Re: [Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books
I think what you might be remembering is that they used to sell them via a sales force who went door to door. They announced a few years back that they were stopping that. --Original Message-- From: Yaroslav M. Blanter Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List ReplyTo: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books Sent: 13 Mar 2012 22:58 On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:54:48 +, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I thought they had already stopped... I'm sure I remember an announcement like this a year or two ago... does anyone know what it is I'm remembering? No, I think there were only like three big universal encyclopaedias still being printed (Britannica, Brockhaus, and Russian Encyclopaedia?), unless I am confusing things. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Neil / QuiteUnusual@Wikibooks ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter
I was using useful in its most basic sense - to mean capable of being used at all. That is, in the context of this discussion, avoids the current situation where there is a risk that the whole encyclopedia (or any other project) is off limits to certain groups or individuals because they can't satisfy the basic need of being able to find what they want to read or see easily and safely. I'm not an advocate of anything more than a mechanism that allows users to express preferences and use search tools that accurately follow those preferences regardless of what they are. Personally I'd love to be able to filter fancruft out of searches. My point is that providing this capability is not censorship and the screams of protest that it would strike at the core of Wikimedia's mission are ludicrous. It is not censorship to help a consumer of information find what they want quickly and to avoid what they don't want. Not providing this capability is censoring the whole of Wikipedia for people who don't want to risk being exposed to inappropriate material. Refusing to help meet the needs of these people has an ivory tower smell about it; we don't care if nobody uses Wikipedia as long as it is perfect. This attitude strikes across the core principle of the movement to make knowledge available to all. --Original Message-- From: Ray Saintonge To: n...@thebabbages.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter Sent: 10 Mar 2012 00:57 On 03/09/12 6:06 AM, Neil Babbage wrote: Wikimedia is not supposed to be some kind of exercise in perfection for perfection's sake. It's supposed to be open, accessible and useful. Useful, like notable is another of those words that cannot be easily defined. In many otherwise non-controversial articles we have pictures that do not further the contents of the articles. They may have a loose connection with the article's topic, but they don't add any information to the topic. They do, however, break up solid blocks of text, and make it more readable. Ray Neil / QuiteUnusual@Wikibooks ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter
And it misses the point that the purpose of providing knowledge is for it to be used. Wikimedia projects will be unavailable to those who would benefit from them if they continue to provide content that is unsuitable or unwanted with no mechanism for the consumer to control it. If you ran a charity store committed to providing educational products free to all who needed them you wouldn't get many children as customers if you put hardcore sex products right by the entrance. You also wouldn't manage to give anything away if nobody could find what they wanted Wikimedia is not supposed to be some kind of exercise in perfection for perfection's sake. It's supposed to be open, accessible and useful. Neil / QuiteUnusual@Wikibooks -Original Message- From: Nathan nawr...@gmail.com Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 08:50:57 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 5:30 AM, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.comwrote: Give as a clear message, that Wikipedia/Wikimedia will never assist in hiding knowledge. The day that Wiki*edia changes its mission from providing access to free knowledge to enforcing our view of knowledge on you, would be a saddening day. Tom It does that already, in a lot of ways. As catholic as it attempts to be, the knowledge paradigm that Wikimedia represents is only a small sliver of the sum of knowledge in the world. That's just one way in which it enforces its view of knowledge; acceding to or refusing to filter content in any way is also enforcing a particular view of both knowledge and the world. It would do both sides well to approach this argument with a little less arrogance and self-righteousness. Nathan ___ 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] Author Wikimedia Foundation at BarnesNobles shop on Nook
So, correct WMF is not the author and this should be changed. Listing people as editors of a book using material from WP or any other project is acceptable. The terms of use and licenses simply require the appropriate attribution and you'd need to buy the book to confirm if this has or hasn't been done. However my view on this is that this reuse was exactly what was intended when the decision was made to make the content freely available and we aren't in a position to complain now. If this wasn't intended then Jimbo could have started WP with a no commercial use license. Sure it seems a rip off to us but there are always going to be people who buy stuff they could get for free - bottled water anyone? Personally I'd like to see someone set up a pay wall version of WP that has strict content control making it available to those groups that won't trust or use WP because of its free-for-all nature. Someone will make money but more knowledge will be spread which I think outweighs the evil of charging a fee... Neil / QuiteUnusual@Wikibooks -Original Message- From: Sarah slimvir...