace image with woman who
appears to enjoy it may carry the message not just that "a woman as
well as a man might enjoy the practice", but that a woman should or
usually does enjoy it.  And some cultural critics have argued that
some sex acts that have been emphasized in mainstream pornography
normalize humiliation of women through sex  (see [[Facial (sex act)]]
for some discussion of this).  My point is that a sex-positive message
may be even more problematic than a clinical one; if every sex act is
illustrated with the subjects appearing to enjoy it, that gives the
implicit message that, e.g., women are equally likely to enjoy any of
them--which is manifestly not the case.

But of course this is mostly a moot point.  Our sexology coverage
really weak, and nuances of images and POV are minor compared to
textual deficiencies in sex articles.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Sage Ross]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 4:50 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2009/5/14 Sage Ross :
>
>> I don't have much to add, but I want to voice my strong agreement.
>> Some sort of serious effort to reach out to the many users who don't
>> share the outlook of our more-libertarian-than-the-general-population
>> community is long overdue.
>
>
> Schools Wikipedia, or similar distributions.
>
> What you're talking about with "reach out" is limiting the contents of
> the live working site.
>

No, I'm talking about something like actively including meta-data that
would make possible filtered.en.wikipedia.org or the like (as Robert
Rohde described), not imposing any limits on the way readers currently
view Wikipedia.

In fact, it wouldn't even have to be directly incorporated into
editing; it could be a separate layer of meta-data, such that all the
filtering happens through a "flag offensive content" interface at the
filtered wikipedia site; users interested in a filtered site would do
all the flagging and it could even be fine-grained so that
objectionable content could be sorted by type.  So, for example, the
pearl necklace photo would get flagged as sexual, Muhammad cartoons
would be flagged as Islam-related, etc.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Britannica

[Sage Ross]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> Дана Wednesday 10 June 2009 16:36:38 Florence Devouard написа:
>> But frankly, I am super pleased to find out that one of the pict I
>> uploaded 4 years ago are now featured in Britannica :-)
>
> And they made a honest effort to be GFDL-compliant. I wonder how many more
> such images are there.
>

They've been doing this since sometime last year.  I first noticed it
in September:
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-are-your-wikimedia-commons-photos.html
(at the bottom of the post is where Britannica comes up)

I think I did a rough estimate a few months ago that Britannica had
added somewhere in the thousands to ten-thousands range of images
taken from Wikipedia or Commons (including both GFDL and CC).  But
they don't provide a link back to the sources and/or userpages, so I
feel like they could do a better job of respecting the license terms.
When an image is a attributed to a hyperlinked name (as most Commons
images are), that would imply that the hyperlink ought to be part of
the attribution when it's used on the web.  Maybe the Foundation
should contact them about this.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] "antisocial production"

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Gerard
Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Is this blog syndicated on either of the two ? That would be the obvious
> thing to get it read :)
> Thanks,
>     GerardM

Yes, the blog is syndicated on both open.wikiblogplanet.com and
en.planet.wikimedia.org.  The blog basically serves as a notification
service of the contents of each new issue; in order not to fragment
discussion venues and to accommodate the need to copy-edit and correct
articles post-publication, the actual full articles are on-wiki.

Incidentally, the June 29 issue just came out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2009-06-29

I'll be updating the blog shortly.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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[Foundation-l] Quality of community-created help pages (was: Recommending a Browser...)

[Sage Ross]

Cross-posting to Wikien-l...

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Unfortunately,
> community-created help pages tend to accumulate vast amounts of
> instruction cruft that distracts from simple high-level information.

Maybe it's time English Wikipedia (at least) created a set of
standards for help pages and a process for identifying good ones.
"Manual of Style (help pages)", "Helpful help page candidates" and
"What is a helpful help page?", anyone?  (The latter two are only half
facetious; the first is probably a good idea, although I would have no
idea where to start.)

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] About that "sue and be damned" to the NationalPortrait Gallery ...

[Sage Ross]

A Wikipedia Signpost article intended to recount the facts and context
of the legal threat is in progress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-13/Copyright_threat

Comments, suggestions, and contributions are welcome.  In particular,
there is some discussion on the talk page of a few issues where more
input would be helpful.

