Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against copyleft
On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 12:33 PM, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: I doubt the local basement startup band actually needs to distribute 5MB songs over a p2p network. That the bandwidth used would hardly trouble their hosting site. Its such nonsense by Nesson and others at PK and the EFF that ASCAP want to counter. Nesson is a borderline drug-induced lunatic. He is also not affiliated with any of the organizations named in the ASCAP letter, as far as I know. Though the comment that you quoted isn't that outrageous. Penalizing ___innocent infringers___ for downloading music blights creators of music who want to freely distribute their music. (em mine). The concern isn't limited to P2P, it is also the risk of stigmatizing things which are available at no cost. It's a pretty real risk— outside of the world of zero marginal cost informational goods free is strong a sign of a hidden catch, so people tend to have the wrong intuitions. I've made a decent amount of money selling people my photographic and software works under licensing _more_ restrictive than the licenses they were already publicly available under simply because some manager was equating free with dangerous and paid with safe. This is a pretty uncontroversial argument. Slamming someone with a million dollar lawsuit for downloading something which they honestly and reasonably believed to be free would absolutely blight those who are willingly distributing their works at no cost. Now— the question of any of the actual existence of lawsuits against innocent infringers, is another matter entirely! But having to demonstrate that the infringement was something a reasonable person ought to have known about before prevailing these bits of million dollar litigation would probably not unduly burden artists enforcing their copyright. ... or at least thats a discussion worth having and isn't something which should be perceived as automatically dangerous to people who depend on strong copyright for their livelihood. On LWN I commented with a bit of criticism towards CC, PK, and the EFF because I don't think they've done enough to distance themselves from copyright abolitionist and crazy people like Nesson [http://lwn.net/Articles/393798/]. But it's a big step to go from saying that they could do more to distinguish their positions to saying that they are actually advocating these things. I don't think you can cite much in the way of evidence to support that position. On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 12:57 PM, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: No, what ASCAP means by that is that they want to get a fee when people distribute CC-licensed music too. Do ASAC also expect to get a fee when music by people represented by BMI or SESAC gets distributed? I think not. So why would you assume that they expect a fee when any music is distributed by an artist that isn't signed up to them? [snip] Yes. That isn't their official position, but their folks in the field take a position very much like that. You can't prove that you won't eventually play something by one of our artists, even by accident, so you _must_ pay up. I could bore you with my personal story of ASCAP extortion making my life unfun, but there are plenty of similar stories on the internet: http://blindman.15.forumer.com/a/ascap-closing-down-live-music-venues_post35872.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against copyleft
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: about the relationship between the fundraising campaign and actual lawmaking. That's not entirely your fault, since the writer threw in some filler about the activity of an administrative agency, apparently because this tangent gave him an opportunity to link to his previous reporting. [snip] +100 The event David was writing about was that the ASCAP sent out this letter: (in two parts) http://twitpic.com/1zai6e http://twitpic.com/1zai66 There is no connection obvious there with any particular lawmaking. Nor am I otherwise aware of any of organizations in question explicitly lobbying for the abolition of copyright though they may have failed, at times, to denounce the claims by others that they were for such an abolition. What I've mostly seen is the advocacy that authors choose less restrictive licensing, opposition to policy which would reduce the current or future public domain, discouraging a legal policy which creates larger punishment for copyright infringement than other more social impacting crimes, and other such activity which should be generally beneficial or at worst neutral to the economic welfare of artists. It would seems that the ASCAP has conflated the aims of these organizations with those of movie pirates, arguably because doing so is in the ASCAP's interest as the bulk rights collecting societies are on the long end of a dying line of businesses and nothing short of an dramatic expansion of copyright powers is likely to keep them alive. Online distribution doesn't favor having a lot of middle men, certainly not a lot of _profitable_ middlemen... but this detail has little to do with the interests of _artists_ and music consumers that the ASCAP claims to be concerned with here, and certainly doesn't have much of anything to do with any existing law. On the general subject of business-protection-laws hiding as copyright-laws I would recommend listening to [[Eben Moglen]]'s commentary on the DMCA from a panel at the 2001 Future of Music policy summit at 15:15 in http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/eben.ogg he continued these views on the positions of the 'music industry' at 31:36, You are listening to a conversation among dead business about how, under certain imaginary conditions, if it only takes long enough for us to recognize that they are dead they might come back to life. If there were a transcript, I'd link to that instead. But there isn't, and Eben's points are really enjoyable, as usual. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy one language - one Wikipedia
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I strongly disagree. There is a big difference between simple language and simple concepts. Children need simple concepts (basically, you can't assume as much prior knowledge because they haven't had time to learn things that adults consider to be common knowledge). Adults that [snip] Full agreement on simple language vs simple concepts but I think drawing the line on children vs not for simple concepts is bogus. If you don't have a strong background in a field then drinking from the fire hose of full-complexity concepts is hard no matter if you are a child or not. If you do have a reasonable background a simplified article will be patronizing and, worse, not especially useful. Children do tend to have a solid background on fewer subjects than adults but not universally so. Children frequently have decent understandings in the areas where they have had interest and exposure— in some topic areas like modern game things (Pokemon) or modern youth-target pop culture subject your typical 5th grader is substantially more informed, and thus able to handle the full detail in all its complexity, than a typical 40 year old. So rather then trying to sterotyping children as universal idiots we should just admit that people come from a diversity of backgrounds and skills and that an article well suited to someone who is serious about a subject area isn't always the same as an article which is suitable to a complete neophile. ... though I don't know how you get people to write good articles for the less informed. It's not like simple (concept / language ambiguity aside) has been all that successful. and I think if you're going to have the wrong article for your needs the too complex one is usually superior (because you can take the additional effort to supplement your knowledge until you are capable of understanding, but no similar solution exists when the information you seek simply isn't there, or where the article's simplifications have deceived you). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy one language - one Wikipedia
On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Benjamin Lees emufarm...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: If you don't have a strong background in a field then drinking from the fire hose of full-complexity concepts is hard no matter if you are a child or not. If you do have a reasonable background a simplified article will be patronizing and, worse, not especially useful. I don't think there's anything wrong with making assumptions about what a person of a given age is likely/expected to know: school curricula are based upon such assumptions, after all. Children who find kiddie books patronizing and useless can choose to access the grownup versions instead. It has been ever thus with precocious youth. But I certainly agree with you that we shouldn't expect kids to know/be able to grasp less about everything; we should expect kids to know more about things that kids tend to know more about. I hope the study that the Board is commissioning consults with educators who teach at any age levels we might think about creating new projects for. Why frame a plan around stereotyping and prejudice, even though those things may be accurate on average, when the simple mechanism of addressing the _need_ exists? By stating that the goal is children you've not even stated a goal at all, except by reference. Every participant will have different, and often legitimate, ideas of what those needs are. Simultaneously, other similar needs by people who are not children which could be easily included would be excluded (e.g. the 2/3rd of _adult_ Americans who can't correctly extract a couple of simple facts out of the middle of an article which is only moderately complex: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_question.asp?NextItem=0AutoR=2 ) Moreover the exact notion of how children ought to be educated is _highly political_, _highly personal_, and very value laden. Consider the recent US news about the Texas board of education, for an example. The most nasty attacks are made on all sides about applying the wrong education to children, and almost everyone fails to bring supporting evidence to these arguments. These politics are not something we should wade into willingly as I do not believe that they they can be easily navigated in combination with the overarching goal of neutrality. Rather— a project intended to address the needs of readers with a reduced background, a lower level of basic education, ones interested in more introductory or casual knowledge... would be a kind of goal which people could share a consistent vision over which is compatible with the principle of neutrality, which does not infantilize any particular class of people (including the infants), and which doesn't inspire non-neutral and usually scientifically unsound arguments about the right and wrong ways to handle children, yet such a project could be expected to serve that need. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Gmail - List messages flagged as spam
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: This will NOT get things out of spam that are already in it, though. Search for in:spam to:lists.wikimedia.org to find them and Not Spam them manually. Gah! The search result for that gives me _thousands_ of messages. ... and it seems that you can only not-spam a page at a time, the not spam option goes away if you tell it to mark all of the messages in the search results ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I don't think scapegoating Wikipedia's gender imbalances to biological differences is especially helpful. And the suggestion that it may not be possible to dumb-down Wikipedia enough to attract women is ridiculous (and offensive). Regardless of our genetic predispositions, there are very real cultural issues that frequently drive female contributors away from Wikimedia projects. [snip] Ryan, I believe your post was unnecessarily confrontational. I would expect you to call me out on that kind of thing, so I'm going to call you out on it. I generally succeed at being thick skinned— but this characterization of my words is hurtful and the witch hunts that sometimes accompany responses like yours are outright frightening. I'm also concerned for other contributors who aren't as online-tough as I am... I know people who wouldn't touch a gender-issues thread with a 10ft poll because they are sure that they'll be misunderstood and burned alive. We can't improve diversity if we create the impression that anyone who disagrees with the group or shares a contrary view is the enemy and fair game for an attack. We should welcome contrary views, even wrong ones, and treat all speakers with patience, respect, and a healthy-helping of assume-good-faith— even when, and especially when, our first impression of their positions is that they are ones which might be harmful to some group or another. After all, by ferreting out a wrong position and building a good counter argument in a respectful discussion between colleges we build knowledge and skills that help us see and correct the same wrongness everywhere. But that can't happen if we use language to address wrong positions that reflect negatively on the character of the speaker. ... and to get real change on these kinds of pervasive issues we need the broadest input and the broadest buy in. This can't be achieved if the topic is one which people feel is open only to people who know the right things to say and the right ways to say them. The characterization of my mainstreaming suggestion as dumb-down Wikipedia enough to attract women is exceptionally uncharitable and contributed significantly to my impression that you were trying to make a target out of me. Just so there is no lack of clarity on this point, I'm opposed to dumbing down in general and the idea that anything would need to be made _dumb_ to attract Women is completely unsupported by any information that I've seen. Making things more attractive to typical people doesn't mean making them dumber. ... In this case I wasn't even disagreeing with anyone. I'd take your complaint, if not the tone, as a deserved response if I'd dismissed any examples similar to the ones you provided in your post... but I simply didn't. I fully agree that there are real cultural issues, and that they should be addressed. (Though I would point out, the author of that first horrifying diff-link has long since left the project, so I'm at a loss as to what action I could take now to deal with that particular case). Any time you can point to clear articulatable problems, I'm all for taking action. Once you've taken care of them, however, it's also important the you keep in mind that some of the imbalances are caused by external factors or indirect non-discriminatory internal ones. By keeping all possible causes in mind, and by maintaining a friendly and positive environment for collaboration, we have the greatest opportunity to get the most benefit in the shortest amount of time. I apologise for giving you— or anyone else— the impression that my post was intended to reflect negatively on Women. That was certainly not my intention. In fact, what I was saying arguably the converse (and I used a fairly derogatory language to characterize what Wikipedia selection bias that I'd like to see us temper somewhat, uber-obsessive techobibilo walking-fact-machines, something which sounds more like a side show exhibit than a human being). I believe Wikipedia's form and practices select for weirdos in many different ways, — some weird in 'good ways', many of then negative weirdnesses, (and, I'm sure many more neutral ones). Some of those selections conspired against including Women (and people of many other backgrounds), ... fewer conspire against selecting our existing majority population, because our existing population has done a good job of removing the things that irritate them. ...and it's worth bringing up because it can lead to interesting suggestions, like the idea that making Wikipedia less appealing to weirdos can improve diversity in areas which are not obviously strongly connected to the specific weirdness since selecting for extremes magnifies even small differences between groups. There are plenty of ways that Wikipedia participation rewards being weird— such as having the patience to write a novel defending yourself when someone
Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: counter argument in a respectful discussion between colleges we build If I can't even manage to say colleague without screwing it up, how can we assume that anything I say was an insult to anything and not just some kind of unfortunate miscommunication? (sorry for the lack of proof-reading, I must have been too busy vomiting out a large volume of words) I am probably less clearly spoken than most people here, — pretty shameful considering that English is my native language and isn't for many of the other people on this list— but I am by no means alone in communicating poorly from time to time. If nothing else I hope that my frequent incoherence can serve as an example of why it is essential to be patient and tolerant when we communicate with others. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 8:26 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: There's been discussion of the gender gap among Wikimedia editors on and off for many years now, and it's a focus of the strategic planning process. This is a part of a larger issue of how to get members of underrepresented groups to edit more, to combat system bias on all fronts. (Or, simply how to get more people to edit regardless). You may find it interesting that these kind of large imbalances can arise out of a simple but surprising mathematical truth: If you have a mixed population with a skill, say skateboarding, that follows the typical normal distribution and one sub-population (e.g. people with red hair) have an average performance only slight higher than another sub-population (blondes), and you were to select the best skateboarders out of the group you would end up with a surprisingly high concentration of the red-hair subgroup, so high that it doesn't at all seem justified by the small difference in average performance. This is is because in normal distributions the concentration of people with a particular skill falls off exponentially away from the average, so if you take the two distributions (amount of skateboarding skill for red-hairs and blondes) and shift one a very small amount the ratio between the two becomes increasingly large as you select for higher and higher skill levels. The same kind of results happen when, instead of a difference in average performance, there is simply a difference in the variation. If red-hairs have the same average skate-boarding skill but are less consistent— more klutzes _and_ more superstars this has an even larger impact than differences in the average, again biasing towards the red-hairs. These effects can be combined, and if there are multiple supporting skills for a task they combine multiplicatively.