[Wikimedia-l] Travel Guide Wiki

[Mark Jaroski]

Hi all,

I'm a long-standing editor/admin/etc. at Wikitravel, though I've been less
active in recent years, mainly due to work and family.

I have, however, been participating in discussions among Wikitravel admins
about our dissatisfaction with our current hosting provider, and what we're
going to do about it. As you know, one of the ideas which has been floated
is to attempt to join WMF. One of the parties to that discussion started a
new Wiki proposal on Meta, and a discussion here.

I'm glad to have the chance to jump in before the discussion gets very far
along. There are some important points to be made:

First, NPOV would probably be a deal-breaker. The travel wiki community
(usually working at Wikitravel) have long used Traveller's Point of View.
This point of view is not neutral at all, but favours the traveller.
Hoteliers, restaurateurs, etc. have different points of view, but for us
it's the traveller's that counts. We're under the impression that there are
other Wikimedia foundation projects which don't use NPOV, and so those of
us favouring approaching WMF have been able to argue that we wouldn't be
forced to use it. If that's wrong then we should probably just give up this
line of exploration and go find another solution.

I personally don't think that a creative interpretation of the concept of
NPOV to make it look like TPOV would do, but of course I'm just one voice.
Still there are others who feel even more strongly on this point.

Second, this is a fairly old and established community, with its own
habits, mores, etc. As with other communities it makes some sense perhaps
to learn about ours a bit before visiting. I think some of our fellow
travellers are a bit concerned about being swamped by the shear size of the
communities involved in other WMF projects (Wikipedia) and rightly so. They
worry that the travel guide community runs a chance of quickly losing
editorial control, and that this will lead not to the desired
consolidation, but rather more unhealthy splintering in the collaborative
travel guide space.

All in all I think there's a pretty good chance that a WMF travel guide
Wiki would stand a good chance at attracting a large part of the community
under the right circumstances. But - it's important to recognize that that
community already exists if one wants to attract it.

thanks!

-mark
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] www.wikimedia.org (Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process)

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Mono  wrote:

> Erik,
>
> This proposal has been circulating for three years. Let's just do it.
>

I didn't know there was a proposal to rename Meta and supersede it, in
favor of another wiki.

As far as merging the dead wikis and utilizing www.wikimedia.org go, I
think it's a great idea. I am however, against renaming and superseding
Meta for this purpose. Meta has its own community. It's used for a lot of
different things, stewards, translations, policy pages. A rename and move,
will have more implications than what are being considered in the proposal.

Regards
Theo
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] Wikidata logo

[Mono]

Can we please have a Wikidata logo contest? They're such a waste of time,
but they've made some really great logos and are always fun/
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] www.wikimedia.org (Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process)

[Mono]

Erik,

This proposal has been circulating for three years. Let's just do it.

User:Mono

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Fajro  wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:48 AM, Liam Wyatt  wrote:
>
> > I've put some initial brainstorming notes about how this could be done
> here:
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia.org
>
> Nice.
>
> We'll add this to the discussions of the new Sister Projects Committee.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sister_Projects_Committee
>
>
> --
> Fajro
>
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] www.wikimedia.org (Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process)

[Fajro]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:48 AM, Liam Wyatt  wrote:

> I've put some initial brainstorming notes about how this could be done here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia.org

Nice.

We'll add this to the discussions of the new Sister Projects Committee.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sister_Projects_Committee


-- 
Fajro

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] www.wikimedia.org (Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process)

[Erik Moeller]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:48 AM, Liam Wyatt  wrote:

> - Also, could we look at merging the OutreachWiki, the StrategyWiki and
> MetaWiki? Maybe they could all live at the (currently extremely
> under-utilised) domain of http://www.wikimedia.org/

I've put some initial brainstorming notes about how this could be done here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia.org

Please weigh in :-)

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia mobile application development

[Kul Wadhwa]

Hi MZ,

I'm going to further address one of your questions below to shed a
little more light
on the relationship of mobile applications and carriers, and another
reason why we
need to have Wikipedia mobile apps.



> Okay, I think that's sensible. In my opinion, initiatives such as Wikipedia
> Zero are exactly the type of work that can only really be done at the
> Wikimedia Foundation-level and great progress has been made there that I
> don't think would have been possible with volunteers. And in a lot of ways,
> being able to host and maintain the mobile sites is something that only the
> Wikimedia Foundation is capable of doing. The mobile application development
> was the part that I saw as possibly being ripe for outside organizations,
> but as you explain below, that may not be the case for a variety of reasons.
>
>>> The idea behind free and open content is that the content can be taken and
>>> reused and redistributed by others without issue. That's part of the great
>>> beauty of Wikimedia wikis. With a vibrant app market for both Androids and
>>> iPhones, why is Wikimedia getting involved in mobile application
>>> development? Isn't this something best left to third parties (which, as I
>>> understand it, have already filled the "Wikipedia app" niche with a variety
>>> of options for both platforms) or interested volunteers?
>>
>> No, its really not and we've heard from countless people that it
>> wasn't working. There are a number of reasons that my team was asked
>> to do mobile apps and i'll list some of them below
>>
>> * Whenever we talk with carriers about partnering with us they want to
>> see a suite of products they can provide on our behalf. These can
>> range from a basic bookmarks on the mobile web, sms access, to a
>> listing our app within their own markets. Any one thing missing ends
>> the conversation pretty quickly. I suggest reading the original blog
>> post from January http://bit.ly/IFoti4 to gain more insite. Kul &
>> Amit can elaborate more on this.
>
> I'm a bit confused about the relationship between mobile applications and
> carriers. As I understand it, carriers in this context refers to cell phone
> service providers (Verizon, AT&T, et al.). The mobile applications are
> generally at a different layer (Apple's iTunes Store, Google's Android
> Market, etc.), aren't they? Is this strictly about pre-installed
> applications on devices sold through these carriers?
>
> I'd encourage anyone interested to read both the blog post _and_ the
> comments below it, where some of these same questions are asked (and
> answered!).
>