Cheers,
Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Article: Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Kat Walsh wrote:
> The Executive Director for Digital Policy of the J. Paul Getty Trust
> has written an article on digitally-reproducible works of public
> domain art, and museums' mission, arguing why and how museums should
> properly make these works as unrestrictedly available as possible --
> thought people here would find it a worthwhile read:
>
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html

Along similar lines, this is worth reading:
"Archives or Assets?"
http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/52/3/Archives%20or%20assets.html

It's the 2003 address to to the Society of American Archivists from
the society's president Peter B. Hirtle, in which he argues along the
same lines for archival holdings.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM and "why use Wikimedia Commons"

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:07 AM, John at Darkstar wrote:
> Is it possible to find some common grounds on why and how a
> GLAM-organization should use Wikimedia Commons? Forget about troublesome
> disputes with specific organizations. Why should they use us and is it
> possible for us to tell them how to better utilize our services? What
> are our services? Perhaps we need a sales department... ;)
>
> John

Look for something along these lines in the upcoming Signpost,
hopefully.  A handful of Wikimedians who have worked with GLAMs are
working on an open letter making the case of mutually beneficial
cooperative relationships with WMF projects.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM, geni wrote:
> 2009/7/18 Yann Forget :
>> In the case of the NPG, it is quite clear that the cost of the
>> digitalization is small compared with the potential benefit.
>> There are people and organisations willing to pay to have a copy of
>> these famous portraits. The issue is how to collect the funds without
>> puting a copyright on the images. For this, we need a new business
>> model. Think about how donations was raised to free up Blender.[1]
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History
>
> €100,000 is not a significant amount of money when dealing with trying
> to digitalize the various UK archives.
>

The exact amount of money is beside the point.  I think the business
model analagous to Blender goes something like this:

A GLAM figures out the cost per item of its digitization project.
Take that, add some modest figure for subsidizing the rest of the
institution's activities, and that's the price for releasing any given
reproduction.  Anyone may contribute all or part of the price for
releasing any given work.  Once the full price has been reached, the
scan is made available for free to anyone.

Maybe this would happen in lots, with the most popular/useful/valuable
works digitized in the early lots with higher prices so that the
capital investments get recouped early on.  The next lot gets
digitized once a certain threshold is reached with the previous one
(e.g., the break-even point to finance the next lot).  Maybe there are
tiers for any given work:$X for 800px, $2X for 1600px, $4X for 3200px,
etc.  If the 1600px version is available already but you really need
the 3200px version, you pay the difference of $2X and now the 3200px
version is available for everyone.

The advantage of this scheme is that there are several groups who
would be likely to help pay for the digitization: publishers who need
hi-res versions and who would previously have paid for licensing; arts
lovers who would be making donations anyway (and who can now point
exactly to what their donation funded); free culture advocates.  And
if there is some way of recognizing the donors ("This portrait was
digitized thanks to the donations of John Q. Wikipedian and Sally B.
Artlover"), it might be much more financially successful in the short
to medium term than the copyright-and-license model.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Peter Gervai wrote:
>> Ultimately the issue for professional photographers who might want to
>> donate their work is copyright. 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia
>> rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If
>> they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow
>> photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
>
> Apart from the clueless phrasing (which may or may not be due to the
> news reporter instead of Mr. Avenaim) what he doesn't seem to
> understand is that the pictures are what they are BECAUSE HE does not
> want to release EVEN ONE of his photographs to make it better.
>
> Basically he says "I do not like the look of it but I do not offer my
> work but you have to change your rules instead". And I'd basically say
> "it is as bad as it is because YOU have the means but not the will to
> enrichen public content", and I may have added that "calling those
> people names who offer their resources, time and money to make
> Wikipedia better while you don't is hypocrisy".
>

Hold up!  This is User:Jerry Avenaim, and he has contributed some of
his low-resolution photographs, and even a higher-resolution one of
Mark Marmon that is a Featured Picture on en-wiki.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Peter Gervai wrote:

> So it seems just what I have guessed: the reporter misinterpreting someone.
>

The slashdot summary includes the choice quotes that are a bit out of
context, but in the original article it starts off the section with
Avenaim by noting his contributions.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Slashdot] Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> ...a properly viral licence will constrain the commercial
> publisher with the requirement that any use by him will also render his
> new context for that photograph just as available for free use as the
> photograph itself.
>

But our nominally viral licenses don't do that.  We've come to accept
that using CC-SA images as illustrations does not extend copyleft
requirements to the accompanying text.

