Re: [Foundation-l] Journal Boycott
I don't know if it's the case, but it would be very interesting to have the Foundation support officialy the campaign (single scholars can do decide to boycott, of course). But universal access to universal knowledge is pretty Open Access to me, and this think is taking momentum, hopefully will be effective. Aubrey 2012/2/1 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Another article: http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-Published/130403/ Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.03699: Research Works Act - Prohibits a federal agency from adopting, maintaining, continuing, or otherwise engaging in any policy, program, or other activity that: (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the author's employer, assent to such network dissemination. Defines private-sector research work as an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the U.S. government, describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing, but does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research. Fred ___ 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] Journal Boycott
2012/2/1 Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org Hi Andrea, could you perhaps elaborate how exactly the Free Knowledge would benifit from boycotting non-OA journals? (Not meant sarcastic, I really want to know) Hi Lodewijk, thanks for the engaging question ;-) Boycotting non-OA journals is not what I had in mind (as others explained), here the aim is to point as Elsevier as an example of a wicked system. Free knowledge could benefit from a renewed scholarly publishing world, in which every research would be open to the public to be read and studied, and the datasets of that research would be open to be tested again. Scientific research is the cutting/bleeding edge of human inquiry, and you perfectly understand how it would be important to have results of that inquiry to be available to anyone who wants to access it. Also, how would you imagine such support? I could imagine that with any support by Wikimedia for a boycott, people would assume automatically that we would start blocking citations of said journals. Or are you thinking about that Wikimedia related scholars are asked to public Open Access? (I could imagine this is already the case) This is more difficult. I don't have many concrete ideas, but if Wikimedia related scholars could add their name to the boycott list, and WMF would say that clear and loud, that would be a small but significant step. Many others could follow. Boycott citations to important articles or journals is not really a good move (it's complicated): better would be for any editor to check if there is an open access article which provide similar results, but this would be very time-consuming, I think, and not always effective. In the past Wikimedia has always taken the stance that if people or companies want to exercize their copyright within legal limits, we have no objection to that (although we may challenge some of the legal limits). Would you propose a standpoint that goes further than that? (because then, it would imho certainly require much more community discussion before we take such step) I would like to point out that Open Access and in general Open Science are movements wants science results open and available for all. Traditional copyright is not the main enemy: the enemy is a publishing system that exploit the work of researchers (which write, review, and buy articles) and public funds (through universities and libraries) with a very too high profits. The system is wicked because there is a monopoly of few huge publishers which decide prices of journals, which force you to buy journals you don't want (the bundle system). Moreover, the are the Impact Factor issues, and the fact that these publishers agree with SOPA, ACTA, etc. I would like also to hear from Daniel, our beloved Wikimedian In Residence for Open Access :-) Aubrey Best regards, Lodewijk No dia 1 de Fevereiro de 2012 17:32, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.comescreveu: I don't know if it's the case, but it would be very interesting to have the Foundation support officialy the campaign (single scholars can do decide to boycott, of course). But universal access to universal knowledge is pretty Open Access to me, and this think is taking momentum, hopefully will be effective. Aubrey 2012/2/1 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net Another article: http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-Published/130403/ Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.03699: Research Works Act - Prohibits a federal agency from adopting, maintaining, continuing, or otherwise engaging in any policy, program, or other activity that: (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the author's employer, assent to such network dissemination. Defines private-sector research work as an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the U.S. government, describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing, but does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia - What exactly does the proposed law say?
Given that a Wikipedia biography is usually the first google hit to come up for a name, it doesn't actually strike me as *that* ludicrous. What Wikipedia writes about a person reaches more readers today than a New York Times article. As someone else mentioned recently, there is a responsibility that comes with that kind of reach. Saying that we don't necessarily stand behind what our article says about you the way a newspaper publisher would stand behind an article of theirs is frankly little consolation to an aggrieved BLP subject. Moreover, some people in Italy are quite easy in sueing: Wikimedia Italy is still on trial (in the person of her president) beacuse someone wrote something bad on the owners of a political newspaper. (and they asked us 20 million dollars...). Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dead Sea Scrolls
2011/10/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: None of the discussions of the Qimron case seem to mention the issue of date of publication. The argument seems to have hinged almost entirely on the issue of originality. The Qimron case is completely irrelevant with regard to the copyright of the images. It is a case about the *text*. If WMF wants to copy *the text* of the scrolls, I don't think anyone is going to have a problem with that. The copyright notice claims copyright in the digital images of the manuscripts, not in the text. There's no copyright over text, that is public domain for sure. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Dead Sea Scrolls
2011/9/28 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org Someone most likely selected the F-stop, the shutter speed, and the lighting. I doubt they just pointed the camera on auto and used the built in flash. Someone most likely selected how to convert the raw image into a jpeg or png or whatever they're using. They may have even done some significant post-processing. Someone definitely selected which camera to use, how many separate photographs to tile together, etc. True. AFAIK, the pre-production and post-production here has been huge. The project is pretty amazing. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
2011/9/22 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:25 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Mike Dupont
jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:57 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is one down, several
hundred to go.
Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English
Wikipedia.
All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are
abandoned.
oh that is alarming. can you tell me more?
That is alarming because it is MZM's fear, but it does not represent
the views of the Foundation.
(MZM, would you mind finding a more accurate way to express your
observations, hopes and frustrations on this subject?)
...
All sister projects are able to pull in grant money if it is pursued.
There are a variety of major foundations devoted to, or prioritizing,
curation and access to {primary source materials, language and
literacy materials, civic journalism, free textbooks, open
educational resources, biology and species data, oral histories, c.}.
I would love to see us attract more of that sort of interest. Even
projects that we worry about and say did not achieve critical mass
are often significant successes by the standards of existing
grant-supported work elsewhere in the world.
Sam,
While it is nice to say that the other projects can request grants
from other organisations, MZM's point is that the WMF is focusing on
English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
The strategic plan mentions Wikipedia an awful lot, and the WMF does
appear to be focusing on English Wikipedia and Commons. Of course
WMF's investment in the mediawiki platform and innovation helps the
sister projects, but the sister projects continue to struggle because
they haven't had the same amount of support as Wikipedia over the
years. The sun does not shine directly on them. Have I told you
about the time that the WMF told a journo that it was OK to use
Wikipedia instead of Wikisource in an magazine article about a
Wikisource project?
I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a
primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project. It would
be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind. maybe the
WMF can have _one_ sister projects support officer (think how many
dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
Indeed.
I remember saying that loudly in Gdansk,
when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the
pages,
but none of the sister projects.
Many of our sister projects has developed a proper identity and direction
(sure Wikisource has)
but a major support wiuld be very much appreciated.
Some of the requests in bugzilla (even simple ones) lay down there for
years,
and communities are just left alone with their technical issues.
I think sister project communities would be enthusiastic if the Foundation
had staff dedicated to them and their problems.
Even a fellow as proposed by Amir (a guy who examine communities and their
tools, collecting knowledge and requests for tools, gadgets and extensions)
would be awesome.
Aubrey
--
John Vandenberg
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
2011/9/22 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs On 22/09/11 10:12, Andrea Zanni wrote: when Sue presented us the Strategic Plan and Wikipedia was all over the pages, but none of the sister projects. I have to say, whenever I make a presentation of Wikimedia and mention sister projects, all I get is blank stares. It really makes sense to focus on Wikipedia in outreach activities. Well, I understand that, but there is a lot of space for development, and for example a project like Wikisource can be extremely interesting for GLAMs (i.e. look at the BnF project with French Wikisource). Aubrey ___ 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] On Wikinews
I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises. I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians, and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals, especially because, right now, it relies on them. Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and secondary sources, Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it collects links about (not so recent) news. Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place. As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New York Times website, which is much more update. I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill an informative gap, because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different articles on the same subjects, but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them. This could be an interesting direction. Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia: in case of patent recentism (unfortunately, often catastrophic events) people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial facts on something that already happened. If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place where to write all that stuff. Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things have slowed down, relying on the Wikinews article. My 2cents, obviously. Aubrey 2011/9/13 Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org: On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this. When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian. At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too. This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...) [1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ 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] Tragedy: videos and slides from presentations Wikimanias (lately 2011 in Haifa)
Well, it seems that every year we choose locations that for one reason or the other are likely not to be accessible to some groups or nationality (I hear complaints every year about these issues)(no judgements, just a fact). So I agree that this uploading issue should be faced once for all, setting up a workflow with WMF technicians that would allow videos and slides to be online in reasonable time. Aubrey 2011/9/3 K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/9/3 Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com: That would seem to be a problem. If you are making separate bugzilla requests for each video, you need to come up with a better process. Either make one request for all the videos, or make a request to be given the technical power needed to just do it yourself. Um no, only one request is needed, You just need to link to somewhere where the video files can be easily accessed so they can be transferred. As for requesting technical access to do that, that would involve shell access to the servers so that is likely never to happen. ___ 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] [libraries] Open Access EU consultation
