Re: [Foundation-l] Dumps mirroring (was: Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?)
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: 2011/9/21 emijrp emi...@gmail.com: Hi all; Just like the scripts to preserve wikis[1], I'm working in a new script to download all Wikimedia Commons images packed by day. But I have limited spare time. Sad that volunteers have to do this without any help from Wikimedia Foundation. I started too an effort in meta: (with low activity) to mirror XML dumps.[2] If you know about universities or research groups which works with Wiki[pm]edia XML dumps, they would be a possible successful target to mirror them. If you want to download the texts into your PC, you only need 100GB free and to run this Python script.[3] I heard that Internet Archive saves XML dumps quarterly or so, but no official announcement. Also, I heard about Library of Congress wanting to mirror the dumps, but not news since a long time. L'Encyclopédie has an uptime[4] of 260 years[5] and growing. Will Wiki[pm]edia projects reach that? Regards, emijrp [1] http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_XML_dumps [3] http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/source/browse/trunk/wikipediadownloader.py [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die Hi emirjrp, I can understand why you would prefer to have full mirrors of the dumps, but let's face it, 10TB is not (yet) something that most companies/universities can easily spare. Also, most people only work on 1-5 versions of Wikipedia, the rest is just overhead to them. My suggestion would be to accept mirrors of a single language and have a smart interface at dumps.wikimedia.org that redirects requests to the location that is the best match for the user. This system is used by some Linux distributions (see download.opensuse.org for instance) with great success. Regards, Strainu ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Perhaps a torrent setup would be successful in this case. -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ 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
I'm not about to re-subscribe to the waste of time that is foundation-l, just to comment that Ilya's remarks are by-and-large correct. Wikinews is not as successful as it should be due to the 800lb gorilla that is Wikipedia. That's no reason to kill it off - especially considering that many of those I'm informed are participating in this little discussion have me, personally, at the top of their hit lists. [If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out Tony1.] Put your own house in order first, gentlemen. Wikipedia *still* does not enforce their not a news site policy, and it is an utter waste of time bringing such up; numerous selfish Wikipedians reject efforts to direct news-writing efforts to Wikinews. I neither know, nor care, if this is because they're incapable of writing to the high quality standards Wikinews sets; or, because they prefer their egos being stroked by Wikipedia's high page-hit counts on articles where they wrote a dozen or less words. Trying to roll Wikinews back into Wikipedia would be a disaster. There are, as said, too many people who've been sitting, patiently, sharpening knives in preparation to kill the red-headed stepchild of the WMF. And, Wikipedia could never ever handle original reporting. That Wikinews is, currently, being used for a second semester of course assignments from an Australian university is - to me - a clear indication that what we do is valid, and valuable. Brian McNeil. -- Email: brian.mcn...@wikinewsie.org WikiMedia UK, interim Scottish coordinator/GLAM-MGS liaison. Wikinews Accredited Reporter | Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news. On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 15:54 -0700, Ilya Haykinson wrote: In my opinion (as a one-time active Wikinews Bureaucrat, I helped drive forward many of the early site policies, though not including the new review regime), I think Wikinews problems run far deeper than the burden of reviews. At issue is the purpose of the project. Our early goals were to have a) a wiki structure that delivers b) an NPOV article base that is c) available under an open-content license allowing reuse. Of these three, I think we'd done pretty well by b) and c). We hadn't however, managed to attract a _growing_ user base to make a) really functional. Unlike all other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews cannot succeed via slow-but-steady improvement. We can't add one article a day and over time build a site with 10,000 relevant articles: we'd still end up with a site that has only one relevant article and a ton of maybe-historically-useful archives. Thus, we would require a lot of people contributing and reviewing things in order to achieve constantly high throughput and retain relevance. Unfortunately, Wikinews always had a problem with attracting a huge user base. We had to rely on a few hundred semi-active contributors, and maybe only a few dozen very committed people. We also would have a bunch of people who misunderstood the purpose of Wikinews and would post stories about their dogs, or biased rants, or things that were impossible to confirm given no sources (accident on corner of 4th and broadway, 3 people hurt). So our response was to focus on quality and process, rather than purely quantity. This meant that if a user showed up with a drive-by article creation -- dumping an article onto a page that was clearly not in the right shape to be published -- we would wait for someone to improve it. If nobody did, it got deleted or marked as abandoned. Imagine a Wikipedia in which every article makes it onto the homepage, immediately or within hours after creation. Either you have to have a lot of people to improve every article to some reasonable standards, or you need to have a process that requires high quality from the start but has a side-effect that restricts quantity. The latter is the direction in which Wikinews has headed over the last several years, and I think that's why we have always had (and continue having) people who're unable to publish legitimate stories: the process is just not optimized for this. My recommendation has been, for several years, to close Wikinews as an independent entity and add a News tab to Wikipedia. Just like Talk and main namespaces have different standards, the News namespace would follow Wikinews-like guidelines for what's acceptable. Articles would be closely tied to summary encyclopedic articles. It would be easy to create news summary pages. The (comparatively) huge number of Wikipedia editors would largely prevent low-quality articles from remaining in prominent positions. We could, thus, enable easy open editing capabilities. I continue strongly standing by this recommendation. I don't know whose call it would be to make this happen. I don't mean to discount the great successes of Wikinews to date. Nobody believed that it was possible to have a high-quality, community-contributed, _and_ generally-NPOV news source
Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:51 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.eduwrote: It seems that giving w.net/com/org to the WMF would be in line with his vision of no corporation controlling a letter. +1 for the idealism, but I'd like to add the concept is quite silly if you consider the bulk of the internet users and their relevant care to domain names. It's pretty slim. Heck, pitchfork.com used pitchforkmedia.com for many, many years without qualms. Users see the URL and bookmark it. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan 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. -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ 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 Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: With regards to the wi.ki domain, I asked people at the WMF back in 2009 about whether they were interested in buying it given that the owner at the time had a notice on the site saying he was willing to sell. The response came back that they were concerned it could be problematic since neither the Wikimedia community nor the WMF has a monopoly on the word wiki and the WMF didn't want to overstep their claim to the concept. I think that is a good reason to leave that alone. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan It didn't get much attention, and since we've basically agreed against the .wmf TLD in addition to wi.ki, I'd like to throw my support behind Ryan Kaldari's suggestion of obtaining the w.org reserved name. Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ 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 Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: With regards to the wi.ki domain, I asked people at the WMF back in 2009 about whether they were interested in buying it given that the owner at the time had a notice on the site saying he was willing to sell. The response came back that they were concerned it could be problematic since neither the Wikimedia community nor the WMF has a monopoly on the word wiki and the WMF didn't want to overstep their claim to the concept. I think that is a good reason to leave that alone. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan It didn't get much attention, and since we've basically agreed against the .wmf TLD in addition to wi.ki, I'd like to throw my support behind Ryan Kaldari's suggestion of obtaining the w.org reserved name. Here's an interesting bit of history from Wikipedia: http://enwp.org/Single-letter_second-level_domain Only 3 of the 26 possible Single letter Domains have ever been registered and this before 1992. All the other 23 Single Letter .com Domains were registered Jan 1 1992 by Jon Postelhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel, the father of the Internet, with the intention to avoidthat a single company could commercially control a letter of the Alphabet. This makes it impossible for companies like Mc Donaldshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mc_Donalds or Deutsche Telekom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Telekom to buy their Logo M or T as an Internet address. It seems that giving w.net/com/org to the WMF would be in line with his vision of no corporation controlling a letter. -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ 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?]
+1 On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: Actually, what we should be doing is asking Afilias for one of the reserved 1-letter domains: w.org. Twitter has t.co, so why not? Ryan Kaldari On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Just create your own tld ;) ___ 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 -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ 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 Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Neil Harris n...@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 -- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Mono mium monom...@gmail.com wrote: Awesome! How about we add popups? Seriously, if you're going to do this, just add AdSense...it's a heck of a lot prettier. On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:10 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com wrote: now that we have blinking banners, Domas Oh! Oh! can we have marquees as well... and those flashy under construction gifs?? -Peachey Firstly, this is probably just an experiment to see if it draws more donations. If it doesn't, they probably won't use the tactic in the future. Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc. Third, adverts are turned off for non-logged in users. Try logging in. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread. I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. Our economical autonomy derives from our principles of openness and freedom. - Brian On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian. On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote: Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc. ___ 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] fundraiser suggestion
Correction: So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will *not*continue to grow. On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread. I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really don't understand your e-mail. Our economical autonomy derives from our principles of openness and freedom. - Brian On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and mission? I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian. On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote: Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you should start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't get hired or servers that won't get bought, etc. ___ 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] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
Here are a couple of quick indexes into the dump file. I didn't venture into the binary revision data. You'll find an alphabetized list of articles that contains all the diffs for each article in the order that they occured in the dump and a sorted index into each revision as well. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/ http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/Given that it's finals I don't even have enough time to dig through this at all. Guess I just wanted a distraction =) - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:27 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.comwrote: FYI, there is an existing timeline at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline And lots of other wikipedia history pages on English, too. :) Phoebe On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Moka Pantages mpanta...@wikimedia.org wrote: This is so exciting! To Steven's point: we've also started a page where folks can add bits of interesting information as they excavate the files [1]. Can't wait to dig in! Congrats, Tim! [1] http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_the_Beginning Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:20:10 -0800 From: Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: aanlktin9cjxr1s_ecfr3nr6xmt6c4o=6ohdhtxp4j...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 This is fantastic, and the timing could not be better. If anyone finds anything noteworthy, please add it to the timeline of Wikipedia that we're building at the 10th anniversary wiki,[1] as well as the other tools for cataloging interesting tidbits from our history.[2] 1. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline 2. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! ___ 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] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
Browsing through the earliest revisions in the revision index ( http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/revisions.html) is rather interesting and full of fodder for founder debates. Consider these very early revisions: [http://www.nupedia.com Nupedia.com] is an open content, international, peer reviewed project run by LarrySanger, who got the idea of supplementing NuPedia with a less formal wiki encyclopedia project. - http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979694938.txt EditorInChief of NuPedia and instigator of Nupedia's wiki. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979690096.txt Sanger's claims to coming up with the idea of adding the wiki concept to the online encyclopedia concept clearly go all the way back to the beginning. Of course, that doesn't speak to offline conversations that gave rise to the idea. And Sanger clearly didn't have much faith in the concept: None of this is to say that the Nupedia wiki will ''replace'' the main encyclopedia; of course it won't. But it will be an interesting ancillary endeavor! http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979695982.txt - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Here are a couple of quick indexes into the dump file. I didn't venture into the binary revision data. You'll find an alphabetized list of articles that contains all the diffs for each article in the order that they occured in the dump and a sorted index into each revision as well. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/ http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/Given that it's finals I don't even have enough time to dig through this at all. Guess I just wanted a distraction =) - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:27 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.comwrote: FYI, there is an existing timeline at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline And lots of other wikipedia history pages on English, too. :) Phoebe On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Moka Pantages mpanta...@wikimedia.org wrote: This is so exciting! To Steven's point: we've also started a page where folks can add bits of interesting information as they excavate the files [1]. Can't wait to dig in! Congrats, Tim! [1] http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_the_Beginning Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:20:10 -0800 From: Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: aanlktin9cjxr1s_ecfr3nr6xmt6c4o=6ohdhtxp4j...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 This is fantastic, and the timing could not be better. If anyone finds anything noteworthy, please add it to the timeline of Wikipedia that we're building at the 10th anniversary wiki,[1] as well as the other tools for cataloging interesting tidbits from our history.[2] 1. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline 2. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! ___ 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] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