-Sage Ross (User:Ragesoss)

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[Foundation-l] Signpost interviews with WMF board candidates

[Sage Ross]

The Wikipedia Signpost on en-wiki put a series of questions to the
board candidates, and their answers may be of interest to the people
on this list who don't normally read the Signpost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Board_elections#Candidate_interviews

Translators may (or may not) be interested in translating these
interviews, as I think the questions and answers have a decent a ratio
of substance to flamebait compared to some of the questions on meta.

Cheers,
Sage Ross (User:Ragesoss)

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[Foundation-l] Geonotice improvements that could make Wikinews great (among other benefits)

[Sage Ross]

One of the great frustrations of Wikinews for me is that it doesn't
have a system for identifying and pointing users toward opportunities
to get out into the offline world and do original reporting.  A
fine-grained cross-project opt-in geonotice system could be a
solution.

Here's how I imagine it working: there is a new opt-in geonotice (in
addition to the current one that reaches everyone in the specified
geography).  For the opt-in geonotice (which would hopefully be able
to reach across projects, since many causal Wikinewsies visit that
site only rarely) any trusted user could add new items to let nearby
people know about reporting or photography opportunities.  For these
opt-in notices, we would not need to lock down the ability to add
items like we do for the current geonotice system (it's a fully
protected page), since people who opt-in will expect a bit a noise.

So, for example, I would set a notice that Senator Chris Dodd is
holding a public discussion about health care reform on such-and-such
date in Hartford, Connecticut.  I mark this as a photo opportunity and
a reporting opportunity.  The system sets a default radius (or better
yet, users specify the radius they want to be notified within) and
everyone within x kilometers of Hartford who has opted in to the
notice gets a watchlist message pointing to more details.  I can
imagine a wide range of tips and events that could be spread to the
right people with such a system.

This would do a couple things: it would draw in new users to Wikinews,
and given enough participation it could provide a resource that is
useful for professional journalists.  Journalists are eager to figure
out useful ways to tap the knowledge of amateurs, and a widely used
geography-based tip-line is something that Wikimedia still has a
chance to be the first organization to do well.  I think finding a way
to play a major part in the ongoing changes in the journalism world
ought to be a high priority for the Foundation.

-Sage Ross (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

[Sage Ross]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 1:52 AM, Ryan Lomonaco wrote:

>
> My thought is that there may be other ways to enfranchise users who are
> clearly community members, but who for some reason or another are inactive
> on the projects themselves.  What those ways are, I don't know.

One way could be to have chapters maintain lists of users linked to
real identities.  Although that might gum up the works for "pink"
chapters that do not intend to become legal organizations.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Geonotice improvements that could make Wikinews great (among other benefits)

[Sage Ross]

The Strategic Planning wiki is a good place to discuss this idea and
how it changed and/or implemented:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals/Geonotice_improvements
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proposals/Geonotice_improvements