@gmail.com Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 19:27:39 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Author Wikimedia Foundation at BarnesNobles shop on Nook I also wish the Wikimedia Foundation would do something about these books. Here is one by me, or by Wikipedia, but NOT by Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome (Editor), and John McBrewster (Editor). http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/marshalsea-frederic-p-miller/1028062431?ean=9786130034771itm=1usri=marshalsea The byline apart, it's disturbing that someone might be conned into paying $77 for it, when they can download it for free. Sarah On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 6:24 PM, RYU Cheol rch...@gmail.com wrote: You can find that at this link. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wikibooks-wikimedia-foundation/1102082833?ean=2940012379689itm=1usri=wikimedia+foundation I think anybody can sell well organized ebook on commercially. But the author is not the Wimedia Foundation exactly. I think the seller eM publication's business is illegitimate. It is a trademark infringement if the foundation did not permit the use. Cheol 2012/3/5 RYU Cheol rch...@gmail.com Hi, all! I searched Wikimedia Foundation by chance and a lot of Wikibooks, possibly collections of Wikipedia articles. The author of the books is Wikimedia Foundation. I don't think Wikimedia Foundation is selling the e-books for 2~3 dollars, and I think it is a fraud. Many buyer commented that they want their money back. I think the Foundation needs to find out the case and alert the bookshop. Cheol ___ 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 mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
What *was* at issue here is how we treat new users; the discussion was approached (on the part of our editors) either as a battleground/fight, or in a quite patronising way. The issue here was that someone was put off from raising the issues. The expertise that is most valued at Wikipedia is expertise in Wikipedia itself - its policies, procedures, technology, etc - rather than expertise in the content. That's a fundamental cultural flaw if the project is to succeed. In reference to other comments here about the treatment of new editors, there has been a noticeable (to me at least) shift away from the role of administrators and senior editors from helping newcomers overcome the challenges to finding them a nuisance. On smaller projects the it's no big deal approach to the sysop flag still dominates and the administrators spend their time correcting naming errors, moving pages, merging histories, adding templates and also adding content to help new work survive. I don't see that at the English Wikipedia any more. Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:15:20 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions Jokes aside :) the problem here is exemplary of what Wikipedia *doesn't* do well, which is to find ways to assess the legitimacy of not-yet-legitimised knowledge I'm not seeing a good argument that we *should* assess the legitimacy. This seems to be being cast in the light of verifiability not truth (a really silly maxim) but, in reality, it goes more back to our idea of we use reliable sources because they are *peer reviewed*. The implicit suggestion here is that Wikipedia could/should act as that form of peer review for so called not-yet-legitimised knowledge. Although it would be nice to have that role it isn't actually all that practical for several reasons: - We already have enough disagreement over sourcing as it is - Very few of us are truly subject matter experts - Even fewer of us have experience of peer review and critical examination of work (this is especially critical in the sciences) - Taking on the role of peer review puts us at odds with our main aim; of providing a summary resource. The main thing it would do is open up Wikipedia as an avenue to push (and legitimise) fringe material. whether the 'truth' is new analysis backed up by serious scholarship (as in this case), or things that have not yet made it to reliable print scholarship (knowledge that's circulated orally, whether in conversations or social media). The core of the problem would appear to be our insistence on the narrowest and smallest possible definition of 'legitimate knowledge'. Is it? Lets look at what happened here. - Someone posted information apparently based on their own analysis - it's not unreasonable to remove this - He began to defend his additions on the talk page and some were incorporated - He gave up further attempts - The next day a lot of those comments were incorporated (if you read through the detail very carefully, to as much of an extent as the published literature allowed) based on the inconsistencies he raised - He went away and wrote a book which forwards a number of new theories and updates our understanding of the topic. Has anyone actually read through the points raised? The problem is not a case of well this factual thing disproves what is in the article. It is much more a case of disagreement over the established *interpretation* of events and over the *extent* to which views expressed by the previously top level source were recorded (for example; no evidence was a mistaken summary of the view raised by the source, a point which was then corrected). And I'd imagine that the solution is to find a workable, sensible and cross-culturally translatable version of legitimacy that is a lot better, bigger and more generous than what we have. No it isn't. We have a good sourcing policy; one which does cover a very wide range of sources and can be relaxed and restricted as required to fit the topic based on good editorial judgement. However, for the topic of *history* (in which I have an interest, and where I work on articles at the moment) we definitely should stick to well reviewed, published material. What *was* at issue here is how we treat new users; the discussion was approached (on the part of our editors) either as a battleground/fight, or in a quite patronising way. The issue here was that someone was put off from raising the issues. I do know of academics who are frustrated by what they see as inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles; and when they try to correct them from their own
