Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates
On 3/22/2012 9:00 PM, Steven Walling wrote: On Mar 22, 2012 8:46 PM, Cynthia Ashley-Nelsoncindam...@gmail.com wrote: In Twinkle, we can add a custom Welcome message. Is it possible to create a customized Welcome template that allows the user to insert a personalized message to the Twinkle interface? Or even make changes to the existing templates that allows users to insert a personal message prior to placing on the user's talk page? Yes, this not difficult at all to add to Twinkle, and if the maintainers of the gadget are willing I think this should be one of the experiments we try. The idea of prompting normal handwritten comments as part of the interface was also suggested in the feedback from our recent test of PROD and AfD templates in Twinkle. Wow, handwritten? I didn't know MediaWiki was going to skip straight past WYSIWYG to OCR. Is it time to start weeding out editors with bad penmanship? More seriously, while a wiki may not be a social network for its own sake, I do think it's worth emphasizing that collaboration depends on some sort of human connection. Bots can be great tools to facilitate work, but they do nothing to facilitate connections. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia considering declaring open-season on works from countries lacking US copyright relations
On 2/23/2012 9:37 AM, Robert Rohde wrote: Under US copyright law (and more generally the Berne Convention), establishing that a work is in the public domain due to a lack of treaty status requires meeting several requirements, and those templates only address the most obvious one. These requirements are: 1) The work was first published in a country that has no copyright relations with the US. 2) None of the authors of the work are citizens of any country that does have copyright relations with the US. 3) Within thirty days of publication in the non-treaty state, the work was never also published in any other state that does have copyright relations with the US. Regarding the second point, the coverage is actually even broader than citizenship, it includes residency. So if one of the authors is an Iranian exile living in Turkey, the work may be subject to copyright protection in the US even if it was published only in Iran. I think it's interesting to note that although the approach under discussion may seem like a mechanical application of law and entirely neutral on its face, the scenario I've indicated suggests that its structural effects could be far from neutral, with significant political consequences. Basically, it means that when a country that does not participate in international copyright agreements, to the extent that it may be a repressive and often censorious regime whose opponents are commonly forced into expatriate life, we could be indiscriminately republishing works acceptable to the regime while taking a much more restrictive approach to works from a dissident perspective. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors
On 1/3/2012 3:08 PM, Erik Moeller wrote: The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a Mark as Helpful feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them. Not disputing that the talk page system might have bigger issues, but it strikes me that adding Mark as Helpful specifically to user talk messages could be a good addition as well, assuming that the current implementation indicates the feature has a positive impact. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] c6e7b72d1e1d565603d3d7b0a77e00ba17a7d306
On 12/1/2011 11:15 AM, Dan Collins wrote: The sum total of human knowledge, and we can't find a decent spam filter. No, that really is the sum total of human knowledge, expressed in hexadecimal. I was pretty sure it would add up to more than 42. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community consensus for software changes (Re: Show community consensus for Wikilove)
On 10/31/2011 11:04 AM, David Levy wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: As a matter of general practice, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to be responsive to the community both before and after the deployment of software, but it doesn't obtain community consensus before deploying software which it would like to deploy on its sites and services, nor does it necessarily write or deploy software changes if a consensus to do so exists. Brandon Harris explicitly stated that the policy for deployment of the tool is that it is by request only, and the requesting wiki must ... show community consensus. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-October/070062.html That leaves three possibilities: A) Community consensus was demonstrated at the English Wikipedia. B) The WikiLove deployment policy was violated. C) The above statement by Brandon Harris is incorrect. If I understand correctly, the English Wikipedia is the main test deployment for this as an experimental feature. While the feature remains experimental, additional deployments to other wikis would only happen if requested by community consensus. At some level, it would not make sense to insist that consensus is required prior to conducting any experiment, as that effectively defeats the ability to experiment. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment
On 10/31/2011 10:09 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Robin McCain, 31/10/2011 17:20: We must also remember that the wiki edit interface and markup can be a little intimidating to a newbie, so opening an edit window and making no changes may be more common than we think. Are there any stats on this? Yes, it was something like 70 % of edit clicks are not followed by save. It's difficuilt to tell how many of those were people (or even stupid bots) looking for the source text. For me, the most common reason why an edit click is not followed by a save is because I end up not having the time to complete the work, or the edit I had in mind becomes more complicated than I thought (sometimes the latter partly explains the former). To put it idiomatically, it's a reaction to biting off more than I can chew. That may not be entirely typical, but in the sense of editing proved more difficult than anticipated it probably explains many abortive attempts at editing. I suppose it's been suggested before, but I think more fine-grained section editing capability, so you can simply highlight any portion of an article and open an edit window for just that portion, could be helpful. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The image filter: Thoughts on the German/English question
On 10/13/2011 8:43 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: My impression, from reading several articles in this topic area in both projects, is that this is quite a representative example, illustrating fundamental differences in approach between the German and English Wikipedias, with the German Wikipedia generally aspiring to a more high-brow, rather than populist, approach. It's worth adding that so many people from German-speaking culture have good English skills, including virtually all of those who are interested in pursuing the less scholarly presentation of information, that it allows the English Wikipedia to serve as a release valve where this might otherwise create greater divisions in the German Wikipedia's philosophy of creating an encyclopedia. Going beyond the issue of images, this manifests itself in their rather different perspectives on inclusion/deletion and notability. In all respects, this was a very insightful analysis of the situation. It's interesting to consider some of the unexpected tradeoffs involved in taking different approaches to making an encyclopedia. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
On 10/5/2011 7:03 AM, Domas Mituzas wrote: The only thing we truly could do is restore read access. But if the it.wikipedia community really wants to strike, there's very little we can do to stop them. :) I sure agree with that. There're plenty of ways to inflict pain without terminating the service entirely. Editor strike means not editing, it doesn't mean full service downtime. When labor unions go on strike, they do more than not show up for work. They form picket lines and take other actions designed to obstruct activity so that company operations cannot proceed. Taken to its logical conclusion, if the Italian Wikipedia community collectively wants to go on strike, then what they have done is apply the full range of tools to carry that out. How do we deal with an editor who starts deleting his contributions out of spite? In contrast to strike actions, in those countries that recognize the right to organize collectively, sabotage and destruction are generally considered illegal and beyond the pale of acceptable behavior. Certainly we should not support anyone in the Italian community who thought it was a good idea to vandalize or delete portions of the encyclopedia as part of their protest. But I don't think someone acting out of spite is a good comparison, since it seems pretty clear that this action is not being taken out of spite. I am happy to keep my trust in the Italian Wikipedia community, that it is in the best position to judge whether this protest is needed, what measures are appropriate to the situation, and how long to carry on with it. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
On 10/5/2011 9:45 AM, emijrp wrote: 2011/10/5 Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com On 10/5/2011 7:03 AM, Domas Mituzas wrote: Editor strike means not editing, it doesn't mean full service downtime. When labor unions go on strike, they do more than not show up for work. They form picket lines and take other actions designed to obstruct activity so that company operations cannot proceed. Taken to its logical conclusion, if the Italian Wikipedia community collectively wants to go on strike, then what they have done is apply the full range of tools to carry that out. Looks like you forget that as exists a right to strike, there is a right to work. Italian Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Yesterday, today? Sure. If there was a part of the Italian Wikipedia community insisting on preserving the ability to edit, this might be more relevant. But since the protest has started, the only voices I've seen speaking against the protest have been from outside that community. That seems to me like a persuasive indication about the level of consensus behind this decision. Questions about crossing picket lines and the right to work are interesting theoretical problems when using this analogy, but they aren't presenting themselves under the current circumstances. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters
On 9/30/2011 8:53 AM, Milos Rancic wrote: As mentioned in some of the previous posts, I think that it is much more feminist to defend right of girls to be sexually educated, even if it would mean secretly browsing Wikipedia articles on sexuality, than to insist on comfort of adult females in offices and questionable background of one pseudo-ideological position. From a feminist perspective, I would think there's clear reason for concern that the kind of sexual education (not just) girls would receive while browsing Wikipedia articles is built upon and reinforces many social elements connected with the oppression of women, and that the selection and presentation of images is a big part of the problem. Having divergent approaches starting with such basic topics as penises and vaginas suggests that that the difference in treatment is pretty pervasive. It's good to support education for girls, but if the kind of education provided is just going to perpetuate the problem, it's fair to question whether it's being conducted appropriately. On this score, it seems likely that we are failing to live up to one of our core principles, that of neutrality. I think we need significantly better editorial judgment applied to many of these articles to address it. That will be a challenge as long as we have a male-dominated community that lacks much appreciation for the nature of the problem, and often fails to recognize how diverse its manifestations are. But I suspect that if we were substantially closer to a neutral approach in our coverage of these topics, there might be much less pressure around the principle of resistance to censorship. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 9/21/2011 7:53 AM, phoebe ayers wrote: On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 10:10 PM, phoebe ayersphoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: This seems like an over-hasty statement. There are many possible categorization schemes that are neutral; the ALA in fact makes that distinction itself, since libraries (obviously) use all kinds of labeling and categorization schemes all the time. The ALA and other library organizations have taken a stand against censorious and non-neutral labeling, not all labeling. If you keep reading the ALA page you linked, it says that the kind of labels that are not appropriate are when the prejudicial label is used to warn, discourage or prohibit users or certain groups of users from accessing the material -- e.g. a label that reads not appropriate for children. That does not mean that picture books for kids, or mystery novels, or large-print books, aren't labeled as such in every public library in the country -- and that is the difference between informative and prejudicial labeling. Would I be incorrect in pointing out that American public librarys routinely exclude world famous childrens book author Astrid Lindgrens childrens books, because to puritanical minds a man who can elevate himself with a propeller beany, and look into childs rooms thereby, smacks too much of pedophilia? Uh... yes, you would be incorrect? I certainly checked out Astrid Lindgren books from the public library when I was a kid. I have never heard of them getting challenged in the US. Citation needed? The ALA maintains a list of books that do get routinely challenged in US libraries here: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/index.cfm. Note, this just means someone *asked* for the book to be removed from the public or school library, not that it actually was; libraries generally stand up to such requests. Also note that challenges are typically asking for the book to be removed from the library altogether -- restricting access to it for everyone in the community -- as opposed to simply not looking at it yourself or allowing your own kids to check it out. It's the 'removal for everyone' part that is the problem; the issue here is freedom of choice: people should have the right to read, or not read, a particular book as they see fit. I'm unable to find a source on this that doesn't appear to be relying on the Wikipedia article in the first place. The supposed rationale seems to be that Karlsson is sort of subversive, if you will, and the books might undermine traditional concepts of authority (for people of a certain era, maybe it also didn't help that the books were popular in the USSR). It's possible that somebody somewhere did question its inclusion once, which could be true of just about any book. Even if so, nothing suggests that the concern had anything to do with encouraging or catering to pedophiles. Were that the issue, I would have thought The Brothers Lionheart a more obvious target, seeing as how it has young boys bathing nude in a river (the scene is illustrated - child porn!), and I've never heard of it being banned either. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] board meeting minutes: Aug 3 2011
On 9/12/2011 3:22 PM, Lodewijk wrote: Hi Phoebe, thanks a lot! Reading the minutes, I am wondering - are the reports of the independent companies (KPMG and Daniel J. Fusco Company) available online so that the considerations of the board can be better understood? If so, it would probably be helpful to link them from the minutes :) I don't know for sure, but I'm going to guess neither report is online. From past discussions about this, the auditors have strongly discouraged having the reports they make to the foundation published. It's not a normal practice with any organization in their experience, and to them it's akin to an attorney letting a client publish the attorney's work product. I would guess that similar reasoning might apply to the Fusco report. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Hypothetical project rebranding Wikimedia
On 9/8/2011 9:27 AM, Nathan wrote: Echoing Orionist; I agree that the analysis is interesting and often spot-on (if brief), particularly with respect to how little marketing of the notion of Wikipedia/Wikimedia we do outside of the fundraiser. They lost me with the logos, though. The differences between the project logos don't indicate anything to the viewer; they are almost random variations of the shape W, and no one who hasn't read the logo pitch will understand what is meant to be conveyed. The puzzle globe logo is widely recognizable, and there's no clear benefit in abandoning it for something else. In the world of branding and advertising, when tackling a rebranding project the need for a new logo is basically assumed at the outset. Wikimedia's branding issues are an instance where that conventional wisdom ought to be challenged. Logo redesign is also a tempting target because the transition is a simple swap, and the agency can easily point to and explain their work product. The storytelling side of the project requires deeper engagement because it has to be thoroughly integrated in the organization to have value. That makes it more work for the branding agency, while simultaneously being less able to claim what their contribution was. It may make more sense to develop that capacity internally, which is one thing the foundation has been trying to do as it expands its staff. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On 9/9/2011 3:37 PM, MZMcBride wrote: It's not out of line to suggest that Wikimedia is especially interested in the English Wikipedia. It's _indisputable_ at the Wikimedia Foundation level. Whether it's as true at the Wikimedia Board level is a bit more arguable, though there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that it's equally true there. A cursory look at the Wikimedia Board resolutions is pretty damning. The resolutions are more a reflection of what issues the board is able to reach a consensus on, as opposed to what it is interested in. From my experience, there was a fair bit of discussion about various concerns involving, say, Wikinews or Wikiversity, but we had difficulty agreeing on what the solutions were, and sometimes whether interventions were necessary or even what the problems were. I don't mean to suggest that the board lacks the ability to deal with other issues and focuses on Wikipedia as a result - I think it reflects the uncertain position of the community generally, which hasn't coalesced much around any particular answer to those questions. I do hope the board continues working on some of those issues. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Brasil + WMF
On 9/2/2011 12:11 PM, Florence Devouard wrote: On 9/1/11 5:37 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote: On 8/28/11 1:00 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: I think that developing such a legal entity should be a high priority for Brazilian Wikipedians to ensure that Wiki activities in Brazil are controlled by Brazilians. At the same time I don't think there is any value to having a WMF appointee on your board; such a person would find it difficult to function under circumstances of perpetual conflict of interest. No other chapter has such a clause. I had never thought of this before, but now that it has been mentioned, I just wanted to disagree, quite respectfully because Ray is awesome of course, and say that I think it is a very interesting idea to have a WMF appointee on the boards of chapters. There should be very few cases where there is a conflict of interest since chapters and the Foundation are deeply tied together always (and that's a good thing). I think having a Foundation representative on the board of chapters does present some possibly insurmountable logistical issues (who will they be?) but I actually think such an arrangement might be incredibly valuable for improving communication and *decreasing* perceived conflicts of interest. --Jimbo I can not help commenting a bit more on the matter of conflict of interest. I think I can probably say more on the matter than most people here. First because I pushed a LOT for the adoption of a COI policy on the board of WMF. And this generated lot's of painful discussions between you, Michael and I. In particular with regards to your involvement with Wikia. For those reading whose memories may not be quite long enough - I assume Florence is referring to Michael Davis here, not to me. The conflict of interest policy was adopted in 2006, before I was on the board. I just thought it would help to make the distinction explicit, as it wouldn't be the first time somebody has gotten us confused. Meanwhile, on the subject of mutual board appointments between chapters and the foundation, I figured I'd chime in as I helped push the idea for chapters to select foundation board members in the first place. For one thing, there's a very different power dynamic between the chapters collectively choosing a couple members of the foundation's board, and the foundation solely choosing a member of an individual chapter's board. The chapter-appointed seats cannot really be controlled outside of the selection process itself, so those board members can act as freely as their colleagues, and certainly no single chapter can force them to act in a particular way. This is partly by design, since the ultimate fiduciary obligations of those board members are still to the foundation rather than a chapter, and is why we emphasized that they are not necessarily being selected as representatives of the chapters. However, somebody appointed to a chapter board by the foundation would be directly answerable to the foundation, and it could be fairly easy to argue that they are an agent of the foundation. It undermines the organizational independence much more dramatically. If the point is to improve communication, then a more practical approach might be to designate observers who are not given authority but merely sit in with a chapter board. That's assuming that the chapter board level is one of the places where it makes the most sense to add a communication interface. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Brasil + WMF