Here is an interesting bit of history - the Wikipedia logo was first an American flag. Then Scott Moonen suggested we make it a globe: In its first day of existences, because the nearest thing to hand for JimmyWales that was suitable for a logo was an American flag, WikiPedia had the American flag, OldGlory, for a logo. ScottMoonen sensibly suggested: I'd recommend you change the American flag logo. Exremely ethno-centric ''et. al.'' I think a globe logo would be much more fitting, if you want to keep with that metaphor. Or perhaps a book. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979773872.txt - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Browsing through the earliest revisions in the revision index ( http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/revisions.html) is rather interesting and full of fodder for founder debates. Consider these very early revisions: [http://www.nupedia.com Nupedia.com] is an open content, international, peer reviewed project run by LarrySanger, who got the idea of supplementing NuPedia with a less formal wiki encyclopedia project. - http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979694938.txt EditorInChief of NuPedia and instigator of Nupedia's wiki. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979690096.txt Sanger's claims to coming up with the idea of adding the wiki concept to the online encyclopedia concept clearly go all the way back to the beginning. Of course, that doesn't speak to offline conversations that gave rise to the idea. And Sanger clearly didn't have much faith in the concept: None of this is to say that the Nupedia wiki will ''replace'' the main encyclopedia; of course it won't. But it will be an interesting ancillary endeavor! http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979695982.txt - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Here are a couple of quick indexes into the dump file. I didn't venture into the binary revision data. You'll find an alphabetized list of articles that contains all the diffs for each article in the order that they occured in the dump and a sorted index into each revision as well. http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/ http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/Given that it's finals I don't even have enough time to dig through this at all. Guess I just wanted a distraction =) - Brian On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:27 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.comwrote: FYI, there is an existing timeline at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline And lots of other wikipedia history pages on English, too. :) Phoebe On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Moka Pantages mpanta...@wikimedia.org wrote: This is so exciting! To Steven's point: we've also started a page where folks can add bits of interesting information as they excavate the files [1]. Can't wait to dig in! Congrats, Tim! [1] http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_the_Beginning Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:20:10 -0800 From: Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: aanlktin9cjxr1s_ecfr3nr6xmt6c4o=6ohdhtxp4j...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 This is fantastic, and the timing could not be better. If anyone finds anything noteworthy, please add it to the timeline of Wikipedia that we're building at the 10th anniversary wiki,[1] as well as the other tools for cataloging interesting tidbits from our history.[2] 1. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline 2. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! ___ 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] Fundraiser statistics
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl wrote: Hmm. We need change strategy. Banners work well, but without changes - you know. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics przykuta I'm not sure that the drop can be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in the banners. I expect us to raise significantly more this year due to an increase in readership, but I think most people that wanted to contribute in the past with the less-than-optimal banners eventually did. Now that we have a much more effective personal appeal, those who want to contribute do it sooner rather than later. - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraiser statistics
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Przykuta przyk...@o2.pl wrote: Hmm. We need change strategy. Banners work well, but without changes - you know. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics przykuta I'm not sure that the drop can be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in the banners. I expect us to raise significantly more this year due to an increase in readership, but I think most people that wanted to contribute in the past with the less-than-optimal banners eventually did. Now that we have a much more effective personal appeal, those who want to contribute do it sooner rather than later. - Brian But look on the Christmas days in 2008 and 2009... The banner was changed. przykuta That fits with what I said - a more effective banner will cause some people who would have donated at another time with a less effective banner to donate now. It's certainly true that a more effective banner will draw in some new donors, but with a more effective banner system the donation rate we are seeing makes sense. We convinced everyone who usually donates to donate right away, and now there are fewer donations per day as a result. - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Wikidata
On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.comwrote: 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. SMW would have to be completely redesigned for use in a project with millions of pages and millions of attributes where arbitrary queries are possible. - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A question for American Wikimedians
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 3:43 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: For some time I am a bit puzzled by the fact that I don't know any African American Wikimedian. For some time just because I am living in a European country without African population, so everything seemed to me quite normal for a long time. I tried to make a parallel between Roma people and African Americans, but it is not a good one. It is very hard to find a Roma with university degree. At the other side, two former State Secretaries are African Americans and present US president is almost, too. What are the reasons? Why American Wikimedian community is exclusively white? Maybe the answer to that question would give us an idea what should we solve to get more contributors. The short answer: snip this seems like a whole lot of unfounded (and fairly offensive) generalizations? If you're really making a class-based argument, then yes, I think the privileges of having free time, a decent education and good internet access are all class-correlated to some extent and are all likely prerequisites for becoming a Wikipedian -- and that's applicable everywhere. But class cuts across ethnicity and gender; you can make the same arguments about poor white people, or whoever. (For what it's worth, I grew up in a rural area that was lily-white but very poor, and very poorly educated; urban demographics aren't the only part of the U.S. to consider). -- phoebe I haven't seen the numbers lately but in the past it was true that the majority of Wikipedia's traffic came from Google. If that is still true it seems likely that Google's demographics mirror what we are seeing here. The implication is that what we are seeing here is indicative of the demographics of internet use in general, which does seem to indicate that these folks just aren't on the internet in the first place. There are of course other explanations, such as, they simply choose not to edit. But I believe if you check the demographic statistics from Hitwise and elsewhere there will be a strong correlation with this overall trend. Basically, these people are underprivileged in our society and it reflects in our demographics. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
I'll bite - it's about time for our yearly advert flame war anyway. The answer is 0 dollars. That is because as soon as we put the advertising up we lose credibility and Wikipedia is no more. - Brian On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on the table each year? 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
Re: [Foundation-l] Increasing the number of new accounts who actually edit
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wikihanni...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Did you know that less than a third of the users who create an account on English Wikipedia make even *one* edit afterwards? Two-thirds of all new accounts never edit! Interestingly, this percentage vary very much from language version to language version. Now, the question is not: what can we do about it? We know plenty of things that we *could* do. The question is this: what are the easiest levers to push that increase the numbers? We have a couple of ideas (they are presented on the Outreach wiki, at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project), but we need your help! Here are three easy things that you can do: 1. Offer ideas 2. Sign up to help with the project 3. Spread the word. Do you know anybody who would want to be interested in helping out? Pass this message on. Best wishes, Lennart -- Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia Sverige and press contact for Swedish Wikipedia // ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för svenskspråkiga Wikipedia ___ Some of the people who create accounts probably realize that they don't actually have a valuable contribution to make, and so move on. Some are just lazy. Some came for other reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. If you want to encourage these people to actually come up with a valuable contribution you'll have to incentivize that for them. While it may be hard for a wikipediholic to understand the lack of incentive structure for newcomers, many newcomers simply may not understand the value of their potential contribution, and so it doesn't put them over the contribution threshold. One way to bring the reward structure of contributing to Wikipedia to their attention would be to explain it to them after they create their account. I'll leave it to the wikipediholics to explain best how to do that =) - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] A prerequisite for the neutral, notable sum of all human knowledge
The WMF mission is to provide free knowledge to the world. Wikipedia, in particular, hopes to summarize all notable topics into a neutral sum. Accomplishing this goal means Wikipedia an the WMF will have to evolve. Consider the implications of the mission: Every single work that contains notable topics must have complete coverage in Wikipedia. While every article need not cite every work, every article must accurately summarize every notable opinion of every notable topic in every work. Some have interpreted the role of the proposed citations project as one of merely centralizing the citations that already exist in Wikipedia. The mission, however, calls for a broader vision. This new project should have a bibliography of all works since that is the scope of the mission. The nature of knowledge further calls for us to understand the links between items containing knowledge, their categorical context and their abstract relationships. This broad, unambiguous view of works and their topics will allow us to explicate them neutrally and select only the most notable ones for inclusion. It will, in the limit of time, prevent our judgment from being clouded by the limited, local view of knowledge that we currently have. The proposed new project has the following features: It is a bibliography of all kinds of works that fall under the umbrella of the WMF mission. Works and collections of works contain disambiguating user contributed text and media. Works can link to other works. Works come together to form categories. People can use this site as their personal bibliography, encouraging participation of a much greater community of users and curation of the bibliography them. There are many challenges to creating a project of such scale, but in order to accomplish our goals of freeing knowledge we must strive to collect it and understand it in a more nuanced way than we currently are. Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: UPEI's proposal for a universal citation index
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@robla.net wrote: On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I have been working with Sam and others for some time now on brainstorming a proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in such a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I hope to write this summer. This sounds great. Just speaking as a community member, I've been thinking about this topic a long time myself, and have plenty to add to the conversation. The proposal white paper will then be sent around to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As we know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no official process. Thus I find it important to get it right. I'd suggest finding an on-wiki spot to discuss this work. Here's one place this has been discussed in the past that may be a good place to revive the conversation: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published Rather than commenting on list about the subject itself, I've commented on the discussion page there: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_talk:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published#Fact_database_6531 Rob Rob, Thanks for bringing my attention to this proposal. It certainly has some of the same ring as this project, with of course some important differences. Commonalities between the projects are that they are multilingual and require a powerful search engine. Differences are that this project is for all literary sources and that I believe it is best suited at the WMF. The widespread use of citations across the Wikipedias will drive user contributions towards adding richer metadata to those citations. And having a source of citations available will increase the quality of the Wikipedias as it becomes easier and easier to cite sources. Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: UPEI's proposal for a universal citation index
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
Brian,
The meta process for new project proposals is still the cleanest one
for suggesting a specific Project and presenting it alongside similar
projects.
It would be helpful if you could update a related project proposal on
meta -- say, [[m:WikiBibliography]], if that seems relevant. (I just
cleaned that page up and merged in an older proposal that had been
obfuscated.)
Thanks for your work on this - definitely in the right direction! I will
consider whether I feel it's the right way for me to get started. One point
is that I am pointing more in the direction of a long-form proposal, and I
have more experience writing white-paper proposals for academia. I certainly
want it to end up on wiki, but when TPTB finally read the proposal perhaps
they will find it more persuasive if it is a professional looking document
that lands in their inbox.
Or you can create a new project proposal... WikiCite as a name can be
confusing, since it has been used to refer to this bibliographic idea,
but also to refer to the idea of citations for every statement or fact
- something closer to a blame or trust solution that includes
citations in its transactions.
Another name that I have come up with is OpenScholar. I still rather like
it, but suspect it has too much of a scientific ring to it? Names are
certainly very important so we should do more work on this avenue. Including
a list of names in the proposal would be a good idea, and perhaps the final
name will be a combination of existing name proposals.
We should figure out how this project would work with acawiki, and
possibly bibdex. Bibdex doesn't aim to And it would be helpful to
have a publicly-viewable demo to play with -- could you clone your
current wiki and populate the result with dummy data?
The problem with WikiPapers is that it has too many features! A feature-thin
version would be ideal for the proposal though, so I will plan to have some
kind of a demo site available.
I love the idea of having a global place to discuss citations -- ALL
citations -- something that OpenLibrary, the arXiv, and anyone else
hosting cited documents could point to for every one of its works.
Exactly :)
Brian
Sam.
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
nemow...@gmail.com wrote:
Brian J Mingus, 19/07/2010 22:20:
The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information
that
other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something
like a
{{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the
citation,
the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations
across
all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. Users can use
this
wiki as their personal bibliography as well, as collections of citations
can
be exported in arbitrary citation formats.
I have already mentioned it before, but this description looks quite
similar to http://bibdex.org/ . Maybe we should join forces (i.e., send
your proposal also to Sunir Shah).
Nemo
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: UPEI's proposal for a universal citation index
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Daniel Kinzler dan...@brightbyte.dewrote:
Hi all
A central place for managing Bibliographic data for use with Citations is
something that has been discussed by the German community for a long time.
To
me, it consists of two parts: a project for managing the structured data,
and a
machanism for uzsing that data on the wikis.
I have been working on the latter recently, and there's a working
prototype: on
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-sandbox-1/Wikipedia:DataTransclusion
you
can see how data records can be included from external sources. A demo for
the
actual on-wiki use can be found at
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-sandbox-1/Ameisenigel#Literatur,
where
{{ISBN|0868400467}} is used to show the bibliographic info for that book.
(side
note: the prototype wikis are slow. sorry about that).
Fetching and showing the data is done using
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataTransclusion. Care has been
taken
to make this secure and scalable.
For a first demo, I'm using teh ISBN as the key, but any kind of key could
be
used to reference resources other than books.
For demoing managing the data by ourselves, I have set up ab SMW instance.
An
example bib record is at
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-bib/ISBN:0451526538, it's used
across
wikis at
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/wmde-sandbox-1/Wikipedia:DataTransclusion.
Note
that changes will show delayed, as the data is cached for a while.
When discussing these things, please keep in mind that there are two
components:
fetching and displaying external data records, and managing structured data
in a
wiki style. The former is much simpler than the latter. I think we should
really
aim at getting both, but we can start off with transclusing external data
much
faster, if we allow no-so-wiki data sources. For ISBN-based queries, we
could
simply fetch information from http://openlibrary.org - or the open
knowledge
foundation's http://bibliographica.org, once it's working.
In the context of bibdex, I recommend to also have a look at
http://bibsonomy.org - it's a university research project, open source,
and is
quite similar to bibdex (and to what citeulike used to be).
As to managing structured data ourselves: I have talked a lot with Erik
Möller
and Markus Krötzsch about this, and I'm in touch with the people wo make
DBpedia
and OntoWiki. Everyone wants this. But it's not simple at all to get it
right
(efficient versioning of multilingual data in a document oriented database,
anyone? want inference? reasoning, even? yay...). So the plan is currently
to
hatch a concrete plan for this. And I imagine that bibliographical and
biographical info will be among the first used cases.