Re: [Foundation-l] Feedback tab on the English Wikipedia
I guess my concern is that it may encourage readers to type in suggestions and take it no further rather than take the next step and begin editing themselves. Definitely important to watch for any changes in the rate of new editors contributing. It also implicitly makes it someone else's problem to fix things compared to our current stock response of if you see things that could be better, fix it yourself. I'm not saying this is intended but it runs the risk of making projects look they have people exercising editorial control. Neil Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 04:47:54 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Feedback tab on the English Wikipedia Sure..except we weren't asking contributors to use this feedback to fix up the articles. I do know that even without any standing system to improve it, several article improvements were made. All I can give you quantifiably, though, is that editors saw the feedback, and thought a big chunk of it was stuff I can use. On 9 February 2012 04:44, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: We'll experiment with wordings as the testing progresses. On your other point - again, how can we find this out without testing it? If little is done with it, we can look into junking it, but nothing ventured... you say that you have existing feedback, and contributors have seen this feedback. You *can* already determine whether that feedback (already in hand) resulted in article improvements. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation ___ 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 votes! Steward elections 2012
Probably not a good day for the Toolserver to have intermittent hardware errors leading to the eligibility checker to time out frequently. It would be a good idea to get someone to prioritise fixing it if you expect a mad rush to vote. Cheers, Neil (QuiteUnusual@en.wikibooks) Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.com Sender: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 06:02:45 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia Commons Discussion Listcommon...@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia BD Listwikimedia...@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia India listwikimediaindi...@lists.wikimedia.org; wikie...@lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Foundation-l] Call for votes! Steward elections 2012 Hello everyone, I am pleased to announce the beginning of the voting of steward elections 2012 [1]. Eligible voters are now encouraged to give their valuable votes to elect new stewards this year. To find out more about voter eligibility, please take a look on our guidelines page. [2] Vote page will remain open to vote until February 27 2012, 23:59 (UTC). This year, we have made some modifications so it will be easier for voters to vote compared to the last years. You just have to follow the following steps. - Click on the big gray vote button on the vote page, a box will appear; - Select your vote (yes/no/neutral), and write your comments (if you have any) in the comment box; - And click vote on that box and it will save your vote automatically. Additionally, we are using template and bot so it will be easy to check the votes and verify the eligible ones. This year, we are also arranging the confirmation of existing stewards [3], so you are also welcome to give your valuable comments/feedback about their works. Confirmations are a good opportunity to check if we are still happy with our current stewards. So please speak your voice there. if you have any queries related to anything about to the election, you can ask us on the talk page [4]. You are also free to poke us on IRC channel #wikimedia-stewards-elections. We hope you will participate as soon as possible to speak your opinion and make this year's election a successful one (as you did in past). Please feel free to forward this e-mail to any other lists if you think it will be useful. :-) Regards, Tanvir Rahman Wikitanvir on Wikimedia (On behalf of the Election Committee.) [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Elections_2012 [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Elections_2012/Guidelines [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/Confirm/2012/en [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Stewards/Elections_2012 ___ 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] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On 22/10/11 22:56, David Gerard wrote: On 22 October 2011 22:51, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: What approaches do you have in mind, that would empower the editors and the readers, aside from an hide/show all solution? And, in detail, why is a hide/show all solution inadequate? What is the use case this does not serve? The board have not detailed what arguments unanimously convinced them, both for the original resolution and, even after all the debate, to uphold it unanimously again after months of acrimonious objection. If restarting communication with people who no longer trust them is considered important, then, if they could please each (individually) do so, in as much detail as possible, that would help a *lot*. - d. I agree. A cookie-based hide all images/show all images toggle clearly visible in the toolbar at the top of pages. together with click-to-reveal for individual images when in the hide all mode should be all that is needed to deal with the various cultural concerns regarding images, as well as concerns about censorship. It would also be very easy to implement. Perhaps an exception might be made for images displayed at less than, say, 30x30, to allow for icons and things like small embedded symbols within text -- although small nav images could conceivably be used for image-trolling, I would imagine that just about any WP