[sorry for cross-posting] I wanted to remind you all that the deadline of the European consultation on Open Access and Open Data is September 9th. Here's the link: http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/scientific_information/consultation_en.htm and here's the survey on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCom/OA/EU Daniel is working on that, but feedback could be useful. Here my few cents about some proposals we could make in the comment sections ofthe survey: 1. We need strategies/policies for OA. We need institutions/university to *require* OAfrom doctoral students and researchers. 2. We need digital preservation to be done by libraries and archives, not publishers. They have right now the functions and services (access, dissemination, preservation) that should be accomplished by libraries. Preservation is an issue. 3. We need clear, easily understandable licenses. CC-BY for articles and CC-0 for research data should do their job. No more ad hoc, human-not-understandable licenses, but clear Creative Commons. (CC-BY= we can use that on Wikipedia, we can upload it on Commons, we can publish it on Wikisource, we have material for Wikibooks/Wikiversity, etc.) I hope this can be useful. Aubrey 2011/7/28 Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com: Thank you Daniel, great work. Lodewijk was suggesting that we reply as an organization, because they don't really count single citizens proposals. If we manage to write something, we could then forward it many times, one per chapter, in several languages :-) But first things first, we need to work on the draft. Aubrey 2011/7/28 Daniel Mietchen daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com: Problem solved; full text now on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCom/OA/EU . Daniel On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Daniel Mietchen daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com wrote: Hi Aubrey, thanks for the invitation. I had indeed planned to set up a document to facilitate collaborative drafting of a response. So far, I have seen the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Euroscience Working Group on Open Access as well as Eurodoc signaling an interest in drafting a response, and doing it all together - perhaps with an individual comment per organization - could be worth a try. The questionnaire comes in three variants - for citizens, organisations and public bodies - and the session to fill it in is time-limited, so we will have to set up an editable copy somewhere. The Commission provided a PDF ( http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/scientific_information/questionnaire.pdf ) whose text cannot be copied, and I inquired with them on July 16 to provide another version of the file. My submission was forwarded to the technical unit two days later but no reaction since - I just dropped them a line again. To get things started, I just set up http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RCom/OA/EU . Please chime in there. Thanks and cheers, Daniel On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all. Lodewijk today forwarded me this interesting EU consultation about open access, open data and digital preservation for scientific information. Press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/890 Consultation: http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/scientific_information/consultation_en.htm It could be very, very interesting if we (as Wikimedia Movement, or Wikimedia chapters) could write a statement to contribute. Maybe our brand-new Open Access WMF fellow could be interested in coordinating :-D Anyway, it seems a good opportunity to put in (digital) paper what we think about these issues. Any thoughts? We have until September 9th. Aubrey ___ Libraries mailing list librar...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries ___ Libraries mailing list librar...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] SAGE Open
Please, let me forward this conversation also to our brand new libraries list. Aubrey 2011/8/19 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net: SAGE Open is one of those PLoS ONE clones. Others include BMJ Open: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmjopen/ Scientific Reports: http://www.nature.com/srep AIP Advances: http://aipadvances.aip.org/ G3: http://www.g3journal.org/ New Journal of Physics: http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630 Open Biology: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/openbiology/ A related commentary: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2011/03/29/might-copies-of-plos-one-change-journals-forever/ . Daniel PLoS ONE clones seems to imply a problem. Are these journals bad in some way? Fred On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: A breakthrough from an unexpected source: http://sgo.sagepub.com/ Fred ___ 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] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
@itwikiquote is an experiment by WMI, it's a bot that writes the Quote of the day via Twitter. It work fairly well. Aubrey 2011/8/19 Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org: Of course there's the infamous @wikipedia_mk and @itwikiquote :) 2011/8/18 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk On 18 August 2011 17:39, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: More useful for smaller wikis. Tweeting new pages or recent changes for enwiki would probably destroy Twitter very quickly. When I was more involved with Citizendium, I wrote a script to pipe new pages into Twitter. It's still running: http://twitter.com/cz_newdrafts Wikimedia article feeds on twitter: @en_wikinews @dewikinews @wikinews (Chinese) @el_wikipedia is an article counter @wikipedia_de is the daily FA @zhwiki_newpages is all new pages @ZHWP is some form of selected article feed Anyone know of other active ones? The German approach here seems a pretty good one, at least to test the water - daily featured article, plus possibly other front-page content. Perhaps a feed of all new (rather than featured-that-day) quality content would be interesting, to give people something they might not see from the main page? A feed of enwiki's newly graded FA + GA + FP would be about ten a day, which seems quite a reasonable figure; I'm not sure what the figures are like for others, though, and this would be a bit more unpredictable than the daily feeds. As far as new articles, well. Feeding an unfiltered list would get a lot of junk (and, perhaps more annoyingly, a lot of quickly dead links). If we look at *surviving* pages, and assume we somehow would be able to not send out the ones that are going to get deleted, then we're looking at an article every forty seconds on enwiki, five minutes on itwiki, ten minutes on jawiki, twenty minutes on huwiki... (This might be an interesting tool for trying to stoke interest in less active projects - feeds slow enough to not be annoying, but varied enough they might catch people's attention. Hmm. I wonder what overlap there is between [language groups common on twitter] and [small WP projects needing users].) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ 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] Black market science