In regards to carriers, it's consistently been a requirement from them to
provide Wikipedia mobile apps for the following reasons: 1) marketing/awareness;
2) better user experience; and, 3) to provide a presence in their own
app stores.

1) As you pointed out, many of these carriers would like to
pre-install Wikipedia
apps on their phones and they require us to have these apps available for them.
They have a lot of control to determine what goes on the deck of Android
phones so that's better exposure for us. Furthermore,
they have told us that their data shows it's the preferred way
their customers access applications. I know it makes less sense for iOS
because Apple exclusively controls what's on the iPhone deck but, from
a marketing
perspective, it's easier for them to message "access to Wikipedia" if they
just identify an app in their marketing campaigns. I was in discussions with
another carrier this morning and they also emphasized the importance of
having an app in order to market Wikipedia Zero because they believe
their customers
may be hesitant to access Wikipedia directly via the mobile web. They
think their
average customer may be wary that it's not actually free, which may
deter them from using
the site if they feel that there is some chance they may be charged for data
usage. Some carriers claim that it's easier to message the Wikipedia
Zero experience
if the app is the clear gateway to it. We're obviously relying on the
insight we're getting
from our partners on this but we've been hearing the same thing from
many carriers on this.

2) In regards to user experience, there are some benefits to users in having
native functionality in a smart phone app but it's a more compelling
argument for feature phones.
Especially for low-end feature phones such as those that run on J2ME, the
in-browser experience is significantly worse than a native app
experience. This was
a common request made by carriers in developing countries where, in
some territories,
feature phone usage is still 50% to upwards of 80% of their user base.

3) Almost every carrier we've talked to have their own app stores:
Android, J2ME,
Bada, etc.. And although I'm not convinced it makes as much sense to
promote the
Wikipedia app in their Android store when most people go to Google's
Play Marketplace,
it's not an either/or proposition (we can do both) and carriers are
willing to put 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Anirudh Bhati]

Hello,

Is it just me or are we all getting email responses out of the original
threads?

Best


On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 1:00 AM, James Heilman  wrote:

> @Yaroslov
> 1) A merger within a WMF project  is supported by admins from both WT and
> WV. WV is going to be meeting on the possibility of merging June 9th in
> Germany
>
> 2) Wikimedia's mission is to provide freely available educational content I
> am not sure which "WMF principles" you do not see such a site as being
> compatible with? You mention that a good travel guide selects information.
> A good encyclopedia sections information as well. I am not sure why we
> would encounter any differences? We deal with spam here on Wikipedia all
> the time.
>
> 2a) Not catering to a specific audience is one of the criticisms of
> Wikipedia. The proposed travel guide would write for a general audience.
> Wikipedia has written for a general audience with some success.
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[James Heilman]

@Yaroslov
1) A merger within a WMF project  is supported by admins from both WT and
WV. WV is going to be meeting on the possibility of merging June 9th in
Germany

2) Wikimedia's mission is to provide freely available educational content I
am not sure which "WMF principles" you do not see such a site as being
compatible with? You mention that a good travel guide selects information.
A good encyclopedia sections information as well. I am not sure why we
would encounter any differences? We deal with spam here on Wikipedia all
the time.

2a) Not catering to a specific audience is one of the criticisms of
Wikipedia. The proposed travel guide would write for a general audience.
Wikipedia has written for a general audience with some success.

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] foundation-l is now wikimedia-l

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
 wrote:

> Thank you. It's worth noting on
> , where the
> mailman admins are/were setting up some conventions and defining a bunch of
> lists to be renamed, which will include Wikimedia-l given the -l suffix to
> be removed according to those standards.

Yeah, I'm aware of that page. I checked with Casey before going with
wikimedia-l. Given that the -l suffix is still in place with so many
lists, and given the pain involved in changing it, we agreed to keep
-l in place at least for root-level lists (project-level / meta-level,
like wikipedia-l, wikimedia-l and wikien-l), whereas new more
domain-specific lists are generally created without the -l suffix.

Erik

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] foundation-l is now wikimedia-l

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Erik Moeller, 10/04/2012 01:07:

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

The list URL should now redirect.


