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] [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] 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