Hi Daniel,
Have you considered that Lucene is the perfect backend for this kind of
project? What kinds of faults do you see with it? At least in my mind, we
can mold it to our needs here. It has the core capabilities found in
Semantic MediaWiki, and it is fast and scalable.
I say this as a serious user of Semantic MediaWiki. I have seen that it
can't scale well without an alternate backend, and I wonder what kind of
monumental effort will be required to make it scale to tens or hundreds of
millions of documents, each of which containing 20-50 properties. Lucene can
already do this, SMW, not so much ;-)
Brian
cheers,
daniel
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: UPEI's proposal for a universal citation index
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Jodi Schneider jodi.schnei...@deri.orgwrote:
Hi Brian,
On 20 Jul 2010, at 18:02, Brian J Mingus wrote:
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Finn Aarup Nielsen f...@imm.dtu.dk wrote:
Hi Brian and others,
I also think that it would be interesting with some bibliographic support,
for two-way citation tracking and commenting on articles (for example), but
I furthermore find that particular in science article we often find data
that is worth structuring and put in a database or a structured wiki, so
that we can extract the data for meta-analysis and specialized information
retrieval. That is what I also do in the Brede Wiki. I use the templates to
store such data. So if such a system as yours is implemented we should not
just think of it as a bibliographic database but in more broader terms: A
data wiki.
Although the technology required to make a WikiCite happen will be
applicable to a more generalized wiki for storing data I think that is too
broad for the current proposal. A WMF analogue to Google Base is an entirely
new beast that has its own requirements. I certainly think it's an
interesting and worthwhile idea, but I don't feel that we are there yet.
As the 'key' (the wiki page title) I use the (lowercase) title of the
article. That might be more reader friendly - but usually longer. I think
that KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09 is too camel-cased. Neither the title nor author
list + year will be unique, so we need some predictable disambig.
I noticed that AcaWiki is using the title, but I am personally not a fan of
it. The motivation for using a key comes from BibTeX. When you cite an entry
in a publication in LaTeX, you type \cite{key}. Also, I think most
bibliographic formats support such a key. The idea is that there is a
universal token that you can type into Google that will lead you to the
right item. The predictable disambig is in the format I sent out (which
likely needs modification for other kinds of sources). The format is
Author1Author2Author3EtAlYYb. Here is a real world example from a pair of
very prolific scientists, Deco Rolls, who published at least three papers
together in 2005. In our lab we have really come to love these keys - they
are very memorable tokens that you can verbally pass on to other scientists
in the midst of a discussion. Eventually, if they enter the key you have
given them into Google, they will get the right entry at WikiCite.
DecoRolls05 - Synaptic and spiking dynamics underlying reward reversal in
the orbitofrontal cortex.
DecoRolls05b - Sequential memory: a putative neural and synaptic dynamical
mechanism.
DecoRolls05c - Attention, short-term memory, and action selection: a
unifying theory.
Citation keys of this sort work, but they have to be decided on by some
external system. Who decides which paper is -, b, and c? Publication order
would be one way to do it -- but that's complicated, especially with online
first publication, or overlapping conferences.
I think whether they're memorable tokens might vary by person... Sure, the
author and year will be identifiable, even memorable. But the a, b, c?
If you want to support more than recent works, I'd urge instead of YY.
Then we only have an issue for pre-0 stuff. :)
Also consider differentiating authors from title and year, perhaps with
slashes.
author1-author2-author3-etal//b
I'm not convinced that -'s are better than capital letters (author last
names can have both)...
The key seems to be a very important point, so it's important that we get it
right. My thinking is guided by several constraints. First, I strongly
dislike the numeric keys used at sites such as CiteULike and most database
sites (such as 7523225). To the greatest degree possible I believe the key
should actually convey what is behind the link. On the other hand, the key
should not be too long. Numeric keys maximize the shortness while telling
you nothing , whereas titles as keys are very long and don't give you some
of the most important information - the authors and the year it was
published. The key format I have suggested does seem to have a flaw, being
that it easily becomes ambiguous and you must resort to a token that is not
easily memorable. Then again, even though many authors and sets of authors
will publish multiple items in a year, the vast majority of works have a
unique set of authors for a given year.
I like your suggestion that the abc disambiguator be chosen based on the
first date of publication, and I also like the prospect of using slashes
since they can't be contained in names. Using the full year is a good idea
too. We can combine these to come up with a key that, in principle, is
guaranteed to be unique. This key would contain:
1) The first three author names separated by slashes
2) If there are more than three authors, an EtAl
3) Some or all of the date. For instance, if there is only one source by
this set of authors
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
I think you mean http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/b/bc/20100513062230!Wiki.png. On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Mike.lifeguard wrote: The globe isn't actually too small, I think it just _looks_ that way because: 1) the new logo has more space in it, in particular at the top 2) the new logo is typically viewed with Vector, which has more space around the logo than monobook did. Take a look at the new logo with ?useskin=monobook and I think you'll find it looks larger. In fact, monobook crowded the logo a bit uncomfortably. For use in Vector, I think the logo could be made larger, as it currently does not fill the space set aside for it. Vector handles the spacing; the logo doesn't need to have padding in the image as well. --Mike Come on. The v2 *is* smaller. Open http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Wiki.png and http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Wikipedia-logo-v2-en.png on two different tabs and switch between them. You will notice the change from italic to normal, that the W was bigger (bolder?) on the previous logo (we may want to increase it on v2) and that the ball was bigger. And by bigger I mean that on the previous logo the borders of the circle reached the left border of the W and the right of the A. The v2 goes from the middle of the W to 25% of the A. This is not a visual effect. Put your cursor on the right border of the globe and change tabs. Whoops, now there is almost a full piece to the border. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia iPhone app goes v2.0
I like the map feature as well. :) I might use it sometimes. I would like it however for it to say points of interest. On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 10:53 PM, James Alexander jameso...@gmail.com wrote: Yea it is :) On Saturday, May 1, 2010, Jyothis E jyothi...@gmail.com wrote: Is that application open source? Regards, Jyothis. http://www.Jyothis.net http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis I am the first customer of http://www.netdotnet.com woods are lovely dark and deep, but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep and lines to go before I press sleep completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) / resources) + ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote: I wholeheartedly second Liam. The maps feature is awesome. Steven Walling On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry if this has been posted or announced before or somewhere else, but I just noticed it. For anyone out there with an iPhone, the official Wikipedia App has been updated to version 2.0 as of last week: http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238?mt=8 As it says in the release notes now with maps, bookmarks and near-complete redesign Maps!! For me, the killer aspect of Wikipedia+mobile has got to be the ability to find articles that are about things nearby me - so great job getting this standard in the official app. Here's hoping the mobile interface continues to flourish on different platforms, localisations and with ever shinier and faster-loading features :-) Thanks guys, -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata ___ 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 -- James Alexander james.alexan...@rochester.edu jameso...@gmail.com 100 gmail invites and no one to give them to :( let me know if you want one :) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- - Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Amir E. Aharoni wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 01:40, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8560469.stm We're the biggest non-profit website in the world. That sounds like argument for us to get the prize money to me. The Internet is definitely worthy of the prize as a whole but I'm not following the logic that for-profit websites are more deserving. Google, for example, is a major force for peace. In fact it is the biggest popularizer of Wikimedia content. Yes, but Google doesn't really need the prize money. Although giving it all to Wikimedia is probably not quite right either. Give the Nobel Peace Prize to DARPA for designing the Internet. And they've made so many other excellent contributions to peace, like unmanned bombers and anti-missile lasers. Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would choose the internet as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even more bizarre choice than last year. -- Tim Starling I'm actually not sure how unmanned bombers are not a tool for peace given our current situation. As Obama noted very eloquently in his Nobel acceptance speech even though we may dream of world peace it is not yet a reality. The reality is that we have rogue regimes, unstable international relationships, religious wars, insane people who manage to get elected as POTUS, etc... Given that we must put men and women in harms way and we must drop bombs it makes sense to do so in the most responsible way possible. These unmanned bombers are a step in the right direction. Similarly for anti-missile lasers. Supposing a hostile nation lobs an ICBM in our direction if we are capable of zapping it out of the sky then we can avoid war entirely. It means that we will not have to retaliate with a counter-ICBM. How is that not for peace? How can you disparage these technologies with tongue in cheek? A world without them would be utopia for sure. We do not live in utopia. Speaking as someone who has been funded by DARPA (I am now funded by [[IARPA]]) and whose research cannot be used for war I can say that not everything they do deserves to be described with insidious undertones. Much of what DARPA invests in has no practical application within any reasonable time frame. Furthermore I would note that the D is for Defense, and Defense does not just mean developing new weapons. More and more defense for us means stopping a threat in its early development so that nobody gets hurt. Lastly I will note two reasons that the Internet should have been nominated (not that it will necessarily win - it is against 200 other nominees!) - Free access to the sum of all human knowledge for those who have it. That's 25% of the world and a recent survey showed that 80% believe that everyone deserves access to the Internet as a fundamental right, including 70% of those who aren't even connected yet. - Secondly, the Internet for Peace Manifesto ( http://www.internetforpeace.org/uploads/manifesto/manifesto_english.zip): We have finally realized that the Internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity. Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict. That's why the Internet is a tool for peace. That's why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of non-violence. And that's why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Net. A Nobel for each and every once of us. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.netwrote: Brian J Mingus wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Give the Nobel Peace Prize to DARPA for designing the Internet. And they've made so many other excellent contributions to peace, like unmanned bombers and anti-missile lasers. Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would choose the internet as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even more bizarre choice than last year. -- Tim Starling I'm actually not sure how unmanned bombers are not a tool for peace given our current situation. As Obama noted very eloquently in his Nobel acceptance speech even though we may dream of world peace it is not yet a reality. The reality is that we have rogue regimes, unstable international relationships, religious wars, insane people who manage to get elected as POTUS, etc... Can we discuss something else, rather than having the list get sidetracked into geopolitical debates that aren't at all useful to the work we do? Aside from fantasizing about a share of the prize money, even the original subject was not especially on-topic for discussion here. Thank you. --Michael Snow Yes, hardly anything is relevant for discussion on this list anymore. It happens either on internal WMF mailing lists or IRL. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.netwrote: Brian J Mingus wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Brian J Mingus wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Give the Nobel Peace Prize to DARPA for designing the Internet. And they've made so many other excellent contributions to peace, like unmanned bombers and anti-missile lasers. Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would choose the internet as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even more bizarre choice than last year. -- Tim Starling I'm actually not sure how unmanned bombers are not a tool for peace given our current situation. As Obama noted very eloquently in his Nobel acceptance speech even though we may dream of world peace it is not yet a reality. The reality is that we have rogue regimes, unstable international relationships, religious wars, insane people who manage to get elected as POTUS, etc... Can we discuss something else, rather than having the list get sidetracked into geopolitical debates that aren't at all useful to the work we do? Aside from fantasizing about a share of the prize money, even the original subject was not especially on-topic for discussion here. Thank you. --Michael Snow Yes, hardly anything is relevant for discussion on this list anymore. It happens either on internal WMF mailing lists or IRL. It's not that those discussions wouldn't be relevant to have on this list, and periodically people try and encourage others to move them to a more public setting. It's that when this list continues to show a tendency for conversation to degenerate, as it just did, then it's quite hard to persuade people that they should want to have their discussions here. --Michael Snow You believe that my reply to Tim is degenerate? That is offensive. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.netwrote: Brian J Mingus wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Brian J Mingus wrote: On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Give the Nobel Peace Prize to DARPA for designing the Internet. And they've made so many other excellent contributions to peace, like unmanned bombers and anti-missile lasers. Seriously, the only reason I can think of that the committee would choose the internet as a recipient is if they wanted to make an even more bizarre choice than last year. -- Tim Starling I'm actually not sure how unmanned bombers are not a tool for peace given our current situation. As Obama noted very eloquently in his Nobel acceptance speech even though we may dream of world peace it is not yet a reality. The reality is that we have rogue regimes, unstable international relationships, religious wars, insane people who manage to get elected as POTUS, etc... Can we discuss something else, rather than having the list get sidetracked into geopolitical debates that aren't at all useful to the work we do? Aside from fantasizing about a share of the prize money, even the original subject was not especially on-topic for discussion here. Thank you. --Michael Snow Yes, hardly anything is relevant for discussion on this list anymore. It happens either on internal WMF mailing lists or IRL. It's not that those discussions wouldn't be relevant to have on this list, and periodically people try and encourage others to move them to a more public setting. It's that when this list continues to show a tendency for conversation to degenerate, as it just did, then it's quite hard to persuade people that they should want to have their discussions here. --Michael Snow You believe that my reply to Tim is degenerate? That is offensive. I've decided that this list is no longer useful so I have decided to unsubscribe. It's been fun. Cheers. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8560469.stm We're the biggest non-profit website in the world. That sounds like argument for us to get the prize money to me. The Internet is definitely worthy of the prize as a whole but I'm not following the logic that for-profit websites are more deserving. Google, for example, is a major force for peace. In fact it is the biggest popularizer of Wikimedia content. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8560469.stm We're the biggest non-profit website in the world. That sounds like argument for us to get the prize money to me. The Internet is definitely worthy of the prize as a whole but I'm not following the logic that for-profit websites are more deserving. Google, for example, is a major force for peace. In fact it is the biggest popularizer of Wikimedia content. Oops, I meant not-for-profit -sorry. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] William Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:22 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:23 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 02/28/2010 09:36 PM, Mike.lifeguard wrote: On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, William Pietri wrote: I've reported when I thought I had something to report I think the problem here is that you haven't reported any accomplishments because there haven't been any. We've got some stuff that is probably done. But we can't actually show it, and we can't prove that it's done, so yes, giving people a progress report saying things are probably better now but you can't see didn't seem so helpful. Going hand in hand with iterative design is evolutionary delivery. Twenty years ago, the norm was for projects to take years to deliver useful software; now, that’s unthinkable. In evolutionary delivery, we schedule many short revision cycles; as often as every couple of weeks, you get a new version to use, test, and critique. And at the beginning of every cycle, you have the opportunity to set your priorities for the next version. This lets you start using the high-priority features right away, and makes sure that your software meets your needs. As an added bonus, you are never left wondering, What are those guys doing? When you see concrete results on a regular basis, there’s no mystery. http://www.scissor.com/aboutus.htm#philosophy I should clarify that that quote just happened to catch my eye, and that it's totally off-topic and unrelated to anything of importance. Actually, in hindsight, I shouldn't be posting when I'm in my current under-rested state. Are you kidding? That quote is spot on. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:03 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.comwrote: On 02/28/2010 08:59 PM, MZMcBride wrote: I finally figured out that the view history button in Pivotal Tracker is where all the relevant details are. For each of the items I'm looking at, Aaron appears to have completed them 2 months ago. But they're not marked as finished because you and Howie haven't done so? What's the hold-up exactly? Sorry, I thought I explained this earlier: deploying to somewhere that people can see is the current holdup. I believe that something isn't actually done until it's has been tested in an environment sufficiently like production that you have reasonable confidence that it will work. I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this long, though... Setting up cur en has been surprisingly easy in the past, particularly with the advent of that fast C-mysql dump importer. And many people can afford those cheap dell quad core nehalem i7 cpus desktops. But honestly I don't see why it can't just be thrown up on any old apache by an experienced wmf admin in a matter of minutes, using the live data but not attached to squid, memcached etc.. Honestly, how much load are we going to subject this thing to right away? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sue Gardner, Erik Möller , Wi lliam Pietri: Where is FlaggedRevisions?