On 9/2/2011 1:35 PM, Béria Lima wrote: *If the point is to improve communication, then a more practical approach might be to designate observers who are not given authority but merely sit in with a chapter board. That's assuming that the chapter board level is one of the places where it makes the most sense to add a communication interface. * 35 people from WMF to observ every single chapter? It's not a full-time job, since being a board member is not supposed to be a full-time job either. I could imagine something like appointing Jan-Bart as the observer for all European chapters, or Barry for all Asian chapters (not that observers would necessarily have to be Wikimedia board or staff). Again, I don't know that this is really the best solution, but it's not completely impractical to arrange if such a direction is chosen. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters
On 8/28/2011 10:04 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com wrote: On 8/28/2011 9:00 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Nathannawr...@gmail.comwrote: Which activities are these? Copyright and internet law lobbying. This is incorrect. Michael, Have you seen the draft Chapters Grant Agreement? I don't believe I have seen it, no. I gather from the other comments it contains language about grant recipients complying with US law. Without a more thorough review, I'm not in a position to say how necessary such language is or how extensively it would be interpreted with respect to a chapter's overall activities. However, it doesn't change my point that nonprofits can in fact engage in lobbying under US law. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters
On 8/28/2011 9:00 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Nathannawr...@gmail.com wrote: Which activities are these? Copyright and internet law lobbying. This is incorrect. The foundation can engage in lobbying under US regulations if it wishes. Restrictions on lobbying by nonprofits are a limitation in degree, not a prohibition. Lobbying simply cannot be too significant a portion of the nonprofit's activities. If a nonprofit does engage in lobbying, the IRS has various tests that can be applied to determine if its tax exemption is jeopardized. The reason for the popular misconception is that most nonprofits avoid lobbying altogether out of an abundance of caution. What the foundation actually cannot do is contribute to political candidates or support partisan activities, those are categorically prohibited. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters
On 8/11/2011 7:08 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: Anyway, thanks for raising the importance of decentralization. The Board agrees: there's a reason it was first in our list of principles. To my mind decentralization is important raises a whole bunch of other important questions: is decentralization more important than efficiency as a working principle? I think it is, at least up to a point. We need to have a diversity of tools and actors involved in fundraising, and decentralization should help that if done well. Also, we do not have an obligation to maximize revenue, so efficiency is not necessarily a cardinal virtue. I don't mean that we should disregard efficiency, but we can choose to sacrifice a bit of efficiency if, as a tradeoff, this benefits some other value we think is important like decentralization. One thing that struck me about reviewing chapter financials was that there are 20+ chapters that don't directly receive donations and haven't applied for many grants to date, and thus have little to no money to support program work. Though mostly outside the scope of the Board's letter, this is for instance one part of our model that I would like to see change -- Wikimedians everywhere should have better access to resources to get things done. On this specific point, I do disagree with Birgitte -- I think a well-developed grants program [and it's true we're not there yet, but want to be soon] could actually help us decentralize faster, in that to obtain money needed for program work chapters or other groups wouldn't have to develop the (increasingly difficult) infrastructure needed to directly fundraise with all the attendant legal and fiduciary concerns. I like the sound of this, but with a note of caution about a well-developed grants program. In many contexts, as grants programs develop and mature, grantees end up needing to develop increasingly complex infrastructure to secure and manage grants. At that point, it may not be any more helpful to these objectives than the model we are trying to move away from. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chapters and replacing the Audit committee
On 8/9/2011 1:43 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote: One possible way to decentralise whilst maintaining or even improving fiscal accountability would be to replace the Audit committee with a group audit committee. I'm familiar with this model here in the UK in our not for profit housing sector - basically multiple organisations in the same group are audited by the same committee. To keep the committee to a manageable size you wouldn't have every chapter on it every year, and you would probably continue to have independents as now. But I would hope you'd avoid having a majority from any one continent let alone one country. Also as a matter of good governance there should be a separation of powers - none of our treasurers should serve on it without at least a break of a year since serving as a treasurer. If you're talking about overseeing a financial audit process, I doubt that a group audit committee would be at all efficient, because of the need to comply with requirements that vary in detail from one jurisdiction to the next. If you're talking about an audit committee to monitor risk factors more generally, then the existing audit committee already takes it as being part of its mandate to study risks for the movement as a whole. For example, see http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_risks_2009 As to the idea of decentralization, I'm having trouble seeing why this suggestion would be the place to start. I don't know if it's a meaningful difference in function, so I'm skeptical as to what the proposal would accomplish. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters
On 8/6/2011 4:00 PM, Florence Devouard wrote: On 8/6/11 1:36 AM, Michael Snow wrote: On 8/5/2011 4:26 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com wrote: .. Honestly, I must say that it is a colossal disappointment to find that with all the posts I've seen both here and on internal-l, nobody has yet made a single edit to the talk page on Meta where the letter was posted. Doesn't anybody here know how to use a wiki? Michael, the board announcement is not a good way to start a conversation. Perhaps it is you who doesn't know how to use a wiki. :P That's funny, it seems to have started quite a bit of conversation. I just wanted to point out that we have these recurring arguments about the right mailing list to use, when we keep ignoring the arguably more open and transparent forum we're all familiar with. A (very) significant part of the discussion was held in face to face for all those who were at Wikimania. An excellent proof in support of why it was urgent to get the letter out now. I'm sorry I couldn't be there to participate. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters
On 8/5/2011 2:22 PM, Nathan wrote: Beria, I don't think your views on transparency as stated mesh all that well with the character of this list. I'd suspect the same is true of the wider community of editors and donors; the assertion that details be discussed in private is both improper and at distinct odds with the history of the WMF. If chapters prefer that their actions not be subject to the oversight of the WMF and Wikimedia community, then they should do their own fundraising and develop their own trademarks. When it comes to the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and one of its chapters, I think it's understandable that much of that discussion happens directly between the foundation and the given chapter. That's no different than the kind of interaction people expect under any circumstances. It's just like an editor might want to receive the courtesy of being contacted personally, on their user talk page or via email, about a problem, rather than somebody going off to blast them on a mailing list. So at some point, I think the concepts of in private or in public are not really what anybody is aiming for, especially since they get used in such black-and-white terms that leave no flexibility for circumstances. That being said, when it comes to discussing the guiding principles for things like fundraising, or the relationships between the foundation and chapters collectively, I do think it would be better to have more of that discussion open to the entire community. In terms of identifying the right forum for discussion, though, I'm not sure how much better this list really is, given that anecdotally its atmosphere has driven so many chapter people to resist subscribing. Honestly, I must say that it is a colossal disappointment to find that with all the posts I've seen both here and on internal-l, nobody has yet made a single edit to the talk page on Meta where the letter was posted. Doesn't anybody here know how to use a wiki? --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters
On 8/5/2011 4:26 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com wrote: .. Honestly, I must say that it is a colossal disappointment to find that with all the posts I've seen both here and on internal-l, nobody has yet made a single edit to the talk page on Meta where the letter was posted. Doesn't anybody here know how to use a wiki? Michael, the board announcement is not a good way to start a conversation. Perhaps it is you who doesn't know how to use a wiki. :P That's funny, it seems to have started quite a bit of conversation. I just wanted to point out that we have these recurring arguments about the right mailing list to use, when we keep ignoring the arguably more open and transparent forum we're all familiar with. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters
On 8/5/2011 7:17 PM, Nathan wrote: John's e-mail reads like a suggestion that the Foundation negotiated in bad faith. I hope this isn't the case, although the references made to consulting with outside auditors and meetings of the Audit Committee suggest this decision may have been conceived prior to the Fundraising Summit. The audit committee met and discussed this in July, so after the fundraising summit. I don't know the exact timeline of everything that went into this, but at that point it was my sense that it was only just coming together as an actual decision, if you will. That's not to say that chapter accountability and reporting, particularly around finances, has never come up as a concern before. It's enough of a longstanding issue that if you think about it, it shouldn't be a real surprise that the board would eventually need to give input on it. If there's a surprise, it's more that it's hard to predict what will drive the board to act on a particular issue at a particular moment. (I'm not exactly sure the board can predict it, either. I would have liked it as chair if agendas were fully predictable six months in advance, but things don't quite work out that way.) --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge
On 7/29/2011 11:06 AM, Wjhonson wrote: Yes of course translating documents has been practiced in academia for a very long time. We however are not a first publisher of translations. We are an aggregator of sources. That is the point of RS. We don't publish first. Translating a quotation from a foreign-language source in a Wikipedia article is functionally no different from translating the contents of a Wikipedia article in one language to create an equivalent Wikipedia article in a different language. The latter is an utterly routine and fairly common practice (though I'm not suggesting that any Wikipedia article *needs* to be based on translations this way). Obviously translation needs to be done with care, just like synthesizing source material to write an article requires care. And some people may be better at one or the other, so it may be possible to improve on the work as Mark describes, as long as the original also remains available, as it should. Stretching a guideline about using reliable sources to the point that it conflicts with unobjectionable standard practices suggests that the guideline is being stretched too far. Even the most reliable sources do not need to be treated like some people treat the Quran, as if it's inappropriate to render them in any language but the original. That's a religious belief, and in a religious context I fully respect that people may believe such things, but in the context of writing Wikipedia articles, our beliefs about the sources we use should not be religious, they should be based on analysis and editorial judgment. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome Tilman Bayer to the Wikimedia Foundation
On 7/8/2011 11:15 AM, Nathan wrote: Michael Snow, Sage Ross, HaeB... I think the WMF is conspiring against the Signpost :-P You could include Phoebe too, for that matter. I'm always impressed with how much has been accomplished with the Signpost that I could never have envisioned originally, and I think they're all great people who have a lot to contribute in their Wikimedia roles. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Nominating Committee
On 6/25/2011 1:50 AM, Lodewijk wrote: Hi, I read from several posts that the process with the nominating committee did not work out at all. In the mean time the whole nominating committee (and therefore any formal procedure where non-board members, read: the community, have any say on who gets onto the board in the appointed seat). I might have missed it (probably have) but is there some kind of evaluation of the functioning of the NomCom and a good reasoning why it was totally abolished? Is it clear /why/ it did not work? Birgitte seems to suggest it didnt work because procedures were not followed. Earlier (don't recall where exactly) (a) board member(s) seemed to suggest that it did not work because they were too slow and did not do their job. Both arguments seem to me something that can be solved quite easily - by starting to follow procedures or by getting different people on the committee. Perhaps someone who was there on the board at the time could clarify? It was certainly too slow of a process, but as Birgitte points out, the system itself lacked the capacity to produce the desired result. I wouldn't fault the committee members for not doing their job at all, they contributed to the extent that they could. What the nominating committee was reasonably successful at was formulating criteria and scoring candidates according to those criteria, in the manner Milos alluded to earlier. It was moderately successful at brainstorming names to consider in developing a list of people we might be interested in, but I don't think it should be relied on as the only or primary tool to surface potential candidates. This work would be enough for a basic screening function, in the same way as reviewing a bunch of CVs to see how well they satisfy essential qualifications, in order to make up the initial hiring pool for a job. It would need to be supplemented by recruiting to make sure the pool is deep enough, and indeed bringing in a recruiter did help the process move forward (the recruiter was brought on during the same time as Matt's appointment was being considered, so wasn't important to that except in that we knew parts of the process weren't meeting our needs). Where the nominating committee really was not able to help much, and probably the major frustration for all of us, was in actually vetting candidates once an initial pool was developed. And I think that realistically, it doesn't make sense to try to do this as a distributed group, as the level of interaction just isn't substantial enough. In the same way that face-to-face meetings are still an essential part of board business, the personal investment required to identify new board members who meet specific expertise needs was more than we could accomplish by our usual community processes. I also believe the nominating committee may not have felt like it could fully step into the shoes of the board in evaluating candidates for what the board wanted. So I think there are unresolved issues in terms of how much of the process can be delegated, and how to more effectively delegate the parts that can be. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Seat and Donations (SPLIT from: EFF Bitcoins)
On 6/23/2011 1:59 PM, Dan Rosenthal wrote: The lesson to be learned from this, I guess, is that even if you have a good process and a good outcome, sometimes the community doesn't necessarily see it that way, and a greater deal of proactive engagement could be helpful in those cases. Less abstractly, I remember there being some talk on this list about the seat and donations at the time Matt's appointment was first announced, but what I don't remember (please correct me if I'm wrong on this) is the WMF publicly addressing community concerns about the grant timing beyond no, the seat wasn't bought. We didn't address concerns about timing when the appointment and grant were announced because the concerns then being expressed weren't about timing. Nobody in 2009 was saying we should have taken the grant and waited a few months to appoint Matt, or appointed him immediately and accepted the grant later. The concern at the time was clearly about a quid pro quo, and it's only useful so many times to repeat that there isn't one. There was also a QA that addressed the actual process and reasons for Matt's appointment, though maybe it didn't explain the context as well as Sue has just done. But the notion that changing the timing would have made the situation less difficult is only coming up in retrospect. To be frank, I also disagree that changing the timing would have improved things in any practical sense. It doesn't really obscure the connection much, if that's even what we would want to do. And for people who were worrying about the implications, I think setting things up in stages is just as likely to make it look worse as to make it look better. The delay simply adds the possibility of new concerns, like wondering what other unstated conditions had to be satisfied in the intervening time for the other part of the deal to go through. And it also encourages the idea that there must still be even more shoes to drop. Basically, the timing issue would just become more raw material for people inclined to engage in speculation. That being said, I fully agree that the engagement and communication with the community around this should have been better. Doing it in the middle of Wikimania was way too chaotic in the first place. Then having our internet connection disappear literally right in between two emails I was sending to announce Matt's appointment and the Omidyar grant left everyone to find out about the grant from Omidyar's press release, and made it seem much less aboveboard than it was. And I recall there was understandable displeasure that some of the targets being used to evaluate the grant were considered confidential at Omidyar's request. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EFF Bitcoins
On 6/22/2011 10:14 AM, MZMcBride wrote: Michael Snow wrote: I thought it was reasonably understandable, even without perfect grammar, that Ting was saying that since Matt is no longer at Omidyar, if your insinuation were true, when he left the foundation would have needed to bring in someone new from Omidyar to fill their board seat. I figured that out, and honestly I wasn't even aware until now that Matt had left Omidyar. I'm not sure it counts as an insinuation if it's true. They bought a Board seat. Honestly, I don't remember much dispute about this point when it happened in 2009 and looking back at the press releases at the time, it doesn't seem as though anyone was trying to hide this point. My original comment was only to say that if someone else (another group or organization) were willing to put up $2 million or more, another Board seat would probably become available. It's not as though the Board is incapable of changing its own structure to meet outside demands. The events happened at the same time, so the connection is pretty obvious, but it was never a quid pro quo. While I was on the board, there was at least one major donor who was interested in being added to the board based on their financial contributions, but that person was not considered a good fit despite being a generous supporter of the organization. So no, the notion that a board seat would be available for money is incorrect. We felt Matt added valuable expertise and would be a good addition to the board, whether Omidyar was donating $1 million or $10 million. As he remains on the board after leaving Omidyar, I presume that's also why he's still there. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Election results?