[*] The applicability here is clear: There is a strong biological argument justifying greater variance in genetically linked traits in men (due to the decrease in genetic redundancy) which is supported by many studies which show greater variance in males. So all things equal any time you select for extremes (high or low performing) you will tend to tend to end up with a male biased group. (There are small also differences in measured averages between men and women in many areas...) And many of the 'skills' that are reasonable predictions of someone's likelihood of being a Wikipedian, if we're even to call them 'skills' as many aren't all that flattering, are obviously male super-abundant in the greater world. How many female obsessive stamp collectors do you know? Male? The kind of obsessive collecting trait is almost so exclusively male that it's a cliché, and it's pretty obvious why that kind of person would find a calling in Wikipedia. One piece of insight that comes out of is that general approaches which make Wikipedia more palatable to average people, as opposed to uber-obsessive techobibilo walking-fact-machines, may have a greater impact at reducing gender imbalance than female centric improvements. (and may also reduce other non-gender related imbalances, such as our age imbalance). So this gives you an extra reason why more people to edit regardless is an especially useful approach. Though are limits to the amount of main-streaming you can do of an academic activity such as encyclopaedia writing. :-) In any case, I don't mean to suggest that your work isn't important or can't be worthwhile. Only that I think you're fighting an uphill battle against a number of _natural_ (not human originated) biases, and I wish you luck! [*] A while back I wrote up a longer and highly technical version of this explanation as part of an argument on gender imbalances in computer science with a mathematician. Anyone into math-wankery may find it interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/mf_compsci ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, [snip] I think you mostly answered your own question for the most part. But I think my statement was intended to be a more general statement about comparing costs than really a statement that this makes wikipedia very hard: OTOH, if you don't read the language well and are depending on the inter-language links to get you to the right article in the right wikipedia, then the change did indeed make the site very hard to use. This is the subject of Noein's car analogy. I agree with the upthread comments on the roseate rectilinear lego-hat. It is as fertile a source of associations as any cloud could hope to be, but language is not among them. OTOH, I could make the same criticism for the watchlist star, which has the additional sin of conflicting with the use of the star iconography used for featured articles. As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be consistent. The fact that you can learn to cope with their stupidity without much effort is often their one redeeming quality. Interface choices should favour determinism except when the cost of doing so is very high, the automatic mechanism is very very reliable, or the kind of non-determinism is very harmless and non-confusing. Anyone who has tried to get wolfram alpha to perform a specific calculation and suffered through a half hour of swapping around your word order knows of the frustration that can come from the computer trying to be smart and failing. In particular, that absence of a listing depends on an basically non-deterministic guess of what you want _AS WELL AS_ the article simply not existing is likely to be confusing. E.g. thinking an article only has a german version when the german version is featured. At the same time I think that changing the order, typeface, color, or adding iconography based on automated smarts is far less likely to result in confusion and is probably an OKAY thing to do. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: . . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as Give people access to free knowledge. This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. [snip] Things like hiding inter-language links and switching to vector even though it locks out browsers used by many people more or less completely deny access to the site for people. I think it's really hard to justify effectively locking people out for the sake of the soft benefits of a great number of people. I'm not saying that there is a true hard incomparability. In general I think that denying _one_ person the ability to effectively use the site unless they understake a costly change in their client would justified by a small improvement for the bulk of the users... but only that it doesn't form a nice neat linear relationship where you can directly trade readers to usability fluidness. ... and that, as you described it, incomparability is a useful approximation much of the time. The approximation only really starts to fall down when you can make a serious argument that there is a true like for like replacement e.g. loss of life = actually saves two lives, as distinct from loss of a life = makes 2000 people live 0.1% longer. Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: Hello, For part 1, see [1]. In his reply to User experience feedback [2], Howief says: the language links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data. Is there any data about their usage since the switch to Vector? Who cares if people click them a lot? The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now. They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool. Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some foreign language box. In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities. I think that extreme inclusiveness of all kinds of interests, often at a small expense to the most common cases was previously a core design value for the site, but that doesn't really seem to be the case anymore... just like the main site is still unbrowsable on blackberry (formally some 14 million page views per day, for those playing the numbers game) or PS3. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jay Walsh's statement
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Adam Cuerden cuer...@gmail.com wrote: With respect, the work on the Sexual Content proposal as pretty much thrown out all of Jimbo's work, and is proceeding from a direction [snip] You're linking to something from May 17th. It would be much more productive to focus on matters which are current rather than sub-issues which are weeks cold. I urge everyone to just let this particular thread of discussion die. There are enough important battles to fight _currently_ that we really don't need to keep awakening discussion-zombies to keep us busy. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 10:34 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: So I think it's fine if the name has a positive connotation. And that connotation should be we're countering inappropriate edits, not we assume that everything's okay, but we'll humor the concerns. Of course, I'm not proposing that we use a term like Vandal Buster. I'm saying that the name itself should imply nothing about the edits' quality. Hm. Accctttuualyy Why not something that _must_ be explained? Call it Garblesmook, for example. (or better, import a word from some obscure semi-dead language... Does anyone have a suggestion of an especially fitting word? Perhaps something Hawaiian?) The big danger of using something with an intuitive meaning is that you get the intuitive understanding. We _KNOW_ that the intuitive understanding of this feature is a misunderstanding. Revision Review is perfectly neutral (and much clearer than Double Check, which has inapplicable connotations and doesn't even specify what's being checked) and thus far has generated more support than anything else has. I think that if were to ask some random person with a basic laymen knowledge of what a new feature of Wikipedia called revision review did and what benefits and problems it would have, I'd get results which were largely unmatched with the reality of it. (Not that I think that any word is good) [responding to the inner message] I think that any name we choose is going to leave a lot of people confused about what's going on, especially if they sit their and ruminate on it. The most we can ask of a name is that it gives them a vague sense of what's going on, and doesn't cause too much confusion as they read further. Thats a false choice. We could use a name which expresses _nothing_ about what is going on, thus making it clear that you can't figure it out simply from the name. Just a thought. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@robla.net wrote: On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 10:21 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.comwrote: That did cross my mind, and it was tempting. But practically, many busy journalists, causal readers, and novice editors may base a lot of their initial reaction on the name alone, or on related language in the interface. By choosing an arbitrary name, some fraction of people will dig deeper, but another fraction will just retain their perplexity and/or alienation. This is a really good point, and brings up another point for everyone to consider. If the name is not *immediately* evocative of something to the casual reader, it might as well be called the Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch. It will be a blank slate as far as journalists and the world at large is concerned. I think we're better off with a term that gets us in the ballpark with little or no mental energy than we are picking something that has clinical precision, but takes more than a few milliseconds of consideration to get the the gist. I support Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@robla.net wrote: casual reader, it might as well be called the Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch. It will be a blank slate as far as journalists and the world at large is concerned. I support Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch. And I have now updated the illustration: http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/endoswitch.png (Are people really going to continue arguing that the naming matters much?) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Updating strings for FlaggedRevs for the Flagged Protection/Pending Revisions/Double Check launch
On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi everyone, I'm preparing a patch against FlaggedRevs which includes changes that Howie and I worked on in preparation for the launch of its deployment onto en.wikipedia.org . We started first by creating a style guide describing how the names should be presented in the UI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Terminology [snip] I'm concerned that the simplified graphical explanation of the process fosters the kind of misunderstanding that we saw in the first slashdot threads about flagged revision... particularly the mistaken belief that the process is synchronous. People outside of the active editing community have frequently raised the same concerns on their exposure to the idea of flagged revisions. Common ones I've seen Won't people simply reject changes so they can make their own edits? Who is going to bother to merge all the unreviewed changes on a busy article, they're going to lose a lot of contributions! None of these concerns really apply to the actual implementation because it's the default display of the articles which is controlled, not the ability to edit. There is still a single chain of history and the decision to display an article happens totally asynchronously with the editing. The illustration still fosters the notion of some overseeing gatekeeper on an article expressing editorial control— which is not the expected behaviour of the system, nor a desired behaviour, nor something we would even have the resources to do if it were desirable. In particular there is no per-revision analysis mandated by our system: Many edits will happen, then someone with the right permissions will look at a delta from then-to-now and decide that nothing is terrible in the current version and make it the displayed version. It's possible that there were terrible intermediate versions, but it's not relevant. I have created a poster suitable for distribution to journalists http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/flagged_protection.png (Though the lack of clarity in the ultimate naming has made it very difficult to finalize it. If anyone wants it I can share SVG/PDF versions of it). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Updating strings for FlaggedRevs for the Flagged Protection/Pending Revisions/Double Check launch
On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: I have created a poster suitable for distribution to journalists http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/flagged_protection.png I have revised the graphic based on input from Andrew Gray and others. http://myrandomnode.dyndns.org:8080/~gmaxwell/flagged_protection3.png ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: implementation, and there's no flagging in the proposed configuration. Additionally, protection in our world implies no editing whereas this [snip] - Must not introduce obsolete terminology (e.g. there's no flagging in our proposed deployment) I guess I'm confused, because I see flagging all over this but you're saying there is none? To the best of my understanding: The flags are what distinguishes approved revisions from non-approved revisions and on designated pages controls which revisions are displayed by default to anons. This is mostly the same way that flagged revisions work elsewhere, the difference in functionality is that rather than the flagging-effect being enabled across an entire project or namespace it is controlled through the protection configuration mechanism on a page by page basis. Additionally, protection in our world implies no editing whereas this The protection interface controls and has long a number of things related to the permissions granted to manipulate a page. The same protection interface allows a page to be move protected for example, which doesn't do anything related to _editing_ but instead prevents the page from being moved to a new name. Following that mode, this feature enables the protection of the flagging process on pages which users deem require that level of protection— just as there as is the case for the other protective modes. or as described by the proposal on English Wikipedia which was approved by hundreds of contributors: Flagged protection is a specific use of flagged revisions which provides an alternative to the current page protection feature: instead of disallowing editing for certain users, editing is allowed, but those edits must be flagged before being displayed to non-registered readers by default. I'm also not clear how Pending Revisions would actually fit into the operational dialogue of people working on the site: A: That trouble maker is back again on [[Cheese]]. B: 'Don't worry, that page has move protection and pending revisions.' A: Oh, if there are revisions pending I should go flag them... hey, there are no new revisions! B: I mean the 'pending revisions' protection level, not that there were actually any revisions pending A: 'You idiot, call it flag-protection like everyone else.' ;) If people want to lay their thumb by playing with the names— I don't much care. But I do want to make sure some horrible desync about the _actual functionality_ hasn't happened, because saying that there is no flagging and no protection are very alarming claims to me. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Google open sources VP8 - WebM
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: WebM is a new open source video codec; That's interesting with a BSD-ish license; Ok, that's amazing Google did it; That's huge. The question to this esteemed community is thus: Shall we start using it? :-) Careful about rushing in too quickly to the bleeding edge. Right now the decoder has what is possibly an exploitable security vulnerability... which isn't yet fixed because the encoder produces invalid files that depend on the bad behaviour. All this will get worked out, but it takes a little time... the release deadline was an external imposition based on the google event and doesn't really reflect a degree of maturity. There are also problems with the Google patent release and a couple of other bits that need to get worked out. But absolutely, get to testing it and report findings. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for this deep analysis. While claiming that we should not compromise any of the principles, you didn't address directly the possibility that we won't reach everybody if we don't compromise. Reaching every human is a (currently and apparently) conflicting principle with free uncensored information. What is your vision about that? Wait for better times? Do you think that with time, the inherent virtues of our model will end convincing the reluctant or opposed people of today? I don't know that reaching everybody was ever a stated goal. Being theoretically available to everybody is a different matter... In any case this issue has been specifically addressed here: David (a real thought leader) Goodman wrote: If there is a wish for a similar but censored service, this can be best done by forking ours; if there is a wish to abandon NPOV or permit commercialism, by expanding on our basis. We do not discourage these things; our licensing is in fact tailored to permitting them--but we should stay distinct from them. We have provided a general purpose feed and suitable metadata, and what the rest of the world does is up to them--our goal is not to monopolize the provision of information. Kat Walsh wrote: Another principle to state related to this (that I've been trying to think about how to expand upon): no resource that is compatibly-licensed is our adversary, and we should encourage that sort of competition. Obsessively chasing every last reader, every last editor, regardless of other factors is just as evil as the practice of chasing every last dollar. Diversity is good. Insisting that our _project_, rather than just the benefits of our good work, directly reach into the lives of each and every person, regardless of the costs? I'd call that megalomania. That isn't to say that balancing audience vs other factors isn't an important thing to do— the decision to run multiple language Wikipedias rather than just teach everyone English was arguably one such decision— but we _do_ have an answer for how we're going to help the people who are inevitably left out. We help them by being freely licensed so that its easier for others to specialize in helping those audiences. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 6:32 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: I think you missed it because it wasn't really discussed before as part of the vector update... right? I admit I didn't read all the announcements, but was this discussed/announced earlier? That's the point I was trying not to be a jerk about—I'd like to think that I'm fairly attentive to this, particularly since the logos are a special concern of mine, but I don't remember any kind of public discussion or request for comments beforehand. Now that I look at the relevant wiki pages, it clearly wasn't any kind of secret, but I can't help but wonder if it was deliberately not made widely known. My response to Jay's message was to post links to the two image files in the hope that someone else would complain, I'm really honestly tired of being so negative. I like every concept in the discussion of the new logo. I think the font change looks fine. But the loss of contrast and definition is unfortunate— at least on my eyes and system the new image looks somewhat blurry and indistinct. But before expressing this view I went and conducted an informal taste test on my system at my office: Four our of four people prefer the old image, and while they had certainly seen the old logo before none of them are Wikipedia regulars. I am less confident about unbalanced. The old logo could also be said to be visually unbalanced and perhaps we're just used to it? None of my test subjects raised imbalance as an issue, they all commented that it was less clear. One comment was forgettable. Oh well— at least we've got something to complain about and improve. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Kalan kalan@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 22:44, Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: We've seen a lot of comments about the size of the puzzle globe, and I don't disagree that it might benefit from being increased in size slightly. I feel this might also affect the overall contrast and definition. The whole usability team is collecting feedback on this, and part of that is the overall shape and size of the identity. As demonstrated at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VPT#New_logo, simply resizing and re-contrasting doesn’t help much: the shape is still poor. So this is what should be focused IMO; apparently making the logo as similar to older one as possible should be the goal. This comment on the wiki seemed especially relevant: I just want to chime in on the new logo. The previous logo, which I created, was certainly not without its flaws, but the new logo suffers greatly on an aesthetic level: it is too small, the anti-aliasing is very low quality, and most importantly, the sense of texture created by the edges of the pieces is completely lost. Finally, I am rather disappointed I was not included in the process to revamp the logo. No attempt was made to reach out to me to let me know this process was even being undertaken. Very poor job on all accounts. nohat (talk) 18:05, 13 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VPT#New_logo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure the presence or absence of a legal imperative is fully relevant to the underlying question. The Commons project has a moral responsibility to take reasonable steps to ensure that subjects of sexually explicit media are (a) of legal majority and (b) have provided releases for publishing the content. The regulations exist for a good reason - to protect the subjects of photos from abuse and invasion of privacy. Why should we avoid taking those same steps? The obligation to protect people against an invasion of their privacy is not limited to, or even mostly applicable to sexual images. Although sexual images are one of several most important cases, the moral imperative to respect the privacy of private individuals exists everywhere. As such, Commons has a specific policy on this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people#Photographs_taken_in_a_private_place ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] However, I also see the issue from another frame that is not part of Tim's spectrum. Sexual photographs, especially those of easily recognized people, have the potential to exploit or embarrass the people in them. I place a high value on not doing harm to the models pictured. Sexually explicit photographs are only one of many classes of photograph which pose the risk of embarrassment. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Childhood_Obesity.JPG (the original was not anonymized, and this image was subject to a lengthy argument as the photographer was strongly opposed to concealing the identity of the involuntary model) Or people who might show up here without their knoweldge, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People_associated_with_HIV/AIDS (Not even getting into all the photographs of people performing activities which are illegal in some-place or another, simply being gay will get you executed in some places, no explicit photographs required, and using some drugs can get you long sentences in many others...) So please don't make it out like there is a unique risk there. Commons has a policy related to identifiable images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people (and why do people on foundation-l keep insisting on discussing these things without even bothering to link to the existing policy pages?) I'm all for strengthening it up further, but I hope an hysterical reaction to sexual images isn't abused to make a mess of the policy and convert it into something which will be less practically enforceable than the current policy. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] On Wikimania locations
Wikimania 2011 has come, yet again another location in the middle-east. It seems to me that every major populated geographic region has a multitude of sites which could create viable wikimania candidacies— and this has certainly been supported by the past applications. A leading application takes an enormous amount of work, expenditure of political energy, etc. on the part of the proposing team— work that could perhaps be applied to advancing the Wikimedia mission in other ways for candidacies which are ultimately fruitless. I believe that if you were to take the best candidate from each region and compare among them you'd find them all to be excellent options and ultimately end up choosing based little details and preferences, often ones mostly outside of the control of the applicants. Accordingly I believe it would be better if we pre-announced a preferred geography for the candidacies each year. Effort could then be conserved for producing really excellent proposals in those years when a candidacy is most likely to be successful. This could also be expected to result in better applications. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Along with Vector, a new look for changes to the Wikipedia identity
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: It seemed like an opportune moment to take our 2D globe, lovingly created by WP user:Nohat and improved/modified a cast of many other volunteers back in 2003, and take it to a truly 3D object. If we were going to undertake this process, we knew we would first need to populate the 'dark side of the puzzle globe' - and of course we turned to our volunteers to do just that. [snip] You'll notice that the new variation of the typeface uses Linux Libertine as an alternative to Hoeffler, the original typeface used to create the wordmark. In order to facilitate the creation of so many new variations of the Wikipedia identity it was important to find a viable alternative - Hoeffler is a commercial typeface that not every project would have access to, nor own. Linux Libertine is very close to Hoeffler in its shape and style, and for on-screen viewing is almost identical to Hoeffler. [snip] I found the concept of these two improvements very exciting. Here are direct links to the old and new images for comparison: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Wikipedia-logo-v2-en.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Wiki.png ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip] But more generally, yes I suppose I may be overstating. Studying religious views on sex and pornography is interesting, because those views align closely with the laws and norms of wider society. Unlike wider society, religious conservatives can give a detailed, consistent and complete justification for their views. And one which inevitably has apparently unresolvable conflicts with one of our core organizing principles, NPOV. Hundreds of millions of viewers a month visit Wikipedia, many of them religious conservatives. But our structure is not one that produces articles on sexuality or religion (and sometimes on politics, and science...) that are found to be acceptable by, at least, the most hard-line among them. Even the most widely acceptable initiative must eventually accept that it can't please everyone. This is probably just one of the limits of our model, and it's OKAY to have limits, everything does. Consider, for a moment, the ALA list of most frequently challenged books: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2009/index.cfm I would propose that the reason we are subject to such a _small_ amount of complaint about our content is that much of the world understands that what Wikipedia does is —in a sense— deeply subversive and not at all compatible with ideas which must be suppressed. This fact gets a lot of names, some call it a liberal bias though I don't think that is quite accurate. But there very much is a bias— a pro-flow-of-information bias. We don't always realize we have it, but I don't think we deny it when we do. Jimmy brought this up in his keynote at Wikiconference New York in 2009: http://www.archive.org/download/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009.ogv There are other resources which address these subject areas in a manner which religious conservatives may find more acceptable, such as conservapedia. It is a beneficial that there are alternative information sources, no one wants a world where all reference works are Wikipedia, so to the extent that our inability to cover some areas to some people's satisfaction creates more room for alternatives it is a good thing. I'd like to address an idea that underlies a lot of this discussion which I think is patently ridiculous: That our inability to please _everyone_ on _all_ articles is actually something to worry about. It's not something that can actually be done, all we can hope to choose is decide who we'll please, and by our core principles it appears that we've chosen to error towards the libertarians. In terms of overall popularity we would have better off not to, but then again I doubt we could have built something so useful another way. There is no existence proof yet, at least. The internet is chock full of things that hard-line religious conservatives would believe imperil the soul of anyone who views it. Even the most aggressive government censorship short of a total internet ban only suppresses are relatively small amount of this material. ... and yet people with these concerns continue to use the internet happily and productively. The impossibility of total censorship means that don't look if you don't like is a reality for everyone and not just libertarians. (English) Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia about 3 million articles ago. Today it is a collection of specialist encyclopaedias, or really— a federation of 3.2 million separate articles sharing a common set of principles and other infrastructure. It is expected and acceptable that some people may strongly approve some parts and strongly oppose others. Wikipedia, in the aggregate, is an excellent resource even for the staunchest religious conservative. But due to our core principles, some parts of Wikipedia will _never_ be acceptable to that audience. In at least a few cases, no amount of careful handling can satisfy a hard factional information which must be suppressed to protect your soul at the same time as fulfilling the effective direction from NPOV to factually express all major viewpoints. As with any of our other limitations— I would recommend that people find other resources that meet their needs when Wikipedia doesn't, just as do for millions of other webpages. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: I just had a thought -- what if it were possible for a user to categorically block views of any images that are not linked to in any project's article pages? Presumably, those Commons images that are found in articles are relevant and appropriately encyclopedic (speaking generally -- I also assume there are some exceptions). A good number of the deleted images were in use... so I don't quite know about that, but lets assume it to be true. Images that were just dumped to Commons without being associated with any particular article would still be available to those who were looking for them -- perhaps to complement a particular article that needs illustration -- but the umpteenth superfluous porn shot (or unconnected Muhammed image) would be invisible to those who chose this option. Obviously, this notion is too cute to actually be helpful, but I thought I'd share it. It has an enormously cute strawman answer: If you don't want to see images which aren't used inline in another wiki, don't look at commons at all! By definition any image in use in a Wikipedia is available outside of commons. :) Don't forget that a major reason that people look at commons is because Wikipedia articles will usually only have a few illustrations, for editorial/flow reasons. If you're mostly interested in visual details about the subject of your interest you'll follow the commons link from the Wikipedia article. ... but in that case your suggested image hiding wouldn't be helpful. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Commons: An initial notice to reduce surprises
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#An_initial_notice_to_reduce_surprises ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)
I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my experiences with commons. Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking Holy crap! Thats a lot of [gallery name]. Freeking teenage pornofreaks!. But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about it: I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least), well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events. I think it's likely that a majority of my deletions have been technically out of process, but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all. To take action you have to understand a few things: The problem, The lay of the land, and The goal. Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!) (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models) I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now. The lay of the land Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of visual education, so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission. There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons: Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues. Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects. I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing educational purposes policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow. There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove redundant / low quality sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community. Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects. There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous I am strongly in favour of allowing our users to choose what they see. If you don't like it, don't look at it is only useful advice when it's easy to avoid looking at things— and it isn't always on our sites. By marking up our content better and providing the right software tools we could _increase_ choice for our users and that can only be a good thing. At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these systems to content providers and politicians. (For more information on the current state of compulsory filtering in the US I recommend the filing in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library District an ongoing legal battle over a library system refusing to allow adult patrons to bypass the censorware in order to access constitutionally protected speech, in apparent violation of the suggestion by the US Supreme Court that the ability to bypass these filters is what made the filters lawful in the first place http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf ) It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't really acceptable to assist it. And even when not used as a method of third party control, these systems require the users to have special software installed— so they aren't all that useful as a method for our users to self-determine what they will see on the site. So it sounds like a lose, lose proposition to me. Labelling systems are also centred around broad classifications, e.g. Drugs, Pornography with definitions which defy NPOV. This will obviously lead to endless arguments on applicability within the site. Many places exempt Wikipedia from their filtering, after all it's all educational, so it would be a step backwards for these people for us to start applying labels that they would have gladly gone without. The filter the drugs category because they want to filter pro-drug advocacy, but if we follow the criteria we may end up with our factual articles bunched into the same bin. A labelling system designed for the full spectrum of internet content simply will not have enough words for our content... or are there really separate labels for Drug _education_, Hate speech _education_, Pornography _education_, etc. ? Urban legend says the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, it's not true... but I think that it is true that for the Wiki(p|m)edia projects we really do need 10 million words for education. Using a third party labelling system we can also expect issues that would arise where we fail to correctly apply the labels, either due to vandalism, limitations of the community process, or simply because of a genuine and well founded difference of opinion. Instead I prefer that we run our own labelling system. By controlling it ourselves we determine its meaning— avoiding terminology disputes without outsiders; we can operate the system in a manner which inhibits its usefulness to the involuntary censorship of adults (e.g. not actually putting the label data in the pages users view in an accessible way, creating site TOS which makes the involuntary application of our filters on adults unlawful), and maximizes its usefulness for user self determination by making the controls available right on the site. The wikimedia sites have enough traffic that its worth peoples time to customize their own preferences. There are many technical ways in which such a system could be constructed, some requiring more development work than others, and while I'd love to blather on a possible methods the important point at this time is to establish the principles before we worry about the tools. Cheers, ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Fox Article