2011/7/19 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com So. What can we do to help take out the proprietary journal system? 1. Openly support the OA movement, partecipating in conferences, making public statements, addressing the issue to the community. We discuss with them on the interoperability of the our movements, as to say we tell them using clear licenses (CC-BY) is *fundamental*. 2. Discuss about a technical framework for publicize OA papers in Wikipedia. Couldn't we harvest OA articles from institutional and subject repositories, and even from OA journals, covering both green and Gold Open access? Couldn't we show dynamic lists of OA articles in the Reference sections of our Wikipedia articles, generated by keyword and language? All OA articles have these metadata in Dublin Core, it would be easy to filter them and create those dynamic lists. (I'm not sure about a Wikipedia policy on preferring OA sources, it could conflict something else) We could even bulk upload every article we find that is in CC-BY on Commons, to store it there (and when we find a solution for uploading them on Wikisource, we should do it too)(yes, we should need a metadata/OAI-PMH framework for us, but I don't think is such a big deal). (these are just ideas, feel free to dump them :-) Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Black market science
2011/7/18 Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net On 07/09/11 2:06 PM, Andrea Zanni wrote: My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians think that they will come to us and upload and curate their text? I clearly remeber the Screw it feeling I had the day after I graduated, meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and so it was). If 5 more minutes of an author's time is too much for uploading a thesis that he has worked in for months or years that's his problem. He could even pay someone to upload for him. It suggests he doesn't have much faith in his own work. It's not our job to hold his hand. I agree that 5 minutes are an acceptable time: what I wanted to say (probably my English is worse than what I think :-) is that curation of a thesis on Wikisource doesn't take 5 minutes, but even 5 hours. 5 hours and a lot of knowledge in Wikisource policies, mediawiki, templates and so on. I perfectly know that having your own thesis in wikitext on Wikisource is a good thing, but I don't honestly know if it is worth the labor. Aubrey ___ 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] Black market science
Phoebe created https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries , I suggest everyone interested in OA just join us there. I know is yet-another-list, but it will allow librarians from the outside to step in and join the conversation. There are few threads in which we are basically discussing the same things, it should be good to merge them in the same place. (so I'll stop here and wait few days to post a reply in the new list :-) Aubrey 2011/7/12 Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com On the other hand, PLoS (plos.org - the public library of science) is a great journal publisher that reviews and publishes scientific work under a free license. [They impose even fewer restrictions on reuse than Wikimedia, using CC-BY, which is a more appropriate license in my opinion for novel and scientific work.] At the very least we should evangalise publishers such as this as a great place to look for specialist sources (for Wikipedia etc.); often I find myself limited to using paid-access sources and I always feel frustrated by this. Free and open journals are awesome, and any opportunity to make use of them should be encouraged. Tom ___ 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] Black market science
2011/7/9 birgitte...@yahoo.com You hardly need to re-transcribe the digital document. You just need to re-format the images and special text within the paste, edit in appropriate wikilinks, and proofread it to ensure nothing was misplaced. Yes, this is true, but as you know well this already much work. If you are a scholar/student, and you want to share an article or a dissertation, you need to know a lot of about the architecture of Wikisource, and recreate the logical structure of a thesis, format it in wiki-text and proofread throurogh 3 quality levels in not a simple, easy job. Proofreading is not at all redundant for documents that have been re-formatted with only the lightest editing. I am certain you will find something to correct in any document of length, no matter how little editing you feel you have done. I agree, but I always feel a little discomfort when I know that proofreading has just been done on a born-digital text, and I need to spend hours on that text just to find some typos (maybe it's me, but sometimes I don't find it worth it) Having a corpus with some depth on Wikisource will open up a much different reading experience than an index of PDFs, even though the words all match. Just look at what is being done with the SCOTUS documents, Wikis simply offer a richer study environment for documents that are properly linked together than other sorts of digital libraries. For all that born digital documents emphasize the digital they often treat the text as if printed on a page by regularly using hypertext only in footnoted references. It is worth putting such things on Wikisource, if you can anticipate being able to get a decent sized corpus of scholarship of some field under a free license. And that will vary by field and maybe even sub-specialty. Yes, it is definiw ittely worth it to put all these text on Wikisource. I uploaded my thesis years ago, also with the explicit aim to test the potential hypertextual features of Wikisource (in it.source we have proper template for Work and Author citations, and I find them the real added value of our digital library). My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians think that they will come to us and upload and curate their text? I clearly remeber the Screw it feeling I had the day after I graduated, meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and so it was). I'm not offering solutions here, but if we want to work in the direction of Open Access and of reaching a massive audience out there, maybe we should think out of the (current) box. Aubrey BirgitteSB ___ 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] Black market science