On 6/17/2011 7:54 AM, Theo10011 wrote: Results are out. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/Results/en Congratulations to Ting, SJ, and Kat, I'm glad that you will be continuing in your good work! Thanks also to the election committee, and just to remind them that they are not done - I'm certain people are interested in seeing the full results matrix as well, so it would be appreciated if they can release that at some point. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 6/1/2011 2:03 PM, Milos Rancic wrote: Wikimedia projects are curated and edited collections, according to certain principles: namely, we host only content that is both free and educational in nature. So Board said that Wikinews is out of scope. Its nature is informational, not educational. I'm sorry, but I don't understand what distinction you're trying to make. In this context, those look like synonyms to me. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] deleting old versions of fair-use files
On 5/30/2011 2:32 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: Hello, There's a bit of discussion about deleting old versions of fair-use files in the Hebrew Wikipedia and it may be interesting to other projects as well. The main questions is: Should old versions of fair-use files be deleted? The two main points that support the deletion are that it saves space on the server and that keeping a version of a non-free file violates the fair use policy, because the old version of the image can be viewed, but is not actually used in any relevant article. I just want to see if I understand this correctly. Is this a reference to files where the current revision is included in some article based on a fair use rationale, but the file also has earlier versions that are not so used? As opposed to a file that was previously used in an article, but is no longer used at all. In the latter situation, it's hard to make a fair use argument because there is no actual use case to point to, and I think the consensus has been that those files should be deleted, consistent with our policies limiting the exemptions for non-free content. For the first case, there's at least a plausible rationale that consistent with how MediaWiki operates, its public record of how the file was derived could be acceptable, including modifications that may be indicated by the file history. It might, for example, indicate how the current revision is a sufficiently transformative use to qualify as fair use, enough to justify the limited use of the otherwise unused old revision. Of course, if you start an analysis based on revision histories like that, you might also conclude that unused fair use files can be kept because they were used in previous revisions of articles. That's primarily an abstract theoretical response, and without some concrete examples to look at I don't really have much of an opinion on which direction we should resolve the question. Nor have I tried to consider how persuasive a court would find potential arguments on either side. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising committee?
On 4/17/2011 9:07 PM, MZMcBride wrote: Hi. Someone pointed out to me that in 2006, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees approved a resolution to create a fundraising committee: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Fundraising_committee. A few months later, it passed a subsequent resolution specifying the fundraising committee's membership: http://wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Fundraising_committee/Membership. In 2010, the Board passed a resolution about fundraising principles: http://wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_principles. The history of the fundraising committee (and what happened to it) is what's confusing me. Did a subsequent resolution/motion abolish it? Was it simply disbanded (and is that possible with the force of a Board resolution behind it)? There are now fundraising staff, but I'm not quite sure how that happened or what happened to any type of committee/workforce. The board passed a resolution redefining the committee system in 2009: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_Committees. That resolution defined all of the committees in operation at that time, and disbanded those that were no longer needed or inactive. The fundraising committee isn't mentioned specifically, but I'm sure it was no longer operational by that point. While it may not have captured every committee that had been contemplated at some point previously, this resolution was intended as an omnibus resolution that would apply to all of the existing committees and establish a new base from which to develop the committee system. Additional committees have been formed since then, but I would consider all earlier committees dissolved unless their continued function was acknowledged in that resolution. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising committee?
On 4/17/2011 9:26 PM, Liam Wyatt wrote: The board passed a resolution redefining the committee system in 2009: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_Committees. That resolution defined all of the committees in operation at that time, and disbanded those that were no longer needed or inactive. The fundraising committee isn't mentioned specifically, but I'm sure it was no longer operational by that point. --Michael Snow Indeed, the fundraising committee is mentioned in the staff committees section: Past committees include the Technical Committee and Fundraising Committee, which are not currently active. This shows that the fundraising was not only disbanded in practice, it was disbanded officially too. Thanks, I was looking at the list of other disbanded committees at the bottom and trying to figure out if we had just overlooked it, so I'm glad to know we did say it explicitly at the time. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent
On 4/5/2011 2:37 PM, David Gerard wrote: Classic is largely unmaintained, since no-one seems to want to bother to maintain it. To coin a phrase, Monobook is the new Classic. Maybe we should rename Classic to Legacy? That might communicate the implications a bit better to anyone considering it. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 3/9/2011 3:09 PM, David Gerard wrote: On 9 March 2011 23:02, David Goodmandgge...@gmail.com wrote: Until recently, the foundation has been increasing its staff by hiring the best person immediately available, rather than a person good enough to do the necessary job. Citation needed. It depends on your definition of recently. We were still making mistakes along these lines a couple years ago, but I think the relevant lessons were learned, certainly by the time we had to hire a CTO to replace Brion (who it's so wonderful to have back with us, not that he fully left or anything). And of course regularly reviewing and applying those lessons is good, not just for hiring but any kind of recruiting. For example, the process that led us to find Bishakha went through a number of iterations and took longer than we would have liked, but ultimately it was what we needed to find the right person for that position on the board. I would generally agree with much of David's advice as a matter of theory, regardless of how familiar he is with actual current practice at the foundation. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
On 3/8/2011 4:24 PM, Pedro Sanchez wrote: On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 6:09 PM, Arthur Richardsaricha...@wikimedia.org wrote: I don't know much about any official partnerships the Foundation has, but a non-trivial amount of in-person collaboration and information sharing goes on on a regular basis in the office between other tech organizations/companies (like Reddit, Google, OWA, Creative Commons, CiviCRM, etc) that would be impossible if we were working in an office in, say, Duluth, Minnesota. Or St. Petersburg, Florida for that matter. This has extraordinary benefit for us, at least in the technology department Thank you for your enlightening response. * Reddit ... a project with values similar to ours * Google ... a project with values similar to ours * OWA ?¿ * CivicCRM ... this one offers services to help internal management * Creative Commons ok, finally one project with similar values than ours: free content Now, out of the five, only one is actually related and shares similare values with our purpose. Then if you're part of staff, you're ina much better position to know about the benefical exchanges allowed by the move (which I agree, it's pointless to discuss now, what's done it's done). But now, if there are so many benefits over these years, but even people working closely don't know, this only hilights how disconnected are the elite from the working community. Now, actual exchanges that have got a lot of publicity and results: Kaltura: SF? No.. NY A big part of Kaltura's contribution was to sponsor the work of Michael Dale, who works out of the San Francisco office, and who previously was at the university in relatively nearby Santa Cruz. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Changes to the CFOO department
On 3/3/2011 12:41 PM, Veronique Kessler wrote: Thanks to everyone who is part of the fantastic projects of Wikimedia and keep up the good work! And thanks to you, Veronique, for all of your contributions. I have enjoyed getting to know you and working with you. You will be greatly missed, and have my best wishes for your future endeavors. The one consolation is that as a movement built around online volunteers worldwide, we are easy to find and never far away, no matter where you go. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 3/1/2011 11:44 AM, David Gerard wrote: On 1 March 2011 19:35, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I'm curious how http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Storyteller fits in with Wikimedia's mission or its strategic plan. It's pretty much directly answered right there on the linked page, for anyone else who's wondering. What bit of the page wasn't clear? Well, some people might selectively read that page and only see the parts about working on the fundraiser (spending money to raise more money), while missing the parts about creative work that conveys who we are to the world (creating educational materials), or telling stories that convince readers to become editors and donors (either one, or both, I would add). It mostly depends on what kind of bias you read the page with. I think all the misapprehensions and misunderstandings out there about the Wikimedia projects (even Wikipedia as the best known example) make a pretty compelling case that work along these lines is still needed. If people actually understood how collaboration on a wiki works, it would be much easier for them to accept the projects for what they are, rather than creating drama about things they aren't. Then we could focus more on dealing with the drama on the projects themselves. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 3/1/2011 12:57 PM, Pronoein wrote: If there is such a minority of ethical concerns, it could be one of the reasons that volunteers are leaving the boat. Based on the one survey of former contributors that has been conducted (see http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results), this doesn't figure highly enough to demonstrate the kind of significant minority you suggest. Rather, the concerns of those surveyed are overwhelmingly about how rulebound, overly complex, and unfriendly their work in the community seemed to be. Perhaps somebody would care to go back through the full survey responses and see if they can identify comments that fit the I was being exploited line you're pushing here. I would prefer to hope that as the foundation's community department works to develop the fundraising and messaging, it will also create and improve upon initiatives that lead to a better community environment, as that seems to be the dominant problem. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 3/1/2011 2:41 PM, Pronoein wrote: Le 01/03/2011 18:31, Michael Snow a écrit : On 3/1/2011 12:57 PM, Pronoein wrote: If there is such a minority of ethical concerns, it could be one of the reasons that volunteers are leaving the boat. Based on the one survey of former contributors that has been conducted (see http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results), this doesn't figure highly enough to demonstrate the kind of significant minority you suggest. Rather, the concerns of those surveyed are overwhelmingly about how rulebound, overly complex, and unfriendly their work in the community seemed to be. Perhaps somebody would care to go back through the full survey responses and see if they can identify comments that fit the I was being exploited line you're pushing here. I would prefer to hope that as the foundation's community department works to develop the fundraising and messaging, it will also create and improve upon initiatives that lead to a better community environment, as that seems to be the dominant problem. Thank you for your answer Michael. However: «Note that this survey was aimed at less experienced editors. » I remember for example that many administrators quit during the sexual content controversy because of the decision of Jimbo. Those people were driven by a vision of a certain type of governance and felt betrayed or disappointed. I acknowledge the limitations of the survey, and as always would be thrilled if we had more and better data. But since you were connecting your thesis to a broad systemic trend, I considered it more useful to look at evidence of systemic trends, not anecdotal reactions to a single incident. In terms of volunteer motivation, I'd have to think being driven by a vision of a certain type of governance has to rank pretty low, considering that our mission has nothing to do with promoting any particular vision in that field. A survey of former administrators or something like that might be informative, certainly, if somebody is available to drive that. My guess is that compared with other former volunteers, their responses would have more similarity than difference. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 3/1/2011 2:46 PM, Birgitte SB wrote: Ambiguity is only a bad thing when someone knows exactly what they want and they choose to be unclear about it rather than when is someone aware of a general need while being somewhat open-minded about how might be filled. This situation strikes me as the latter, advertising for a writer to develop public relations material for fundraising would probably bring in a much more narrow set of applicants and would also make it harder to get the new employee to take the other duties that are desired seriously. I don't know how much hiring you have done, but it is not uncommon for people to get their minds set as to what their job is early on and getting them to put a lot of effort into things they believe are not what they were hired to do is difficult. So if you want a new employee to have a wide range of duties, you should advertise describing a more open-ended position. People that have narrow mindsets are less likely to apply for vague jobs, and everyone wins because good hiring is all about fit. Narrow and well-settled duties = detailed description of opening. Wide-ranging and uncertain duties = ambiguous description of opening. This explanation is quite insightful, I think. The challenge described is a significant piece of why the Wikimedia Foundation has developed a somewhat non-standard approach to its organizational structure and allocation of staff responsibilities. Practically every conversation I've had with Sue about this, while hiring for a number of different positions, has touched on how unusual a combination of background, skills, and personality is needed for someone to be the right fit for us, and how adaptable both we and the candidates have to be during the hiring process in how we think about the position. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Storyteller job opening
On 3/1/2011 4:31 PM, SlimVirgin wrote: On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 18:06, Sue Gardnersgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 1 March 2011 15:54, SlimVirginslimvir...@gmail.com wrote: Michael, I wouldn't underestimate the I'm being exploited feeling for people either leaving, or failing to join up. In Wikipedia's early years, we were exploiting ourselves, as it were. But the more of a corporate structure the Foundation assumes, the greater the sense that we're working for something in which we have no input. There will be a tipping point that differs for each individual, and they may not even express it in those terms. Ah, Sarah, I don't think that's particularly fair. Bear in mind we've just published a strategic plan that 1,000+ Wikimedians helped create. I'm not denying that some Wikimedians may feel alienated from the Wikimedia Foundation: I'm sure it is true for some. But something in which we have no input is, IMO, not a fair characterization. Thanks, Sue I accept that, Sue, but it's a matter of perception. I can see a lot of effort on the Foundation's part to reach out to new communities, but a similar in-reach program to keep current editors feeling invested would help a lot. I appreciate that, and would renew my suggestion to have some kind of communications staff dedicated to internal relations, as distinct from external. Every time one of these new jobs is announced it does add to the feeling (rightly or wrongly) of corporate expansion that we're not part of. It's interesting that these feelings should attach to job openings in particular. In contrast to how it was put earlier - Nobody likes being exploited, in particular volunteers - actually, in my experience it is people who work for pay that most resent being exploited, not people who work for other reasons. While volunteers can feel that they have been taken advantage of when their work is abused, in general employees are much more sensitive to inadequate compensation for their labors, overwork, or being underappreciated. Volunteer motivation is important to understand, of course, although I'm not a big fan of volunteer management as a phrase because our environment is geared more toward self-organization and self-management. The foundation can try to influence things to motivate people up to a point, but one of the wonderful things about volunteers is that we supply our own motivation, and largely regulate it as well. Here we happen to be touching on a sensitive area, partly because balancing volunteer and staff effort is one of the factors in motivation, but there's also a factor here that's beyond the foundation's control, and where volunteers have to figure out their own motivation. I realize that economic conditions in much of the world are not the best these days, and I sympathize with people who are personally affected. To get to one of the points underlying this discussion, I would like to offer some advice. Volunteers who happen to also be looking for paid work should not focus on openings at the Wikimedia Foundation as their solution, as it can't possibly hire all the diligent wiki editors who might want to work there, no matter how successful the next fundraiser is. For people looking to add volunteer work to boost their CV, I would expect that Wikipedia is now widely-recognized enough to give about the same benefit as volunteer work with various other well-known charities. But if someone is really focused on working at the Wikimedia Foundation specifically, then my advice is the same as it would be for anyone targeting a specific employer - demonstrate that you have the skills and experience that employer is looking for, or go get them, quite possibly by going elsewhere first. Experience in our particular community may figure as an advantage among similarly-qualified candidates, but it doesn't substitute for having other qualifications that the foundation needs for a position. Nor, as I expect current staff who started as editors could confirm, is working for the foundation the solution to all of your problems, just exchanging one set of challenges for another. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Criticism of employees (was VPAT)