community would regard that as unencylopedic, and block any attempts to do so. I'd be interested in any arguments that might be made against such a proposal. - Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On 23/10/11 16:24, Andrew Garrett wrote: On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 8:27 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: A neutral all-or-nothing image filter would not have such side effects (and would also neatly help low bandwidth usage). It would also make the project useless. I don't want to see the 0.01% (yes, rhetorical statistics again) images of medical procedures, and I'd avoid seeing the (much higher) X% of images that are NSFW while in public. That does not mean that I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not see any images whatsoever. Given the choice, I would not use such a filter. We have the technology and the capacity to allow users to make nuanced decisions about what they do and don't want to see. Why is this a problem? I think this has been dealt with before. Firstly, images should only be in articles to which they are directly relevant -- we should be able to rely on the community to remove images which are irrelevant to articles. This is no more, but also no less, reasonable an expectation than to expect them to keep images correctly categorized in sufficient detail to allow your personal preferences to be catered for. Secondly, the title and context alone is usually enough to suggest what topic an article is about. Just to give an example: I'm pretty convinced that if I click on, say, the article for [[Stoke Poges]], that I will not be presented with an image that offends my personal sensibilities. Likewise with [[Calcium]] or [[Astrolabe]]. On the other hand, if I were offended by medical images, I might think twice about viewing [[Splenectomy]] or [[Autopsy]]. (Note that all of these examples are sight-unseen -- if I'm wrong about any of this, and, say, [[Calcium]] contains an unpleasant image, please let me know.) Given that, if you are concerned about distressing medical images, it seems obvious to me that you can get almost 100% effectiveness at preventing this by just turnin on the global image filter before browsing Wikipedia on medical topics. If you believe the pictures are safe to view, based on the image captions, one click turns them back on again. The same applies to browsing Wikipedia for articles that might contain images that might offend your religious sensibilities, or non-work-safe images. If you're not sure about the topic of an article (what's an [[Ursprache]]? Could it be some kind of nasty-looking injury?), you can play safe and turn the filter on, and be absolutely 100% sure of not being offended, or leave it off and still be _almost_ sure of not being offended because most articles do not contain images that offend anyone. The rest of the time, just leave it turned off -- which is also one click. Where would the difficulty be in that? - Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
Yes they are able to strike, but that still doesn't give them the right (legal or moral) to shut down property that doesn't belong to them. In any case, if the servers are located in the US then US law applies to their management. On 04/10/2011 21:02, Milos Rancic wrote: On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 21:58, Aaron Adrignolaaaron.adrign...@gmail.com wrote: Whoever has locked out access to it.wikipedia.org should be immediately desysopped under emergency procedures. This site is run by the Wikimedia Foundation and I've seen no authorization by the WMF for the vandalism of one of its websites. In Europe, people are able to strike. ___ 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] Dead Sea Scrolls
The digital copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls have copyright, not the originals... On 26/09/2011 19:58, emijrp wrote: Hi all; Finally, the Dead Sea Scrolls[1] have copyright[2]. Courtesy of The Israel Museum. Congratulations. By they way: Hi Wikimedia Israel. Regards, emijrp [1] http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ [2] http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/terms_pg ___ 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] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews
The projects will always have some crossover (or grey areas if you prefer) because they present the same information, just in different ways. For example, a textbook (Wikibooks) presents the same information as an encyclopedia but in a more inclusive way. That is, it tries to present all the information on a subject, not link out to other books in the WP style. It is also worded in a more conversational style. The Wikinews / Wikipedia crossover is obvious. A news event is reported by Wikinews, usually as a synergy of other news sources and it evolved as difering source speculation turns to consensual fact. Eventually the story becomes static and if it remains noteworthy it should then form the solid basis for a Wikipedia article. This of course relates only to events not places or people. By that I mean if Osama is killed then of course the article about Osama is updated with the news of his death. But the news report itself is better started in Wikinews until it stabilises and only then becomes an article in itself in WP assuming it has the relevant significance. In an ideal world all news events would start on Wikinews this way, but that'll never happen so it's more a question of encouraging that kind of behaviour while accepting the world isn't perfect, isn't it? On 07/09/2011 14:05, Bod Notbod wrote: On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Thomas Morton Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says Wikipedia does not record events until they are x days/months old? Yes, this would solve a large number of problems (not least resolving the historical significance issue). I think we'd lose something valuable. As I say, we often get positive news coverage for our articles on recent events. Osama was one, the death