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 2:55 AM, teun spaans teun.spa...@gmail.com wrote: Would it stand any chance to file against Foxnews for slaunder? It seems they are also actively approaching organizations who donated support to wikimedia. The recent mass deletions have made it harder to refute their outrageous claims— since they can now state that these images previously existed but must have been deleted. Images tagged for deletion — though some were still viewable Friday afternoon — include pictures of men, women and young girls involved in a range of sex acts with each other and, in some cases, with animals. I have no doubt that this is referring to any of many 18th century drawings of historic and artistic interest which we still have. For example, as was pointed out on commons, it could even be describing an image like this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leda_Melzi_Uffizi.jpg (though it was probably describing something more raunchy, some of the french drawings from the 1880s are pretty crazy) In any case, I've never seen _photographs_ meeting the above description on commons. Sadly we can no longer take the easy path of combating the outrageous claims of child porn by pointing to categories such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pedophilia filled with old drawings sourced from the US library of congress and point out that _this_ is what Fox and Sanger are complaining about — because now people will just believe that there previously was something else there which we've since hidden. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: I fully endorse every aspect of Mike Godwin's comment. The Boards statement makes it clear that their view is that Community discussion is needed to find long term solutions to the issue. And that not censored should not be used to halt discussions about the way to manage content. The clean up project initiated by Jimmy on Commons has brought much needed attention to a long standing problem. Now is the time for the Community to focus on cleaning up Commons and writing a sensible policy about managing sexual content. I think the question weighing heavily on everyone's mind is why Wikimedia didn't simply ask for this first before taking such direct and hasty intervention? I've not personally seen _too much_ of the not censored being used to halt discussion, commons does mostly have a working understanding that there are compromises— though the compromises have largely fallen too far to one side in my opinion. Simply re-emphasizing educational resource and not a porn host would probably have been enough to spur action at commons, even though that wouldn't be enough to move some of the less well functioning communities, and it would avoid the current drama, and the disruption and damage to the projects as in-use images were deleted out from under them. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: On 8 May 2010 16:48, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote:Most of the debate has been about Jimmy, not about Commons policy on non-educational images. So fix it. Moreover, Jimmy specifically directed us not to discuss these deletions until June 1st. This is hardly a good way to assist in writing a sensible policy. On the subject of a sensible policy, Sydney, perhaps you could direct us to the EnWP policy that makes short work of this issue? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:37 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: I don't disagree, but I meant what I said about *single* most important issue! And I'm not sure that's how I'd frame it. The board statement seemed pretty clear; reaffirming existing policy. I guess it depends a bit on what capacity you think Jimmy was acting in; this is not the first time in the last decade that he's used bold action to get us to rethink content policies. This depends on which us you're speaking about. Jimmy is basically unheard of on commons, except by the English speaking audience that knows him via English Wikipedia. He has never intervened on commons, as far as I know, — he only had some 30 edits or so at the time this began. Likewise for most of the other Wikipedias which this event has impacted. As far as which capacity, I think Jimmy's own statements make this abundantly clear regardless of what the PR spin says: I am fully willing to change the policies for adminship (including removing adminship in case of wheel warring on this issue)., I am in constant communication with both the board and Sue Gardner about this issue, and Some things are simply going to be non-negotiable. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 1:07 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Samuel Klein wrote: I don't think this is a technical issue at all. Considering how flexible and reversible wiki-actions are, it seems eminently appropriate to me for the project founder to have 'unlimited technical power' on the projects -- just as you and all of our developers do, at a much higher level. Deletions are easily reversible. Multi-wiki image transclusion removals, distrust in the Wikimedia Commons and resignations from Wikimedia projects? Less so. Seconding this. The deletion of images which are actively in use is _NOT_ easily reversible. It can require editing dozens or even hundreds of pages in languages which you don't speak to completely undo the results of a commons deletion. This, combined with maintaining good relationships with the projects, is why all commons admins are very careful about deleting images which are actively in use. Experienced commons admins all know this. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If you want to please gay college students you structure it another way. [snip] The deletions performed would not have done even a bit of good making Wikipedia more useful to students in Saudi Arabia. For that we must first start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy. In the access to wikipedia to the general public was inhibited due to a commercially available album cover. I expect that Chinia is still very unhappy with our coverage of human rights and other political and historical subjects. Even in US schools, I can't believe that ones who would inhibit schools over risqué drawings from the 1800s sourced from the US library of congress would suddenly permit access while we still detailed anatomical photographs. (As far as I can tell Jimmy's almost complete cleanup included only one of the almost 300 human penis pictures — is anyone actually proposing we remove all the anatomical images?) It's important to state a goal— it might be arguable to continue deleting educational images if it would cause Wikipedia to be usable in more places... but without a stated goal all we could hope to do is cause the harm without enjoying the benefit. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: Think future, not past. Think project, not Jimmy. We do think future: if Jimmy had already carelessly intervened twice and caused controversies both time, how can we except the story will not repeat. We do think project: if we already had careless interventions with desysopping, users retiring and wheelwarring, how can we except we will not have more users leaving and more users getting upset by being ignored? The deletions themselves aren't the problem; the manner in which they were carried out is. As a lawyer you should understand that the due process is important. Well— some of the deletions were clearly a problem. Currently 30% of Jimmy's deletions have been undone. The deletions of in use images isn't something we would have decided to do outright. Instead we probably would have worked to find replacements if the images were decided to be problematic. The deletion of in-use work have eroded the trust our customer projects have in commons (the Germans are referring to this incident as Vulva reloaded)... resulting in plans to mass-reupload the deleted works locally which have mostly been forestalled based on the diligent work commons admins are performing in getting images which were in use restored. To the best of my ability to discern, none of our customer projects (many of which allow local image uploads) have guidelines which would have resolved the concerns with sexually explicit images had they been applied to commons. This is one of the major complicating factors: While commons is also in independent educational resource, we are _also_ a service project for the other projects. When commons deletes in image a local project would have allowed this can produce significant bad blood. We have mostly established a good working relationship around copyright and other areas where commons tends to be restrictive. But in the case of copyright we could lean on an understanding of copyright concerns local to every project. Commons must be restrictive because it is used by everyone, we can't let ourselves be used as a back door to violate the policies of XYZ Wiki. But, example restrictions on sexual content basically do not exist. So instead this activity comes off as a back door effort by commons to override the community decision making on every Wikimedia project. (I should be noted that every complaint I'm raising in this message could have been avoided by simply skipping the images which were in active use) If one of the major wikipedia had sexual content restrictions we'd have an easier time developing a process for commons. In the absence of such a restriction on a Wikipedia it's harder to even make the case that such a rule is even required for commons. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions
When I heard that Jimmy had taken an axe to explicit images on commons, I thought it was good news as I've been frustrated and disappointed by my own inability to convince the commons community that some things, like the bulk copying of erotic imagery from flickr— hundreds of images with little to no prospect of use in an article, was inappropriate. By in my first few clicks on Jimmy's deletion log I instantly found several hundred year old works of art by artists who have articles in almost every major language Wikipedia. ... and that these deletions were not just errors. When the images were deleted by people operating under that impression, Jimmy wheel-warred. As an example of their maturity, I'm not aware of any Commons Admin that undeleted a second time. After seeing that went and viewed Jimmy's talk page, and the commentary there was enough to dispel all hope I had of being able to support this initiative. I strongly recommend you read these sections yourself: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Franz_von_Bayros.3F The delete everything now, regardless of how long its been there, how widely used, the fact that it's a 100 year old line drawing, and worry about allowing some stuff later, maybe approach seems maximally poisonous to me. I've been guilty of it myself in the past, but I hope that I've learned better by now... I think Jimmy's conduct is alarming, disproportionate, and ill-considered. I find it shocking that the board has chosen to explicitly support this 'wild west' approach. I feel like our community is being dragged into a petty game of personal one-upmanship between Larry Sanger and Jimmy. On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: What I can say to your questions is that Jimmy informed the board about his intention and asked the board for support. Don't speaking for other board members, just speak for myself. I answered his mail with that I fully support his engagement. Personally, I think that the board is responsible for defining the scope and basic rules of the projects. While for projects like Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary the scope is more or less easier to define. On Wikipedia we have the five pillars as our basic rules. But we have also some projects that have a scope that is not quite so clear and no such basic rules. Commons is one of these projects, and the most important one. I hope the rest of the board will step forward and disclose their level of support for Jimmy's actions. I think such disclosure will be relevant in the communities decision to support the members in the future. I don't see any reason why the board discussion on this topic should be kept confidential. Michael, Ting. Please consider this to be a request for the board to release its entire discussion related to this subject so that the community may better understand the basis for this sudden action against the commons community. I think a lot of people who have invested considerable effort into the structure and operation of commons will be gravely offended by your claim that Commons has no such basic rules, for it most certainly does— I know that your words hurt and offend me. The point that commons governance has not managed a single area to your liking can not be construed as evidence that commons is lawless. Fact is, there is no consensus in the community as what is educational or potentially educational for Commons. And as far as I see there would probably never be a concensus. And I think this is where the board should weigh in. To define scopes and basic rules. This is why the board made this statement. There is an enormous space of things strongly understood to be acceptable by consensus, and at least some space understood to be unacceptable. Then there is a area under which no clear consensus exists but under which several carefully navigated compromises exist on Commons and the projects. These compromises are not, in my opinion, anywhere near sufficient. But they do exist and they are helpful. The actions taken have disregarded both the area under clear consensus (e.g. hundreds year old works of art by famous artists) as well as having disregarded the area of compromise in the no consensus space. For example, on many Wikipedia projects drawings (albeit rather detailed ones) were used rather than sexually explicit photographs to illustrate articles on specific sex acts. — The compromise being that there is a need to use illustrations on these articles, just as we use illustrations on other physical activities (like dancing) but that drawings could achieve the informative purpose without being quite as likely to offend. Unfortunately Jimmy unilateral removed the commons policy preferring the illustrations: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Sexual_contentdiff=prevoldid=38893040 I think is incredibly unfortunate— it damages one of the things we've been able to do, not just at commons,
Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:50 PM, Techman224 techman...@techman224.com wrote: It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation through its Office actions policy removed and oversighted the signing keys for Texas Instruments calculators under a DMCA takedown notice on October 7, 2009. Cary Bass then oversighted Some random cryptographic signing keys are even less appropriate material for Wikipedia than the first ten-gazillion digits of pi or detailed instructions on compiling GCC. Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for your copyfight. There is plenty of reason to exclude this material regardless of the copyright/legal concerns, and plenty of other people hosting it elsewhere. Doubly true where the material is promoted with spammish efforts, like it has been with some of these cryptographic keys. The WMF should absolutely duke it out to protect material that ought to be in Wikipedia in accordance with the educational mission and community editorial guidelines. It ought not engage in fights outside of those areas for every instance of possibly suppressed legitimate speech that occurs on the Internet (even in cases where we all personally support the efforts). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:49 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 March 2010 12:28, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for your copyfight. There is plenty of reason to exclude this material regardless of the copyright/legal concerns, and plenty of other people hosting it elsewhere. Doubly true where the material is promoted with spammish efforts, like it has been with some of these cryptographic keys. http://enwp.org/WP:09F9 is the previous thinking on this matter. Summary: memespam is a pain in the backside and interferes with doing what we actually do. Thank you for reminding me of this, I generalized it a bit to also cover the TI signing keys. The talk page also has some excellent commentary. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia crosses 10Gbit/sec
Today Wikimedia's world-wide five-minute-average transmission rate crossed 10gbit/sec for the first time ever, as far as I know. This peak rate was achieved while serving roughly 91,725 requests per second. This fantastic news is almost coincident with Wikipedia's 9th anniversary on January 15th. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day ] In casual units, a rate of 10gbit/sec is roughly equivalent to 5 of the US Library of Congress per day (using the common 1 LoC = 20 TiB units). Wikimedia's 24 hour average transmission rate is now over 5.4gbit/sec, or 2.6 US LoC/day. A snapshot of the traffic graph on this historic day can be seen here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010-01-11_wikimedia_crosses_10gbit.png Ten years ago many traditional information sources were turning electronic, and possibly locking out the unlimited use previously enjoyed by public libraries. It seemed to me that closed pay-per-use electronic databases would soon dominate all other sources of factual information. At the same time, the public seemed to be losing much of its interest in the more intellectually active activities such as reading. So if someone told me then that within the decade one of the most popular websites in the world would be a free content encyclopedia, consisting primarily of text, or that the world would soon be consuming over 50 terabytes of compressed educational material per day—I never would have believed them. The growth and success of the Wikimedia projects is an amazing accomplishment, both for the staff and volunteers keeping the infrastructure operating efficiently as well as the tens of thousands of volunteers contributing this amazing corpus. This success affirms the importance of intellectual endeavours in our daily lives and demonstrates the awesome power of people working together towards a common goal. Congratulations to you all. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia crosses 10Gbit/sec
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: Today Wikimedia's world-wide five-minute-average transmission rate crossed 10gbit/sec for the first time ever, as far as I know. This peak rate was achieved while serving roughly 91,725 requests per second. The rate can't be that rough if we already know it to 5 significant digits. :-) Accuracy != Precision. 91725 is indeed precise, but it was low by about 9k req/sec, as Domas mentioned, since the count I used excluded a new server. I expected that kind of error (though not that much of one!), thus the 'roughly'. My apologies for the untrimmed figures. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Secret Santa … and Env ironment
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 6:51 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Wikimedians, Austin and I thought it might be fun to have a Secret Santa New Year's drawing among Wikimedia friends! We're basing it on the MetaFilter community Secret Santa drawing, which has 256 participants and uses a website called Elfster. Totally optional of course, but totally fun to get random things in the mail from other community members. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/WaldfogelDeadweightLossXmas.pdf ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
Geni is speaking of the huge banner on Enwp at the moment featuring Craig of craigslist. Hit reload a few times if you haven't seen it. It links to a clearly spoken statement of support for wikipedia. To avoid you haivng to click and goofing up the counters, here is what it says: I'm a proud supporter of Wikipedia, and I encourage you to make a donation to support their work too. Wikipedia is an accomplishment of major proportions. It's become the first draft of history, a vital, living repository of human knowledge. How did we ever manage without it? Wikipedia makes it easy to learn about anything. It's dramatic proof of the supreme effectiveness of collaboration: people from all around the world work together on Wikipedia to build articles with one purpose - to provide free knowledge. But the work has just begun. And Wikipedia needs our financial support. If you read it, if you edit it, if you visit it more than once a month: please join me in supporting Wikipedia today. There is are no hyperlinks to anything but WMF donation stuff, from the target. On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 10:50 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: I see we have taken to advertising craigslist. Would anyone care to explain why? Your post makes me sad: I think the banner is doing the right thing and if we complain about moderate and well considered actions then we lose credibility when something more foolish is done. I normally respect and appreciate your comments but I this one is not a fair one. The banner isn't a link to craiglist, it's 'The founder of this other widely known (and I think usually well respected) organization endorses wikipedia, here is why...' Arguably craiglist is only known and credible to much of the same subculture that WMF's message has already reached— I suppose the results will have to be left to speak for themselves— but is this an add for craigslist? Hardly. It's a craig-of-craigslist ad for Wikipedia, speaking about the virtues of Wikipedia, not craig or craigs-list (other than the virtue of his support, which is being used as social proof). I accept that there can be a reasonable discussion about the wisdom of this kind of messaging, but I don't think that such a discussion could be had with your rather extreme characterization overhanging. Might I convince you to restate it in a way more conducive of discussion than dispute? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Recent firing?