On 2/18/2011 12:38 PM, Zack Exley wrote: On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 11:28 AM, phoebe ayersphoebe.w...@gmail.comwrote: And it's worth pointing out the obvious -- the reason there are so many places is because it's nearly impossible to keep up with *everything* going on in the communit(ies)* all the time. Even a subset of that discussion can be too much for those of us trying to get other things done as well; most of the subscribees of the list probably skim it at least some of the time. And the vast majority of our community is not even on Foundation-l but a pretty large percentage (I'd guess) of those people who interested in governance, foundation and meta-issues probably are subscribed, which is just one of the reasons why it's worth trying to make it a useful forum -- a perennial hope and dream! I'd just like to add my perspective as a relatively new staffer at WMF. People in the office really do read Foundation-l and all the other movement lists. They are very much influenced by them and take them very seriously. A couple of times, someone on this list has said that WMF staff call Foundation-l Troll-l. I've never heard anyone refer to it that way. In my experience, it's actually mostly community members frustrated with the quality of discussions who call it that. The staff avoid that kind of tone, understandably, as it might seem unprofessional. Personally, I prefer not to suggest that anyone is a troll, except for Domas (he likes it). --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Changes to the identification policies and procedures
On 2/4/2011 11:19 AM, Birgitte SB wrote: I imagine MZMcBride's inquiries have so often been slanted as though they had originated from a hardened negative opinion, because he gets his information from the gossip network rather than the WMF. I think I am so often ignorant because I do the opposite. It seems to me, that MZMcBride has been taking pains for sometime to change the tone of his messages. I personally have noticed a continual incremental improvement on his part. It bothers me that despite what I would rate as his success in crafting a neutral and reasonable message, he is still characterized as demanding answers and chided for bringing up the issue altogether. Whatever anyone else thinks MZMcBride, I have noticed your efforts and I appreciate them a great deal. Introspection and change are hard things to do; thank you. I agree with much of Birgitte's analysis. I would add that it is not fundamentally wrong to try to surface issues from the gossip network to a more public discussion. (The gossip network is as closed and opaque a forum for discussion as any private mailing list; I'd call for it to be more open, but that would be denying human nature.) Among other things, surfacing these discussions can do the foundation a service by informing it about what matters are being discussed there. However, it does require a great deal of care to surface things in a way that is productive and informative, rather than simply poisoning the public discourse. You can see some of this in how the respectable media approach news that is thrust upon them by tabloids or internet chatter. They go to considerable lengths not to defame and try to avoid unfairly maligning or adding their own insinuations and speculation. I think the pattern of inquiries here has improved, though it could still stand further improvement. On the foundation side, meanwhile, I believe more work ought to be done to minimize the need for the gossip network as an information channel. I've repeatedly pushed for creation of a staff position specifically dedicated to communications with the community. As the current communications staff, Jay and Moka are wonderful but much more external-facing, and have their hands plenty full with just that. I've been expecting that one of the Community department positions outlined in the annual plan would cover this, and if things follow the schedule I would hope to see such a position relatively soon. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: BBC 5 Live Investigates
That seems generally consistent with typical practices on Amazon.com, which are oriented toward maintaining a walled garden and avoiding any kind of outbound link. It's really an extension of standard business practice for any commercial distributor or middleman who doesn't want to be cut out of a deal, and that's what Amazon is writ large. You can see it in how merchandise from third-party sellers is handled. Even if Amazon doesn't carry the item itself, and even if the seller with a listing on Amazon actually has an independent website, everything about the listing is structured to avoid any hint that such a website exists, even to cover shipping terms or return policies. Unfortunately, this philosophy also makes Amazon.com quite bad at standard practices for giving credit where it is due. (And no, linking to IMDB doesn't count, since they own it.) --Michael Snow On 2/1/2011 3:31 PM, David Gerard wrote: Books, LLC. respond. They say they included Wikipedia URLs on their pages, but Amazon removed them. - d. -- Forwarded message -- From: Andrewand...@booksllc.net Date: 1 February 2011 23:29 Subject: BBC 5 Live Investigates To: dger...@gmail.com, slimvir...@gmail.com, geni...@gmail.com, thewub.w...@gmail.com Hi David Gerard, I totally understand your concern about Wikipedia getting proper credit on wiki books! And I understand how annoying it is when that doesn’t happen. What Charlotte was investigating, as I understand it, was why Amazon in the UK had dropped the wiki book descriptions we (Books LLC) provide them with. Those descriptions credit Wikipedia as the source, include an excerpt of one of the Wikipedia articles, a URL to read the full article at Wikipedia, and the titles of other Wikipedia articles in the book (space permitting). The book itself credits Wikipedia on the publisher’s page, the introduction and at the end of every article. I agree with you that readers have a right to that information. Hopefully, with our continued pleading Amazon UK will provide it. While Amazon didn’t explained why they dropped the Wikipedia credits, they did say that they don’t allow URLs in book descriptions. I guess they don’t want their customers leaving Amazon and going to Wikipedia. If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. I will be happy to help in anyway I can. Kind Regards, Andrew Williams Public Relations Manager Books LLC BBC 5 Live Investigates on Books LLC, Sunday night 9pm UTC Remove Highlighting [.To WMUK-l for local interest, and foundation-l as the issue's been discussed there at length.] Just spoke to a researcher, Charlotte something, for BBC 5 Live Investigates, Sunday 9pm, this item likely to go out 9:45pm or so. This was just for her research, it wasn't a recorded piece. The piece is on Books LLC and similar operations, which sell reprints of Wikipedia articles as books on Amazon. She was after the Wikipedian viewpoint. I said that it's entirely legal - that you can use our stuff without permission, even commercially, and we like that - Please, use our stuff! - you just have to give credit and let other people reuse your version: share and share alike. So the only issue is that it isn't clear enough these books are just Wikipedia reprints. For us, the annoyance - I said that annoyance is probably the word - is when a Wikipedian finds one of these books, goes aha, a source!, buys it and ... discovers it's just reprints of stuff they have. While trademark is an issue, we'd like them or Amazon to make it a *bit* clearer that these texts are Wikipedia reprints. She wasn't clear on the business model. I said these are print-on-demand books, where *no* copies exist until someone orders one, at which point a single copy is printed and sent. POD is *very good* these days - you can send a PDF to a machine, and the machine will produce an *absolutely beautiful* perfect-bound book for you, which previously would have been quite pricey. This is enough for them to have a tiny, tiny niche. I also pointed out that anyone can make their own PDFs of Wikipedia articles and some of the projects have partnerships with outside companies to do nice printed books of Wikipedia reprints. But in such cases, everyone is very clear on what they're getting: a nice printed physical copy of content they already have for free on the web. I tried to answer very descriptively, as I can't speak *for* 160,000 people, but there's been enough foundation-l and related discussion to get an idea of what people think. My apologies if I missed bits, this was off the top of my head without referring to nuances of discussion :-) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l [at] lists Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] propuesta de proyectos
On 1/19/2011 1:35 PM, Pedro Sanchez wrote: Don't ask how the foundation could help your projects, ask how your projects can help the foundation. Clever, but needs editing. In contrast with the original quotation, the foundation is not intended as an object of patriotism, or an entity to be built up for its own sake. Ask, rather, how your projects can help with sharing knowledge and free culture. (Since that aligns with the foundation's mission, I suppose it would help the foundation, but I don't think asking that way motivates quite the same.) --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On 12/14/2010 7:54 AM, Tim Starling wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! I guess producing database dumps was easier in those days. Seriously though, this is absolutely fantastic news! --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?
On 12/9/2010 3:03 PM, K. Peachey wrote: I'm not going to debate the whole wording thing, but I will point out, It is a crime to receive property/goods under false pretenses in Australia which is what advertising a person with the incorrect job title would be. Don't forget it isn't only the foundation handling the donations this year, the local chapters are as well. -Peachey You're not going to express an opinion on the merits of the question, but you're going to insinuate criminality is involved anyway? Come on, you're better than that. I've already indicated where I stand on this, but I find it embarrassing to have that position associated with debating tactics like this. It's a perfect example of why it's often so easy to dismiss our critics, when their approach involves such sleazy argumentation. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?
On 12/9/2010 3:28 PM, MZMcBride wrote: Calling Jimmy Wikipedia founder was already incredibly close to crossing the line. Calling Sue Wikipedia Executive Director clearly crosses the line. From reading your posts today, I believe you agree. While I didn't and wouldn't raise the issue of criminality here, the sleazy tactics are in the fundraising approach, not in the criticism. Which line are you talking about here? Crediting Jimmy Wales as a founder of Wikipedia is indisputable. Yes, other people might wish to claim that title as well - based on previous discussions when I was on the Board of Trustees, I don't believe the Wikimedia Foundation takes any position on that, although obviously Jimmy on a personal level does - but none of those other claims can negate Jimmy's. As for referring to Sue as Wikipedia Executive Director, I find it inaccurate and confusing, but I know enough about the staff and the fundraising process to expect that it was the result of well-meaning attempts at communicating concisely with a large audience unfamiliar with our organizational details. Assuming good faith, I think it crossed a line as far as accuracy goes, but being misguided or inartful hardly makes it sleazy. And yes, it is sleazy and underhanded to insinuate things like criminal behavior about other people if you're not willing to commit outright to a set of facts to establish a charge or an accusation that can be defended against. By way of illustration, that is one of the reasons various advocates for a free press, free speech, and other civil libertarians are so outraged at some of the government and corporate tactics that have been used against Wikileaks in the past week or so. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?
On 12/9/2010 4:12 PM, MZMcBride wrote: Michael Snow wrote: Assuming good faith, I think it crossed a line as far as accuracy goes, but being misguided or inartful hardly makes it sleazy. Assuming good faith is what Newyorkbrad did when he suggested that it was simply a typo. There is no reason to assume good faith when you know that people are intentionally creating banners and landing pages that are wrong. They don't intend them to be wrong. They may actually be wrong, as I've said, but they are not intended to be wrong. That is why we assume good faith. And yes, it is sleazy and underhanded to insinuate things like criminal behavior about other people if you're not willing to commit outright to a set of facts to establish a charge or an accusation that can be defended against. K. Peachey did cite both the law and the actions by Wikimedia that he or she believed to be in violation of it. I'm not sure why you seem to be suggesting that there is ambiguity here. No, K. Peachey avoided citing actions by not debating the whole wording thing that would establish what the action entailed, offering instead a generic description of criminal law that would encourage people, in passive-aggressive style, to draw their own conclusions about the supposed criminality involved. I can't tell whether K. Peachey believed the actions in question would be in violation of the law or not. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility
On 11/22/2010 1:08 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/22/2010 11:31:50 AM Pacific Standard Time, wikipe...@frontier.com writes: On 11/22/2010 10:47 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/22/2010 10:33:53 AM Pacific Standard Time, rkald...@wikimedia.org writes: * I believe Salary and other compensation includes payment to contractors, of which we currently have about 20-30 (which aren't counted as employees). Why so many, and contractors generally make much more than employees. Why not get rid of some of those and hire more employees? I know of a lot of people looking for work. And I know of some positions they're welcome to apply for if they have suitable qualifications: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings Aside from that, staffing decisions are not simply something that gets flipped around at will. In some cases, Wikimedia contractors have that status because it would be prohibitively difficult to treat them as employees (some staff located abroad, for example). Others are hired for specific time-limited projects which it makes more sense to do on a contract basis (Eugene Eric Kim for the strategy project, for instance). Also, the notion that contractors generally make much more than employees seems to ignore the fact that this bucket is labeled Salary *and other compensation* (meaning things such as health or retirement benefits). How does 20-30 contractors equate to the 10 open positions listed? It seems short to me. I didn't suggest that any of the openings are being used to replace contractors, that was just a response to the comment that you know a lot of people who might be interested in such openings. I don't see what logic there is in stating that having an employee abroad is prohibitively difficult but it's not so if they are a contractor. That makes no sense to me. Many countries tie aspects of their social safety net into employer-employee relationships through various regulations, taxation, and reporting obligations. These systems often differ dramatically between jurisdictions, making it quite burdensome to comply with more than one at a time. Not to mention that a jurisdiction may not accept such a relationship unless both parties are based there, meaning that the foundation would have to set up local subsidiaries in order to make non-US contractors employees. (Incidentally, I apologize to all for my earlier reference to staff working abroad without giving geographic context or simply using better terminology.) At which point, it doesn't really make sense to duplicate the overhead already being assumed by the chapters, some of which have begun hiring staff themselves. Shifting people to chapter employment might address some cases, but it's still a different situation from working directly for the Wikimedia Foundation. If WMF is truly adding wages paid to contractors into the Salary and other compensation bucket I don't think this is G.A.A.P. Wages paid to contractors should not be treated the same as salary paid to employees for the purpose of annual reports like this. That is, they should not be lumped together in this sort of bucket. I thought your complaint was that contractors are being paid too much, not that they are being counted in the wrong place. They aren't - as a member of the audit committee, I have full confidence that the Wikimedia Foundation's tax reports are using the appropriate categories for expenses. Ryan may have been in error about whether payments to contractors were included in the figure quoted (he doesn't work in accounting). That doesn't change the point that the and other compensation includes rather significant expenses beyond simply base salary, which is why hiring contractors involves a different compensation structure. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Donor comments?