2011/7/7 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de On de.wikisource.org they scan every page of the original text, upload the scan on Commons and show the scan on the right part of every page as an image. It is even obligatory to have the original scan of the text. The following page is an example: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Oberamt_Tettnang_231.jpg (I just hit the random page) I know - in fact, it was exactly what I wanted to explain :-) I think this system is perfect for digitized documents, aka paper documents which has been scanned and need transcription. MVHO is that the same system is redundant for born-digital documents. If we use the Proofread Extension (that's how it's called), you need to re-transcribe the whole text, or at least have it formatted. Then you transclude the text in ns0. The text is reliable, but it is a lot of work, and lot of it is just redundant (why write by hand something tha has just benn written in a good pdf?). If we use the simple ns0 (many wikisources are not so sctrict as de.source in this regard) you need to do the same (transform in wikitext, format). So the issues remain. Now, I was wondering if we can find another (technical? organizational? political?)solution for born-digital documents, as pdf, scientific articles etc. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Black market science
2011/7/6 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com On 6 July 2011 21:29, Arlen Beiler arlen...@gmail.com wrote: Once it is published, can't it just go to Wikisource? Or would it have to be CC-By or something like that. If so, Wikisource would still be the best suited for that, we would just have to put it in a journal namespace or something along that line. As I see it, there are some technical/organizational issues. Wikisource accepts CC-BY-SA/CC-BY texts (and often OA articles use these licenses), but does not change the text it self, only maybe in terms of format and layout. It's a policy of the project to be absolutely coherent with the source. This solves the issue of modifying the article itslef, and having it in the exact words of the author. But the current architecture is designed for digitization of paper books: as I see it, we lack a simple, easy way to upload and show born digital documents, as scientific articles would be. I mean, we can always (and sometimes we do) ri-shape articles in wikitext and put them in the ns0 of Wikisource, or event upload the article on Commons and re-transcribe the text with the pdf as a scan, but you see this is reinventing the wheel, everytime. I still don't know how could we do, but I feel that we should have a more automatic way to upload this kind of content (and then giving it our added value, as wikilinks etc.) (for example, we could accept latex as it is...) Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] HOWTO turn your scholarly journal into an open access journal
2011/4/19 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com This is not directly relevant to WMF projects, but it's of great importance in helping the free content world along. http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/13/howto-turn-your-scho.html http://repository.alt.ac.uk/887/ Is there anything we can do to push this along?e.g. Would a blog post be apposite? - d. Strong support for the pushing :-) Aubrey ___ 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] WikiGuide on Wikisource
[sorry for cross-posting] Hello everyone. Wikimedia Italia is proud to announce you the release of the new WikiGuide, a video tutorial dedicated to Wikisource. The video, directed by Christian Biasco and produced by WMI, is a seven minutes long presentation of Wikisource projects, aimed to introduce new users into the complex mechanisms of the digital library. This is the third WikiGuide available, after the first on Wikipedia and the second on Commons. The video is available on Commons at the URL http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Italia_-_WikiGuida_3_-_Wikisource.ogv and on Youtube too (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR0g5ACaC-g): it is released in CC-BY-SA. Italian subs are already available online (both on Youtube and Commons) and English subs are being traslated at the moment. We'll post again as soon as we have them (for further translations and internationationalization). Best regards, Andrea Zanni / Aubrey -- Board Wikimedia Italia http://www.wikimedia.it ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/15 Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com I've been involved with open access journals as a professional activity from the start of the movement, long before I joined Wikipedia. There has been only limited success. Though there are almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are either very small or very unimportant, and in almost all fields of study, none or almost none of the important journals are open access: This is my experience too; thanks for pointing it out. I also think this is true, but I wonder how much the current, established process of scholarship is driving high quality articles towards closed access: as I said before, OA is mainly librarian-driven, because researchers and professors are much more worried about their career and tenure (it's no judgement, just a statement), so they struggle to publish in high quality journals. I think it is very difficult to change the whole environment of scholarship, and just pointing out the virtue of being open is not enough if not supported by real benefits regarding tenure and career. I personally believe that the Wikimedia movement should ally with OA movement (i just don't know how ;-), also tho change this situation. Open access to reasearch and science is open access to culture and knowledge, we perfectly match. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. This is true, but in most cases access to the resource allows transparency and verifiability, and we certainly want those. BTW, do we (Wikimedia communtiy) have good and enstablished contacts with the open access community? I mean, apart from single users or wikimedians. IMHO lobbying with them also at an higher level should be a priority for Wikimedia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/8 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com 2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn juergen.f...