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Why would you even ask that question, let alone expect an answer? Last I checked, no Wikimedian also carried the title of majority shareholder or anything close. You're not entitled to sordid details of personnel management. Try to remember that the Wikimedia Foundation is a business, and needs to operate with more professionalism than announce everything announce often. On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Sebastian Moleski seb...@gmail.com wrote: I have to disagree. The reason for the speculation is not the rumor. The reason for the speculation is a misguided sense that there's some sort of absolute right to know about these things. Jimmy's right: it makes sense that board or upper level management positions are discussed among the project community (although I would not consider this list to be a useful forum of community discussion). It does not, however, make sense that this principle be applied to someone responsible for office IT. I don't know what the reasons were for why this particular employment is scheduled to end. And there's no reason that I or anyone other than those directly involved with it internally to the foundation should know. It's a simple case of none-of-your-business. Practically every state and municipal government in the US is subject to public disclosure laws, sometimes part of 'Government in the sunshine' legislation, which require most relevant information about the daily operations to be made available. This usually includes information on employee performance, reasons for departure/dismissal, etc. about everyone from top management through the junior dog-catcher. Though the law usually does exclude highly private/personal information (for example, medical information). [I'm coming from a US centric angle here because that is what I know. Feel free to mentally replace US locations with any other place with robust records laws] Accordingly, I find the supposition that being very open about the operations of the foundation is somehow incompatible with professionalism or ethical behaviour to be simply unsustainable. Wikimedia is not a business. It is a publicly supported charity. The WMF depends on the public both for the funding used to cut everyone's paychecks and for the creation of the material which makes its sites worth visiting. In terms of man-hours-input the community of contributors dwarfs the foundation's full time staff considerably. The inescapable reality of this is that the employees and officers serve at the pleasure of the public. Although the chain is not a direct chain of command, it is no less real. So I don't think it's surprising to see people making noises expressing a desire for the kind of openness which is technically available from state and local governance almost universally thought the US. In enacting this article the Legislature finds and declares that it is the intent of the law that actions of state agencies be taken openly and that their deliberation be conducted openly. The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created. Cal. §11120 I believe Wikimedia Foundation already has a stated goal of being on the leading edge of organizational openness and has done well /by commercial standards/.Perhaps it's time to take that a step further and voluntarily subject the organization to the public record laws of some state or some composition or subset thereof. Not only would this advance openness but it may help avoid arguments over the form and level of openness by delegating those decisions to others who have thought harder about them than we have. It may also make cooperating with other organizations simpler because rather than trying to explain Wikimedia's bizarre one-off openness requirements and the inevitable debate about the wisdom of every aspect, it could be simply pointed out that the WMF operates under some particular rule-set used elsewhere. Pre-existing government openness rulesets also have the advantage of the existence of training materials for staff and layman guides for the public. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia meets git
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 4:38 PM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: There are ways to optimize all of this. Most users will not want to download the full history. Then why are you using git? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [openmoko-announce] WikiReader
-- Forwarded message -- From: Sean Moss-Pultz s...@openmoko.com Date: Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:51 AM Subject: [openmoko-announce] WikiReader To: annou...@lists.openmoko.org, List for Openmoko community discussion commun...@lists.openmoko.org Dear Community! Today, with the greatest of pleasure, I am ready to share with you the birth of our third product -- WikiReader. Three simple buttons put three million Wikipedia articles in the palm of your hand. Accessible immediately, anytime, anywhere without requiring an Internet connection. No strings attached. With WikiReader you'll be prepared for those unexpected moments when curiosity strikes. And once you have it, you'll realize how often you ask yourself questions during the day. WikiReader takes our original ideas of openness and accessibility to an even greater realm. WikiReader is so amazingly simple. There really is no interface. You turn it on and instantly become immersed in the rich world of reading specific topics or the serendipitous pleasure of discovering something by chance. It's perfect for all ages. From the Aha! moment when we held our first prototypes, to the last few months as we worked around the clock to polish every last detail, this product was a joy to make and even more fun to experience. We are head-over-heels in love with WikiReader. Never have I found so much fun in the little moments of curiosity life offers us. Try one and I'm sure you'll agree that we've delivered the essence of reading Wikipedia in an addictively simple form factor. Sales start today at http://thewikireader.com. Enjoy. Tell your friends. And let us know what you think! Sincerely Sean Moss-Pultz ___ 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 Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Happy-melon happy-me...@live.com wrote: [snip] It's not just that. On a technological level, considerable sections of the FlaggedRevs code are called on *every* page view, whether the page has FlaggedRevs behaviour or not. Even if it's eventually saying no, carry on normally in 99% of the cases, the question is still asked. And asked on every one of those six billion pageviews. When the answer is yes, we need to do something special here, of course, the load that the FlaggedRevs Completely hogwash. The overwhelming majority of those six billion pageviews never touches mediawiki at all— they're satisfied out of the frontend caches. Not that flaggedrevs doesn't have performance considerations, but you'd do well to keep the hyperbole down a notch. ...and it's not like we're talking about some extension which was only ever designed for tiny wikis (as many extensions are), dewp and enwp were always primary targets for this extension from inception. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Consensus on Meta for suspecting every volunteer of abuse ?
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Tim Landscheidt t...@tim-landscheidt.de wrote: So, should we find a term that is suitable for all six billion people on this planet, or should we covertly prefer users who are curious enough to just click on that link to find out what's behind it? Obviously we should replace the text messages with the ulitmate wiktionary Defined Meaning numeric identifier! or… you know… just submit a new translation. (but… I for one welcome the ultimate conlang lexicon overloards!) ___ 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 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. ___ 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 4:10 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation. Please help me understand the implications of this statement. It simply means that a) we want to make sure that for the production roll-out, the user interface is not insane and appropriate to the specific en.wp configuration that's been proposed; Aren't our volunteers qualified to contribute to this? b) we'll want to track participation metrics after the roll-out to see what the impact of this technology is. I'm not sure what after the fact analysis has to do with the deployment schedule. Accusations of obstructionism don't help; I understand where these come from, but it's a massive case of assume bad faith. Please stop it. Bad faith — I don't think those words means what you think they mean. I don't think anyone at the WMF is acting in bad faith. Surely if you intended to harm Wiki(p|m)edia you could come up with something better than this. My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the WMF staff has decided that it knows better than hundreds of contributors and that it needed to act paternalistic and protect the community against its own decision by ignoring it. I am not the only person to harbor these concerns, for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisionsdiff=316628512oldid=316625478 . All off of these can be supported by the facts in front of me; None of them reflect very positively on Wikimedia's staff, but neither require even an ounce of bad faith. If assume good faith has become a code-word for pretend everything is done perfectly; ignore problems; provide no criticism then it's an aspect of our culture that needs to be eliminated. I felt the latter hypothesis was supported by your statement that we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on participation. Even with your clarification I can't help but understand that when I ask 'Why is FOO being delayed' and you respond (in part) 'Because we are concerned that it will harm things' that you aren't saying that you're intending to obstruct the deployment... Extracting the purest (strawman?) form of statement: It has not been done yet, in part, because we think what the community decided may harm participation. However, we aren't working with the community to ameliorate this harm is pretty much the definition of obstruction. This is precisely the thing I was talking about when I said that I'm concerned that Wikimedia is treating the contributors as 'users' rather than partners: If there are concerns about negative side-effects of an initiative with a partner, you talk them out and find solutions, you don't drag your feet on implementing and hope the demand goes away— though some organizations find that to be an acceptable approach to handling needy customers. If Wikimedia were more communicative about limitations and timelines and more responsive to requests there wouldn't be as much need or room to speculate. ___ 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 7:30 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: Gregory, To address: My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki...WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project.. Your quoting makes it sound like I'm calling usability and strategy wiki niche interest. Here is what I actually wrote: My leading hypothesis were either that the staff was incredibly overloaded with new initiatives like usability and strategywiki that there simply hasn't been time to even make a simple configuration change; ghat WMF's priorities have become so warped due to petitioning by niche interests that it can't complete a simple request for its largest project, or that the In bullet point form, my theories were: (1) Tech staff is so overloaded with new work from usability, etc. that they can't make a small configuration change for enwp or an enwp test. No matter how important these new initiatives are, if they are overburdening the staff this greatly than we have bitten off more than we can chew. (2) That WMF no longer cares about EnWP because advocates for other projects post almost daily on foundation-l while ENWP disproportionally underrepresented. (Enwp is off in it's own land) (3) That fears about flagged revisions were causing the WMF to delay. I'm pleased that Sue has responded resolutely to clarify that (3) is not her position. In any case, please endeavor to not misquote me in this manner in the future. ___ 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 7:57 PM, Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org wrote: 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 That config has been there for a month, but it might be broken in some way; as far as I know nobody's yet done any organized poking at the test site. We'll look it over in the next few days... It seems to work just fine, actually. The extension is on, the configuration is being loaded for the right database, and things seem to function when I test them. Holy crap! In my defense: It's pretty clear that no one was aware that it was turned up yet. The notice indicated that things were still being setup. Activating it requires a right that only you have at the moment: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsersgroup=sysop [if there is anyone but brion listed; they've since been added] The bugzilla bug has not been updated: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18334 Other people inquired about the test site: May 5, May 12, Jun 9, Jun 19, Jul 16th I inquired about this several times on wikitech-l: Aug 31 and Sep 1, then privately on Sep 15 and Sep 20th. Of course, people have inquired on EnWP itself too. As pointed out by Philippe, it came up in the 09/25 office hours IRC which included these gems: (I've cut ruthlessly, original is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25) [22:33pm] Natalie: SueGardner: What is the hold-up with flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia? It's been months and months. ... [22:39pm] Jake_Wartenberg: brion: so there is no flagged protection on flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org [22:39pm] Jake_Wartenberg: just flagged revs [22:40pm] cary: I think that's enough on Flagged Revs. Had I been aware of the discussion on IRC I would have first nagged you again about why you were saying it was there when it didn't appear to be! Thank you. My apologies: I'd have had little reason to complain if I'd know that the test was up; the absence of the test is what seemed outrageous. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
Sue, I sent the below included inquiry to wikitech-l regarding http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/. Now almost a month later I still have received no response regarding the status of this test deployment. It is is still not active on the test site, — although this has literally gone on for months. As far as I can tell this is one of the most significant initiatives on English Wikipedia as of lately— in that it has site wide impact and the design and decision of the configuration was the work of hundreds of people, including a reworking after the WMF staff refused to implement the initial decision which only achieved almost a decent majority support, for lack of sufficient community support. Now that the plan has been improved and the support is overwhelming a commitment to roll with this plan was made but no progress appears to be being made. Inquiries have been met with silence. I believe the community expects and deserves a greater level of responsiveness from the staff of Wikimedia. What I'd like to know— What is delaying this deployment? What is a reasonable expectation for the timeline in implement community chosen decisions? How can communication be improved so that the communities high priority implementations aren't ignored for weeks and even months by wikimedia staff? How can the people who care about this help see it through to completion? What does this say about the enormous strategic projects initiate when Wikimedia is already failing to meet its commitments on high impact community initiatives? Thank you for your time and consideration. -- Forwarded message -- From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com Date: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org Status? To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:17 PM, K. Peacheyp858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:02 AM, Platonidesplatoni...@gmail.com wrote: You know, when you point to a broken page, people^W wikipedians tend to do absurd things like fixing them :) I was going to fix some up, but import is restricted and i was too lazy to do copy/paste imports. Ehhh. It don't know that it makes sense to spend effort manually fixing pages on a test project. If the import procedure is not working right it should be improved... In any case, I'm sorry for the tangent. The main intent of my post was to determine the current status: Is the import finished? When will the configuration changes for flagged protection be turned on? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It's not article count, it's editors
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Erik Zachte erikzac...@infodisiac.com wrote: Examples are: article views per hour, unique visitors, percentage of potential audience reached (unique visitors per million speakers). All of Why are people without computers or reasonable access to computers considered potential audience for editing a website? Why are people whom are effectively illiterate considered potential audience for editing an encyclopedia? I agree that in some stretched sense of 'potential' it's absolutely true; but since solving these problems is pretty far outside of the activities of the Wikimedia foundation today, are metrics which include these people really that reasonable? I don't believe they are. In particular, using speaker estimates will cause us to misunderstand the relative success of the site: If the penetration for X is better than Y is it because of something we've done better or could do better? Or is it simply because Y has less literacy and less access to technology? (If we aren't to limit the scope of 'potential' to potential which can conceivably reached within the scope of the WMF's mission then I would propose that by far the most cost-effective way to increase our overall percentage of potential would be to promote increased birth rates in developed nations with high literacy and access to technology) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial, Is Wikpedia non commercial?
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:55 PM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: I would like a professional opinion on the question : Better stated, I would like your opinion on this, if it is not off topic. Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit? Is working on the wikipedia more like a commercial non profit work and not really non commecial in terms of the microsoft licenses quoted. Thank you for revising your question. (1) As with many things: The question with the greatest impact is: Does anyone care? There are a lot of questions which are very hard to clearly answer but which do not create problems simply because no one cares. I've never heard of a major software company hauling someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence. (2) The actual answer to your question depends on the definition of non-commercial in the particular license. If non-commercial isn't clearly defined for the purpose of the license then the question is unanswerable, and the user is at their own risk. I'm doubtful that any two commercial software vendors achieves a non-comercial use only restriction in the same way. (3) Another way of looking at this is this— By our own rules, materials submitted to Wikipedia must be freely licensed for all kinds of use, including clearly commercial ones. If a non-commercial use only software license permitted use for Wikipedia then it would be possible to launder works through Wikipedia in order to make them available for commercial use. This would probably not be a desired effect, but it may be the common reality; see (1). (4) If some of our own users are violating their licenses while contributing, thats unfortunate but it's a risk that they've personally chosen to take which we can't control. From this perspective the non-commercial issue is, at worse, little different from using completely unlicensed software... also something we can't control. (5) Of course, many people in the Wikipedia communities recommend users use Free Software and our project pages reflect these recommendations. Free Software enables the collaboration and cooperation which are essential to the Wikimedia projects, avoids complicated software license permission concerns, and supports the openness and transparency which should be common to good scholarship. Considering (4) and (5), this is basically off-topic... To the (almost non-existent) extent that we have any effective policy at all on software that our users use it is to recommend that they use Free Software; we can't know how users software is licensed; any license violation by a user that did exist would be their issue rather than ours. Cheers, ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial, Is Wikpedia non commercial?