-Sage

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Sage Ross wrote:
> One of the great frustrations of Wikinews for me is that it doesn't
> have a system for identifying and pointing users toward opportunities
> to get out into the offline world and do original reporting.  A
> fine-grained cross-project opt-in geonotice system could be a
> solution.
>
> Here's how I imagine it working: there is a new opt-in geonotice (in
> addition to the current one that reaches everyone in the specified
> geography).  For the opt-in geonotice (which would hopefully be able
> to reach across projects, since many causal Wikinewsies visit that
> site only rarely) any trusted user could add new items to let nearby
> people know about reporting or photography opportunities.  For these
> opt-in notices, we would not need to lock down the ability to add
> items like we do for the current geonotice system (it's a fully
> protected page), since people who opt-in will expect a bit a noise.
>
> So, for example, I would set a notice that Senator Chris Dodd is
> holding a public discussion about health care reform on such-and-such
> date in Hartford, Connecticut.  I mark this as a photo opportunity and
> a reporting opportunity.  The system sets a default radius (or better
> yet, users specify the radius they want to be notified within) and
> everyone within x kilometers of Hartford who has opted in to the
> notice gets a watchlist message pointing to more details.  I can
> imagine a wide range of tips and events that could be spread to the
> right people with such a system.
>
> This would do a couple things: it would draw in new users to Wikinews,
> and given enough participation it could provide a resource that is
> useful for professional journalists.  Journalists are eager to figure
> out useful ways to tap the knowledge of amateurs, and a widely used
> geography-based tip-line is something that Wikimedia still has a
> chance to be the first organization to do well.  I think finding a way
> to play a major part in the ongoing changes in the journalism world
> ought to be a high priority for the Foundation.
>
> -Sage Ross (User:Ragesoss)
>

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Re: [Foundation-l] Update on struck votes issue on SecurePoll

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Rjd0060 wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Gregory Maxwell  wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Philippe
>> Beaudette wrote:
>> > Earlier today a number of adjustments were made to votes which had
>> > been previously struck in the election for Wikimedia Board of
>> > Trustees.  We believe the votes that are still struck are validly
>> > struck; if there is a dispute, any user is encouraged to contact the
>> > Election Committee (board-electi...@lists.wikimedia.org) or any member
>> > personally for clarification.
>>
>> Is there any reason why some, but not all, super-seeded votes have
>> also been struck?
>>
>> There are a number of cases, but picking one I know personally,
>>
>> Details 15:49, 28 July 2009     Ragesoss        en.wikipedia.org
>> 
>> Details 14:06, 9 August 2009    Ragesoss        en.wikipedia.org
>>
>
>
> Yeah, I noticed this quite a bit also.  If a voter voted more that once, it
> seems like all but their last vote is greyed out usually - only sometimes
> are first votes struck.  Not sure if second/third/etc. votes need to be
> struck just because the user voted again or not, based on that.
>

What happened with my vote, which Phoebe noticed and brought to both
my and the election committee's attention, is that my first vote was
initially struck out without being superseded.  Phoebe and I
speculated that this might have been because I accessed the voting
page again without casting a second vote (and then, yesterday,
accessed it a third time and voted a second time).

-Sage

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[Foundation-l] Terms and conditions for Omidyar Network grant

[Sage Ross]

The press release Q&A,
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Omidyar_Network_Grant_August_2009QA
, notes the following:

"Wikimedia and Omidyar have developed targets related to financial
sustainability (the percentage of operating expenses supported by
individual donations), global reach (global unique visitors monthly,
as reported by comScore Media Metrix), global participation rates
(defined as the number of editors with 5+ edits in the previous month)
and the completion of the Wikimedia Foundation's strategy project."

What are the specific targets for percent from individual donations,
reach, and participation rates?

It seems to me that hard targets for global participation rates, in
particular, could tie our hands in terms of prioritizing resources.
In flagship projects like English and German Wikipedias, participation
rates have started to decline and may be very difficult to raise
again.  Thus, depending on the target, the only way to reach a certain
global rate might be to focus inordinately on immature projects or
start new ones that put participation rates over core mission issues.

Wikia is still seeing exponential growth, and one can imagine a wide
range of similar very loosely educational projects to what Wikia does
that might attract participants but create little actual educational
value.  If things were really desperate, one could even imagine
Wikimedia trying to poach participants by starting advertising-free
Wikia forks.

Not that I think any of that is likely, but the targets are important
for the community to know.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Georg von
Zimmermann wrote:

>In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have
> pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao.
>
> That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to
> develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews.

I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something
Wikimedia should be interested in.  I was actually thinking of
proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still
do so).

> Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private
> limited company. Eventually, I  would be pleased if our company could
> move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding
> through donations.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be pleased to see a project
like this become part of Wikimedia.  We've never really absorbed other
communities under the Wikimedia umbrella before (like Wikia has), but
at this point Wikipedia has earned enough goodwill also support lesser
known worthy projects.

-Sage Ross

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Re: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 9:42 AM, teun spaans wrote:

>
> The only question which your statement here raises is why you limit yourself
> to reviews. Imho there might be a considerable market area for people who
> have opinions to voice on politics, religion, etc.
>

Reviews are quite different political and religious opinion.  Unlike
political or religious commentary, reviews (especially if they combine
numerical ratings with textual evaluation) are valuable in aggregate,
as they can help others make yes/no decisions about whether to invest
time and/or money into some particular, uniquely identifiable thing
(whether watching a particular movie or buying a particular
flashlight).

Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
reviews.   Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an
extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon),
and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit
company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access
or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the
good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.
Although individually such reviews have subjective elements, I don't
see that as fundamentally incompatible with WMF values.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

[Sage Ross]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Delirium wrote:
> Sage Ross wrote:
>> Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
>> reviews.
> I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't
> seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge
> production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the
> software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any
> of our existing software, either.
>

I agree, it's something of a departure in being not directly
collaborative and not well-suited for the standard wiki approach.  I
think it does have to do with knowledge production--it collects
first-hand knowledge of how well goods function and what their
shortcomings are, for example.

The reason I think Wikimedia might ought to get involved in this area
is because--in terms of public recognition and infrastructural
stability--Wikimedia is becoming a cornerstone of the free culture
ecosystem.  So it makes sense to me to start
supporting/mirroring/organizing/structuring useful free content that's
being created within smaller, possibly financially unsustainable
projects, and to make it possible for such projects to continue even
if their original venues shut down.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Akahele: Omidyar venturing out

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Gregory Kohs wrote:
> Being that it was a topic of rousing discussion here last week, Wikimedians
> may be interested in a brief summary of the Omidyar/Wikimedia/Wikia
> connection, as authored by me and published by the non-profit, Internet
> Review Corporation:
>
> http://akahele.org/2009/08/omidyar-venturing-out/

Thanks Greg.  This is a useful and fairly even-handed piece.  I feel
like your nitpicking of whether the seat was "bought" or whether there
is a "tie" is (pardon the phrase, literature people) just semantics.
What Halprin essentially asserted in the interview with Andrew Lih was
that the grant was not conditional on Halprin being seated on the
board (or retaining his seat after his current appoint ends at the end
of the year).  He didn't deny that, in a social rather than
contractual sense, he was considered for a seat on the board because
of the grant negotiations; in fact, he basically said that he and/or
Omidyar Network expressed interest in a seat on the board because of
the grant negotiations, and as you show, that's pretty typical of the
way that Omidyar Network interacts with non-profits.

I don't see anything that either Halprin or WMF has said about seat
and the grant as evidence of duplicity.

And I dare say that you would avoid the word "bought" too if both your
sister and your $2 million benefactor thought that word had misleading
negative connotations.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Akahele: Omidyar venturing out

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Sage Ross
> 
>> wrote:
>
>> [Halprin] didn't deny that, in a social rather than
>> contractual sense, he was considered for a seat on the board because
>> of the grant negotiations; in fact, he basically said that he and/or
>> Omidyar Network expressed interest in a seat on the board because of
>> the grant negotiations, and as you show, that's pretty typical of the
>> way that Omidyar Network interacts with non-profits.
>>
>
> He said that?  Where has Halprin or anyone with knowledge of the appointment
> said that Halprin was considered because of the grant negotiations?  Where
> has anyone even acknowledged that there were grant "negotiations"?  What was
> being negotiated?  What were the other offers?

See http://wikipediaweekly.org/2009/08/28/episode-82-matt-halprin-interview/
and 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Wikimania_2009/Halprin
(transcript of one section of the interview).

Halprin said: "But I think that at this point in time, I think what
Sue would say is, that even if Omidyar Network hadn't gotten involved,
once she got to know me that she would have actually said: hey, this
is someone who could be helpful for us at this point in time."  What's
implicit is that Omidyar Network did, in fact, get involved and that's
why Foundation people got to know him well enough to decide that he
should be added to the board.