@gmx.de: Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein: Melissa -- absolutely! I don't know the real stats, but I think we cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason. Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether its available on-line or printed only. Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal. They provide also indvidual subscription but only to the their members. It is relatively easy to become an ACS member - but WMF cannot help too much with this. Maybe it would be more clever to grant access to the top scientific databases - for example for most active editors -leading wikiprojects... AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred thousands, if not millions). -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ 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] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community, including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :) This is also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did you have in mind? I was just waiting the librarians to weigh in :-) I'm really not sure of what we can do together, but I certainly was astonished when few years ago I learned about open access. We have many things in common, and in a certain sense we are more closer to the OA movement than the free software one. Nonetheless, the OA is mainly known by librarians, and (at least in Italy) few scholars and researchers. I think the Wikimedia could do his part to promote OA, and discuss with members of OA to build common strategies. Or at least get to know each other, there are plenty of things we can learn from one another. Furthermore, another direction could be discuss about licensing: OA has a weird form of licensing scholarship, and a way to make the main OA licenses (e.g Bethesda) compatible with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be an huge step forward. Obviously, my 2 cents. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiRoll
This is really interesting. Do tyou think is it possible to have similar stats also for sister projects (eg. quote, source, commons, etc.) ? Aubrey 2011/2/15 Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl I hope, that this stats-page written by Maciej Smoleński will be helpful: http://www.wikiroll.com/ check it and enjoy przykuta ___ 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] WikiRoll
Well, I don't know if you knew that you can cheat stats.grok putting the right URLs: http://stats.grok.se/it.s/201102/Pagina_principale for example, gives you the stats of it wikisource main page. So there must be logs somewhere (I just don't know where ;-), even if you can't use directly the form. Aubrey 2011/2/15 Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl Something must be wrong with this stat counter. Back in 2009, Main Page was getting two million views per month, more or less http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/most-popular-wikipedia-pages/4hmquk6fx 4gu/191#view This counter show an amazing drop off if its now only getting about 12,000 views per month based on this weekly figure here http://www.wikiroll.com/popularity_en.cgi?lang=enday_first=15008; day_count=7 hmm per hour in last day/week/month. But yes, something is wrong http://stats.grok.se/en/201102/Main_Page He, Maciej, use data from http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ It's no problem to add other language wikis, but for sister projects he needs logs przykuta ___ 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] [Commons-l] Wikidata
As it is the first new project in quite a long time, having a WMF staff member assigned to it would be brilliant. As this would/should involve the first deployment of semantic mediawiki by WMF, it would be good for that someone to already experienced with semantic medawiki. Agree. Starting using SMW for a brand new project for data could solve all the issues that prevented it to be used until now? Hope it could. it would be extremely helpful for project like Commons and Wikisource (just talking about data now) Aubrey. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking Wikibooks (was Re: PediaPress)
I really enjoyed reading your mail, Robert, because I could literally feel the love you have for this project. Quoting Amir, I too would like to share my 2 cents about this. 1 cent: I reflected a lot on some slides Eric Moeller showed us in Gdansk. He compared sister project using some parameters, and one of them was the work unit: Wikipedia has a lot of granularity, you can do little changes and they are still effective. Wikisource and Wikibooks have big work units (you start or edit books, not smaller articles). It saw a leap (everyone saw that) in the contribution on Wikisource after we installed the Proofreading extension and promoted widely a single Proofreading of the Month. People started proofreading single pages, they felt their contribution to be tangible and useful, and this literally changed everything. Wikisources still have a long way to do, but they are growing fast, and I definitely believe that reducing the work unit was a crucial factor. 2 cent: in Italy, there is a community of high school teachers called Matematicamente, and last year they wrote and published a mathematical textbook releasing it under Creative Commons. Long story short, the founder of the project told me they tried working on Wikibooks, but the vast majority of the teacher was not comfortable with the wiki mark-up, and at the end of the day it had been easier to work on OpenOffice (I just let you imagine how difficult it was for them to collaborate on a single book...). Moreover, for that project NPOV worked as an additional obstacle, plus all the community rules they had to face. The guy told me he still like Wikibooks, but it did not work, mainly for the people's wiki illiteracy. My bests Aubrey 2010/11/16 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:11, Robert S. Horning robert_horn...