On 11/19/2010 12:12 PM, Keegan Peterzell wrote: On 11/19/2010 12:33 PM, Renata St wrote: Thanks Sara. I was looking for that thinking that somebody already asked the q. That is so weird I would have never thought it would reduce donations Another q: are you going to have matching donations? If yes, I will wait to make mine. If not, I'll contribute now. Renata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l We absolutely take matching donations, more information can be found on the WMF website itself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Match_Your_Gift/en Thank you for your questions! I think there's some confusion here, I assume Renata was referring to having an organization that would match all donations for a certain day or week, as has happened in some of our past fundraisers. That link is information for people whose employers have a gift-matching program as one of their employee benefits, which can cover donations made at any time, even if they are not made during the current contributions campaign. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people who order printed books? --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Copyright terms, again
On 11/10/2010 11:27 AM, Andrea Zanni wrote: 2010/11/10 Milos Rancicmill...@gmail.com We are discussing now at WM RS list about treating copyright terms for Serbian authors. Terms are: * Previous situation was 50 years after author's death. * The new copyright term in Serbia came in 2004, introducing 70 years after author's death. * That means that works which authors died in 1953 or before is something like CC-BY (as in any continental jurisdiction). Sorry for nitpicking, but I don't understand the 1953. If you have 50 years, it should be 1960 (or 1959, if it is 50+1) As well, if you have 70 years, it should be 1940 (or 1939, if it is 70+1, and this is the case of most european countries I think). Probably there's something related to the year of the new law coming in (2004), but I do not understand. Presumably the copyright extension only applied to works still subject to copyright when it took effect. Therefore, authors who died in 1953 would have had their Serbian copyrights expire before 2004, based on a life-plus-50-years term, and the works of authors who died in 1954 would remain under copyright because the life-plus-70-years term took effect in 2004 before their Serbian copyrights expired. So basically no additional copyrights will expire for another 14 years. Copyright extension has generally worked to create a massive dead period during which no works are added to the public domain. It's for similar reasons, albeit with a more complicated transition in its copyright regime, that the public domain in the US has been stuck at works created before 1923 for ages now. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table, vs. Google's serving portion
On 11/7/2010 4:09 PM, geni wrote: As for tweak algorithmic factors firstly it's already happened at least once (there was a noticeable drop in wikipedia's Google SERPS positions a few years back). Secondly since both bing and yahoo rank wikipedia highly (in fact while I haven't checked recently for a long time google ranked wikipedia lower than those two) it seems unlikely that any reasonable algorithmic change would kill off wikipedia's traffic. I don't think there's any point in checking Bing and Yahoo separately anymore. I'm not sure what effect that might have on Wikipedia traffic in and of itself, but it means there are fewer algorithms to tweak, for good or ill. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Left on the Table
proposition against which to sell advertising. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing, was Re: Ban and...
David Gerard wrote: Forget medical information. How about making a plane that won't fall out of thesky? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/26/kenya-plane-homemade I *facepalm*ed. ENGINEER HUBRIS IS NOT WHAT WIKIPEDIA IS FOR! No, but it's what much of Wikipedia was written with. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal for new projects
On 10/24/2010 4:12 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Pharospharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps an alternative strategy could be to hold a grand round-robin vote to launch one new project per year, at least in beta phase. This might ensure that the very best ideas get through and are actualized, without quite opening the floodgates. I like the idea of one 'beta' per year. Before starting these betas, we should have a rough process for how we decide when to kill an unsuccessful beta. An RFC on meta? Should the parallel processes require comparable levels of agreement for starting or shutting down a project? That would seem fair. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposal for new projects
On 10/24/2010 4:30 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com wrote: On 10/24/2010 4:12 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Pharospharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps an alternative strategy could be to hold a grand round-robin vote to launch one new project per year, at least in beta phase. This might ensure that the very best ideas get through and are actualized, without quite opening the floodgates. I like the idea of one 'beta' per year. Before starting these betas, we should have a rough process for how we decide when to kill an unsuccessful beta. An RFC on meta? Should the parallel processes require comparable levels of agreement for starting or shutting down a project? That would seem fair. I'm not following you. Are you referring to existing processes for starting/killing projects/subdomains? Could you expand/rephrase? A mixture, I guess. The idea of a regularly scheduled process to launch new projects seems reasonable, and an annual cycle sounds good to me. A firm commitment to launch one (and only one) beta project per year does not. If there are multiple great concepts, or none, I don't want us to be bound to a quota. But if there's a basic altitude for achieving launch, presumably losing too much altitude after launch would justify shutting down before there's a crash. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? How is it in other language projects?
On 10/2/2010 8:59 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: I do believe the fact that there is less of a culture of scholarly source research in en:WP, and a preference of press sources over scholarly sources, especially in the humanities, impacts very negatively on en:WP's performance in this area. I believe this is twin to the common problem in English Wikipedia culture of an inappropriate bias against sources that are not written in English, or not readily findable online (and often both apply). Given that English is much more of a lingua franca in the sciences than in other disciplines, it should not be surprising if this leads to inferior coverage in the humanities. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27
Erik Moeller wrote: 2010/9/28 John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com: This doesn't answer my question, which was: _When_ will the board _review_ [the task-forces output]? I'm sorry I didn't answer your question, John. Please note that I'm neither on the Board, nor am I part of Board meetings, nor do I serve as a conduit for them; the agenda for Board meetings is set by Sue together with the chair of the Board and other Board members. My understanding via Sue is that they'e focused so far on the high-level priorities articulated in the strategic plan, and my sense is that if individual task forces have items that they'd like to get the Board's review or input on, they should bring this to the attention of the Chair of the Board (tchen at wikimedia dot org) or an individual Board member they know. But others can chime in and correct me on this if needed. To elaborate, this particular task force recommendation was called to my attention shortly before I completed my term as chair, but we did not have an opportunity to put it on the agenda in that brief window. I relayed it to Ting as part of our transition of responsibilities, so it has been passed along, and no doubt people are welcome to inquire as to its current status. But since I'm no longer privy to board deliberations, I can't provide much insight on its perceived priority relative to the larger strategic issues facing the board. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Agenda set by Sue? (was Re: Pending Changes development update: September 27)
On 9/29/2010 8:47 PM, Anthony wrote: On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 2:55 AM, Erik Moellere...@wikimedia.org wrote: the agenda for Board meetings is set by Sue together with the chair of the Board and other Board members. It is? Isn't that really really odd? Maybe it's not the most artful way of characterizing things (certainly it would be wrong to assume that the order in which individuals are mentioned corresponds to their priority or influence over the agenda), but I didn't find it so bizarre that I would need to call it out for correction. Anyway, Erik did mention that he's not on the board nor involved in its meetings, and accurately directed people to the board (not Sue) as the proper channel for seeking the board's attention. Given his distance from the process (and how different the organization was when he previously served on the board), I'm not sure why you would expect him to provide authoritative pronouncements on such details. Moreover, as a member of the staff he reports to Sue, and experiences the work of the board through Sue, so it's natural for his perspective on the work of the board to be oriented that way. The board chair ultimately sets the agenda for board meetings. In doing so, the chair follows the course the board has set for itself previously and relies on discussion with the vice chair and the executive director, along with input from the remaining board members. (This is how it worked when I was chair, and I expect current practice will not have changed too dramatically.) To the extent that issues the board needs to consider come to its attention through the staff or via day-to-day operations, obviously Sue would be the primary channel for that to happen, and such matters naturally are a significant piece of board business. That doesn't mean that Sue dictates the board's agenda, however. The board ultimately decides for itself what it needs to focus on, whether that's the recently completed strategic planning process or the current effort to sort out existing roles in the Wikimedia movement. It can also decline to pursue matters Sue has asked it to consider, though I must say that in my experience Sue was very good at maintaining an appropriate role relative to the board, and the idea of her diverting the board's agenda from where the board wanted to go is purely an imaginary problem. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27
On 9/29/2010 7:00 PM, Risker wrote: On 29 September 2010 21:07, Jimmy Walesjwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: On 9/28/10 7:41 PM, Risker wrote: Yes it is, and it's an important one. Several of us had already been working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly. I respect what you are saying here, very much. But I think the right approach is always release early, release often. There is no need to rush, but there is also no reason not to release fixes as they are available, because there is no particular ship date with marketing, etc. Jimmy, here's where you're wrong. The first version was marketed as the solution that would allow the [[George W. Bush]] article to be publicly edited - it was marketed that way on and off wiki - and instead we had 40 hours of non-stop IP vandalism and browser crashes for almost every reviewer. Whether or not it was reasonable to expect the feature to solve this problem on the first try, I don't think we should settle for that as our goal. This particular kind of case is mostly driven by media appeal and is not the best objective to focus on for accomplishing our mission. What the English Wikipedia really needs is to be able to reverse the situation that has prevailed since the Seigenthaler incident, so that people can write new articles and material without having to create an account or endure a waiting period, and the project can stay closer to the notion of being an encyclopedia anyone can edit. For me, any attraction that developing a flagged revisions or pending changes feature has ever had is connected to the potential that it would lead to an environment in which we can restore that ability for unregistered contributors. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27
On 9/28/2010 4:41 PM, Risker wrote: On 28 September 2010 18:58, Ryan Lomonacowiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Michael Snowwikipe...@frontier.com wrote: We would be better off with more people working seriously to figure out the best answers to the issues this feature addresses, plus whatever issues there may be with the feature itself, rather than having a debating duel about the significance of a set of polling statistics. It's like having politicians decide how to govern entirely based on opinion polls. This is really a much better point than I made. Yes it is, and it's an important one. Several of us had already been working on a plan for the second trial, and those of us discussing had widely agreed that it would be much more likely to be successful if more of the recommendations on improving the software were incorporated, thus our recommendation that it not proceed so rapidly. It's pretty hard to maintain motivation, though, when it's clear that the software's going to be a permanent feature regardless of what the project does or thinks, and that any further trial is not going to change that fact. Aside from the point already made regarding the desires of projects other than the English Wikipedia - I guess I struggle to see what's so demotivating about the prospect of a feature being permanent in the sense of being written into MediaWiki code while the English Wikipedia community still has the full ability to decide not to implement it on that project. Is it the potential of having to withstand continued political battles seeking to have it activated? That would implicitly acknowledge, at the very least, that there is some need not being met, meaning that alternative solutions are required. Further improved trials might get us closer to such solutions, and we should keep experimenting where we can. I'll reserve comment as to whether we have the right balance between urgency in tackling serious problems and exercising patience to maximize our chances of success. I don't often write to this list, and I realise that I sound fairly negative in this thread. The fact of the matter is that I personally entered more articles into the first trial than any other administrator (20% of all articles involved), that I actively and strongly encouraged other administrators to do so as well, that I pushed hard to ensure that the largest number of editors possible received reviewer permissions, and I was one of the few people who trialed the version on the test wiki in the two weeks before it went live, finding a significant number of problems (some of which were addressed in advance of the release). I was also the person who made sure that the WMF spokesperson with respect to the trial was in agreement with the prior stated position of the community, and that the feature would be turned off if there was not clear and unambiguous support for it at the end of the trial, just to make sure we were all on the same page. So, yes...right now I (and several other administrators who were very active in this trial) are very disturbed at what has happened here. We felt there was a clear criterion for continued use of the tool, which was worthy of our collective time, energy and powers of persuasion. With that in mind, it's almost impossible to consider developing a second trial, since it doesn't seem like it will matter what criteria for continued use the project determines. From this characterization, my impression is not so much that there is a conflict between the community consensus and the developers; much more, it strikes me that the extent of adoption and publicity for this feature remains tremendously limited, so that it's extremely difficult to say it's been adequately evaluated or speak of a consensus about it. If the Wikimedia Foundation has fallen short, then, it's not by disregarding the will of the community, but in a responsibility shared with community leaders, of gaining attention from a wider group of participants. I would guess that the vast majority of people actively involved in the English Wikipedia still barely know any of what's going on with this. That may be somewhat surprising to those of us who have been involved in Wikimedia projects for a long time and think of this as a perennial proposal for addressing longstanding issues. But I think not only do people see this proposal through very different lenses, but for many the lens is focused elsewhere anyway, and they are watching different trees in the forest. Part of the challenge is figuring out when and how it's appropriate to interpose corrective lenses to guide people's energy in certain directions. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How bureaucracy works: the example