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:04 PM, wiki-li...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: It makes no difference. Wikipedia licenses everything on for commercial use. As you cannot relicense someone else's work, you cannot use a NC license worked. Most NC licensees probably wouldn't mind wikipedia reusing stuff, but they don't want big media reusing it. In case others are confused by the tangent here; Please note: jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote: It is my opinion that we should be careful of people who are using restricted software for contributions because it might be in violation of some licenses. He's asking about a different issue: If it's okay to use software which is licensed only for non-commercial use to create material for Wikipedia. This is unrelated to creative commons' -NC licenses. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining Non-commercial
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:19 PM, wiki-li...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: You can't combine a CC-BY work with a CC-BY-SA work without either imposing a SA limitation on the CC-BY work, Which anyone can do when combining CC-By and CC-By-SA works by others. (If you don't want people adding random limitations to your works; don't use CC-By) or removing the SA limitation on the CC-BY-SA work. Which only the copyright holder(s) of the BY-SA work can do. Which is no different to that of someone combining CC-BY-NC-SA license with a CC-BY-SA license. Not so, see above. I can't combine the NC-SA and SA works of third parties without negotiating alternative license terms; the licenses are mutually incompatible. The limitation of BY-SA keeps the work and it's derivatives freely licensed. True— it's a limitation, but it's one that merely contravenes some of frequently anti-cooperative aspect of copyright protection. You can look at SA works as existing in a parallel copyright universe where restrictive copyright controls do not exist. This is categorically different from the (often vague) nature of use restrictions connected with non-commercial licensing. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The $1.7 million question
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:47 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] The key question is whether the full history dump was ever considered to be a project that needs WMF funding to be allocated, as opposed to letting it be solved by the normal open source model. Post the root password to the database servers and I'm sure that there will be no more dump problems. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] open IRC meeting w/ Wikimedia Trustees: this Friday, 1800 UTC
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Samuel J Kleins...@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip] Speaking of which, I'm also looking for someone to organize the minutes. [NB: you don't have to be present during the chat to do this.] Again, pls contact me off-list. Doesn't the board have a role designated to take minutes at meetings? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] open IRC meeting w/ Wikimedia Trustees: this Friday, 1800 UTC
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Michael Snowwikipe...@verizon.net wrote: It does, but this is not an official meeting for the board to conduct business, it's a meeting to provide people in the community with a chance to have a discussion with the new board members. As such, I'm not sure it's meaningful to have minutes, but as mentioned it will be an open meeting and I'd think there should be no objection to publishing the entire log. And if minutes is taken to mean simply a summary of the discussion, no doubt that would be welcome as well. So, I just heard that this wasn't an official meeting after posting my message. It seems pretty bizarre that the balance of the board first heard about this meeting in the public announcement. I hope this isn't how the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is going to conduct its business from now forward. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Use of moderation
In the thread WMF seeking to sub-lease office space? On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Austin Hairadh...@gmail.com wrote: (to Gregory Kohs) [snip] I've placed you on indefinite moderation with the goal of improving the signal:crazy ratio. With something like 40 posts made to that thread after Mr. Kohs' last I think it is clear that the squelching of a (admittedly, trigger-happy) critic was ineffective at improving the SNB (signal-to-blah) ratio. …while at the same time it increased the scent of idea-centric rather than presentation-centric censorship. This is doubly a concern when moderation is used against someone who made an error that any one of us could have made and jumped to some hasty conclusions. Certainly there are non-profits which are little more than fronts for their operators' private gains, ones started for that purpose, and ones which fall into it after years of normal operation. In some places and at some scales the kind of self-dealing Mr. Kohs was concerned about are arguably the norm. I don't believe that they currently apply to Wikimedia but my confidence is in part derived from that fact that were there any real evidence of such things the critics would be all over it. (I do, however, think Wikimedia has done a worse job than it could have at avoiding the perception of self-dealing) Kohs was gleefully pointing at some supposed evidence of naughty-naughty. He missed a critical detail which made his position laughably wrong. I have no doubt that it was an honest mistake: in the end it only made him look silly. It was a mistake anyone could have made if they didn't begin by assuming good faith but the value of a critic is that they start with a different set of assumptions and values. I'm of the view that the further growth and development of Wikimedia and its family of projects is utterly dependent on having solid, well-considered, and productively-spoken critics. Internet forums are highly vulnerable to groupthink: as we work together we become a family. It's all too easy to avoid thinking critically about your family and about things you've invested time in. It for this reason, under other names, that we invite outsiders to serve on our board. A view from outside of WMF's reality distortion field (and from inside someone else's RDF) is essential. Mr. Kohs is frequently not an ideal critic: by being too prone to extreme positions, and by falling into accusations, he loses credibility. But even an off-the-wall critic can help make an environment more conducive to productive criticism. Someone more moderate may feel more comfortable speaking up when there is a strong critic handy to take the unreasonably extreme positions and the resulting heresy-fire and the existence of someone with an extreme position can help other people find a common ground. I'd prefer that moderation of this list be used as a last resort to maintain civil discourse and not as a tool to impose an external view of the desired traffic volume and especially not in a way which could be construed as prohibiting criticism. Dealing with criticism, including occasional off-the-wall criticism and sometimes outright nutty criticism, is one of the costs of open and transparent governance. I make this post with over a year of consideration: had this kind of (in my view) heavy-handed moderation been effective at improving the discourse on this list, I would be left with little to say. I don't think anyone here can say that it has improved. As such, it's time to try something different. ___ 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 Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Benjamin Leesemufarm...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: I propose the foundation-announce-l mailing list be set up with the following posting rules: 1) One post per person per thread. That includes the initiator of the thread. That's not how announcement lists work. The whole point of an announcement list is that the only posts on it will be announcements; and for the list to be useful, the announcements have to be limited to those that are important to the list's topic (which is usually narrowly defined) and of interest to the subscribers—which generally means that only people in positions of authority are allowed to post. mediawiki-announce and toolserver-announce are good examples. I'm pretty confident that Anthony knows how traditional announcement lists work. But what is the meaning of an announcement list for a non-hierarchical highly decentralized project? For smaller projects you just give all the active project members the rights to post to the list — and trust that they understand that they are supposed to keep the volume down and that all the project members agree about what is announcement worthy. I think what Anthony suggests is an interesting and worthwhile idea. The Wikimedia communit(y|(ies)) have a lot of communications challenges: People are often unaware of interesting things that others are doing. The editorial channels like EnWP's signpost are fairly narrow pipe. And the open communication lists suffer from high traffic even when their signal to noise ratio is decent. I don't agree with the notion that we need moderators and list admins to make sure the rules are not broken, obviously the list would need someone who can enforce the rules but there is little reason to believe that there would be much enforcement work after all: the wikis do okay without heavy handed control. Right now there is a lot of announcement duplication because there is no clearly right place to send announcements with foundation wide impact, so we send them everywhere. Were I king of the universe I'd probably pick somewhat different criteria than Anthony suggested (i.e. I might suggest something crazy like initial posts must be translated into at least two languages… to shift the communication cost onto the sender; or require that any posting be on behalf of at least two people), but I don't know that the specifics matter or that my suggestions would really be any better than his. If someone wants to try out something along the lines of what Anthony is suggesting I'd be willing to volunteer for list-mod duty, with the understanding that the moderators purpose is primary enforcing the rules for traffic control purposes. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:24 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/28 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Stephen Bain stephen.b...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Anthonywikim...@inbox.org wrote: It seems to me to be begging the question. You don't answer the question how bad is vandalism by assuming that vandalism is generally reverted. Can you suggest a better metric then? I must admit I don't understand the question. He means what would you measure in order to draw conclusions about the severity of vandalism. The obvious methodology would be to take a large random sample and hand classify it. It's not rocket science. By having multiple people perform the classification you could measure the confidence of the classification. This is somewhat labor intensive, but only somewhat as it doesn't take an inordinate number of samples to produce representative results. This should be the gold standard for this kind of measurement as it would be much closer to what people actually want to know than most machine metrics. If the results of this kind of study have good agreement with mechanical proxy metrics (such as machine detected vandalism) our confidence in those proxies will increase, if they disagree it will provide an opportunity to improve the proxies. These are techniques widely used in other fields. ___ 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 10:12 AM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: 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 Although I was trying to avoid advertising it in public this was something I'm aware of and had pointed out to the election committee, but something I don't consider to be a risk we can meaningfully address by not releasing ballots. Quoting myself from a private email: I think the bigger risk is vote watermarking leading to vote buying: I.e. You could register with my site and tell me you want to vote for M,ABFO,CDEGHIJKLN I then tell you I'll give you $10 if someone votes for G,M,ABFO,CJ,LN,DEGHIK. I make sure not to give out the same modified ballot twice, and I pay people if the ballots end up in the report. To fight against this I recommended that the WMF delay ballot disclosures for a few months and announce that they'd be doing so. People will be less inclined to wait for their $10. ;) I don't think stronger protection is justified because people could just load some toolbar that votes for them like subvertandprofit uses. http://subvertandprofit.com/content/prices is a good cluestick for people who think you can solve quality challenges with voting. :) So, basically, my position is that the risk of buying due to vote marking isn't much greater than the risk of buying based on the puppet voter intentionally using a buyer controlled web-browser to vote... and that we can equalize the risk by simply delaying the ballot release a little bit, but not so much as to degrade the value of the ballots as evidence that the election was conducted fairly. 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 [snip] Nitpicking, but the number of possible unique ballots is much greater than the factorial because of equality, and equality must be preserved in order produce the election calculations. The formula mostly easily represented is a messy multipart recursive formula, which I'll spare you (in part because I don't know that I have all the boundary conditions right). It's less than X!*2^(X-1). ___ 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 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. On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/26 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying. I'm inclined to agree. I just don't see any sufficient benefit to releasing the data to make it worth the risk. Why do people want this information? Is it just because they don't trust the vote count? Benefit: Increased resistance to tampering by the vote operators Benefit: Increased community confidence in the process (because of the above) Benefit: Increased information available to voting system researchers (I think we're the only source of real ranked preferential ballots) Benefit: Increased information to inform future campaigns (knowing that ~10% of the voters last year only ranked Ting is very useful information, for candidates and for everyone contributing to the election process) Cost: Increased risk of compromising voter confidentiality (leaking information through ballot ordering) Cost: Increased risk of external manipulation (via vote buying) Cost: The actual effort required to post the data Thomas, can you tell me the names of the *people* who could have completely rigged the election in the absence of ballot disclosures? (Here is a hint: It's not the election committee) How can you trust these people absolutely when you can't even name them? Can anyone here not employed by the foundation or on the election committee do so? Even if you can trust them to be honest, can you trust them not to make mistakes? Why? They have made mistakes in the past. I have no reason to believe anyone trusted would screw with the election results intentionally. But why trust when we can verify? Vote buying is a real risk but there are many ways to catch it and the secrecy of vote buying is likely to be inversely proportional to its effects, moreover, preventing ballot disclosure only stops one form of vote buying. It would be more effective, but more development costly, to buy votes by paying people to either run some browser extension that fills out and submits the ballot for them, or give them your authentication-cookies and act as a proxy for them to open the HTTPS connection to the back-end server and vote as you. In the latter case the voter couldn't even fake out the payer. ___ 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 2:13 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: 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. You've conflated issues. Regardless how how eligibility works the decision to release ballots or not has implications. It's a separate issue. I'm not sure how to make it more clear that were not discussing voter eligibility here. So instead lets discuss eligibility some: Can you provide the eligibility criteria you'd like to apply? Please be precise and actionable, i.e. make sure that I could write a program using the publicly available data to determine eligibility. I think this would be most enlightening. (Oh, and in the future please provide citations when you make claims like 'the board is drumming up scary situations', because as far as I know it's not correct and you're just ranting.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Guillaume Paumierguillom@gmail.com wrote: [snip] It is very common for members of the board of a non-profit organisation to donate money to support this organisation. It was my understanding that the appointment was of Matt Halprin, not the Omidyar Network. On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: However, in this case, even if we assume the seat was outright bought for $2M, I don't think there are I'm not sure why people are behaving as though there is any ambiguity on this point. The Omidyar Network agreed to make a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation with the understood condition that their representative would receive a seat on the board. There is no need for speculation, it is what it is, like it or dislike it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: I hedged my language because I don't believe it is that simple. I do believe the money and the seat are linked, but I don't believe just Thats quite fair, however: anyone could buy a seat for $2M. For example, I doubt Mr. Kohs would be seated even if he had $2M to offer Should we not refer to elected candidates as elected when exactly the same provision applies? [snip] (Or at least I want to believe that the existing Board is capable of walking away from piles of money if it came with too many strings and conflicts attached.) There is absolutely no reason to doubt that. None at all. It happens every single day that the Wikimedia sites do not run advertising. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Casey Brownli...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I think that fits the definition of sell, others may disagree but it is semantics and is unimportant. Is it unimportant? We're discussing how this action is perceived as having bought a seat, so I'd say that that semantics and interpretations definitely are important here. Is any of it? It doesn't appear that anyone outside of troll-l^wfoundation-l cares. Even over at Wikipedia review the response has been more along the lines of Wow, they suckered Omidyar!. Much of the discussion here seems to be a concern that someone platonic community member will be outraged, not that the participants themselves are more than mildly disappointed. When ENWP changes their site notice to direct readers to a wikinews smear piece about the board selling a seat— then we can worry. Until then, this seems like a lot of pointless lip-flapping. Cheers. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does. Wikipedia is extremely structured. The writers are not always expected to know the structure; gnomes do the tidying up. You must have an enormously different idea of extremely structured than I do. I once created software to extract lat/long from Wikitext on enwp and gave up when I got to the 100th or so distinct template invocation which did almost but not quite exactly the same thing. Go search the archives for some of my example bat-shit category linkage maps. It's extremely structures compared to complete anarchy, or perhaps extremely structured compared to the human body. It's not structured compared to normal sources of data. Not at all. ___ 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 Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I think part of the problem is that there were some odd ideas about how the Advisory Board would work. For example, it has a chair. I can't work out why. Why would the advisory board ever meet as a group? Being an expert is only of use if you are an expert in the subject being discussed. Individual members of the advisory board should be [snip] Presumably a chair can track membership and expertise and handle routing messages to the relevant parties, participate with recruiting, and otherwise act as an impedance match between the board proper and the advisory board. I'm not sure if that was what was envisioned, or if chair is the best name for it, but I think that it's a reasonable alternative to the sort of flat structure that you're describing. ___ 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 Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Gregory Kohsthekoh...@gmail.com wrote:
I wonder what takes so long to upload a small data file?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2009/Votesoldid=1606753
Let's see... August 25 minus August 12 equals nearly two weeks of delay (and
subterfuge?)...