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:57 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 28 February 2010 22:17, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I run a mediawiki farm with mediawiki trunk installed. I've got the process of setting up new wikis scripted and can set one up in 30 seconds. If you just need a place to install a wiki you should be able to find one no problem. Also, WMF has a whack of servers. You should have absolutely no problem getting one in short order. Particularly for a high priority project. My 2 cents. The problem isn't getting a wiki running, it's getting a wiki running in a way comparable to English Wikipedia, which is far from a default Mediawiki install. Given that these are the people that actually keep the enwiki servers running, I wouldn't expect it to take them this long, though... Setting up cur en has been surprisingly easy in the past, particularly with the advent of that fast C-mysql dump importer. And many people can afford those cheap dell quad core nehalem i7 cpus desktops. But honestly I don't see why it can't just be thrown up on any old apache by an experienced wmf admin in a matter of minutes, using the live data but not attached to squid, memcached etc.. Honestly, how much load are we going to subject this thing to right away? I should add - if the Toolserver is still replicating mysql that would be the perfect place for this. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sex-related content improvement
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: Or go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sex_positions , one of the most viewed pages of English Wikipedia. Do you think the images there are of excellent quality? I don't. I think they have a certain innocent charm. They look like pictures drawn by an illiterate who needed a hobby whilst on remand. And why not? People *should* have a hobby. IIRC those images were drawn for that article by a Wikipedian. They are accurate depictions of the acts in question and under a free license. I don't understand how a perfectly composed, high resolution photo would add relevant information to the diagrams. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Minors and sexual explicit stuff
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 6:04 PM, private musings thepmacco...@gmail.comwrote: Hi all, On Wikipedia Review, 'tarantino' pointed out that on WMF projects, self-identified minors (in this case User:Juliancolton) are involved in routine maintenance stuff around sexually explicit images reasonably describable as porn (one example is 'Masturbating Amy.jpg'). http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=27358st=0p=204846#entry204846 I think this is wrong on a number of levels - and I'd like to see better governance from the foundation in this area - I really feel that we need to talk about some child protection measures in some way - they're overdue. I'd really like to see the advisory board take a look at this issue - is there a formal way of suggesting or requesting their thoughts, or could I just ask here for a board member or community member with the advisory board's ear to raise this with them. best, Peter, PM. Wikipedia is not porn. 29 posts left. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: Is it possible that sometimes Wikipedia steals Wikinews' thunder? You get something like that kid (not) in a balloon and it struggles/fails to get on Wikipedia but I assume did OK on Wikinews. Sometimes a current event is big enough that Wikipedia can cover it without fear of deletion (I think of Katrina) and I seem to recall the coverage in Wikipedia was amazing. Perhaps that means Wikinews can only ever be a little brother because Wikipedia gets to cover the big stories as well as Wikinews ever will. The [[Colorado balloon incident]] Wikipedia article has had 120,000 views. I'm sure that the [[6-year-old boy in Colorado found alive, unhurt after runaway balloon allegedly carried him away]] article on Wikinews received far, far less attention. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip] plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with de.wp, Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet. I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have not yet been added to the test wiki at http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation. Please help me understand the implications of this statement. The English Wikipedia reached an overwhelmingly strong decision to try a particular mode of operation. I hope you can appreciate how difficult it can be to balance various interest and achieve agreement on a change with such a widespread impact on a project as large and well established as EnWP. Enhancements were made to the software by volunteers to support the proposal and a configuration was designed. Since then there has been almost no progress in turning up a public trial wiki with this configuration for testing and further refinement. Now, we (I do know know for whom you speak) are concerned about an underspecified concern regarding a negative impact on participation. So? Now what? Does the now staff obstruct the rollout with passive resistance and year+ delays? Based both on the actions thus far and on your statement this is what it sounds like to me. Is this sort of over-concern regarding participation, so paranoid that it obstructs a simple time limited trial of an article selective feature, the behavior we can now expect from the WMF now that it has substantial funding tied to unspecified participation goals? I too am concerned about participation: I'm concerned that people who came to build a project together will not want to participate under a Wikimedia Foundation which views its contributors as 'users' rather than partners. Reaching a design for the policy and configuration and educating and convincing people is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer labor from hundreds of people across several years. Moreover, the ability to reach a decision to try something at this scale is a ray of hope that EnWP hasn't become totally stuck and immune to change. All of this is wasted if the Wikimedia Foundation isn't able or willing to hold up its side of its partnership with the community. The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the flagged protection use case. The community has largely taken care of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Implementation#PHP_configuration Of course, there will need to be additional refinement but that can not proceed until the test wiki is up. We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out, hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of this year. When will the test wiki be activated? This requires something like pasting 25 lines of configuration, an extension install, and kicking a maintenance script. Even if everything else is delayed having the text site up and running would allow the community to test and provide feedback to volunteer developers who can refine the software in advance of the availability of resources for the large scale deployment. Greg, why can't we just put the code up on the Toolserver? Why does the foundation need to be involved at all? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Italia being sued
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.comwrote: Mike Godwin, 16/09/2009 07:54: We've had a lot of experience of spurious reports of lawsuits originating in Italy. In the majority of those cases, Wikimedia Foundation itself never receives service of process -- in effect, the cases only really exist in Italian media. I'm not saying that's the case here, but we haven't heard anything yet from Italian process servers yet. I want to be clear: this message is offensive to Wikimedia Italia. Nemo To restate, there is a tendency in Italy for a media sensation to be made of purportedly legal matters when no legal actual legal processes have been initiated, and no legal documents drafted. As you can see, the statement has nothing to do with Wikimedia Italia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning process update
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Eugene Eric Kim ee...@blueoxen.com wrote: Hi everybody, For those of you who don't know me, I'm leading the Wikimedia strategic planning process. Our goal is to develop a five-year strategic plan through an open community process that is going on right now and that will go on through July 2010. We're trying to answer three questions: * Where do we want to see the Wikimedia movement in five years? * Where is it now? * How should we get from here to there? The hub for this conversation has naturally been a wiki: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/. It's been up for about two months now, and we've already gotten an incredible amount of engagement there. We've also been holding regular IRC office hours (as most followers of this list know), and Philippe Beaudette, the facilitator of this project, has been tirelessly talking with many people and evangelizing the project. We're now moving into a phase where we're going to be encouraging even greater participation. This Wednesday, we'll be putting out a broad Call for Participation, advertised through the Central Notice, which means that anyone accessing any of the Wikimedia project sites will see it. I wanted to make sure that all of you were aware that this is happening, and I wanted to point you to a few links that explain this in more detail. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Process http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_forces In the meantime, if you have any questions or thoughts, please share them, either on the strategy wiki, here on this mailing list, or with me or Philippe directly. Thank you! =Eugene -- == Eugene Eric Kim http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates http://www.blueoxen.com/ == This is great to hear and I am very curious to see how it turns out. It's too bad Special:Statistics can't show you basic information over time. To facilitate before/after comparisons, as of now: 372 content pages; 4,118 pages; 30,382 edits; 1,870 registered users; 682 active users. This is of course a quantitative vs. qualitative assessment, and more interesting will be the strategy that emerges from thoughtful interaction between the community and the foundation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning process update
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:52 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: It's too bad Special:Statistics can't show you basic information over time. Thankfully, Philippe has been saving these statistics so you can see the over time effect: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Planning:Statistics -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 Gr8, thanks for pointing this out. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning process update
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: I knew it would come in handy for something... :-) Tx. Do you know what counts as a user account given SUL? Someone who is logged on at another wiki merely visits, and now they are a new user account? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning process update
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: I have wondered that, and do not know the answer. My GUESS - uneducated and probably wrong - would be that it's not an account until they write something on SUL or create the account locally. On Sep 14, 2009, at 7:03 PM, Brian wrote: Tx. Do you know what counts as a user account given SUL? Someone who is logged on at another wiki merely visits, and now they are a new user account? I poked around a bit, and I think they have to actually sign in with the new account before its in the table, which makes sense, and means the #s are reasonable. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: 2009/9/8 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: As such, it's time to try something different. What do you suggest? Are there models from other mailing list communities that we should experiment with to create a healthier, more productive discussion culture? What, based on your own experience of this list, would you like to see change? I think we should stop using this outdated technology altogether and instead switch to a web-based forum, where comments can be postmoderated (i.e. removed after posting), and unproductive threads can be moved or locked. Mailing lists, by their nature, have a large potential for abuse by trolls and spammers. It's trivial to impersonate another user, or to continue posting indefinitely despite being blocked. We're lucky that the behaviour we've seen here has been merely inconsiderate, rather than malicious. Discussion on the English Wikipedia continues to function despite hateful users who try every dirty trick they can think of to disrupt the community. We're lucky that foundation-l has only seen the merest hint of a reflection of that turmoil, because the tools we have to deal with abusive behaviour on mailing lists are far less capable than those that have been developed for Wikipedia. Some modern forums have features that can interact very intelligently with email, which to my mind might be the best of both worlds. Such things would still allow the features you mention such as thread locking and removal of abuse from the archive, but would also allow people to continue to receive email copies of posts if that is what they prefer. For example, have a forum where people can subscribe to receive email copies of either all posts or just specific threads of interest. Most systems would require that you then visit the website to post replies (which could be facilitated by including a reply url in any emailed copy), though I do recall once seeing a forum email manager that created a unique reply-to address for each thread/user, hence allowing one to email replies directly onto the forum while still having those replies be subjected to any thread and/or user specific rules that had been put in place. In any event, I think we could probably set up a system that provided more flexible control over threads and users without necessarily sacrificing the convenience of email for people that prefer that approach. And of course, people who don't want email interaction could just use such a web forum as a web forum without enabling any email features. -Robert Rohde If an enterprising hacker were to enable fully bidirectional e-mail - liquid threads functionality then I can see this being accepted, but otherwise it seems implausible. Despite all the benefits of forums they don't come close to the global usage habits and convenience of e-mail. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Robin P. robinp.1...@gmail.com wrote: In the past there were several project proposals on incubator, but we deleted them because they were not active. Since then, tests for new WMF projects are not allowed. If they were still allowed, Incubator would be full of inactive projects. Even now, there are inactive test projects for new languages, because the procedure is difficult and takes a very long time. I assume requests for creating entirely new projects would require even more difficult and longer procedures, resulting in an Incubator full of inactive tests. I don't think that deleting them is a good idea,. Perhaps you can archive them after a certain period of inactivity, but the incubator should allow project ideas to be revived and should give projects plenty of time to become active. There must be a carrot of course - the WMF should make some sort of statement about how successful a project should become, and what sorts of vision it might have, for them to commit more resources to it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Head of Communications position open?