of Michael Jackson was one, I think we got good reviews for the New Orleans hurricane too. Even then; during this period they are not good news, they are a quickly changing record - often inaccurate and usually poorly written. WN is better set up to cope with this process. Well, I haven't done any type of survey of our articles that fall into the area we're discussing, so I'll defer to you on your points. It wouldn't surprise me if it were the case that the articles are poor, that seems quite likely to me. Nevertheless I think it's like Samuel Johnson's comment, to misquote: Sir, an encyclopedia reporting on news events is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. I find news events covered in Wikipedia exciting. And it marks us out from the competition. Just out of interest, and I assure you I don't ask this as a way of trying to trip you up - I genuinely ask out of curiosity: let's say a celebrity dies of old age (and that there's not a great deal of interesting things to say about the death), would you apply the no news for x days/months rule to an edit to their dates? I'm presuming not. The question raises a thought for me, though. I think if we decide that we are not going to capture things because they are not far enough in the past, we may not capture them at all. People are invigorated by things that have just happened. If we say no, you must wait three months I'm sure that person isn't going to place a red cross on their calendar and come back to record it. It will simply not get written, I would suggest. Perhaps it will take a decade before the ultimate article on the Iraq War is written. But I'm glad we have *something* there now. Bodnotbod ___ 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] Transfer a domain to the foundation
You could try contacting the domain registrar email addressdns-ad...@wikimedia.org or you could contact the WMF staff via talk pages on Meta (e.g., User:Philippe (WMF)). did you try #wikimedia-tech on IRC? They might be able to help. On 31/08/2011 15:46, Huib Laurens wrote: Hello, I currently have the domain www.wikilovesmonuments.com in my possession. I'm am willing to transfer this domain to the foundation, but I don't really know who to contact, and IRC didn't help me. Can somebody point me to the right person or can the right person contact me on: h...@wickedway.nl ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] roadmap for WM affiliation ; a name for self-identified affiliation
On 16/07/11 13:19, Alec Conroy wrote: On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote: In reply overall-- I definitely agree that Wikipedia is, by far, our strongest brand-- and a very different brand than the one that would be served by a wider unnamed movement. I haven't been anywhere near as ambition to think we could get a brand anywhere as good as Wikipedia. Its brand is so off-the-charts it's a little unfathomable. I'd be happy with something in the neighborhood of Wikimedia-- if donors and editors communities can easily understand it means Wikimedia Movement on other servers, I'm good. Now, how can we expand this into another name? Simple answer: we can't. Well... we certainly do it as well as Wikipedia. But we can piggyback off the Wikipedia name in ways, as the name Wikimedia does. ... Wiki is the key word: for good or ill, the word wiki now means wikipedia-like collaborative things to the general public. Perhaps the Wikiknowledge movement? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?
On 02/06/11 19:52, George Herbert wrote: On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:55 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 June 2011 18:48, Faefae...@gmail.com wrote: In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of work. This sort of scenario is why some of us have a thing about the backups :-) (Is there a good image backup of Commons and of the larger wikis, and - and this one may be trickier - has anyone ever downloaded said backups?) - d. I've floated this to Erik a couple of times, but if the Foundation would like an IT disaster response / business continuity audit, I can do those. Tape is -- still -- your friend here. Flip the write-protect after writing, have two sets of off-site tapes, one copy of each in each of two secure and widely separated off-site locations run by two different organizations, and you're sorted. Tape is the dumb backstop that will keep the data even when your supposedly infallible replicated and redundant systems fail. For example, it got Google out of a hole quite recently when they had to restore a significant number of Gmail accounts from tape. (see http://www.talkincloud.com/the-solution-to-the-gmail-glitch-tape-backup/ ) And, unlike other long-term storage media, there is a long history of tape storage, an understanding of its practical lifespan and risks, and well-understood procedures for making and verifying duplicate sub-master copies to new tape technologies over time to extend archive life, etc. etc. If we say that Wikimedia Commons currently has ~10M images, and if allow 1Mbyte per image, that's only 10 TB: that will fit nicely on seven LTO5 tapes. If you use LTFS, you can also make data access and long-term data robustness easier. If you like, you can slip in a complete dump of the Mediawiki source and Commons database on each tape, as well. Even if I'm wrong by an order of magnitude, and 140 tapes are needed, instead of 14, that's still less than $10k of media -- and I wouldn't be surprised if tape storage companies wouldn't be eager to vie to be the company that can claim it donates the media and drives which provide Wikipedia's long-term backup system. With two tape drives being run at once at an optimal 140 MB/s each, the whole backup would take less than a day. Even if I was wrong about both the writing speed and archive size by an order of magnitude each, this would still be less than three months. The same tape systems could also, trivally, be used to back up all the other WMF sites, on similar lines. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?