Not much room for subterfuge once they are posted: You'll be able
compute the full pair-wise table and confirm that it produces the same
results. Voters will be able to look through and identify that at
least one ballot identical to theirs made it in.
Since the officials can't know who will and who won't go checking for
their own ballots in the pile the only real avenue open for election
rigging is through sock/meatpuppet accounts. The edit count and
activity requirements mean that there should be sufficient public
information available on each of the voters for anyone to go sniffing
around for funny business. Since making a meaningful impact on the
election would require on the order of 100 accounts concealing that
kind of activity would be difficult.
The voting process could be improved — but I think it's one of the
most resistant to outright manipulation of any online voting system
I've seen.
Though this level of confidence is predicated on the raw ballots being
available, at least eventually.
I provided the election committee with a sorting script on August
10th. This script addresses Thomas' anonymising and randomising
concern and does so better than actually randomizing[*] because
sorting is deterministic.
---cut here---
#!/usr/bin/python
#Raw ballot information leak remover
#input is ballots, one per line, I.e.
#O,NHKCJILMGBFEDA
#OMN,GBLKIJADFC,E,H
import sys
for ballot in sorted([,.join([.join(sorted(x)) for x in
y[:-1].split(',')]) for y in sys.stdin]):
print ballot
---cut here---
[*]
http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2001182781025.gif
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[Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation SAN FRANCISCO and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Omidyar Network today announced a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, one of the world's top 5 most visited websites. The Wikimedia Foundation has also appointed Matt Halprin, a partner at Omidyar Network, to its Board of Trustees. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia's projects. We are very grateful for Omidyar Network's support. I am also delighted to have Matt joining us, said Michael Snow, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board. His extensive experience with online communities, trust, and reputation, will make him an excellent addition to our Board. Matt also has a background in strategy development, which will be particularly useful for us as we embark on the collaborative strategy development project, Wikimedia's top priority for the coming year. The Wikimedia Foundation is a critical player in the growing social movement toward greater transparency and openness. I am honored to be serving on the Foundation's board, said Matt Halprin, Partner, Omidyar Network. Wikipedia reaches and engages millions of people every day, enabling information sharing in a collaborative, online platform. Omidyar Network sees great potential in Wikipedia as it continues to expand in emerging geographies, where this social impact will be magnified even further. Before joining Omidyar Network, Halprin was most recently Vice President of Global Trust and Safety at eBay. Prior to eBay, Halprin served as a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on strategy issues. In addition to direct financial support, Omidyar Network will dedicate internal resources and engage its network to support Wikimedia's strategic planning process, communications work, and recruiting. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Omidyar Network Commits $2 Million Grant to Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Nathannawr...@gmail.com wrote: One thing I'm curious about... Why did this announcement come from Greg? I simply saw it on PRNewswire and figured folks here would appreciate seeing it. I have no clue why it wasn't already posted here but the coordination of press-releases can be a tricky thing especially when most of the staff and the board is in Buenos Aires. Do they do siesta in Argentina? :) ___ 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 6:06 AM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are actually in a vandalized state? Although you don't actually answer that question, you answer a different question: [snip] approximations: I considered that vandalism is that thing which gets reverted, and that reverts are those edits tagged with revert, rv, undo, undid, etc. in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged. Which is interesting too, but part of the problem with calling this a measure of vandalism is that it isn't really, and we don't really have a good handle on how solid an approximation it is beyond gut feelings and arm-waving. The study of Wikipedia activity is a new area of research, not something that has been studied for decades. Not only do we not know many things about Wikipedia, but we don't know many things about how to know things about Wikipedia. There must be ways to get a better understanding, but we many not know of them and the ones we do know of are not always used. For example, we could increase our confidence in this type of proxy-measure by taking a random subset of that data and having humans classify it based on some agreed-on established criteria. By performing the review process many times we could get a handle on the typical error of both the proxy-metric and the meta-review. The risk here is that people will misunderstand these shorthand metrics as the real-deal and the risk is increased when we encourage it by using language which suggests that the simplistic understanding is the correct one. IMO, highly uncertain and/or outright wrong information is worse than not knowing when you aren't aware of the reliability of the information. We can't control how the press chooses to report on research, but when we actively encourage misunderstandings by playing up the significance or generality of our research our behaviour is unethical. Vigilance is required. This risk of misinformation is increased many-fold in comparative analysis, where factors like time are plotted against indicators because we often miss confounding variables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding). Stepping away from your review for a moment, because it wasn't primarily a comparative one, I'd like to point out some general points: For example, If research finds that edits are more frequently reverted over time is this because there has been a change in the revision decision process or have articles become better and more complete over time and have edits to long and high quality articles always been more likely to be reverted? Both are probably true, but how does the contribution break down? There are many other possibly significant confounding variables. Probably many more than any of us have thought of yet. I've always been of the school of thought that we do research to produce understanding, not just generate numbers and Wikipedia becomes more complete over time, less work for new people to do is a pretty different understanding from Wikipedia increasing hostile towards new contributors are pretty different understandings but both may be supported by the same data at least until you've controlled for many factors. Another example— because of the scale of Wikipedia we must resort to proxy-metrics. We can't directly measure vandalism, but we can measure how often someone adds is gay over time. Proxy-metrics are powerful tools but can be misleading. If we're trying to automatically identify vandalism for a study (either to include it or exclude it) we have the risk that the vandals are adapting to automatic identification: If you were using is gay as a measure of vandalism over time you might conclude that vandalism is decreasing when in reality cluebot is performing the same kind of analysis for its automatic vandalism suppression and the vandals have responded by vandalizing in forms that can't be automatically identified, such as by changing dates to incorrect values. Or, keeping the goal of understanding in mind, sometimes the measurements can all be right but a lack of care and consideration can still cause people to draw the wrong conclusions. For example, English Wikipedia has adopted a much stronger policy about citations in articles about living people than it once had. It is *intentionally* more difficult to contribute to those articles especially for new contributors who do not know the rules then it once was. Going back to your simple study now: The analysis of vandalism duration and its impact on readers makes an assumption about readership which we know to be invalid. You're assuming a uniform distribution of readership: That readers are just as likely to read any random article. But we know that the actual readership follows a power-law (long-tail) distribution. Because of the failure to consider traffic levels we can't draw conclusions on how
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Jimmy Walesjwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: [snip] Greg, I think your email sounded a little negative at the start, but not so much further down. I think you would join me heartily in being super grateful for people doing this kind of analysis. Yes, some of it will be primitive and will suffer from the many difficulties. But data-driven decisionmaking is a great thing, particularly when we are cognizant of the limitations of the data we're using. I just didn't want anyone to get the idea (and I'm sure I'm reading you right) that you were opposed to people doing research. :-) Absolutely— No one who has done thing kind of analysis could fail to appreciate the enormous amount of work that goes into even making a couple of simple seemingly off the cuff numbers out of the mountain of data that is Wikipedia. Making sure the numbers are accurate and meaningful while also clearly explaining the process of generating is in and of itself a large amount of work, and my gratitude is extended to anyone who contributes to those processes. I've long been a loud proponent of data driven decision making. So I'm absolutely not opposed to people doing research, but just as you said— we need to be acutely aware of the limitations of the research. Weak data is clearly better than no data, but only when you are aware of the strength of the data. Or, in other words, knowing what you don't know is often *the most critical* piece of information in any decision making process. In our eagerness to establish what we can and do know it can be easy to forget how much we don't know. Some of the limitations which are all too obvious to researchers are less than obvious to people who've never personally done quantitative analysis on Wikipedia data, yet many of these people are the decision makers that must do something useful with the data. The casual language used when researchers write for researchers can magnify misunderstandings. It was merely my intent to caution against the related risks. I think the most impactful contributions available for researchers today are less in the area of the direct research itself but are instead in advancing the art of researching Wikipedia. But the two go hand in hand, we can't advance the art if we don't do the research. The latter type is less sexy and not prone to generating headlines, but it is work that will last and generate citations for a long time. Measurements of X today will be soon forgotten as they are replaced by later analysis of the historical data using superior techniques. That my tone was somewhat negative is only due to my extreme disappointment in that our own discussion of recent measurements has been almost entirely devoid of critical analysis. Contributors patting themselves on the back and saying I told you so! seem to be outnumbering suggestions that the research might mean something else entirely, though perhaps that is my own bias speaking. To the extent that I'm wrong about that I hope that my comments were merely redundant, to the extent that I'm right I hope my points will invite nuanced understanding of the research and encourage people to seek out and expose potentially confounding variables and bad-proxies so that all our knowledge can be advanced. If this stuff were easy it would all be done already. Wikipedia research is interesting because it is both hard and potentially meaningful. There is room and need for contributions from everyone. Cheers! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Lars Aronssonl...@aronsson.se wrote: Kaare Olsen wrote: What I think is the primary reason for the Danish Wikipedia being much smaller than the neighbouring languages is that Danes generally are internationally minded and pride themselves on being good at English - people may simply prefer to use/edit Wikipedia in that language (even I did that when first attracted to Wikipedia). I find it hard to believe that this would be a major difference between Denmark and Sweden. But it would be really interesting if we could somehow trace the use of the English Wikipedia to users of various mother tongues (for Northern Europe, country or IP address range might be a good enough approximation for mother tongue). Perhaps Swedish users stay on the Swedish Wikipedia to read about sports, but go to the English to read about music. For each IP address range, we could (well, Domas could) analyze which language of Wikipedia those users primarily go to. If users from 130.236.xxx.yyy mostly visit the English and Swedish Wikipedia, we can assume that it constitutes a Swedish-speaking community. If no conclusive pattern is shown on the /16 (class B) range, each /24 (class C) net can be analyzed individually. I published a very simple GEO vs Project readership report a couple of years back. I could dig up the data, but it's old now. It's not terribly hard to run, and the old script should still work. It was generally the case that for much of the world English Wikipedia was accessed Wikipedia by readers with roughly comparable frequency to the 'expected' language, and in some cases far more so… though there were some significant exceptions: For example the Italians stuck to itwiki and the Japanese stuck to jawiki. Much of Europe was more mixed. There is also this old data: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin How many messages need to be translated to make mediawiki basically usable? My own belief was that you only needed a few dozens to make the software basically usable, at least enough to bootstrap usage. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Svipsvi...@gmail.com wrote: But that's without mentioning the horrible state of the localisation in general: Wrong context translations, just wrong translations and many spelling errors. Contextual errors I can understand, figuring out all the right contexts for a message can be tricky. How were the spelling errors and wrong translations introduced? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Missing audio of WMF Board candidates
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Nathannawr...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] certainly see why it would be frustrating for him: he's much more reasonable in voice chat than over text, and if the audio were widely circulated it's possible he would have come in a few places higher in the election. Mr. Kohs may have also placed higher had a swimsuit review been included as part of the process. Obviously we need a swimsuit review. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Question to post...
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Ray Saintongesainto...@telus.net wrote: Aryeh Gregor wrote: On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Cox, Seritaserita@bridgespan.org wrote: Google's new search engine, Caffeine, is supposedly kicking Wikipedia entries further down results page. Thoughts? Comments? So what? Wikipedia's goal isn't to get high search rankings. It's to be a useful resource within its domain. That principle is too easily forgotten. It's an over-simplification. A resource that no one can find isn't a useful resource. Things like usability and simple awareness can have a major impact on the fulfillment of the mission even if they don't directly impact the content. There are many indirect effects as well— Less search engine hits means less readers means less editing means less content and probably less neutral content. It also means less funding, and while the site wouldn't need as much funding with less traffic there would still be less money for things like software development where cost is not a function of traffic. So— So what? is the wrong position. Good search positioning is not mutually exclusive with useful content. 'Content' is the first priority, but getting that content into peoples hands can't be far behind if we're to do something worthwhile. Cheers, Greg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Question to post...
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Cox, Seritaserita@bridgespan.org wrote: Google's new search engine, Caffeine, is supposedly kicking Wikipedia entries further down results page. Thoughts? Comments? http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39484015,00.htm [from my comments in #wikimedia-tech the other day] So— I tried 20 random words, and the WP result was lower in four of them, the same in the rest. No pattern really... We still have the problem with article at funny name; redirect from common name; common name search on google gives squat, which I consider to be much more major. When you're at the top there is no place to go but down. A larger comparison would be nice, but I didn't seen any reason to think that it was a major change. I generally expect the SEO people to over-react to, well, just about everything. (I went on, on IRC, to point some examples of the behavioural change that happened towards the end of 2007 (per my cruddy memory) where non-widely-linked redirects basically fell out of the google index... search terms like Jesus bug or many other things like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Redirects_to_scientific_names ... if we cared about the traffic flux from google we'd see what we could do to fix that) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Question to post...