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: sfmammamia writes: A bit of a mystery -- in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, page E-8, there's an ad for the Wikimedia Foundation Head of Communications position. This ad does not appear online, at least I could not find a companion posting, either on the foundation site or on Yahoo (the Chronicle's online ad partner). Perhaps once the staff is back from the Labor Day holiday there will be clarification? Or did I just miss something? Hi, sfmammamia. Here's the nutshell answer to your question: because the Wikimedia Foundation is an international organization that hires staff from around the world and yet must with all relevant US employment law, we sometimes need to adhere to specific legal and administrative requirements. In other words, sometimes we must run employment ads, such as the posting of this position, in a newspaper like the SF Chronicle or elsewhere. This shouldn't be interpreted as a sign of any shakeup. Jay, for example, is not leaving the Wikimedia Foundation -- he's doing a great job, and we expect and hope he will stay with us, doing the same great work, for a long time. --Mike Godwin General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation I don't know what these laws are, but my first guess is that the foundation doesn't plan to actually hire anyone who responds to the ad, but must post the ad in order to conform to equal opportunity employment laws? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/9/8 Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net: What could be the cause of this recent dearth of new projects? Certainly the process for getting a new project underway is so complex and exhausting that it's not something that many people will be likely to engage in - especially considering that project ideas are often proposed by people who aren't currently very active Wikimedians. Perhaps we need to set up a formal system for long-time Wikimedians to adopt ideas they're excited about, to help push them to approval? In any event, if you want to add to the Wikimedia family, my guess is that it's currently a commitment of 2-3 months of several hours per week to get to that point, provided it's achievable to begin with. I do think that project adoption is something that we should explore in the right circumstances; it's not something we've ever done but IMO we should be open to it. I don't think OpenStreetMap or OpenLibrary want or need to be adopted. ;-) But there may be other smaller semi-successful projects that would like to join our project family, and that would make sense as part of it. I would also make the point that adding capabilities to existing projects can be just as effective at cultivating new communities of participants as creating an entirely new wiki, and sometimes more so. For example, as of a few weeks ago, there's now a fledgling community of people on Wikimedia Commons who add annotations to images, because a volunteer developed a cool image annotation tool. The entire community of people adding categories to Wikipedia articles could only form after the categorization functionality was developed. Because the Wikipedia community is so vast, adding capabilities that engage more people on Wikipedia specifically, or improving access to the existing capabilities, can have dramatically greater impact than creating a blank-slate wiki. That is not to say that I think there should be no new blank-slate wikis, or wikis with custom software, for specific purposes. But I would also not see the fact that no new top-level Wikimedia project has been created in recent years as a sign of stagnation - wonderful capabilities have been created in the existing Wikimedia ecosystem in that same time period, some of them with dramatic positive impact. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate I propose expanding the notion of the Wikimedia Incubator to include entirely new projects that are very, very easy to create. They don't need to be approved by the WMF - they just need to demonstrate their value by attracting a community and creating great content. This would be more like the Apache Incubator, but even more open. This gives people an easy way to prototype their ideas for new projects, to advertise them, and over time will give an overview of what kinds of projects and approaches to projects are likely to succeed and likely to fail. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: I've created http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l for brainstorming of how to make this list a little bit less of a cesspool. Austin, your page says nothing about the kinds of conversations you would like to see on foundation-l. My take on foundation-l is that the foundation doesn't take it very seriously. They recognize the potential of a mailing list and like the possibilities, but in practice there are too many people being overly critical of the foundation here for it to be useful to them. Also, the topics of discussion often seem like useless jabs that aren't really in the direction of progress. People are just itching to find the foundation doing something wrong so they can start a riot. This is unfortunate - why are so many people more interested in backwards-looking criticism than forward-looking progress? Some of us feel that the foundation has become out of our reach. That no matter how much we discuss and try to reach consensus it will just be too hard, or there will be a lack of interest in our consensus at the foundation, for any real change to happen. You practically have to get a grant on behalf of the foundation anymore in order to convince them you've got a good idea. Sue recently posted a couple of articles to foundation-l that were cookbooks for how to shut people that you perceive to be unproductive out of your community. That was obviously a flawed e-mail to send. Of course we are all aware of people who want to discuss the color of the bike shed. Discussing the difference between red and blue is not, in fact, a priori bad, and there should be some of that. More generally however the foundation should take it upon themselves to increase the level of discourse on these lists by seeding it with great topics, and, more importantly, allocating time from each of their employees in which they are expected to participate in these discussions. This is, after all, the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list. And yet with dozens of employees the Foundation's voice is but a whisper here. To me, this is the thing that has gone most wrong about this list. The Foundation just isn't here. They may be subscribed, and they may read, but they do not participate. They do not lead by example (with a few notable exceptions) by raising the level of discourse, and most all of Foundation business is conducted either in person, or in private e-mails. We feel like we have to shout in order to get their attention, and that not only do we not know what they are up to, but we have no say in it. I have seen it said several times that this list has too much traffic. I think that's an overgeneralization - it has too much negative traffic. This list can handle as much productive traffic as the foundation cares to seed it with. Rather than having that conversation over private e-mail, consider whether it could benefit from the voices of a few community members. If nobody replies that's fine because by sending it the foundation has both increased the level of transparency in its thinking and operations and also let the community know that it takes what they say seriously. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF seeking to sub-lease office space?
On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/9/4 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2)The amount described is pretty much consistent with the WMF's entire office there which means if it was the WMF subletting it is more consistent with a general move. Yes, as noted in our 09-10 plan, we are relocating to a new space, as a consequence of which the current satellite office will be re-merged into the new HQ. We're hoping to sublet the Stillman space, once we've covered up the entrance to our secret underground lair of doom and despair, and removed all artifacts of alien technology. Huh? Is that really a useful contribution to a discussion? On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:23 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:37 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 7:24 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 6:53 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Huh? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Akahele: Omidyar venturing out
On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, I started reading I'm sorry, did you have something to say that *wasn't* a waste of time? I did read it, and unlike your e-mail it provides a useful perspective in a large and complicated issue. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal: foundation-announce-l
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: Sometimes, fighting through the high traffic lists to find announcements is a huge problem... Philippe Quite the contrary, it is an even larger problem to be subscribed to an increasingly large number of ever fragmenting lists. Additionally, a read-only announce list would serve to stifle community discussion of WMF announcements. If the Foundation wants to have an announce list and then cross post all announcements to announce-l and foundation-l it wouldn't be so problematic but I doubt such a list would have a large number of subscribers. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Tim Landscheidt t...@tim-landscheidt.dewrote: Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: [...] The WMF as a membership organisation would be great, but I don't think it is practical. A better option (which I have discussed with a few poeple) would be having the chapters as members of the WMF and the community as members of the chapters. There are other global non-profits that work along those lines. (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, for example.) Why? What's broken at the moment? The English full-history dump, for one. And that would work if the WMF were a membership organiza- tion? Interesting. Tim If it were once again a membership organization it would imply that the Foundation had not reneged on the original vision without the ability of the community, which approved that vision, to provide input on the modified input. It would turn around the Foundation's usurping of community power. It would give each community member a voice. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Tim Landscheidt t...@tim-landscheidt.dewrote: Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: [...] The WMF as a membership organisation would be great, but I don't think it is practical. A better option (which I have discussed with a few poeple) would be having the chapters as members of the WMF and the community as members of the chapters. There are other global non-profits that work along those lines. (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, for example.) Why? What's broken at the moment? The English full-history dump, for one. And that would work if the WMF were a membership organiza- tion? Interesting. Tim If it were once again a membership organization it would imply that the Foundation had not reneged on the original vision without the ability of the community, which approved that vision, to provide input on the modified input. It would turn around the Foundation's usurping of community power. It would give each community member a voice. Sorry, input is an overloaded word for me due to my occupation in neural networks. I happen to be working with several input layers right now and flubbed that entirely ;) But it should say, to provide input on the modified vision. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter. In 2008 the unencrypted votes were rapidly released, but I was not involved in that decision. This year, I don't think I have been asked directly to provide this data, but it seems that the Board and election committee is in favour of it being released, and nobody else has offerred to produce the data. So I just wrote the relevant script, and am now testing it, so the results will be available to the committee and the Board shortly. -- Tim Starling This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members of the community to vote. You'd rather spread FUD about vote buying than design a system that allows the largest number of community members to vote. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members of the community to vote. You'd rather spread FUD about vote buying than design a system that allows the largest number of community members to vote. What on earth are you talking about? Tim is concerned about legitimate risk. I don't share Tim's opinion on the matter but I certainly don't consider it fear mongering. Like anything else it's a decision where benefits must be weighed vs costs. Fortunately the decision to disclose ballots isn't one that interacts heavily with making the voting system open to many people. The reason we let such a tiny fraction of the community vote is because of an irrational and inflated fear of fraudulent votes. The risk has been blown entirely out of proportion and absolutely no technical measures have been been pursued. The Board and those who they coordinate with technically sit around and drum up the scariest possible situations they can think of and then develop a policy which prevents it from happening without even considering technologies that would allow more people to vote. You say its a legitimate risk, but you do not quantify how risky you believe it is. The answer is that it is almost zero. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Erik Zachte erikzac...@infodisiac.comwrote: There is another way to detect 100% reverts. It won't catch manual reverts that are not 100 accurate but most vandal patrollers will use undo, and the like. For every revision calculate md5 checksum of content. Then you can easily look back say 100 revisions to see whether this checksum occurred earlier. It is efficient and unambiguous. This will work for any Wikipedia for which a full archive dump is available. Erik Zachte Luca's WikiTrust could easily reveal this info. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the candidates ranked as follows: Final ranking 1 Ting Chen (Wing) 2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage) 3 Samuel Klein (Sj) Congrats to Tin, Kat especially SJ! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is the key to avoidance in the future!) I'd also like to know if any users were denied the ability to vote who should have been permitted on account of this error? It was a coding error; it was corrected. This is important: NO ONE WAS DISENFRANCHISED BY THE ERROR. People were given suffrage who weren't entitled. Philippe This comment makes my skin crawl. Everyone is entitled to have a voice and it is only the Board's impoverished vision of the community and limited sense of what technology can accomplish that has led them to create arbitrary rules about how to best stifle the voices of the vast majority of the actual community. Not only that, but the Board has forgotten the WMF's original vision where all editors were highly valued members of the community. Because the Board does not have to sit face to face with these people they feel free to treat our community members as if they were not, in fact, people, with highly valued and varied life experiences whose votes do in fact contain useful information - in the information theoretic sense. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 8/7/09 2:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: By containing the magic words senior and architect the proposed Senior Software Architect is, in my experience, not inconsistent with industry naming practice for the most important tech guru who isn't primarily a manager. It's not a bad title in any case. (I was previously a manager and made a decision to hire a boss because I realized I'd rather be doing technical work than performance reviews. These days I'm just a lowly 'Senior … Engineer', and I'm quite happy with that, thank you very much) Exactly. Now, if we really think of a _totally badass title_ before we get the business cards printed up I'm open to changing it, but honestly I like it and it fits the role I see for myself just fine. :) My favorite title of all time, and I think the undisputed winner of the most badass title of all time, is Chief Internet Evangelist. You could be the Chief MediaWiki Evangelist, although architect does have a nice ring to it for the time being. Perhaps later on in your career you'll take on the role of Chief Wiki Evangelist. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Kwan Ting Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: You know, this comes up every year. And there's always good argument to both sides but there's never consensus to actually change it. There has been an election in one form or another since 2004, and except in 2004 where the requirement was having an account that is at least 3 months old or be a sysop on a project that is less than 3 months old (hey, Wikimedia *was* new after all :D), there has been an edit requirement to vote. Between 2005 to 2007, a voter was required to have had made at least 400 edits to a particular project (by roughly a month before voting) and be at least 3 months old. Last year, the requirement were raised to 600 edits by 3 months prior and 50 edits any time in the previous 6 months with exceptions granted to server administrators, paid staff of at least 3 months old, and current or former trustees. This year the requirement were relaxed slightly such that the 600 edits can be made up to 2 months prior, and with unified accounts combined votes across projects. At the end of the day, what form the suffrage requirements take depends on what group of people we want making that decision. Is it on one extreme the end user of the product, i.e. the readers of Wikipedia, Wikinews, etc...? Is it on the other extreme only people the editing community has decided to entrust with additional privileges, i.e. sysops? Or perhaps only people who have supported the projects in the form of monetary contributions? Or somewhere in between the two extreme, as we have now. Once that has been decided, the technical means of restricting voters to only that group of people can be arrived at, hopefully relatively easily. X number of edits by Y time is just a method of restricting suffrage to the group of people we want. It's a waste of time arguing X should be Z, or edits should include mailing list posting (which mailing list?), MediaWiki commits, Bugzilla bug tickets, ... We could spend all day doing it. Instead of arguing over the method of restriction, define who we want to restrict it to first. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine Speaking of consensus, where can I find the consensus for severely restricting the number of people who can vote by an arbitrary rule, and where is the consensus for the particular rule? You make it clear that The Powers That Be sit around a coffee table and pick whatever they think is best. In the absence of such a consensus the default would be a more permissive voting system. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: Allow me, please, to reinforce this, wearing my election committee member hat. This years' rules were mostly carryovers from last years' rules. When we started, we looked around, realized that no significant opposition to last years' rules had been expressed, checked the talk pages to be sure, and modified the rules to cover anything we thought needed to be changed (for instance, this year we were able to use edits from across wikis, using SUL - which was one of the points of opposition that was raised last year, but there was not a technically feasible method to do it at the time). I'm sure that if there is significant response to the edit count requirement, next year's committee will happily (he said confidently, with no intent to volunteer for next year's committee) review it then. Philippe It should be the goal of all those who hold power to convince the populace that they must arrive at a consensus in order to change the status quo. That way those with power can more easily enact laws that appear uncontroversial and have them enter the status quo. Their power is then enhanced by the inherent difficulty in achieving a consensus, especially when the tools available for reaching consensus on general issues are brittle and difficult to use. It is further enhanced by quoting the status quo standard often, discouraging any attempts to enact change by pointing out that it would be extremely difficult to get everyone to agree since you are a mere individual. An alternate system would, by default, put power back in the hands of the community frequently, taking advantage of the fact that technology makes it trivial to sample their voices as often as seems fair. I suppose you will tell me that I can do this - I just have to vote for a candidate for the board that agrees with my views. This is a great idea, except that I am not eligible to vote. The WMF is a far cry from the original vision of it as a membership organization. Also, the board propagates stale laws under the notion of status quo for which the original consensus is no longer remembered. There is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any good ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of those ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Kwan Ting Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: Brian wrote: I'm going to take particular issue with the last point here. On 3 June *2008*, right after last year election, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild), one of last year election committee member, posted on the talk page of either Election 2009 or election 2008 (and subsequently merged with this year) If you have an idea on how to improve the 2008 board elections system for 2009, please post them below under a section name that briefly summarizes the subject. I believe I covered this in my post where I mentioned brittle and difficult to use tools that do not actually facilitate consensus building. Also, a single person providing a comment and the board acting is not, in any way, a consensus. If the litmus test for changing a rule is consensus, then why are rules being changed after only one member of the community thinks its a good idea? The answer is that this is not how the system works. Rules only change when those with power think its a good idea. Philippe posted this year rules on this mailing list on 27 May. I am arguing that the rules have always been broken and that the original consensus is no longer remembered. Thus, their merit, in its entirety, should be fully reconsidered. I do not know what conversations the board has amongst itself when considering how much they should restrict the voice of the community. I can say that it is not visionary in the technological sense and that it goes against the original vision for the WMF, as I remember it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Jul 31, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Brian wrote: There is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any good ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of those ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system. Really? Been to the strategic planning wiki lately? There's a whole big section there asking for proposals from the community. :-) Philippe I am definitely in favor of this new effort, particularly with the CentralNotices. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
The Wikimedia Foundation was originally envisaged as a membership organization. Per my recollection, everyone who ever edited would become a member. That didn't happen for legal reasons, however, I believe in the spirit of it being a membership organization. Unfortunately we now subscribe to the recentist perspective that only those that maintain a certain pace of editing are eligible to vote. We ignore, not only new editors who do not yet have 600 edits, but all editors who have 600 edits but have contributed to the projects in other ways recently, or have lapsed into just using the projects as a useful information resource. I highly doubt that a statistical analysis was carried out which found that editors that don't meet this requirement skew the results. I also highly doubt that editors that don't meet this requirement are incapable of comprehending the statements created by those seeking election, ranking them and making a perfectly valid choice that increases the power of the result. In my view, the only reason to limit voting to editors with a certain number of edits is to limit the effects of ballot stuffing. However, technical measures can easily counteract this effect. Additionally, the more people you allow to vote the more effective your anti-ballot stuffing countermeasures will be, as the larger number of votes mutes the effect of those who vote for the same person from several ip addresses. Thus, I must conclude that this rule was created arbitrarily. And if it was voted on, I seriously consider the result of that vote suspect, given present knowledge. /Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote: Recentist? Ignoring the, ahem, fanciful language you've chosen, I'd like to throw my support behind the voting qualifications wholeheartedly. For me, the analogy is simple: just because you get a driver's license once doesn't entitle you to drive for the rest of your life. This isn't just about what will skew the results with ballot stuffing. It's about giving suffrage to people who can make an informed decision that will positively affect the work of the community by getting adequate representation on the Board. Steven Walling You have only said that you support the current plan, without making an argument as to why it is beneficial. There is no information in the current heuristic that indicates that the editor is more or less familiar with the candidates than an editor who does not. Given that it is an international election it is quite likely the case that many of the people who are qualified to vote are not familiar with the majority of the candidates and they will have to read up on them. I argued in my original post that the heuristic does not distinguish between the capability of people that it captures and people it does not to make an informed and valid ranking decision about the candidates. To reiterate, you simply said you agree with the current plan without arguing that this is false. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote rule decided?
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote: Recentist? Ignoring the, ahem, fanciful language you've chosen, I'd like to throw my support behind the voting qualifications wholeheartedly. For me, the analogy is simple: just because you get a driver's license once doesn't entitle you to drive for the rest of your life. This isn't just about what will skew the results with ballot stuffing. It's about giving suffrage to people who can make an informed decision that will positively affect the work of the community by getting adequate representation on the Board. Steven Walling You have only said that you support the current plan, without making an argument as to why it is beneficial. There is no information in the current heuristic that indicates that the editor is more or less familiar with the candidates than an editor who does not. Given that it is an international election it is quite likely the case that many of the people who are qualified to vote are not familiar with the majority of the candidates and they will have to read up on them. I argued in my original post that the heuristic does not distinguish between the capability of people that it captures and people it does not to make an informed and valid ranking decision about the candidates. To reiterate, you simply said you agree with the current plan without arguing that this is false. The second sentence should read: There is no information in the current heuristic that indicates that editors who are allowed to vote are more or less familiar with the candidates than those who are not. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies sides with NPG
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Mathias Schindler mathias.schind...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:46 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=866109 I am getting timeouts on this server. Does any have copy of their statement for me? Mathias It times out for me as well. And for Google Translate. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategy.wikimedia.org soft-launch
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: As part of the Foundation's Strategic Planning Initiative, a new wiki ( http://strategy.wikimedia.org ) is being soft-launched today. This soft-launch is being announced only to foundation-l and a few other places, but is not at all secret - consider this an open-beta test. When you have a few moments, your input is greatly desired - please take time to look at the strategy wiki, to answer the questions there, and to start to think about what proposals you might have for the Foundation's five-year strategic plan. The process for submitting proposals is at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Call_for_Proposals . You can familiarize yourself with the strategic planning process overall by reading the links on the Main Page. This wiki will be fully launched soon, but in the meantime, don't hesitate to make suggestions to either Eugene or myself. Philippe Beaudette Facilitator, Strategic Plan Wikimedia Foundation pbeaude...@wikimedia.org I recall convincing arguments on this list that meta was the appropriate place for this, rather than fragmenting into a new wiki. This is because previously created wikis succumb to wiki rot and eventually link spam. Why were those arguments rejected? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategy.wikimedia.org soft-launch
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I recall convincing arguments on this list that meta was the appropriate place for this, rather than fragmenting into a new wiki. This is because previously created wikis succumb to wiki rot and eventually link spam. Why were those arguments rejected? Did you see Erik's comment by any chance? http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053348.html -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 No I hadn't, thank you. It doesn't cover the most important case in my mind: meta is where people actually are! A new wiki is not a magic recipe for an insta-community and its hard to guarantee that everyone who would be interested in the content there will end up seeing it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategy.wikimedia.org soft-launch
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/7/27 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: It doesn't cover the most important case in my mind: meta is where people actually are! Strategy.wikimedia.org is part of SUL, moving from one space to the other is trivial. To reach a very large group of people (much larger than the group of people currently editing on Meta), we'll be using CentralNotices through the different stages of the process. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Oh, great. That basically covers it, assuming it is what I think it is (a site notice on all SUL wikis). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] A brief, high level analysis of the total number of contributors and the anatomy of a decision
These are some excellent mailing list and Wikipedia stats that Erik has cooked up/refreshed, although kind of a pain to do meta-analysis on. You can however paste the html tables into OpenOffice Calc which is nice (after some serious complaints from your cpu!). The csv format was not very fun. http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/ http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm I notice that the 364 power posters (posters with more than 200 emails across all lists) account for 312569 / 458349 ~= 70% of all mailing list posts. Also, 164 of these power posters account for 46579 / 52201 ~= 90% of all posts to foundation-l. I denote this subclass of power posters uber posters. Combined with the project statistics we have (I realize this is somewhat arbitrary, but still quite interesting in my view): 1 benevolent dictator, 7 board members, 27 foundation employees, 164 uber posters, 364 power posters, 635 wikimania attendees, 12927 very active wikipedians, 91067 active wikipedians, 744752 monthly wikipedians and 928022 total wikipedians. There are many other interesting numbers you could include. I couldn't find the total number of mailing list contributors and only an admin with access to all lists could give us the total number of subscribers. We could also compare the number of sysops etc.. across all wikis in addition to the total number of visitors and especially donors. The most interesting part of this data to me is the power posters and uber posters. It would take a careful analysis of the anatomy of a decision to draw any conclusions from it. For example, you would need to draw links between conversations on the lists, conversations on the wiki and conversations in person to know how many people actually contribute to a decision, and it would be interesting to see the average number of contributors to decisions weighted by the importance of that decision, further scaled by other factors. My feeling though is that a relatively small number of uber posters act as voices that are representative (in the eyes of the foundation) of the much larger number of contributors across the projects (these data are largely specific to Wikipedia), and that foundation staff then make an assessment of consensus based largely on the opinions of foundation staff which has been informed by whatever conversations happened to occur on list. It is hard for someone to be everywhere all at once given the astronomically large number of places that one can hold a conversation across all WMF hosted media and I know that some foundation staff are excellent at patrolling and knowing absolutely everything about places such as meta and the english wikipedia and that many important conversations happen in person that most of us never hear about. /endrunon All that said, I continue to worry that our benevolent dictator, board members, foundation employees, power posters, uber posters and wikimania attendees are not very representative of the the community at large. Part of the problem is that we have almost no way of measuring that. Even if the community only included everyone up to wikimania attendees it would appear that only a tiny fraction of contributors account for all of the decision making. When we include all contributors we see an awesome consolidation of power. To put it simply, I am not very happy with this consolidation. I would like to see the foundation use technology to bring more of these contributors into its fold and involve them in the decision making process. We can use technology to increase the signal to noise ratio while simultaneously improving the quality of decisions and finding alternate and optimal solutions that would only occur to less than 1 person in a thousand. As it stands, those solutions are not being found. As the foundation continues to bring in employees it gains more and more power and takes it away from the community. That's my view at least. I would like to drastically reverse that trend so that there is no consolidation - so that it is easy (and indeed, beneficial for us all) for anyone who wants to be involved in whatever decision to get involved and make a difference. Starting mailing list threads just doesn't seem like it. I also note that the mailing lists have been on the decline since June of 2006. /Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CC attribution with cut'n'pasted text - Tynt's Tracer Tool
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/7/24 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/16060 Basically, if you cut'n'paste text, it appends a CC credit line to the pasted text. Obviously the paster can remove it, but it does remind them this is licensed, not PD. Worth using for our stuff? A bit obnoxious? What do you think? I vote for a bit obnoxious. What if they are using it as fair use, or under the GFDL? Or copy it to something which is already CC? Or something which is entirely personal use so attribution is pointless? Or to some large document where inline attribution is inappropriate? In that case they can highlight the attribution and press backspace! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CC attribution with cut'n'pasted text - Tynt's Tracer Tool