While I support the idea that we should have a discussion about how to manage and structure our bureaucratic elements, I think the distinction posited between American and European perspectives is imaginary. As an example, personally I have so far declined to accept bureaucrat status largely because of the connotations of the name. This despite the fact that I feel reasonably capable of navigating most bureaucracies (a skill that has far more to do with whether someone can appreciate bureaucracy than their nationality). --Michael Snow On 9/25/2010 8:53 AM, Milos Rancic wrote: If I understood well, Americans don't have such bad feelings toward the word bureaucracy and its derivatives. In Europe it is different. When I tell to Gerard that he is better bureaucrat than me, he feels offended; although I thought about specific virtues, not defects; and although I've defined myself a number of times as a Wikimedia bureaucrat. That difference lays probably in 300 years of different developments of societies. Franz Kafka wasn't living in 18th century, but in 20th. Horrors of bureaucracies wasn't so obvious in 18th century because it is hard to say that any kind of sensible bureaucracy existed then. Arbitrariness of feudatories and rulers was much bigger problem. And at least in the case of bureaucracy, Americans had much more luck. As you could see I am usually use the American meaning of the word bureaucracy and its derivatives. Complex societies can't exist without more or less good bureaucracies. Unlike many of my friends, I appreciate good formal bureaucracy. This is the minimum and it is much better to deal with formal bureaucracy than with informal relations. As a user of [social] institutions you can count on formal bureaucracy, while it is not possible with informal relations. However, to be effective, bureaucracy has to be managed. This is particularly true for very complex bureaucracies, and Wikimedia is already a very complex bureaucracy. And it (bureaucracy) is not managed well. The main problem with not well managed bureaucracies are not well defined responsibilities. In other words, it is not possible to say that one person or one group is responsible for some malfunctioning. It is the product of the right decisions at the lower level of complexity, which creates malfunctioning at the higher level of complexity. That means that I am not blaming anyone particularly, but that we have increasing number of the problems of that type; which means that all of us have to think how not to make such mistakes. Last couple of months I am not uploading images to Commons as I would like to do. Not counting that I block all of my upload link for ten or more minutes per one high resolution photo, it is very painful process even for 20k logo. Today I am working from my netbook. It is not so easy to find the right button and the screen is small. I wanted to upload 20k logo for new Wikipedia edition (in Banjar) [1]. I wanted to find the right copyright tag (logo is trademark of WMF). So, I clicked on Permissions link, instead on question mark. When I went back all of the form was blanked. Note that I did that because I didn't want to be arrogant bureaucrat. People who want that project have already created SVG logo and I didn't want to insist that they have to create PNG derivative; I can do that, it should be easier. So, I wanted to do that as I treat that as my responsibility. I filled the form once again and I had to spend next ~15 minutes while trying to upload the 20k logo: license is not correct, author is not correct, this is not correct, that is not correct. And I am using Commons from the time when it started to exist. There is no way that I would be willing to upload any file on Commons because I would like to do it; just if I have to do it. The logical question is, of course, have I complained about it? This problem exists for a year or so. And I am sure that I am not the only person who complained about it in various ways. The first step in solving the problem is to ask one of the responsible persons to fix it. So, maybe a year ago, I've asked that person. He told me to fill the bug. No, I am not willing to fill the bug. (Note that I am doing that regularly as a LangCom member.) There are three types of [technical] bugs in process: (1) mostly, nothing has been done; (2) my bug is redundant, someone is working [or not] on this issue already (in this case for a year or so); (3) if I am lucky and someone responds to the initial bug request, I would have to spend hours in defining, explaining etc. And I just wanted to upload a photo or logo. It should last for 5-15 minutes, depending on my upload speed. Not hours in explaining what the problem is. And if I have to spend hours every time when I see a problem, I think that it is much more reasonable to spend hours in talking about the problem in general
Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
to involve endorsing views of which you are unsure, hence fewer authors signing on to a paper and a greater tendency toward a lone wolf approach. I know that personally I feel some slight hesitation when I edit just a section of an article that I might be seen as responsible for endorsing the whole (not just that there's no undetected vandalism or errors, but that the article is well-informed and balanced overall). Another issue is that the humanities approach to analytical writing is harder to adapt to a neutral point of view, because that's not really what you're encouraged to strive for. When writing student papers, I recall on so many occasions hearing exhortations to make an argument, take a stand, reach a definite conclusion. With more and more expertise behind it, that may be great for stimulating academic debate or advancing particular ideas, but Wikipedia wants that only at a considerable distance. These dynamics play out in concerns about article ownership manifested in one direction, or in what David Gerard likes to call Wikipedia's house style in the other direction. Another manifestation is that it's probably a bigger challenge for experts in the humanities, broadly speaking, to persuasively overcome objections from the uninformed. It's easier for someone to be obtuse and stubbornly fight ideas that are generally accepted, something that for scientific questions shows up primarily in the biggest-picture contexts where no one expert can demonstrate or defend every last conclusion, topics like evolution or global warming. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Fellowship program
On 9/15/2010 2:12 PM, Guillaume Paumier wrote: Hi, Le mercredi 15 septembre 2010 à 14:09 -0700, Philippe Beaudette a écrit : Please see the Wikimedia Blog (http://blog.wikimedia.org/ ) for an exciting announcement about the Wikimedia Foundation Fellowship program, and the first recipient of a Fellowship, Steven Walling. Specific, deep links are better for the archives :) http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/15/wikimedia-foundation-fellowship-program/ This is an idea that has been floating around for a while and I think it's a very good concept to try out. I'm excited that Zack is putting those ideas into practice and I look forward to seeing the work of Steven and future fellows. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.
Peter Damian wrote: Hoping I am not straying too far off-topic. You are. Are the Citizendium forum and mailing lists so completely dead that issues with its articles cannot be discussed there? --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.
Peter Damian wrote: You take exception, in a thread which is explicitly about content issues in Wikipedia, with a post that makes unfavourable comparison between Wikipedia and one of its competitors. Why is this? The post I was responding to was nothing but an assessment of a Citizendium article. It made no comparison, favorable or unfavorable, to an equivalent article on Wikipedia. At most it engaged in some speculation about what Wikipedia *might* have. If your intent is to discuss content issues in Wikipedia, then you need to actually explicitly discuss them. (Although I might suggest that you should familiarize yourself with some of our other mailing lists and consider whether another list, like wikien-l, is better suited to have this conversation, since foundation-l exists for issues related to the Wikimedia Foundation and the overall movement surrounding its projects, not just Wikipedia.) --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles
Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: 2) Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such as ours which pretends to have an international scope. -m. I guess if 75% of the members were from the US nobody would ever complain. Hardly. It's not as if there have been no complaints ever about a majority of the board being from the US. It would be better if both the Americans and the Europeans would cut back on sniping at each other, acknowledge that it's unhealthy for either of them to be so disproportionately represented, and focus their energies on recruiting more people who add real cognitive diversity. That's part of what the board and the foundation are trying to do in the context of the strategic plan. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
Michael Galvez wrote: 2. Once the articles exist in multiple languages, the articles take on a life of their own and become out of sync. If Wikipedians want to keep those articles in sync, we would like to help them by enabling section-level translation. I'm guessing that few communities will find it particularly valuable to keep a translation in sync, except possibly for language pairs that have close affinity and parallel evolution (approaching the point that some people would regard them as merely dialects). So maybe for a situation like translating French articles into Picard, at most. But even supposing the Tamil community, as an example, might find it helpful to boost their content with translations of English articles, once that's been done I can't imagine them wanting those articles perpetually reharmonized with changes in the English version. The point of seed content is to provide a basis for new life and growth, which by necessity must outgrow and cast off the shell in which the seed came. At that point, trying to maintain or recreate the shell doesn't particularly help further development. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings
wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: 2. As an editor, you are participating in a collaborative process, which has quite a lot of meritocracy, so your contribution to the project matters. Either an action/edit is good or it is not. Why would previous editing history make any difference to the objective facts of the edits? Does the input from someone new have less merit then someone with 'history'? Because that isn't an example of a meritocracy its a clique. This argument is simplistic and seductive, but mistaken on many levels. It assumes that every last unit that matters can be isolated, and evaluated purely in that isolation. We learn otherwise from examples like the scientific understanding of actual matter, which shows the limits of such reductionist thinking. An edit is an event or a change in state (maybe a physicist might like to call it a phase), but it is not an objective fact in the sense you are arguing, even if it hopefully deals in objective facts. We refer to editorial judgment in what we do because there are definite judgments involved, which can certainly be evaluated but cannot be reduced to purely mechanical independent processes. Otherwise, we would simply design a program to make all of the changes automatically for us. Instead, things must be evaluated in context, and quite often the context is much more enlightening to the evaluation than the thing in isolation. Imagine trying to deal with vandalism on a wiki with no means of connecting one inappropriate edit with another. Human knowledge does not progress in this fashion; it does not begin at the subatomic level and move outward. Although this has been the cause of many fits and starts in its overall development, it is for very good reason that knowledge works from a rather larger picture. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
Aphaia wrote: Ah, I omitted T, and I meant Toolkit. A toolkit with garbage could be called toolkit, but it doesn't change it is useless; it cannot deal with syntax properly, i.e. conjugation etc. at this moment. Intended to be reviewed and corrected by a human doesn't assure it was really reviewed and corrected by a human to a sufficient extent. It could be enough for your target language, but not for mine. Thanks. I think then it's not just about the capabilities of the tool or the qualities of the language, but also the abilities of the human being who is counted on to intervene in the translation. As with Wikipedia editing generally, we don't really have a good mechanism to ensure that a given individual has a particular skill level, we rely on their mistakes being corrected by others. The only guarantee that the editor of an article understands its subject matter (or even, in this case, knows the language in which it is written) is for each of us to be aware of our own limitations. It's quite likely that for some languages, current translation tools are not usable. It's possible that in some cases they never will be usable. Speakers of a given language should evaluate and decide for themselves. But it's certain that some people shouldn't be using these tools, if they're not doing enough to clean up the machine translation word salad. I know that I'd hesitate to use them in languages that I've studied but am not particularly fluent in, like Spanish or Italian (not that those Wikipedias need this kind of contribution from me anyway). If the tools are being used indiscriminately, it might be best to persuade people that they should work in areas they understand, not simply reject the tool outright. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Money, politics and corruption
On 7/14/2010 12:28 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: The problem with behaviour that is not good / acceptable is that at some stage it will be recognised and it will kill off the people in a similar way as to Essjay. The best indication that such things can happen is the upset of our capable, competent and upright former chair. I was convinced that he would be re-elected and I would have welcomed his re-election. I am thankful that Gerard thinks well of me, but to disclaim a bit of the context, let me say that I can't imagine that either money or corruption had any impact whatsoever on the process. Politics? Sure, but only in the sense that human interactions in any institutional setting are necessarily political. I prefer his subsequent description of Phoebe as a wonderful person who I expect will be a fine board member. In more general terms, speaking not just of the board selection, I think a highly charged and inflammatory concept like corruption is not well-suited to describing the situation. It's fair to be concerned about it, and the potential distorting influences of money, but the problems I have heard about usually do not fit that description. Both the chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation occasionally must resist undue influences from outside; both could work to improve their relationship with each other; and both still need to mature as organizations. The foundation may be a bit further along on the last point, and hopefully the chapters can learn from those experiences. I know the chapters have sometimes faced their own internal challenges, but they seem typical of young organizations that are just learning how to function appropriately. While I agree with the other comments that whistle-blowing should be protected, from my experience it seems like the need for it is relatively low in this case - by that I mean I've been aware of chapter leaders discussing internal concerns that arise and seeking advice when they need it, rather than dismissing the idea. As the movement grows and develops, we may find better ways of auditing that kind of performance. For now, it seems like the right thing for chapters to focus on figuring out what they should be doing, and learning from mistakes as they come up. --Michael Snow ___ 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
James Alexander wrote: On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 6:04 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/ascap-assails-free-culture-digital-rights-groups/ They're actually gathering money to fight free content. We may need to do something about this. - d. I can at least understand them having issue with EFF and the like but the article is right: going against Creative Commons is laughable. How DARE you decide to release your own content into the public sphere, how DARE YOU! /me sighs Creative Commons is actually a much bigger threat to their revenue stream than EFF is, which probably explains the animosity. ASCAP administers licenses for the music its members create, collects fees when it is performed, and distributes royalties to members accordingly. The fees also pay for the costs of administering the system. If the material is available through alternative licensing channels, it undermines the ability of ASCAP to make money off of it. It's the same reason that Getty Images won't allow photos they acquire through their Flickr deal to remain available under the site's Creative Commons license options. The letter looks like garden-variety political fundraising where the money will mostly go toward campaign contributions for select politicians (no doubt with an eye on particular congressional committees). I'm not sure it will be used to hire any actual lobbyists or mount a specific legislative campaign, although we should certainly keep an eye out for further developments in that regard. If that does materialize, I'd be happy to speak out on it in a personal capacity, whether or not the foundation is in a position to do so. --Michael Snow ___ 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