On 03/06/11 00:44, Mark Wagner wrote: On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 16:11, Neil Harrisn...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: Tape is -- still -- your friend here. Flip the write-protect after writing, have two sets of off-site tapes, one copy of each in each of two secure and widely separated off-site locations run by two different organizations, and you're sorted. The mechanics of the backup are largely irrelevant. What matters are the *policies*: what data do you back up, when do you back it up, how often do you test your backups, and so on. Once you've got that sorted out, it doesn't really matter whether you're storing the backups on tape, remote servers, or magic pixie dust. Not quite. You're right about procedures, but you can't begin defining procedures until you have something concrete to aim at. Tape is the One True Way for large scale backup, even today (ask Google), and I thought it might be useful to give an illustration of just how cheap it would be to use. Tape is a great simplifier, and eliminates a lot of the fanciness and feature-bloat associated with more sophisticated systems -- more sophisticated is not necessarily better. Here's a straw man proposal for procedures: I'd suggest backing up _everything_ -- cluster servers, local office IT servers, staff PCs, the lot -- for WMF internal archive and disaster recovery purposes. Something like monthly incremental backups, filing away media to the remote sites after verification, and yearly or six-monthly total backups to a complete new set of fresh media. For only a month's worth of work, replicated disk copies is fine: the tape archive is a back-stop, for when the replicated disks fail. Dumps for external archives could also be made using the same drives, but to different media, and with a much more restrictive policy about what is saved. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language (Milos Rancic)
On 22/05/11 18:29, WereSpielChequers wrote: We are likely to reach each of the following on the way to our target, and it would be great to announce them when we reach them: 1 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a language that they understand 2 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a language that they understand 3 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a language that they understand 4 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in their native language 5 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in their native language 6 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in their native language WereSpielChequers This raises the interesting prospect of bringing Wikipedia to the billion or more people who are currently illiterate, as the cost of access to mobile phones and network connectivity continues to fall to the point where it is becoming available even to some of the poorest people in the world, regardless of literacy. (Consider, for example, the reported increases in literacy in some parts of Africa as people learn literacy skills simply to be able to SMS their friends and use Facebook.) As part of the WMF's mission, I wonder if it could be worth considering providing a Web-based English (or other language) literacy course that could start with very simple video lessons to give an elementary vocabulary first, and then allow the user to slowly bootstrap their language sophistication from there? Although this would be a massive job to create, once the mission was put in place, many people might be willing to crowdsource the needed content. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]
On 11/05/11 11:32, HW wrote: I think the advantage is that it would allow us to generalize the concept behind enwp.org, which is that we want short urls for all languages and all projects. I'm thinking along the lines of http://en.wp.w.org . From that angle I would say that short urls of this type have become rather popular. You could of course use goo.gl, but then your url is obfuscated, whereas in this case it's not. I can't really see en.wp.w.org (11 characters, four components, hard to remember) as being that much better than en.wikipedia.org (16 characters, three components, easier to remember, contains the Wikipedia branding). enwp.org, on the other hand, is 8 characters long, has only two components, and is a natural contraction of en.wikipedia.org. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]
On 09/05/11 23:57, Platonides wrote: Just create your own tld ;) Sadly, .wp wouldn't pass the new gTLD process: new gTLDs must have at least three characters. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]
On 10/05/11 00:46, Kirill Lokshin wrote: On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Brian J Mingusbrian.min...@colorado.eduwrote: On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Neil Harrisn...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: On 09/05/11 23:57, Platonides wrote: Just create your own tld ;) Sadly, .wp wouldn't pass the new gTLD process: new gTLDs must have at least three characters. -- Neil How about: http://en.wp.wmf Would many people recognize or remember wmf? I suspect that, in terms of brand recognition, Wikipedia Wikimedia Wikimedia Foundation WMF. Kirill en.wiki or en.wikipedia would do just fine -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raising funds without being quite so annoying to readers
On 05/03/11 14:30, David Gerard wrote: On 5 March 2011 14:19, Neil Harrisn...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: And also, WMF should make it possible to accept continuing donations as a subscription on a monthly basis. Even better, they should do this already! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Monthly_donations/en (a link from http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate with the words If you'd like to make an automatic monthly donation please click here. Aaargh. How could I have missed that? Can it be made public how many people have taken up that option, and what the current monthly income is? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raising funds without being quite so annoying to readers