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/7/24 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: In that case they can highlight the attribution and press backspace! Sure, but we shouldn't make it unnecessarily difficult for people to reuse our content and tidying up after our crude attempt to force attribution would qualify as unnecessarily difficult. I believe the alternate usability interpretation is more persuasive. That by law they are required to provide attribution and yet many users are totally unaware a) that they are required to provide attribution b) that a free encyclopedia cares about attribution in the first place and c) of the specifics of providing attribution. If we consider the burdens that I have just outlined as compared with the burden of highlighting and deleting some text its clear that automatically solving the 90% case for users is the correct thing to do. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] new survey of digital collection copyrights
Preprint: http://www.ala.org/ala//mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/preprints/Schlosser.pdf On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:55 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.comwrote: Relevant to the NPG et al discussion: Unless Otherwise Indicated: A Survey of Copyright Statements on Digital Library Collections, by Melanie Schlosser. published in College and Research Libraries, v.70(4), pp371-385 (July 2009). Unfortunately it's not freely available online, but if you have access to a good university library you should be able to get it. Here's the abstract and some excerpts: Abstract: This study examines the copyright statements attached to digital collections created by members of the Digital Library Federation. A total of 786 collections at twenty-nine institutions were examined for the presence of statements and their content evaluated for common themes. Particular attention was paid to whether the institutions in question are meeting their obligation to educate users about their rights by including information about fair use and the public domain. Approximately half the collections surveyed had copyright statements, and those statements were often difficult to distinguish from terms of use and were frequently vague or misleading. Snippets of interest to our discussions: Of the collections examined, 41% consisted entirely of public domain items; 51% of these had a copyright statement, but only 10% of the institutions mentioned public domain implicitly or explicitly in their statement. 86%, however, mentioned personal or educational use (which is not relevant to public domain items). Of the collections of copyrighted items, 48% had some sort of statement; 8% mentioned fair use explicitly while 53% mentioned personal or educational use. In general, the copyright status of a collection did not affect whether or not a copyright statement was present -- only half of the collections had statements overall, and no institution was consistent in its labeling. And: Quite a few public domain and mixed [copyright status] collections had Creative Commons licenses or specific or vague ownership statements, implying that the contents are copyrighted in some way. It was especially common for statements to acknowledge that the institution does not hold the copyright to the original item (either because it had passed into the public domain or because the copyright was held by a third party) but to assert copyright over the digital image. Schlosser notes that The definition of a 'copyright statement' used by this study was somewhat arbitrary. Many of the statements examined were buried in collection descriptions or looked more like terms of use statements than copyright statements. She concludes that It seems unlikely that libraries are purposely deceiving users with false or misleading claims of copyright ownership (copyfraud). However, this study presents evidence that, far from educating users about copyright or promoting the public domain, many libraries engaged in digitization projects are omitting a key tool for copyright education or using it in ways that undermine users’ needs for accurate copyright information. Once again, it is outside the scope of this paper to examine the reasons. It is possible that working knowledge of copyright law in many libraries is not sufficient for grappling with the complexities involved or that the issue has simply slipped through the cracks as libraries embark on difficult and resource-intensive digitization projects. Note this article is U.S. institution and law-centric, but gives some nice background on copyright changes and the actions and position of libraries. As Schlosser says, While users push for more content and functionality at less cost, and copyright holders demand greater technological and legal protection for their works, libraries are often caught in the middle. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Donation Button Enhancement : Part 2
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Rand Montoyarmont...@wikimedia.org wrote: Wikimedians-- As many of you know, last month we began work on exploring the visibility of the donate button on all Wikimedia projects. After a long comment period, we received many comments and many new ideas. Some of these ideas we have incorporated into a new set of test buttons. Thank you to everyone who took the time to evaluate Round 1 buttons. You can see those discussions here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade/Round1 We have 4 designs that we will be testing on the Wikipedia:EN main skin during August and the first part of September. We are going to evaluate each button for one full week. This process will unfold over the next two months. You can see the designs and timeline at this link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade Testing should be done in parallel, not in sequence. History has demonstrated that donors have a tendency to respond disproportionately to the new thing. Which means that whatever button you test first will have an advantage over whichever one you test last. Probably the easiest way to get a reasonable distribution is to vary which button people see based on their IP. -Robert Rohde It's also necessary to control for seasonal traffic (and thus donation) variations. I note that the first three button tests are at the end of summer while the fourth coincides with the beginning of the school year. It could be the case that there is no variation, or that the variation is highly significant. Since nobody has looked there is no way to tell if the test results are valid. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices andsystems
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Tim Landscheidt t...@tim-landscheidt.dewrote: Happy-melon happy-me...@live.com wrote: We need to think a little bit outside the box, here; this domain should really be available, and make sense to use, for *all* WMF sites. http://www.wm.org is only occupied by a websquatter at the moment, AFAICT; I think a schema like http://wm.org/wiki_code/article_title or http://wm.org/wiki_code/?oldid=oldid would be cleanest. For enwiki it would be http://wm.org/enwiki/Foo; the worst-case scenario is AFAIK http://wm.org/mediawikiwiki/Foo; still only 28 characters plus the title. Use one of the qqx reserved codes for stuff like copyright, and you have a complete service. [...] To think outside the box would be to apply for a URN scheme and have popular browsers implement it (like wp: in Kon- queror for example). It cannot get cleaner than that, and we would not have to worry about operations issues either :-). Tim Even better, you could have the most popular search engines rank many Wikipedia articles as the first result for their titles and have the most popular browsers automatically search for whatever keywords you type into the address bar. (Astute readers will note this is already the case). Of course, this doesn't get around the CC URL license terms (neither does the URI solution, AFAICT), but it points out the sillyness in requiring a URL in the first place. In my opinion the requirement that you link to the CC license is simply to raise awareness of CC itself and has nothing to do with usability. Finding the source and stable copy of the content you are looking at is trivial, and thus so is finding its license. This true with only keywords and without URLs/URIs. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.comwrote: On which wiki do you mean, for FlaggedRevs? For the English Wikipedia, my understanding is that consensus was reached in favor of a limited trial for FlaggedRevs three months ago, but it hasn't been enabled yet because the tech team is still tidying things up and checking that everything works http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-May/043187.html. This was not a matter of the Foundation consulting the community—the community petitioned the Foundation, from what I can tell. i didn't know it happened that way. I thought that, quite some time ago, the Foundation paid a developer 20k to develop the extension, and then got community approval for at trial? Oh nevermind, I must be thinking of the ratings extension? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No default codec for video and audio in HTML5
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:20 PM, Hay (Husky) hus...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Flash isn't generally available out of the box, though, is it? In theory, no. In practice, yes. Adobe claims around 99% of all web users to have Flash installed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_flash#Installed_user_base -- Hay I think you have to have Flash 9 to get H264. It's a shame they couldn't get all vendors to agree to ship both ogg and h264 codecs. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:32 PM, John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no wrote: Minimum attribution of «Terms of Use» from Wikimdia Foundations site would be http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/; That is 96 chars, with spaces, of 140 bytes available in a SMS. For some languages the attribution will take more than one message. Ooops... John You just need to provide a url to the article. Type wikipedia.org/articleinto your address bar and wait 5 seconds. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:32 PM, John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no wrote: Minimum attribution of «Terms of Use» from Wikimdia Foundations site would be http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/; That is 96 chars, with spaces, of 140 bytes available in a SMS. For some languages the attribution will take more than one message. Ooops... John You just need to provide a url to the article. Type wikipedia.org/articleinto your address bar and wait 5 seconds. I actually was not aware that the terms now ask you to link not only to the article, but to the license as well. That is a burden. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No default codec for video and audio in HTML5
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.comsimetrical%2bwikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: It's a shame they couldn't get all vendors to agree to ship both ogg and h264 codecs. No, it's not. H.264 is patented and you need to pay licensing fees to use it. It's not an open standard and should not be used on the web if it's at all avoidable. It's possible Mozilla couldn't even legally ship it, at least if they continue to distribute under the GPL. (Maybe if they distributed only as LGPL/MPL they could avoid any issues by making the H.264 part BSD-licensed or something.) A compromise is a win-win. In the absence of a compromise its a lose-lose. Except that H264 wins since almost all of us already support it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
Sorry, where I said AbuseFilter I meant to say FlaggedRevisions. I'm not sure on how AbuseFilter came to be agreed on. On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Jennifer Riggs jri...@wikimedia.orgwrote: I'm curious. In your perspective who is doing the central management that makes it difficult for ideas to percolate up? WMF, Jimmy, Board, select administrators/highly involved community members? In your opinion, is there an infrastructure barrier or a personalities one? jriggs It's an infrastructure, policy and outreach issue. I assume that every single person has the very best for the projects in mind and is doing it for the right reasons. That said, I see the definition of community being interpreted very narrowly. I liked what I saw with AbuseFilter but that was a singular case. Filtering edits is almost on the same level as showing advertisements. In these rare cases any change you try to make will quickly make its way through the community because many people will be outraged. There are a lot of other situations that don't propagate as well, not because they aren't very important, but because people just don't know about them. I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to come here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that agreement happened. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
snip
I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to
come
here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that
agreement
happened.
The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
programming in template space.
The developer that abused templates so that qif could be written does not
constitute a consensus. The conversations regarding programming on Wikipedia
were extremely limited given their impact.
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[Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: I'd be interested to see your positive, assume-good-faith list of suggestions. One of my favorite suggestions, from Erik, is that we use IdeaTorrent ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ ) in order to provide a single place for users to engage in very important discussions about all manner of issues relating to the community. Right now there is simply no way for our widely disparate community of users, who have expertise in every area imaginable and whose collective input is extremely valuable, to come together and have a conversation. It takes someone such as yourself to champion an idea to the community and present it in its best form and make sure that the best of the arguments from both sides are heard from users. As the projects have grown and as they have become more centrally managed in a top down fashion it has become increasingly difficult for ideas to percolate from the bottom up. How can a user with a great idea on one wiki present it and be sure that users from the other wikis and the WMF see it? Likewise, how can the Foundation ask questions of the *entire* community? Neither users or the Foundation have a voice that can reach everyone (fundraising and the like are an exception). There isn't a plausible conduit through which we can present and receive ideas and those ideas are considered on an equal basis with all other ideas and then refined and improved by the will of the community and ultimately implemented (by a volunteer or the WMF). Regarding the software, I think it's great to hold a conversation on wikitech-l about the best way to replace ParserFunctions. Of course, the way we got ParserFunctions was through a conversation on wikitech-l which entertained a few ideas but ultimately did not have the wider goals of the community in mind due to the narrow scope of the discussions. Usability and encyclopedia writing were not concerns, CPU cycles was. The justification was, and continues to be, well, there is obviously a problem here. Therefore we, the code writers, have free license to develop a new solution, ask our friends in IRC if it looks nice, and then put it on the live sites. It's not even clear how you could extract a consensus from wikitech-l if it were there. If you take fully consulting the community consensus seriously then there is a very different design model that then leads to development. In this method we have a plausible way of asking a large number of *editors and users* what is wrong with the software. You have to get many of the people who actually edit the encyclopedia a lot and have something to say about what's wrong with it and what's right with it in the same place fully engaged with each other. Right now we do not have tools that facilitate this. Article talk pages are simply not it. Meta is not it - the people aren't there. The mailing lists aren't it - the people aren't here. We represent a tiny minority of the community and a minority of the total number of people who would, if they were afforded the opportunity, have an opinion worth hearing. If you look at the number of people engaged in any conversation which will have a serious impact on all of the projects and then compare that number to any measure of active editors and contributors you will see that it is shockingly small. I encourage the WMF to make that ratio as large as possible, and I suggest that the larger you make it the more we will all benefit. I get the feeling that many people look at full consultation as a lot of really hard work. I think that's wrong - we are supposed to be leveraging the power of communities. The WMF has the power to enable a community to come together and form a consensus by bringing their attention all to the same place. I think that until something like that happens full consultation is more of a dream that many people aren't even trying to realize and changes will continue to be made to the software and otherwise which aren't really in the right direction. For example, it's not clear to everyone that Wikipedia even needs a programming language. I don't know if it does or not. There are a lot of things to take into consideration, such as usability, readability of the main article namespace, duplication of content, ease of more sophisticated editing, and issues you or I might not even think of! Adding a programming language is not a magic bullet to these issues. It could in fact be that templates and the way we work with article content in the first place needs to be entirely rethought. This is not a conversation that should be limited to wikitech-l. In fact, editors might have a more useful opinion. But in the current system their opinions won't be sought out as the decision to do it was entirely top down. Lastly, I do not consider a wide distaste for the look of ParserFunctions to be a sanction for a new programming language. ParserFunctions was added because a few users decided to abuse
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for
simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex
conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into
what appears to be line noise.