Jeffrey Peters wrote: Dear Michael, I find it problematic that you suggest that yourself or the Foundation would speak out against this, when the law in question is about terminating the access to those who have been caught pirating material in violation of set copyright multiple times. Jeffrey, it seems the underlying article has confused you 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. However, just because I would be willing to defend copyleft and support Creative Commons, it doesn't mean I have taken any position about a proposal, which is not yet law as far as I know, and apparently was not pushed in a strategic plan produced by an Obama administration executive, who is not an elected official and cannot legally accept contributions, but happened to produce this plan a day before the fundraising letter in question, which curiously does not say anything about what I have just mentioned except the first part involving copyleft and Creative Commons. I think the length of that sentence ought to illustrate just how tenuous the connection is. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Board resolution commissioning study and recommendations
It seems like we have yet to figure out if we can get the announcements list to automatically copy messages here. But since the reply-to function is at least set properly for this list, I'll take advantage of it now to make sure the full original message is posted here as well. --Michael Snow On 6/23/2010 10:47 PM, Michael Snow wrote: As a follow-up to the previous statement and discussion about appropriate educational content, the board has passed a resolution requesting a study of the issue of potentially objectionable content. We have asked the Executive Director to organize this study and develop recommendations for the board. We expect these will be shared with the community and stimulate further discussion about whether to adopt particular recommendations. Potential action would only follow that process, but since it's hard to say what that might involve without knowing the recommendations in advance, I will also pass along some questions and answers that attempt to explain the process in more detail. The text of the resolution follows: 1. The Wikimedia Foundation vision imagines a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That is our commitment, and we aspire to see it realized. 2. We are making good progress towards that goal. Today, hundreds of millions of people read the Wikimedia projects every month. Those people represent a wide diversity of ethnicities, nationalities, ages, socioeconomic conditions, sexual orientations, religions, values and attitudes. We are proud of that, and we consider it proof of our projects' broad relevance and utility. 3. In any group as diverse as ours, ideas about acceptability and taste will necessarily vary widely. We know that to be true in our case because, over the years, we have received many requests asking us to remove from the projects different types of material, on the grounds that it is objectionable to particular individuals or groups. However, Wikimedia policy has never called for material to be deleted purely on the basis that it is, or may be, objectionable, and our projects have long contained caveats to that effect. 4. We do expect material in our projects to be educational in nature, and any material that is not educational should be removed. We see our role as making available all knowledge, not solely such knowledge as is universally deemed acceptable. We believe that individual adults should be able to decide for themselves what information they want to seek out. In the case of children, we believe that their parents, teachers, and other guardians are best placed to guide them to material that is appropriate for them, based on their development and maturity, as they grow into adulthood. 5. Nevertheless, we are concerned about the possibility of people being exposed to objectionable material that they did not seek out. This may include material that is violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise disturbing; culturally offensive depictions; profane or vulgar language; depictions of potentially dangerous activities; and exposure of children to material that may be inappropriate for them. We believe that the Wikimedia projects are a valuable educational resource, and we do not want these issues to interfere in sharing knowledge with present or future readers. 6. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees believe that the Wikimedia projects have a serious responsibility to carefully balance these interests to the best of their ability. This includes considering the interests of both adults and children, as well as understanding different cultural perspectives about what material may be offensive. It is a difficult challenge, and we do not take it lightly. WE THEREFORE RESOLVE THAT: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees hereby requests its Executive Director to undertake a project studying this issue, and to develop a set of recommendations for the Board. In this work, we ask that she consult with a variety of stakeholders and experts, including Wikimedia editors, other organizations which have grappled with the same or similar issues, and thought leaders including relevant members of our Advisory Board. We ask that she make an effort to include non-Western perspectives. The purpose of this work is to develop recommendations to enable the Wikimedia projects to appropriately and effectively serve all audiences, including both adults and children, and including readers both current and prospective. The scope of this work should be broad, and might include recommended changes to editorial policies, technical solutions, the development of new projects that are appropriate for children, and so forth. In an effort to allow sufficient time for thoughtful investigation, but also to bring closure to this issue within a reasonable period, we ask the Executive Director to deliver preliminary recommendations to the Board at its fall
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] QA regarding board resolution
Replying for the purpose of forwarding the original message, part two. --Michael Snow On 6/23/2010 10:59 PM, Michael Snow wrote: What is the purpose of the resolution? The Board is asking its Executive Director to conduct a study, with the goal of figuring out what to do about potentially-objectionable material in the projects. We know there is, and will always be, some material in the projects that some readers will find offensive: that's inevitable, given the size and scope of our readership, and our commitment to providing access to all of the world's knowledge. We don't want to cause unnecessary offence to people, and we particularly don't want to offend people if it means they won't therefore use our projects, or that they will aim to keep other people from using them. We want our projects to be available to as many people as possible, and we would like, as much as possible, to minimize the number of people who are prevented from accessing the projects by third-parties. Having said that, we see the projects' role as making available all knowledge, not making available solely such knowledge as is universally deemed acceptable. It's a challenge, and we need to strike an appropriate balance. Therefore, we're asking our ED to do some investigation and thinking, and make some recommendations to us at our meeting this fall. How was the resolution developed and agreed upon? The board and the community have been talking about this topic for the past two months -- and indeed, the Commons and Wikipedia communities have been discussing it for many years. Once the board reached general agreement that a study was a good idea, we asked our ED to draft a resolution to that effect. After she did that, we spent several weeks talking with each other, refining the language of the draft, and voting to adopt the resolution. Does the board have consensus on what to do about potentially-objectionable materials in the projects? No. So far, board members have exchanged several hundred e-mails on this topic, and we will continue to discuss it in the coming months. Currently, board members have expressed quite different views, and there is no consensus on how to resolve the issue. We think that's completely fine though: it's complicated, and it's worth a lot of thought and discussion. That's why we've commissioned a study: to see what we can learn from other similar discussions that have taken place within other organizations. What are the individual board members' views on this issue? How divided is the board? We don't really want to characterize individual board members' views. Having said that, individual board members have expressed their opinions publicly in the past, and they will probably continue to do so. The board is comfortable with disagreement on this issue, and it's comfortable with people expressing their opinions. For example, Michael Snow has been having a conversation with contributors on Commons, and both Jimmy and SJ have been expressing their views there too. That's fine, and the board encourages it. How is this study related to the purge of some sexual imagery that happened on Commons a month ago? The Commons purge happened because Jimmy felt there was material on Commons which didn't belong there -- that was potentially objectionable, and had no educational value. The board released a statement on May 7, encouraging Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there was no such value. Jimmy himself then deleted a bunch of imagery he thought was problematic. In so doing, he made a lot of admins on Commons really angry -- essentially because they felt Jimmy was acting unilaterally, without sufficient discussion. So yes, this study is an attempt to better handle the general issue of potentially-objectionable material on the projects, including Commons, by giving it some sustained attention. In its statement May 7, the board said that it was not intending to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. Has that changed? We don't know yet what recommendations will come out of the study. It's quite possible they will include recommendations to change policy on the projects. In giving direction to the consultant, we have asked that everything be considered: nothing has been ruled out. In the aftermath of the Commons purge, a lot of editors felt that the Wikimedia Foundation, the board, and/or Jimmy had overstepped their authority. What do you say to those editors who believe that editorial policy is their purview, not the responsibility of the board or the staff? We agree with editors who say that, and we believe that Wikimedia's current methods of developing and enforcing policy, for the most part, work really beautifully. The Wikimedia projects are a shining
Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy one language - one Wikipedia
Samuel J Klein wrote: Overall, we've never decided whether a simple or children's encyclopedia should be a separate project with its own root domain, or another set of 'languages' that show up as an interlanguage link or as FOO.wikipedia.org . I don't think we've even decided those are the only options. It could also use a namespace within the same domain, or take advantage of other technical features like subpages, or be set up like a portal or wikiproject, or other possibilities I haven't thought of. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Board resolution commissioning study and recommendations
Thomas Dalton wrote: On 24 June 2010 19:08, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 June 2010 07:20, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: 4. We do expect material in our projects to be educational in nature, and any material that is not educational should be removed. I would suggest that passing a resolution that outlaws most user pages is a bad idea. I think it is obvious that the board mean that clause to refer to the actual content of the projects, not the various meta stuff that also exists on the sites. That's the meaning, definitely, same as it was in the previous board statement. I would observe, too, that for material on user pages, if you're even going to ask whether it's educational, what is it going to educate people about? That particular user, presumably. And in that context, it's pretty hard to rule out any kind of self-expression that person has chosen as not being educational about them. It may be inappropriate for other reasons, such as community policy or social concerns, but this wouldn't really be a basis for enforcing that. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Board resolution commissioning study and recommendations
Victor Vasiliev wrote: On 06/24/2010 10:20 AM, Michael Snow wrote: 4. We do expect material in our projects to be educational in nature, and any material that is not educational should be removed. I still believe such a statement imply that most of Wikisource content will have to be deleted if remove all non-educational content. I recommend that people not confuse educational with pedagogical or try to divorce its interpretation from the context of the particular project. Historical records have educational value, for example, even when those records are not created for pedagogical purposes. --Michael Snow ___ 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
Ryan Kaldari wrote: Gregory, I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your post, but it sounded very much like you were saying that encyclopedia writing is a skill that is too academic for women: ...general approaches which make Wikipedia more palatable to average people... may have a greater impact at reducing gender imbalance than female centric improvements... Though are limits to the amount of main-streaming you can do of an academic activity such as encyclopaedia writing. Perhaps you were not meaning to imply that women are too average to be interested in academic activities. I'm glad to hear that isn't the case, but I would encourage you to be more careful with your wording in the future. There is a long history of scientific apologetics being used to perpetuate sexism, racism, etc. Just look at the science of phrenology, or more recently The Bell Curve. Anyway, I don't want to drag this thread into a debate on scientific -isms. I just wanted to remind everyone that there are real steps that can be taken to address the gender imbalance problem, regardless of any real or perceived gender differences. I think the valuable point Gregory had, which is obscured both by the sensitivity of the topic and the obscurity of the theoretical basis for the argument, is that there's quite a bit that can be done to encourage greater female participation that doesn't involve specifically targeting females. This need not (and should not) assume that women have less ability, so it's also important to use care in how we frame the discussion. But I think the academic performance of women in society generally amply demonstrates that there's nothing fundamental about a knowledge-sharing project - that being our ultimate aim - which would explain the kind of imbalance that exists in our community. It is possible to theorize about biological differences like greater genetic variability as explanations, but for characteristics like gender that are so intimately connected to a social construction of the concept, it's largely impossible to truly isolate them and eliminate the social factors at play. That also makes it hard to talk about the subject without perilous characterizations and generalizations, but talk about it we must. At risk of going in that direction, I could suggest that usability initiatives fit in very well with what Gregory was suggesting. Usability doesn't particularly have gender on the agenda, but it's possible to see that type of concern as somehow female in our society. To use a bit of gross stereotyping, one might consider it typically male to seek to demonstrate skill in mastering a challenging environment, and more typically female to seek to apply skill toward changing the environment to make it less challenging. The problem is partly that while from a neutral perspective, there's no particular reason to favor either of these skills, in practice we tend to be quite imbalanced, with social consequences that follow accordingly. Another illustration are the cultural issues various people have highlighted here, such as hostility and tone of discussion. On the surface those are gender-neutral considerations, but because of how people are socialized, they have important consequences in reality. That's before we even get into problems where gender is more obviously implicated, like locker-room-type banter or casual objectification of women. This is why I think it's so important for us to examine our culture and figure out what we need to do to improve it. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The problem with Wikipedia...
Dan Rosenthal wrote: Isn't the quote backwards? The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. It could never work in theory? It can be formulated various ways. Raul's Laws has yet another variation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raul654/Raul%27s_laws I'd note that in the history of that page, it dates back to March 2006 and even then the original author was listed as unknown. That makes it exactly the sort of quote that is easily misattributed to Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Floating a notion: permanent Wikimania committee?