@netzero.net wrote: Something is missing here. I'd like to think it is this tangible medium of a physical book that is what is wrong, but I'm really not sure. If there are other ideas, I'd like to hear them. ... What is wrong? my_theory My theory about the very high profile of Wikipedia and the mostly low profile of the other projects is that in Wikipedia it is very easy to predicate. People love to predicate. Look it up in a dictionary - i refer to all of that word's meanings. Put simply, Wikipedia is the world's largest and most convenient soapbox. There's a policy page in the English Wikipedia that says that Wikipedia is not a soapbox ([[WP:SOAP]]). But people try to use it this way anyway. It is very, very attractive. Some of them eventually understand that NPOV is a good thing and become good Wikipedia editors. An encyclopedia, by its nature, is the perfect platform for saying things like X is a Y. We are all familiar with that: Kosovo IS A country / unrecognized country / partially recognized country / de-facto independent country / province of Serbia / occupied province of Serbia. This opportunity to easily disrupt the NPOV - even temporarily - with one's own version of the predication is a necessarily evil that makes Wikipedia so popular. Other projects are nowhere near offering the opportunity to say such things, at least not as easily. Wiktionary is supposed to consist of almost nothing but predications, but it's too linguistic. Wikisource is a great place for lovers of archiving and typesetting (like myself), but you can't be original there. Wikinews and Wikiquote... nobody is quite sure what they are at all. Wikibooks can, theoretically, be a place for making predications and for spreading POV. But most people, given the choice of writing a book about a subject or an encyclopedic article about it, will write an encyclopedic article. Not just because it's shorter, but because it looks like a more natural way of answering the question What is X?... the way they want to answer it. /my_theory How to solve it? Sorry, no idea. I love textbooks for all ages, so i would love to see Wikibooks flourish. I made a few corrections to existing Wikibooks, but i find it strange to start a Wikibook from scratch. -- Amir E. Aharoni ___ 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] Looking for stories of readers affected by Wikipedia
Well, I know I'm boring, but Eco said something related to this topic. He started the interview stating: I am a compulsive user of Wikipedia, also for *arthritic* reasons: the more my back hurts, the more it costs me to get up and go to check the Treccani, so if I may find someone's birthday on Wikipedia it's all the better. [...] Of course, it's a matter of time. When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful. When I write, I don't remember if someone was born in the 6th century or the 7th; or maybe how many *n's* are in Goldmann... Just a few years ago, for this kind of thing you could waste a lot of time. Nowadays, with Wikipedia and Babylon, which checks the spelling, you can save a lot.[1] It's not much, but one could infer that Wikipedia is useful for old famous bestseller philosphers... Aubrey [1] http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview_with_Umberto_Eco 2010/11/11 wjhon...@aol.com In a message dated 11/10/2010 10:32:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, sgard...@wikimedia.org writes: (Donors often send us stories like that, and I am often looking for stories to tell people about the projects. So I've asked her to send good ones to me.) I would be interested in seeing someplace where you would share these stories (you imply above that so far you're sharing them only verbally, in-person), or alternatively where people could share their own stories. Would there not be a reasonable place in-world where things like this could be put up? WSJ ___ 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] Copyright terms, again
Thank you Michael, this helps a lot. I knew my question was silly but I didn't know the reason ;-). Aubrey 2010/11/10 Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com On 11/10/2010 11:27 AM, Andrea Zanni wrote: 2010/11/10 Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com We are discussing now at WM RS list about treating copyright terms for Serbian authors. Terms are: * Previous situation was 50 years after author's death. * The new copyright term in Serbia came in 2004, introducing 70 years after author's death. * That means that works which authors died in 1953 or before is something like CC-BY (as in any continental jurisdiction). Sorry for nitpicking, but I don't understand the 1953. If you have 50 years, it should be 1960 (or 1959, if it is 50+1) As well, if you have 70 years, it should be 1940 (or 1939, if it is 70+1, and this is the case of most european countries I think). Probably there's something related to the year of the new law coming in (2004), but I do not understand. Presumably the copyright extension only applied to works still subject to copyright when it took effect. Therefore, authors who died in 1953 would have had their Serbian copyrights expire before 2004, based on a life-plus-50-years term, and the works of authors who died in 1954 would remain under copyright because the life-plus-70-years term took effect in 2004 before their Serbian copyrights expired. So basically no additional copyrights will expire for another 14 years. Copyright extension has generally worked to create a massive dead period during which no works are added to the public domain. It's for similar reasons, albeit with a more complicated transition in its copyright regime, that the public domain in the US has been stuck at works created before 1923 for ages now. --Michael Snow ___ 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] Five-year WMF targets exclude non-Wikipedia projects
The vast majority of our users are using Wikipedia and not the other projects, which means even a small improvement to Wikipedia is likely to have more impact than even a large improvement to one of the other projects. That's an unproven assumption. It might even be the opposite, i.e. reinforcing Wikipedia might only increase the gap between the projects. I definitely agree with Yann. The topic is complex, I think that both assumptions are someway true. Surely, more people using Wikipedia, more potential viewers on links to sisterprojects, thus more potential users. But the more Wikipedia is huge, the more it will steal attention form other wiki project. I'm sure the everyone of you struggle explaining people that Wiki*m*edia is not Wikipedia, and viceversa. Why this should not apply to sister projects too? Sue was very clear that prioritising Wikipedia only applies to the WMF. I was the one who raised his hand during Sue's presentation in Gdansk, and, as far as I understood, she agreed in mentioning sister-projects in the targets. If the new slogan of the WMF shifted from Let it happen from Make it happen, well, this should be the case. The community can, and should, continue to improve the other projects, the WMF just feels that its limited resources are better used where they will have more impact. I understand this, but we are not asking the 90% of the limited resources, just a recognition that we exist and we are doing our best to create useful and reliable (free) content. Aubrey WM Italy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that dealswithcontentissues.