In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the
template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of
articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke
templates, or rather how we make data available to templates.
If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50
lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is
declared multiple times like so:
|birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}}
born July 6, 1946
|DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946
Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about
articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can
imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once,
like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And
so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than
declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly
inline in the text in a highly readable format.
Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them
within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce
the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning
of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph.
Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is
declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article.
This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation.
Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all
circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our
visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those
articles is another page where users can control higher level
organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it
in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new
programming language, and place it in a variety of locations
throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the
wikitext at all.
It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases,
such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that
the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated
that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider
editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to
MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data
to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called.
I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so
unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from
articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be
rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond
wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all
of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the
reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people
were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem
that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been
adequately characterized.
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure how one would make your hook system work in a way that
was practical and not totally opaque to the editor.
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
There is actually code lying around somewhere that implements such a
system for ref so that the first call would not need to attach the
full reference definition but could simply use ref name=foo / if a
corresponding ref_define name=foo.../ref appeared later in the
text.
Personally, my guess is that a system of placement by reference would
make for a more flexible / less confusing approach than trying to
create a system of article hooks and attach infoboxes and the like to
them.
Placement by reference aka move all the nasty stuff to the bottom :p
I think this approach would be good combined with the ability to
declare facts ala `born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]'. That way we no
longer have nasty stuff at all - we simply reference a template such
as display name=infobox / which gets its arguments from the facts
declared in the article which called it.
The method of declaring facts in wikilinks is indeed derived from
semantic mediawiki. But I just look at it as a testbed for good ideas,
not as an extension for WMF to install.
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[Foundation-l] How do you fully consult the community consensus?
Going forward, how does the Foundation plan to make large changes to the software in full consultation with the community consensus? Is the assumption that all of the members of the community who are knowledgeable and interested have already signed up to the relevant mailing lists and all that is needed is to send out a quick 'ping' and get their thoughts? What constitutes the community when it comes to the software? Or is this just a guideline that has been on Jimbo's user page for many years which is not really relevant since laymen should not really be involved in technical decisions? Is there anyone at the Foundation who currently takes this principle seriously? Honestly? What about the developers - are they aware of and actively engaged in implementing this principle? Does the Foundation feel that it doesn't actually need to consult the community? It can determine the technically best solution for the projects and then implement it without soliciting feedback from as many people as possible? What would constitute due diligence in contacting the community? For example, suppose that the Foundation had determined that there were 5 really good solutions to a problem in the software and that they take full consultation seriously. Could you then present those 5 solutions to the community en masse using a survey, analyze the results and choose a winner (or have a runoff?). How large of a change to the software requires full consultation? After consulting the community, does the Foundation feel it is within its power to then choose something different? Does the Foundation take the requirement that all changes to the software must be gradual and reversible seriously, or not? What does that mean to you? Thanks, Brian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Video and subtitles
http://metavid.org/wiki/ http://metavid.org/wiki/MetaVidWiki_Software http://metavid.org/wiki/MetaVidWiki_Features_Overview On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 7:39 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, I am at the moment at a book sprint about Open Translation Tools. One of the topics in the books is how to deal with video. Subtitling and dubbing are the two obvious techniques to make video relevant for multiple languages. Kaltura was mentioned and, Kaltura has combined its platform with SubPLY for its subtitling. As I understand it at this moment, SubPLY is proprietary. Does this mean that we do not have a way to subtitle the videos that we hope to host in the near future. Thanks, GerardM ___ 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] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
2009/6/23 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com Yes, but my understanding is that while google provided part of the mbp data and scans, its continued updates to ocr since then are not being shared. I would be glad to learn this was not the case... The dataset you need to train an OCR system to be as good as theirs is the raw images and the plain text. They aren't making it easy to get either of those things :( They have presumably improved the software in other ways as well.. WTF GOOG? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.netwrote: The dataset you need to train an OCR system to be as good as theirs is the raw images and the plain text. They aren't making it easy to get either of those things :( They have presumably improved the software in other ways as well.. WTF GOOG? Well, when your shorthand uses their stock ticker symbol, your argument has already been coopted. --Michael Snow I get the joke but um, I used it on purpose and which one of my arguments been coopted ?? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
Ok Shakespeare. But in plain english you appear to be saying that corporations are inherently greedy and have a tendency to be evil. Sure, but we expect more out of GOOG. This is not MSFT we are talking about. On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.netwrote: Brian wrote: On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: The dataset you need to train an OCR system to be as good as theirs is the raw images and the plain text. They aren't making it easy to get either of those things :( They have presumably improved the software in other ways as well.. WTF GOOG? Well, when your shorthand uses their stock ticker symbol, your argument has already been coopted. --Michael Snow I get the joke but um, I used it on purpose and which one of my arguments been coopted ?? Coopting is not like rebutting; it does not bite chunks out of specific pieces, it swallows whole. Symbols are powerful things, perhaps even more so outside the mathematical logic of argument. They do not serve only your purposes, even if you use them purposefully. My observations may be wry, but they are not entirely in jest. --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] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
This has reminded me to complain about Google Books. Google has the world's best OCR (in virtue of having the largest OCR'able dataset) and also has a mission to scan in all the public domain books they can get their hand on. They recently updated their interface to, as they put it, make it easier to find our plain text versions of public domain books. If a book is available in full view, you can click the 'Plain text' button in the toolbar. Unfortunately the only way I've found to download the full text of a public domain book from Google is to flip through the book a page at a time, copying the text to your clipboard. There are roughly 2-3 million public domain books in Google Books. On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: There is a wealth of work done all the time by primary source researchers and publishers, which could be improved on by having wikisource entries, translations, c. Related question : how appropriate would large numbers of public domain texts, with page scans and the best available OCR [and translations of same], fit with what Wikisource does now? This is clearly a wiki project that needs to happen : OCR even at its best misses rare meaning-bearing words. If not Wikisource, where should this work take place? SJ On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 11:41 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2009/06/19/using-wikisource-as-an-alternative-open-access-repository-for-legal-scholarship/ Interesting. How well does this fit with what Wikisource does? - d. ___ 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] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
Not likely. I've been banned from Google's regular search at least a dozen times during semi-frenetic search sprees in which I was identified as a bot. There is no doubt that if you try to automate it you will be quickly shot down. On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Brian wrote: Unfortunately the only way I've found to download the full text of a public domain book from Google is to flip through the book a page at a time, copying the text to your clipboard. There are roughly 2-3 million public domain books in Google Books. That's easy to fix :) ___ 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] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
That is against the law. It violates Google's ToS. I'm mostly complaining that Google is being Very Evil. There is nothing we can do about it except complain to them. Which I don't know how to do - they apparently believe that the plain text versions of their books are akin to their intellectual property and are unwilling to give them away. On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Falcorian alex.public.account+wikimediamailingl...@gmail.comalex.public.account%2bwikimediamailingl...@gmail.com wrote: So the bot just has to run at human speeds so it does not get banned, it still won't get tired or make unpredictable mistakes. And you can run it from different IPs to parallelize. --Falcorian On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Not likely. I've been banned from Google's regular search at least a dozen times during semi-frenetic search sprees in which I was identified as a bot. There is no doubt that if you try to automate it you will be quickly shot down. On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Brian wrote: Unfortunately the only way I've found to download the full text of a public domain book from Google is to flip through the book a page at a time, copying the text to your clipboard. There are roughly 2-3 million public domain books in Google Books. That's easy to fix :) ___ 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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Platonides platoni...@gmail.com wrote: Where does it forbid them? 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update roll-out
It's more than a concession isn't it? The GFDL has the or any later version clause. The CC-BY-SA is not a later version of the GFDL. I think we have to keep it forever and ever. On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/6/18 Stephen Bain stephen.b...@gmail.com: On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 3:00 AM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: Because the GFDL is only of interest to a minority of re-users, ... If this is the Foundation's view, why did it opt to push for (hobbled) dual-licencing going forward, instead of transitioning completely to CC-BY-SA and retaining GFDL only for legacy content? As I understand it, it was a concession made to the FSF during the negotiations. ___ 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] Licensing update roll-out
What do you consider to be new content ? Newly started articles, or new edits? On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/6/18 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: It's more than a concession isn't it? The GFDL has the or any later version clause. The CC-BY-SA is not a later version of the GFDL. I think we have to keep it forever and ever. Existing content will always be available under the GFDL regardless of what the WMF does, the WMF has nothing to do with it. We're talking about new content. Legally, there is nothing requiring new content to be available under the GFDL, that requirement was introduced by the FSF as a condition for allowing us to switch. ___ 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] Reuse policy
Not that the conversation isn't worth having, but you should be aware that we've been over every single one of these points at length on this list. The WMF hosted version is considered a stable copy - it's safe to link to and you have every reasonable assumption that it will continue to exist. If it ceases to exist it's reasonable to assume that someone else will host a stable copy and that redirects will be setup on all of the WMF domains to the new stable copy. Honestly though, this is an apocalypse scenario, in which case the stable copy is the least of your concerns. You seem to be advocating what I consider to be an extremist point of view - that all re-users should include the list of authors. The goal of the WMF is not to give every person access to the list of all authors of the potentially re-used piece of free knowledge they are looking at. It's the knowledge itself that is important, and requiring a list of authors is a serious burden that gets in the way. The hyperlink clause, reasonable to the medium and means, is a more reasonable approach. On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Jiri Hofman hofm...@aldebaran.cz wrote: Hello everybody, I hope, it is never too late to discuss these things. Today, I have noticed the Commons added following text under the edit window: Re-users will be required to credit you, at minimum, through a hyperlink or URL to the article you are contributing to, and you hereby agree that such credit is sufficient in any medium. I was and I am a fan of switching to CC-BY-SA 3.0. However, I am not a fan of this violation of freedom which Wikimedia declares for its projects. It is true, a similar statement is present at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update . But this change was not discussed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers as I can see (it was shortly discussed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers/Oppositional_arguments). Also it was announced nowhere (as far as I know) that this policy will be advertized in this explicite manner. I feel to be cheated. I was voting for an easier implementation of freedom. I was definitively not voting for the end of freedom. And this statement means the end of freedom. Why end of freedom? Just imagine, the Wikimedia will have closed the business. Everybody, who used links to provide a sufficient list of authors, will be in troubles immediately. Yes, everybody can download dumps. But will this be enough? No. For example it will not be possible to easily update just published paper books (for example textbooks for children at schools). The publisher will not be able to use the freedom, he could think he enjoyed. Yes, the publisher can always exactly follow the license. But then Wikimedia should not even suggest that something less than exact following of license could be enough. Similar, may be more understandable problem: just imagine, the article which was reused, is deleted in the Wikimedia project. The list of authors will be lost in a very similar way like in a case of Wikimedia shutting down completely. Just another problem: imagine, the Wikimedia foundation will get into financial troubles. This can happen very easily (I hope it will not happen soon). All the reusers who have thought linking to Wikimedia site was sufficient, will be pushed under a serious threat. They can be blackmailed: give to Wikimedia foundation money or you can close your business based on CC-BY-SA licensed content. And one problem more: what about works of third parties? If somebody issues his work under CC-BY-SA 3.0, how could anybody insert it into Wikimedia projects when Wikimedia allows to re-use it and not to follow the original attribution manner specified by the author? Either nobody could insert the works of the third parties into Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia would explicitely allow to violate the third party's rights given by license the third party have chosen. What is a freedom if it cannot be guaranteed for ever in all conditions? It is not a freedom anymore. I am an author of quite many texts in Wikimedia projects. I can hardly accept my work could be misused in such a way. I do not allow to attribute my old works in this way. And I will be not willing to continue working at, for example, Wikipedia if this becomes a common policy there. I understand this does not have to be a big problem at Commons - the image descriptions are usually not the most important part of the articles. The media (image, video, sound) is. And if I understand it well, the authors of the media must be still attributed directly. However, I see it as a major problem in case of Wikipedia and similar projects. I understand re-using the texts inside Wikimedia project is complicated if the attribution means a list of writers. But we should deal with this. It's a challenge. We can show the world the collaborative