On 6/17/2010 5:35 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: OK, so I guess my question is (and we talked about this on IRC too) -- who has the power or the ability -- or who *should*, in a perfect world -- create such a committee? We don't have much precedent for this. There were concerns over who or what body can create governance/oversight structures, particularly if this isn't really just a Foundation issue. I suppose the board could create the committee, if it's not clear who else might have the authority. Or perhaps better, the board could authorize its creation. I think the board is a bit reluctant to jump in, partly for the reason Sue mentioned that overseeing Wikimania is not really a board-level issue (it's primarily operational rather than strategic), but also because the board is not well placed to fill and maintain committees like this. When it becomes a situation of appointing people none of us really knows, or feeling that there are probably people we're not aware who ought to be recruited to a committee like this, it's pretty uncomfortable to have that responsibility. But if we authorized the committee and then let the staff and experienced Wikimania volunteers review applications or expressions of interest to join the committee, that might work out. That's kind of the direction things have moved in any case. Some of the early committees that still function have evolved to a place outside the board's immediate activity, and the current work of the governance committee is focused more on structures needed to organize the board's own functions. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: WikiLeaks inspired New media haven proposalpasses Parliament
If it's in the US, wouldn't it be a data center? (I'm mildly disappointed to discover that the Meta pages on the guerilla UK spelling campaign and the gorilla US spelling campaign were deleted some time ago. Though honestly, Noah Webster should have finished the job and made it campain.) --Michael Snow susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Liam, We're not (looking to set up a new data centre in Europe). We're planning a second US data centre, likely in Virginia. Mark Bergsma's in the office this week, leaving to scout out possibilities with Danese, tonight. They, or someone else involved with tech, can probably talk more about that, if you want specifics :-) Thanks, Sue -Original Message- From: Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:12:08 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: WikiLeaks inspired New media haven proposal passes Parliament Thought people here might be interested in this. We should be at that conference (last bullet point) IMO. Are we looking to set up a new data-centre in Europe? -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata -- Forwarded message -- From: Julian Assange jul...@wikileaks.org Date: 16 June 2010 19:34 Subject: WikiLeaks inspired New media haven proposal passes Parliament To: liamwy...@gmail.com FYI: Reykjavik, Iceland; 4:00 UTC, June 16th 2010. The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international new media haven in Iceland, with the world's strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and a Nobel prize for for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the Icelandic Parliament. 50 votes were cast in favor, zero against, one abstained. Twelve members of parliament were not present. Vote results are available at http://www.althingi.is/dba-bin/atkvgr.pl?nnafnak=43014 One of the inspirations for the proposal was the dramatic August 2009 gagging of of Iceland's national broadcaster, RUV by Iceland's then largest bank, Kaupthing: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Financial_collapse:_Confidential_exposure_analysis_of_205_companies_each_owing_above_EUR45M_to_Icelandic_bank_Kaupthing,_26_Sep_2008 Two changes were made to the proposal from its original form as per the opinion of the parliament's general affairs committee [http://www.althingi.is/altext/138/s/1329.html]. The first of these altered slightly the wording of the first paragraph so as to widen the arena for research. The second of these added two new items to the list of tasks for the government: - That the government should perform a detailed analysis, especially with respect to operational security, for the prospect of operating data centers in Iceland. - That the government should organize an international conference in Iceland regarding the changes to the legal environment being caused by expansion of cloud computing, data havens, and the judicial state of the Internet. Video footage from the proposal's vote will be available at: http://www.althingi.is/altext/hlusta.php?raeda=rad20100616T033127horfa=1 http://www.althingi.is/altext/hlusta.php?raeda=rad20100616T033306horfa=1 For details of the proposal and press contacts, please see http://www.immi.is ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases
On 6/9/2010 2:01 AM, Austin Hair wrote: On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: 2) Make sure that every paid developer spends time dealing with the community. This can include giving support to end users, discussing things with volunteers, reviewing patches, etc. They should be doing this on paid time, and they should be discussing their personal opinions without consulting with anyone else (i.e., not summarizing official positions). Paid developers and volunteers have to get to know each other and have to be able to discuss MediaWiki together. I like the discussing their personal opinions without consulting with anyone else bit, and you bring up a very good point. I don't think (and I don't mean to imply that anyone else does) that anyone's conspiring to keep the community out, or saying leave this to the professionals, we know better. When you're hired onto a team, though, you're wary of saying anything that would cause strife or confusion. This isn't necessarily out of fear of retribution from your employer—it's simply conventional professional ethics, and it's usually not even a conscious thing. (It's also not limited to paid staff—the people we put on the Board specifically for their vocal opinions on things often fall into this, for understandable reasons.) When it comes to the board, along with others who have oversight responsibilities like management staff, there's an additional factor in this. It's not generally appropriate, or good for staff morale, to publicly go through the work of employees or contractors when you're in such a position. There are good reasons that work evaluations and other personnel matters are considered confidential. I don't mean to say that staff shouldn't be discussing code, roadmaps, or rationales as widely and openly as possible, but if for example I was qualified to review a staff member's patch (which I'm not), I might want to think twice about what audience gets that feedback. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases
Chad wrote: On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: ...if for example I was qualified to review a staff member's patch (which I'm not), I might want to think twice about what audience gets that feedback. --Michael Snow Why? If they're contributing a patch to MediaWiki, they should go through the same public patch/feedback - commit/feedback cycle as everyone else. The only acceptable time to develop in private is when we're looking at active security vulnerabilities, and even then once a patch has been written the code is committed and the issue becomes public knowledge. Can we be a bit harsh sometimes? Sure. But we're equal opportunity offenders here. Anyone who submits code--staff or volunteer--is subject to the same treatment on Bugzilla and Code Review. If your patch sucks, we're going to tell you about it, and there's absolutely no reason to sugarcoat it. If someone can't take public criticism, then quite frankly they probably shouldn't be working on open source software. The replies to my comment are missing the point. Sure, the developers themselves need to be able to handle public criticism of their work, just like wiki editors. But I was responding to Austin's comment in particular about board members being cautious with their opinions. In cases like that, there are additional concerns, like the propriety in publicly critiquing someone's work when you also can presumably influence their continued employment. That requires that certain feedback go through other channels, even when the same feedback could be given openly if it were coming from the general public. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases
Aryeh Gregor wrote: On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: The replies to my comment are missing the point. Sure, the developers themselves need to be able to handle public criticism of their work, just like wiki editors. But I was responding to Austin's comment in particular about board members being cautious with their opinions. In cases like that, there are additional concerns, like the propriety in publicly critiquing someone's work when you also can presumably influence their continued employment. That requires that certain feedback go through other channels, even when the same feedback could be given openly if it were coming from the general public. Oh, okay. I was about to respond to you too, but I did miss the point. :) What you seem to be saying is that code review should be public, but people like board members shouldn't review code because criticism might make people worry that they'll be fired or something. I think you're overestimating the morale impact of negative code review -- in serious review-then-commit systems like Mozilla uses, virtually no code gets accepted in its original form without modifications, even when written by experienced developers. Well, board members shouldn't review code because they're mostly not qualified to do so. The comment as it relates to morale is a more general point, it's not limited to the specific context of MediaWiki development. So it's less about how the process side of code review should work, and more about the organizational challenges for the foundation in interacting with community or public process. I think that's also related to what Rob was trying to say in different terms. --Michael Snow ___ 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 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Michael Snow wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in terms of what is available. We make things available, and they should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission. My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices, just by adopting availability as a default, that's simply wrong. The present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted, the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are. --Michael Snow ___ 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 6/6/2010 9:03 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Michael Snow wrote: Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. Well, yes and no. Historically the first time the offensiveness of images on wikipedia first came to a head (so to speak), was the images on [[Clitoris]]. At least in that instance the contributors who feigned the images as being offensive to viewers -- while in many cases claiming *they* personally weren't at all offended (!!) -- were predominantly male. My recollection was/is that the defenders of a photographic image on that page, instead of a schematic drawing, were mostly female. There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I don't deny the general point about the testosterone-laden atmosphere in some areas of our community, but I do want to note that even in the latest controversy over images, the person on the Board of Trustees who came strongest in defense of a unfettered retention of sensual images of educational value was its (single?) female member. It would be a serious mistake to claim that she was doing so only to fit in with the lads. (I assume you mean Kat, but she is not the only female board member.) I'm certainly not suggesting that. Sometimes it's easier to strongly argue positions that are counterintuitive to the role people might expect of you, because people are unlikely to suggest your convictions are skewed by your personal characteristics. I also think the focus on simple retention or deletion is almost a red herring sometimes, despite the conduct of another board member which basically framed the debate that way. The board's initial statement about educational images is kind of stuck there too, but we've been working on something a little more nuanced to come soon. In the meantime, I would encourage people to look at the discussion that's been happening on the Commons village pump regarding educational image use more generally. --Michael Snow ___ 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 6/6/2010 2:57 PM, Mariano Cecowski wrote: I can't believe that with all the complains no one has yet brought up the fact that the 'watch' has been replaced by a star that turns blue instead of yellow. I always think I don't have the page in my watchlist!!! Now, that's a reason to complain (Lynch the usability team!) I trust that at least the last part of this was meant as a joke, but I think it's worth a comment anyway. This is not so much related to usability or interlanguage links, but the larger issue some people have been highlighting about communication and culture. If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. For African-Americans online, talk about lynching is arguably more offensive than violations of Godwin's law. For me, this highlights some of the issues that make our culture much more closed than it should be. I think we are often far too careless in the tone and language we use with each other. We need to both be more careful in how we communicate, and more forgiving of those who inadvertently make mistakes in this area. I'm happy to forgive a comment about lynching made in ignorance of its connotations. In this discussion, there's been quite a bit of consternation about the attitude of the usability team, which seems to have grown largely out of a comment attached to the debated piece of code. I imagine the author may well regret it, but I don't think it should be seized upon in isolation from the productive dialogue I've seen. An administrator on the wiki might be a bit grumpy in an edit summary, too - that's not a good thing particularly, but not necessarily worth indicting the entire community, as some critics try to do. It happens, people are human, hence both fallible and capable of improving. Because of the race aspect, this is also a good opening to talk about diversity and cultural awareness. As a community, we are overwhelmingly white (to use the racial constructs of the US; to express it another way, of European ancestry). We manage to have a smattering of Asian people, of various ethnic groups. But some groups are effectively not involved at all, and the European and American flavor is very dominant. Because of how that shapes our interactions, is it any wonder that black people might not feel welcome among us? We may be perfectly innocent, as exemplified here, yet our culture can appear hostile to people of African descent. Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
David Levy wrote: William Pietri wrote: I know that these names have been worked over extensively by Jay and Moka, who have a lot of experience dealing with reporters and the general public. They were pretty happy with the two names that were part of the initial proposal from Rob, so I am willing to trust their professional judgment as far as reaction from the press and the person on the street. More, in fact, than I trust my own, as I know that I'm tainted by long years as a programmer and as a participant here and in Ward's wiki. Rob has explicitly asked us to comment on these names and set up a forum in which to do so (and propose alternatives). You've vigorously defended the name drawing the most opposition and declined to comment on the name drawing the most support, and that's fine. But please don't suggest that we're wasting our time by doing what Rob asked of us. He isn't. You edited out the text William was replying to, but in expressing his trust that the public relations professionals have the greatest expertise as to how the general public will receive the terminology, he was responding directly to speculation about how the general public would receive it. There's nothing in that comment to suggest that the community should not be involved or is wasting its time. When dealing with multiple intended audiences (in this case, editors, readers, and the media), there is inevitably a balancing act in targeting your choice of words. It is unlikely that any name will be absolutely perfect for all use cases. Some degree of editorial judgment and discretion will have to be applied, and that's exactly the purpose of this discussion. --Michael Snow ___ 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 5/7/2010 5:30 PM, Sue Gardner wrote: On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruningk...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, Kim Bruning Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here. Just to come back to this point, the board has had some ongoing discussion and will be having a meeting on Tuesday, May 18. I don't know for certain that there will be a statement following that meeting, or whether there will be any particular outcome. I have been informed that some resolutions will be proposed, but I can't predict whether they will be acted upon. Also, did anyone keep a log of the open meeting from Wednesday in the #wikimedia IRC channel? Has that been posted anywhere for others to review? --Michael Snow ___ 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 5/15/2010 4:34 AM, Joan Goma wrote: *The roots of the problem* Michael, if the Board is analyzing the issue then it should address the roots of the problem. We would like to. Roots are sometimes difficult to get at. The fact that recent discussion has taken place around sexual images has the advantage that sex raises a lot of interest from everybody. But from my point of view the issue is grounded in two deeper problems: 1) what happens if the board takes a decision against the community consensus? 2) What happens if the community of a project rejects discussing deeply an issue up to finding a consensus, if they simply vote and applies the majority decision? It seems to me that this is what happened. The community defined a policy without analyzing the issue deeply enough, they didn’t reached a consensus. The board decided that this should addressed and Jimbo actuated. Perhaps this is a caricature of what happened. Surely the real story is far more complex. There was an open debate in the community, the board resolution was more or less ambiguous, and the actions of Jimbo could have been more polite. But I believe that the roots of the problem are more or less there. As you say, it's an oversimplification and it doesn't match the details exactly, but you've done well nevertheless at focusing on essential concepts. I would think that the board is unlikely to make a decision that goes against full community consensus. Reaching or identifying that consensus can be a challenge, though, as I think anyone who's worked on highly debated topics on the wiki knows. Sometimes there's a lack of analysis (or simply attention) that makes an apparent consensus immature, not the consensus that would be reached if everyone was really involved. In many cases, this isn't that big of a problem. Not inventing policies until there's a need for them is usually wise, as it gives people the freedom to be bold and move the work of the projects forward, without worrying about mastering complex rules. But on occasion, this has meant that inadequate care was given to issues of serious concern, as used to be the case with biographies of living people. I don't know that the community has ever really rejected the idea of serious discussion in such a situation. People sometimes argue based on various votes (more like opinion polls, really), but I think most of us understand those are not definitive. The problem is more that it's quite challenging to conduct these discussions, and as a tool, a wiki is better suited to other tasks we do than to this one. *Proposed changes in the system* From my point of view the system should be changed in two ways: First Wikimedia Foundation (and its governing body, the Board) should have a mechanism to force the community to debate and search for a consensus. Call it founder’s flag or voice of conscience flag or whatever you want. This is exactly what Jimbo did. He didn’t impose his will although founder’s flag gave him the power to do it. I think this is a good concept and part of what we are trying to figure out is the right tools for it. I suspect the founder flag was not the right tool for a number of reasons. Now that it has been removed from the equation, how would people suggest that this be set up? Secondly it should be stated clearly that once a true consensus is reached, the community is sovereign in developing the project. The duty of the Foundation is providing the means to put in practice those decisions. To put a humoristic example, if the law of some state says that the value for number pi is mandatorily 3.2 [1] and the community reaches the consensus that we must explain clearly that the law is wrong, then if necessary the Foundarion must avoid being under the rules of that state. To give a more serious example, we have a consensus on Creative Commons licensing, and in fact there was a desire from the community to go in this direction long before we were ultimately able to. I don't imagine that changing unless a better free licensing system arises and the consensus changes. So to answer your suggestion, I'd reiterate my earlier point: I really don't envision the board or the foundation going against anything that amounts to a true consensus in the community. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new material continually being added. The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the grounds that it may offend. Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status report on logo copyright issues at Swedish Wikipedia
David Castor wrote: Short update for anyone interested: The discussions referred to below and in other messages now seem to be near a conclusion as we have implemented a new version of the links to sister projects, placed in the left margin just above iw links, still using the logos but well separated from article texts. It is still to be widely implemented, but examples can be seen in the articles on the Bible (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibeln) and on August Strindberg (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg). I like it. For me, the aesthetic aspect is much the bigger benefit, actually, as articles that have sufficiently diverse relationships to warrant cross-project links often have a good deal of other template clutter. I much prefer, if we're going to decorate these articles (and we should), that we focus on real visual, interactive, or other multimedia supplements, and not poor substitutes for these. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Working on movement roles
In addition to the committee reorganizations I mentioned, which are sort of internal to the board (that is, the purpose is to improve the board's own functioning), something we are starting to work on is to think systematically about different roles within Wikimedia as a movement. These roles may be those of individuals as volunteers, or in groups such as chapters; it may include roles that exist, or those we determine are needed. Defining these better, so that they can be filled more effectively, and so that people can be more effective in their work, could help us build a stronger working community. Part of this is an outgrowth of the strategic planning project, where we have a task force on movement roles, and I encourage people to do further work on the strategy wiki in this area. I would suggest the board believes this is also a larger ongoing question, one we will be wrestling with even after the strategy plan is in some sense completed later this year. We intend to keep this moving beyond that. Arne in particular has taken a strong interest in this issue, and he and Jan-Bart have been preparing some thoughts to share with the chapters leading up to next week's chapters and board meeting. Coming out of that, I hope we will start to develop a better sense of fundamentally who we are and what kinds of relationships we should create to better develop the Wikimedia projects. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Working on movement roles
On 4/10/2010 11:19 AM, Steven Walling wrote: Personally I think it's preferable to alter/simplify existing roles than further complicate an already complex organizational model by adding new roles into the mix. I suspect that's largely a matter of individual perspective, depending on what roles you think exist now. I totally agree with trying to make things simple, though. Some roles that we might talk about adding may exist already in some fashion, but because they haven't been acknowledged/defined/simplified, many people who might help fill those roles may not recognize the opportunity to do so. Part of the exercise will undoubtedly be an inventory of current and possible roles. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Board committees update
Following up on Bishakha's appointment, this means we now have the full complement of members on the Board of Trustees. With that taken care of, for now we have decided to dissolve the nominating committee which participated in the process. Again, I want to thank the volunteers on the committee for their service and their help in seeking out and screening candidates. Part of the reason for this is that the board generally agreed that the committees need further reorganization, and this will likely start with the creation of a Governance Committee. For the vast majority of nonprofit boards, this committee (which may go by different names) is a basic organizational standard, designing the operational structure of the board and overseeing its effectiveness. In our ad hoc organization, we haven't gotten around to this properly, and I think the board's work would benefit significantly. One of the first things a Governance Committee would do is review which committees are needed, whether we have them or not, what their responsibilities should be, composition and so forth. More will be forthcoming as those recommendations are developed. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