On 05/03/11 14:05, WereSpielChequers wrote: Picking up on the comment by Tobias about less intrusive fundraising, I would make sure we are pursuing the following: 1 Build up a past donors database, communicate with them effectively and then as long as they donate annually make sure they aren't irritated by ads for people who haven't donated at all. (I gather something is now being done here, but I know it wasn't in the past). And also, WMF should make it possible to accept continuing donations as a subscription on a monthly basis. For example, $5 a month feels much less painful than $60 once a year. Continuing donations also don't require a decision to keep on giving -- the donations just continue until canceled. Building up a base of continuing donors would be almost as good as having an endowment, and would make financial planning much easier. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
Thesis: The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it? Argument and proposal: Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response. This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith. I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was no big deal, and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office. If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process. Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base new admin role, and a set of specific extra old admin powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough. All existing admins would be grandfathered in as old admins in this scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted the full old admin powers automatically after one year, unless they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit completely. None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there should only be new admins, and old admins with the only distinction being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin ageism should be a specifically taboo activity. Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages, interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that they can now ask any old admin to turn on their admin bit, with this request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why new admins should not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.) So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: [Wiki-research-l] UPEI's proposal for a universal citation index
On 21/07/10 22:38, Nikola Smolenski wrote: Дана Monday 19 July 2010 22:20:15 Brian J Mingus написа: Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would eventually be like, once it is fully matured? I was thinking about this too. Main advantages that I see are that citations will become easier to use for editors while more informative for readers. Too often I just link to something instead of properly filling a cite template because it's just too bothersome. For example, instead of this crud: {{cite book|author=Š. Kulišić |coauthors=P. Ž. Petrović, N. Pantelić | title=Српски митолошки речник |origyear=1970 |publisher=[[Nolit]] | location=Belgrade |language=Serbian |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља}} we would have just: {{cite|work=Српски митолошки речник |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља}} Since there might be more than one edition of the same book, you'd still have to do a unique identifier, and expanding the cite into the text of the article is still a good idea. I would suggest making the system work like the current {{cite pmid}}, {{cite isbn}} and {{cite medline}} templates, where you'd add (say) {{cite citeid|345343095}} to the article, and a bot would come round to the article and replace this with: {{cite book|author=Š. Kulišić |coauthors=P. Ž. Petrović, N. Pantelić | title=Српски митолошки речник |origyear=1970 |publisher=[[Nolit]] | location=Belgrade |language=Serbian |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља|citeid=345343095}} Doing this would combine the advantages of a central database, which has great advantages for providing authoritative centralized data, with the redundant copying of the same information into the article, which has great advantages for archival purposes, so that, were the central database ever to be lost, or access to be unavailable, the information would remain accessible in the article text itself. By retaining the link in the expanded template, corrections and improvements to data in the authoritative database could then, as necessary, be propagated into articles using a bot. However, if bad data is ever uploaded into the database, the full expansion of the cite would still be available in the article history, again aiding archival access, and protecting against data corruption. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to reply to a mailing list thread
On 31/03/10 00:23, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 31 March 2010 00:15, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: Of course I can read my email via gmail.com, which hides the crap, however that is not ideal when I want to read my email and compose responses while I am offline. Get Gmail Offline, then! (You turn it on somewhere in preferences.) It uses Google Gears to enable you to read and compose emails offline and it syncs when it has a connection. Again, Gmail Offline is a proprietary product, and stores all of your mail in Google's cloud. It's perfectly reasonable for people not to want either, and make their own choice of both client and storage medium. Mailing lists, and the ecosystem surrounding them, have worked just fine for around 40 years; why break something that works just fine for other people as it is currently? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
Waldir Pimenta wrote: Nikola Smolenski wrote: Magnus Manske wrote: One bug: I got a graph of Imran Khan's bowling statistics rather than his portrait... And if you give me code to identify a person's image, I'll be happy to implement it, as would the NSA. As it stands, I chose a random article Google image search has it, so it's not that complex. Not that I suggest you should implement it in PHP :) It *is* complex. Yes, it's not impossible; yes, it's been done. But that doesn't mean it's simple or easy. Btw, Magnus, thanks for building that demo. It's great for putting this idea in perspective! :) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l There's a review of the state of the art in face detection at http://vision.ai.uiuc.edu/mhyang/face-detection-survey.html , if you are looking for ideas for algorithms. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/6/5 Neil Harris use...@tonal.clara.co.uk: Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/6/4 Jon scr...@nonvocalscream.com: Has apache/proxy level filtering been considered? Filtering for what? Javascript is executed client-side, ie. after the page has gone through the apache servers/proxies. Filtering to remove _all_ Javascript, other than references to statically maintained Javascript files maintained by Mediawiki's developers. Well, that's certainly possible, but there are a large number of legitimate and worthwhile uses of custom javascript. Things like Twinkle are done with custom javascript and many members of the community find such tools extremely useful. Which is why Twinkle's code should be hosted by WMF in the same way as the Mediawiki code, and the Twinkle developers given commit access to that code in the usual way. Javascript is software, and should be managed like software, not like wiki content. We don't give every admin commit access to the code repository, nor should we do so for Javascript. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