What was being negotiated was terms of the grant, at the least; as the
Q&A says, there are targets that WMF has to fulfill in receive the
full grant.  From the interview, it also seems that discussions were
geared toward figuring out how much WMF and Omidyar Network had in
common in terms of goals and whether Halprin's expertise was needed or
would be helpful on the board.  And I imagine they discussed what
kinds of things the WMF might want to spend a few extra million on.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Akahele: Omidyar venturing out

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Anthony wrote:

>
> If Omidyar Networks had not offered a grant, but offered to put Halprin on
> the board, would the board have accepted it?  I don't see anyone with
> knowledge of the situation saying no.

I had the impression that WMF had been courting Omidyar Network for
some time; it's hard for me to imagine that a potential grant wasn't
part of the context right from the beginning.  But indeed, we're
mostly speculating here.

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?

[Sage Ross]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 10:35 AM,   wrote:
> In a message dated 11/12/2010 2:13:03 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> jay...@gmail.com writes:
>
>
>> I agree with everything except whether or not they are in line with
>> our basic values.  They may not align with Wikipedia's values, but as
>> a separate project they dont need to be; instead they need to fit
>> within the core values that all our projects have in common. >>
>>
>>
>
> And they don't.  As pointed out they have POV and also they are
> credentialist.  They do not invite the world to contribute, they effectively 
> bar the
> majority of the world from contributing.
>
> They are not a meritocracy.  They are instead an authoritarian oligarchy.
> Of course the same criticism has been leveled at us, but then we don't
> actually engrain it in our principle policies.

I'm one ocean late to this conversation, but I'll give a big +1
offering to host Citizendium.

They wouldn't be a WMF project, and so wouldn't need to adhere exactly
to all the core Wikimedia values.  (And NPOV doesn't extend to all WMF
projects anyway.)

But read the Citizendium neutrality policy, if you haven't.  The core
differences between their policies and ours are about the editing
process and project governance, not the kind of result they are
striving for: "we should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and
not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is
correct." [1]  That's not quite what NPOV says, but it's close enough
that we've already been able to incorporate a fair bit of CZ content
into Wikipedia. [2]

[1] = http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Neutrality_Policy

[2] = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Citizendium_Porting

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Sage Ross]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or
> more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because "RFA is broken"
> discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning
> communities of about 50 regular writers or more.
>

[citation needed]

And I don't mean that all facetiously.  It'd be worth documenting the
relative "brokenness" of admin selection processes across languages.
We have some interesting analyses of adminship on English Wikipedia
that brought a few of the problems into sharper focus, but nothing
that I know of in a similar vein that looks across multiple languages.

Are all the "RFA is broken" discussions talking about similar things?
Or is each broken in its own special way?

This page is rather, er, underdeveloped:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Administrator

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Making wikimediafoundation.org more open to contributions

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 11:28 AM, David Gerard  wrote:

> Suggested principle: stuff should go on meta unless there's a very
> good reason for it not to. The strategy and usability stuff should
> have been on meta or mediawiki.org in the first place, for example. A
> wiki for every little thing is a *bad* idea.
>

Not that I have anything new to add, but this is one of those threads
where it's nice to see a long string of +1's.

I wrote an essay a few months ago based on that principle:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Not_my_wiki

-Sage

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Re: [Foundation-l] Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 3:08 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> We have a range of ideas about how e-mail could be used for
> retention/engagement

Here's one more for the idea pile...

If the operations reasons for not mass-enabling email notifications
can't be overcome (or even if they can be), something finer grained
could still make a big difference.

That is, when you leave a message on someone's talk page, there should
be the option to send them an email notification automatically at the
same time, through the equivalent of Special:Emailuser.

This is what Kaldari's WikiLove gadget does when you leave barnstars
and such, and it's great... especially for newcomers.  I hacked
together a version of the script that has a "Just a message" option so
you can leave a plain message but still send an automatic email at the
same time, which is quite handy for the ambassador program where we
work with students who don't log in regularly.

-Sage

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