I believe it was in history (or perhaps textual criticism) where the distinction between primary and secondary sources was first made. The idea of NPOV is fundamental to the humanities. I'm not really a humanist, but I have a little background both in Humanities and STM (if you consider mathematics as STM) and in the interview with Eco I tried to focus on the differences between these two domains and their approach to collaboration. I'm not saying that Humanities do not struggle for an objectivity/consensus, but I just wanted to emphasize the difference between STM studies, in which I do think it is easier to understand and comprehend the procedures, ideas and mechanisms of Wikipedia (for many reasons). From what I've experienced, it is generally more difficult to explain these things to humanities scholars that stm scholars. And I was wondering if Wikipedia, limiting the article to one, single and neutral version, is enough to some Humanities scholars, who maybe would prefer the possibility of many articles/monographies, one for interpretation. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
I think that Tim's point was precisely to get to some non touristic-only (i.e. often unreal) destination, to understand better the life of local inhabitants and the conflict. This is not part of Wikimania, obviously, but would be an interesting possibility (e.g. more than beach, IMHO). Maybe Neve Shalom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neve_Shalom_%E2%80%93_W%C4%81%C4%A7at_as-Sal%C4%81m) could be a good (and peaceful) experience. I don't know Haifa, but maybe also there there are groups\location\associations worth a visit. Personally, I like very much the idea of a Wikimania explicitely aimed to a ''peaceful message'' (whatever this could mean). But still I don't want to force the WM Israel team to change the program, if this was not what they defined. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
My opinion is simple. Israel is not a good place to have such an international event as Wikimania. I wouldn't vote for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE and other countries that are hard for many people to get into. Having such a conversation isn't the point of Wikimania. The fact that a team is amazingly active shouldn't be a reason to make this annual, exciting and useful meeting so complicated and dangerous for so many people. I can see why the Wikimedia Foundation may not be so interested in taking one side in any political/ethical debate outside its main mission. That's reasonable and understandable. But in my opinion the whole thing is about picking a place that is a 'good' host. I sincerely amdmit that I agree with this view: very likely, a bid for Teheran, Ramallah or even Beijing would have had lots of critics, and reasonable ones. Nevertheless, alea iacta est, and I really appreciate the willingness of the Wikimedia Israel team to help partecipation of Arab\Muslim citizens. Somebody said that is better to focus on real people interested in going to Haifa, and Harel too is right when he says that a ''bridge'' (as you, Osama) to potential participants could be very helpful. We have one year still to arrange initiatives (as a enhanced streaming\virtual coverage of the event, with chats, skype calls and so on) and succeed difficulties, so is better to try. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
DISCLAIMER: this is a delicate issue that could easily generate a flame. So please everybody presume the good faith and stay on topic :-) I don't really know if this issue as been discussed in earlier threads (I subscribed to this list after Gdansk and the only pertinent thing I found is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2011/Bids/Haifa/Q%26A#Participants), but I would like to know if there are updates about the possibility for Middle East citizens to have permissions to enter Israel for Wikimania 2011. I guess this type of permission is not easy to obtain (I'm thinking for example about citizens of Syria, West Bank or Iran) and I also remember a discussion in Gdansk (with Jan Bart, just after the World Cup Final :-( ) about some initiatives we could support to increase participation. Are there any news or updates? Could I find some information somewhere? Thank you in advance. Aubrey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Umberto Eco's interview
Thank you all for your compliments. For me it was an honour to be received in Eco's house (you can see some (bad) backstage pictures here: http://aubreymcfato.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/intervista-a-umberto-eco-per-wmi/... the library of Eco is really astonishing) and WMI really supported me especially in the difficult task of translation (.mau. and P0 did the great work). I encourage you to fix the translation if needed, and I announce you that the interview will probably be published in some librarians-dedicated journals in this fall [1]. Thank you again and spread the work ;-) Aubrey [1] In fact, I have to admit that the interview was for me the occasion to ask professor Eco some questions that were useful form my master thesis, so I got a real double-win situation ;-). 2010/8/5 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com Przykuta, 05/08/2010 08:37: Ah, the license http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/proposals/archives/2010/July I've already replied there. It was a silly error. Nemo ___ 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