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 5:09 PM, David Goodmandgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps we should try using the titles for things that other people use--not for g-rank, but as signs that we recognize that an encyclopedia is made for the readers. Eh— It's unsolvable in some cases... People frequently use multiple terms for the same thing. And what happens when one term is really common in Canada and one is really common in the US? Do we always use the US version because the US is more populous than Canada? It would be a fair decision by one reasonable metric, but deeply biased by other reasonable metrics. An alternative argument is that When a 'more correct' name exists, we should use that because we're an encyclopaedia and we're supposed to educate people on these things. Perhaps you don't agree— but hopefully you can see why others can reasonably hold that position. The real answer to this problem is ALL names should work equally, and with redirects they do. Except, it seems, that search engines behaviour may be undermining this to some extent. ... but changing the naming in response to the symptom rather than a response to the real problem. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Hotlinked images Was: GLAM-WIKI report
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip] Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. So there have been a number of statements against doing something like this, but (unsurprisingly) I don't think they have been strong enough stated or hit all the arguments that I think are important. So please humour me for a moment. I think hotlinking images is something we ought not to do for several independent reasons. (1) There is no reason to do so. The so far cited reasons for GLAM interest in this are Branding and Statistics. Hotlinking or caching would do nothing to improve branding— Most of the time a hot linked image looks just like a local one to users. Whatever branding we'd find acceptable could be accomplished as well or better locally. Statistics gathering is something that is interesting to many of our contributors, we cand should have good statistics for everything (and caching would be useless for statistics), so hotlinking should create no improvement. GLAMS have spent money building their own databases, yes. But ours are an additional copy, our problem, and not a significant cost. The only other reason I can see for hotlinking would be collecting resellable marketing data on Wikipedia viewers, and I do not believe that this would be a use we'd wish to support. (I'm not making a value judgement here— If that is indeed someone's goal thats fine— only that it's not one WMF would intentionally support). See below for more… (2) Hotlinking has enormous privacy problems When the rubber hits the road NDAs are ineffective: People make mistakes. Governments and ISPs snoop. Privacy polices are often bad and allow things which would horrify people. Hotlinking would greatly increase readers exposure to information leaks. Some random museum has no business knowing that I loaded the pederasty article just because some art was placed in it. Wikimedia's handling of reader privacy ought to be leading-edge trend-setting stuff. That would be an nearly impossible goal if media were inlined from many third party sites. (3) It significantly reduces the atomicity of the Wikimedia projects. Today are *things*, objects you can obtain (± temporary problems with the dump system), archive, data-mine, etc. I have complete (though not current right now) copies of Wikipedia in all languages along with all images and other media, as well as the core software. Not just partial bits and pieces, but the whole thing. External links are a clear boundary between what is in Wikipedia and what isn't. ... and the stuff *in* wikipedia is all freely licensed and available for download. They are now all tracked with a common revision control system, have common (if bad…) metadata. External dependency would lower reliability and make the generally less tractable. It would become more difficult to retain backups and historical records. Perhaps some day Wikipedia will be too big to maintain any singular copy of for purely technical reasons, but we are a long long way away from that now! So basically I think there are a bunch of practical and principled problems with hotlinking, but that hot-linking isn't actually needed. Really good upload systems that preserve metadata and provide good links to external resources? Statistics collection? These are good an uncontroversial things. They don't require hotlinking. Cheers— ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] PARC Was: Election Results
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too? I didn't. Speaking of PARC, does anyone have any contacts with them? I wrote asking about how they removed vandalism from their revert and have not had a reply (and my comment on their blog was either deleted or never published). In particular I'm curious because their revert concentration over time appears to show the same seasonal trend in vandalism that you get from charting the proportion of vandalism over time. (Its much easier to identify a subset of vandalism and track its behaviour than it is to remove all vandalism). ___ 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 4:03 PM, Pavlo Shevelopavlo.shev...@gmail.com wrote:
A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
Would you please add detailed statistic summary (number of people
voted, %% of eligible wikipedians, dice and slice of those to projects
groups etc.) ?
... I mean as detailed as possible - more is better
{{Sofixit}}
The things you are asking for should be possible with already
available public data. These things would be good, but they are
things that *you* can do. :)
Please save the election committees' cycles for dealing with whatever
non-public stuff remains. :)
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[Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:
This paper is making the rounds: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862 This is a pilot study of the use of “Flash cookies” by popular websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are using it to respawn or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users. Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking. Inside it says: We encountered Flash cookies on 54 of the top 100 sites. […] Ninety-eight of the top 100 sites set HTTP cookies (only wikipedia and wikimedia.org lacked HTTP cookies in our tests). These 98 sites set a total of 3,602 HTTP cookies. Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior. ___ 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
Betsy Megas be...@strideth.com wrote: Due to an error in a script that was used to generate the list of authorized voters for this election, roughly 300 votes were cast by users who were not qualified based on the posted election rules (requiring that voters have made at least 600 edits before 01 June 2009 across Wikimedia wikis and have made at least 50 edits between 01 January and 01 July 2009). Those votes will be removed by the election committee prior to the election being tallied by Software in the Public Interest. Once this is completed, the election results will be tallied and announced shortly thereafter. Questions regarding why a vote was struck can be addressed to board-electi...@lists.wikimedia.org. 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? ___ 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 11:44 PM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@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. I am interested in the specific nature of the coding error, for example The script applied the wrong cutoff date or edits across multiple projects for the 600 edit criteria were merged based on UID rather than username or users from prior years were also permitted or users whos name shared a common prefix with a permitted user were additionally permitted. The text I quoted began with Due to an error in a script, so I had expected my query would receive a response more specific than a mere repetition of the already disclosed information. I hope that my inquiry has now been made abundantly clear now. Since the error has been corrected surely there can be no harm in disclosing its specific nature. (we've had problems with the automatic list in the past, best to discuss these things so that they can be well understood) This is important: NO ONE WAS DISENFRANCHISED BY THE ERROR. People were given suffrage who weren't entitled. Will people be given an opportunity to contest these strikes? Without knowing the specific nature of the error I can only assume that there may have been parties technically qualified, for example by being system administrators or foundation staff, whom would have been given a vote after being denied by the prior automatic rule who may now be disenfranchised by a hasty correction. It is my understanding that the parties incorrectly stricken previously were not contacted. I believe that an attempt should be made to contact stricken parties, even if it means delaying the results. ___ 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 Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/12 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: It is my understanding that the parties incorrectly stricken previously were not contacted. I believe that an attempt should be made to contact stricken parties, even if it means delaying the results. Really? That amazes me. Surely everyone that has their vote stricken for any reason should be informed. You can't accept a vote and then throw it away without telling the voter, that's appalling. Note: Even if I'm not incorrect, I'm speaking about people who were stricken and later fixed, it may just be that they were fixed before a message could have gone out. I too agree that there is an obligation to contact, hopefully with enough time to respond and point out an error, but I don't believe that the the contact must be absolutely immediate. (For those who might think we're just splitting hairs on this: In last years election there were several pairs of candidates with a fairly small margin between them, 8 votes in one case. With three candidates being elected I don't believe its outrageous that the striking might conceivably change the result of the election, so it really should be handled with the utmost of care for practical reasons as well as principled ones) ___ 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 Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Tim Starlingtstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is the key to avoidance in the future!) It was my fault, and it was pretty much identical to the error I made in 2007, where certain kinds of edits were double-counted and so the effective edit count threshold was lower than it should have been. Thanks Tim. It sounded like what happened in the past. I apologize for not doing my part and catching it this time. :( To err is human... nice to know that at least some of us aren't bots. ;) May all future errors be as correctable! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Update on struck votes issue on SecurePoll
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Philippe Beaudettepbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: Earlier today a number of adjustments were made to votes which had been previously struck in the election for Wikimedia Board of Trustees. We believe the votes that are still struck are validly struck; if there is a dispute, any user is encouraged to contact the Election Committee (board-electi...@lists.wikimedia.org) or any member personally for clarification. Is there any reason why some, but not all, super-seeded votes have also been struck? There are a number of cases, but picking one I know personally, strikeDetails 15:49, 28 July 2009 Ragesoss en.wikipedia.org/strike Details 14:06, 9 August 2009Ragesossen.wikipedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Update on struck votes issue on SecurePoll
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Casey Brownli...@caseybrown.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 4:35 AM, Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com wrote: And is there some data about those numbers from last elections? A page with a large number of stats[1] was linked from the Results[2] page last year. I think that's what you want. Well, actually, it gives a lot of statistics... but seems to be missing one of the most important ones: number of eligible voters. There exists a pre-calculated list of eligible voters used to authorize access to the polls. Is there any reason that this couldn't be made public as soon as it is generated? With good eligibility data available spiffy graphs like mine from 2007 can be generated: http://toolserver.org/~gmaxwell/election_analysis/ivote3/graphs.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board election spamming
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, This is a huge improvement over the last election where not all projects were targeted for this type of mail. As a result there is less bias in the system. So you can opt out if you do not want to receive an e-mail for the next election. Iit is a huge improvement to have an e-mail by the organisers of the election over someone who does because he can and has thinks it a good idea. This is very much a friendly nudge to go and do your democratic duty because you can. Although it's not an improvement in that its very close to the election and the rate of response to the mail appeared to lag several days in a prior election. A lot of people are going to notice the mail next week and be annoyed that they were left out. Someone should make a note of that for the future. My rule of thumb for any notification procedure on Wikipedia, based on meetup and other events, is that one week is required to even reach a majority of the eventual targets and that two is much better. Sufficient notice is important— Especially when responding to the notice is something that may require reading a half meg of text or so. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Voluntary self-regulation of multimedia service providers
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:08 AM, Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 8:41 AM, private musingsthepmacco...@gmail.com wrote: Well yeah Milos - but we probably won't - will we! - Seems a bit silly. I was hoping we could have a thread about the principle of discussing / evaluating some of the various voluntary codes of conduct out there - perhaps someone is aware of a US standard (is that what you're getting at, Geni - that the location of the servers is probably the most important factor?) I don't see any reason why should we follow any law which we don't have to follow. We don't have to follow the internet norm that making your web page text BLINKING YELLOW ON BLUE is something you don't do… and yet we do. Don't think of this has obeying laws, think of it that there are some things we don't have to do, which aren't in conflict with our mission, and which would be in our interests. Although the starting premise that we don't comply with a (multitude of) code(s) of conduct is a bit flawed. The projects clearly do— though they may not be ones written down by third parties and they may be inadequate... ___ 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 5:19 PM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: Our approach to job titles actually has an emerging basic pattern. :-) It's not 100% consistent because we sometimes have stuck with commonly used titles like Office Manager and General Counsel, but generally one we try to follow: [snip] It's not bad to have an internal pattern, but I think it's more important to match the practices in industry. 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) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Two questions about the licensing update of media files
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Michael Snowwikipe...@verizon.net wrote: [snip] I cannot fathom why you would limit media to being released only under the GFDL unless it was designed specifically for incorporation into a GFDL work. It's a documentation license, not a media license, and when applied to radically different contexts it will still be free in the dogmatic sense, but it may no longer be all that useful. Because, unfortunately, representatives of Creative Commons have asserted that CC-By-Sa licensed media can integrated as a whole integrated into non-free works, producing a result which is not freely licensed. In other words— that the cc-by-sa copyleft is nearly moot in the context of images since they tend to be either incorporated verbatim or subject to only trivial non-copyright deserving modifications even when the the resulting work as a whole clearly builds upon the illustration and isn't merely a collection of separate things. The license text itself appears to be reasonably explicit on this matter— but I feel it would be unethical to use CC-By-SA when doing so would cause me to end up litigating against people who were merely following, in good faith, what they believe to be authoritative advice. GFDL licensed images are still perfectly usable in freely licensed reference works, in spite of the inconveniences in the license. It's unfortunate that there doesn't currently exist an unclouded copyleft license which is well suited for photographs. ___ 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 2:40 AM, Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Ryan Lomonacowiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: The rules did disenfranchise me, for example. It doesn't bother me that I can't vote, but that said, I would've liked to vote if eligible. I am not active on Wikipedia, but I do follow the mailing lists, and have followed the election process. If I really wanted to, I could've racked up 50 edits to get a vote, but that almost seems dirty, I guess, to make edits just to regain eligibility for the election. I think that mailing lists posts should be treated as edits. It wouldn't contradict the argument I made. ___ 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 10:08 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: 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. Who says there needs to be? The recent edits criteria reduces the incentive to crack or otherwise collect old unused but qualified accounts. For example, I could setup a free watchlist aggregation service and users would give me their passwords. Over time I could obtain many and then wait for accounts to naturally become inactive, then I could vote with them. It also makes it harder to otherwise obtain votes from accounts whos owners have lost interest in the project and might be willing to part with theirs easily. Recent editing activity also provides more information for analysis in the event that some kind of vote fraud is suspected. A recent edits criteria is justifiable on this kind of process basis alone. 50 edits can easily be made in a couple of hours, even if you're not making trivial changes. If you're not putting that level of effort it seems somewhat doubtful that you're going to read the 0.5 MBytes of text or so needed to completely and carefully review the provided candidate material from scratch. Like all stereotypes it won't hold true for everyone but if it's true on average then it will produce an average improvement, we just need to be careful not to disenfranchise too many. ___ 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 2:00 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 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. (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at this, it's probably absolutely hideous for all kinds of technical reasons) Eh, backspace isn't much of a difficulty. It could probably also be made to only trigger for text over some particular size. You're not likely to have a legal obligation for a couple of words, but if you copy several paragraphs you'll have both a legal and an ethical obligation to provide some form of attribution. I could see more practical issues with it complicating moving text around in articles. The applicable principle of usability is that the default behaviour should be what is the usually the right behaviour and you should be able to override it when it isn't. Attribute on copy fits that principle. A while back I put in a JS kludge on commons that made right clicking on thumbnails remind you once and only once (via a cookie) that you can save a higher resolution version from the image page. Erik eventually removed it based on the completely reasonable complaint that it left the same kind of bad taste as sites that totally disable image saving. So, how does this solution avoid 'feeling' like sites that do obnoxious things? I notice that my browser spins busy whenever I highlight. Is that okay? ___ 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 9:19 PM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: Indeed, that's the reasoning behind the proposed approach. We don't want it to typically be changing constantly for an individual user. Yes, a sequential run does introduce various problematic biases. An IP-address based hack could work, but would need to take into account dynamic IP addresses and such, without introducing strange new biases of its own. We'll discuss a bit further - good ideas / algorithms welcome. :-) For this the normal procedure is to give users a session cookie of some kind (either one handed out by the server or one just generated on the client) and base the selection on that. For caching reasons I suppose you'd just want to do this all client side. Should work fine. Alternatively, someone rigs up the front end caches to do this substitution based on IP at serving time. This would be non-trivial with squid. It would be much easier with varnish, alas. In any case, I strongly agree with the argument against running them sequentially. Not only do you get the uncertainty from changing habits over time but later buttons will suffer from the influence of prior ones. Whatever can be done to avoid sequential testing should be done. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