Tim 'avatar' Bartel wrote: Hi, recently the report of the KnowPrivacy [1] study - a research project by the School of Information from University of California in Berkeley - hit the German media [2]. It came to the conclusion that All of the top 50 websites contained at least one web bug at some point in a one month time period. [3] which includes wikipedia.org. This is very troubleing and irritating for some of our (German) users who are very sensitive to data privacy topics. So I established contact to Brian W. Carver (University of California) who connected me to David Cancel, the maintainer of Ghostery, which was used to identify the web bugs. David wrote me today: The following web bug trackers were reported to us, on the following subdomains: Google Analytics - vls.wikipedia.org Doubleclick - hu.wikipedia.org Both were seen in yesterday's data so they're recent. We don't receive any page level information so that's as much detail as we have. Hope that helps. I wasn't able to track down the Doubleclick web bug on the hungarian Wikipedia, but Google Analytics web bug is integrated in every page of the West Flemish Wikipedia via JavaScript [4]. Our privacy policy [5] states The Wikimedia Foundation may keep raw logs of such transactions [IP and other technical information], but these will not be published or used to track legitimate users. and As a general principle, the access to, and retention of, personally identifiable data in all projects should be minimal and should be used only internally to serve the well-being of the projects. I think we should stop the current use of Google Analytics ASAP. Bye, Tim. Surely this is something which should be possible to block at the MediaWiki level, by suppressing the generation of any HTML that loads any indirect resources (scripts, iframes, images, etc.) whatsoever other than from a clearly defined whitelist of Wikimedia-Foundation-controlled domains? Doing this should completely stop site admins from adding web bugs. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
John at Darkstar wrote: We need tools to track user behavior inside Wikipedia. As it is now we know nearly nothing at all about user behavior and nearly all people saying anything about users at Wikipedia makes gross estimates and wild guesses. User privacy on Wikipedia is is close to a public hoax, pages are transfered unencrypted and with user names in clear text. Anyone with access to a public hub is able to intercept and identify users, in addition to _all_ websites that are referenced during an edit on Wikipedia through correlation of logs. Compared to this the whole previous discussion about the Iranian steward is somewhat strange, if not completely ridiculous. Get real, the whole system and access to it is completely open! John As you say, there is no possibility of absolute privacy from anyone with access to the traffic stream, since the Internet was never engineered to give this kind of privacy. Wikipedia as completely open as any other non-https website -- and, even with https, as with any other website with publicly visible transactions, for anyone with access to the traffic stream, simple traffic analysis is generally enough to correlate user identities to IPs. A combination of http and Tor is probably as good as it gets in attempting to avoid this, but even this has its limitations. But it is simply unreasonable to equate this with no privacy at all. Most possible eavesdroppers do _not_ have access to the entire traffic stream, and those who do have access to traffic generally only have access to part of the traffic stream, and even then, most of them can't be bothered to eavesdrop, or are discouraged from doing so by privacy laws. Given this, it is quite reasonable to take appropriate technical measures that attempt to keep as much of that remaining privacy as secure as possible. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
John at Darkstar wrote: The interesting thing is who has interest in which users identity. Lets make an example, some organization sets up a site with a honeypot and logs all visitors. Then they correlates that with RC-logs from Wikipedia and then checks out who adds external links back to themselves. They do not need direct access to Wikipedia logs or the raw traffic. There is only one valid reason as I see it to avoid certain stat engines, and that is to block advertising companies from getting information about the readers. The writers does not have any real anonymity at all. John Indeed they could. But even so, they would still have great difficulty in getting more than a small fraction of Wikipedia's readers to both visit the honeypot and make an edit that links to it, and the vast majority of unaffected users will still avoid being bitten by this attack. And even then, they will still only have obtained a mapping between the user's current IP and their Wikipedia account, and will still have to correlate this back to a personal identity, which is often harder than it might seem to be in theory. The world is a dangerous place, but just because privacy and security can never be absolute is not a reason to make good faith efforts to preserve it as much of both as reasonably possible within the limits of time and resources available. Just because a door can be knocked down with a sledgehammer (or a wall demolished with a pneumatic hammer) is not a reason not to have a lock on it, or a door there in the first place. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l