And, Daniel just implemented an alias as well [1], which I'm testing
by responding using the foundation-l address. (I promise this'll be
the last meta note for a while if all's working!)


Thank you. It's worth noting on 
, where 
the mailman admins are/were setting up some conventions and defining a 
bunch of lists to be renamed, which will include Wikimedia-l given the 
-l suffix to be removed according to those standards.


Nemo

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[emijrp]

2012/4/11 John Vandenberg 

> I agree that travel content is within the scope.  In addition to the
> content itself, which helps other people, the process of writing and
> communicating travel information is educational for the writer.
>
> There was a session about WikiTravel on at RCC2011 Canberra, where the
> need to change host was discussed, and forking generally was
> discussed.
>
>
> https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/University_of_Canberra/RCC2011/All_about_Wikitravel
>
> The wikiteam dumps of wikitravel are a bit old now; is someone working
> on making fresh dumps publicly available?
> https://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/downloads/list?can=2&q=wikitravel
> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/wikiteam-discuss/0gSFlnxeKOo/discussion
>
>
Hi;

Furthermore, WikiTravel dumps generated by WikiTeam include only the last
revision for every article. WikiTravel server is a bit weak, and full
history exports fail.

We would like to download a full dump if available.

Regards,
emijrp

-- 
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT  |
StatMediaWiki
| WikiEvidens  |
WikiPapers
| WikiTeam 
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Delphine Ménard]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Peter Coombe
 wrote:
[snip]
>
> No Original Research shouldn't be an issue, we already have Wikinews
> accepting original reporting.
>
> Neutral Point of View might be a more delicate area. You probably
> couldn't write a travel guide using the same standards of NPOV as used
> on Wikipedia, and if you could it would most likely be very dull. As
> far as I know all the existing projects follow some form of NPOV, but
> it isn't actually enshrined in the Foundation's mission statement,
> vision or values.


I was thinking about this idea of NPOV and I'm thinking that trying to
apply NPOV to a travel guide (and here I'm just thinking about the
"what to visit" part of it, rather than "which hotel to stay in" or
such can go in two directions.

First, I can imagine, as you say that using some kind of NPOV might
make the travel guide dull, because it'd end up listing about 300 tiny
things to see in one small location, and you'd lose the edge of
knowing "what to really see". On the other hand, I can imagine that
allowing not-so-known locations to be integrated in a travel guide
because of NPOV (everything gets to be there, if it exists, basically)
could be also extremely interesting in allowing people to travel
differently, and bring them to admire that
never-mentioned-in-a-normal-travel-guide monument or go and see that
extremely-interesting-for-its-time-but-made-by-a-nobody statue that no
other guide bothers to list because well, it's not a Michelangelo
thing.

Something of an attention to detail that I can see Wiki communities
having as opposed to larger established travel guides that keep on
telling you to do the same things everyone else does.

I am not advocating for or against NPOV for a Wiki travel guide, I'm
just thinking outloud at what would be the challenges of taking it in
or leaving it out.

Cheers,


Delphine
-- 
@notafish

NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost.
Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org
Photos with simple eyes: notaphoto - http://photo.notafish.org

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:19:05 +0200, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi,
 you are providing a perfect reason why you might contribute to 
a WMF

based travel wiki... No adds 
Thanks,
 Gerard



Yes, this is actually correct.

Cheers
Yaroslav

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
 you are providing a perfect reason why you might contribute to a WMF
based travel wiki... No adds 
Thanks,
 Gerard

On 11 April 2012 17:16, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:

> If you're serious about seeing it become the next Wikimedia sister project,
>> I'd focus on making a better case for how it falls within Wikimedia's
>> scope.
>>
>> MZMcBride
>>
>>
>>  The scope has been extensively discussed in this thread, and a
> convincing answer has been given. This answer is that travel is an avenue
> of education, possibly a more important one than an encyclopedia (since
> visual impressions are the strongest), and everything which promotes
> educational travel thus falls within the scope of the movement.
>
> There are however other issues which were also discussed.
>
> 1. The existence of two projects, Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, with unclear
> position of both communities concerning the unification in general, and the
> unification under the WMF umbrella in particular.
>
> 2. A good travel guide usually selects information. For instance, a list
> of all resturants in Paris is useless. A list with comments or a star-rated
> list is more useful, but the most useful is  star-rated selection which
> only contains a very limited number of entries. It is not clear whether
> such selection is compatible with WMF principles, and if not, why do we
> want to have a useless project (which potentially will be dominated by the
> entries of the restaurants themselves). I note however that one of the
> functions of an encyclopaedia is selection of encyclopaedic information,
> and this is why we have these perennial battles about notability).
>
> 2a. A good travel guide caters to specific audience - e.g. backpackers,
> retirees, or adventure travelers. If it attempts catering to all travellers
> at the same time, it becomes useless.
>
> 3. My personal impression (of somebody who has an advanced knowledge of a
> subject) is that Wikitravel is just a very poor travel guide. For standard
> places like Paris it can not currently beat any of the major travel series.
> For non-standard places, it contains nothing. May be this is fixable, I do
> not know. However, the real reason I never contributed to Wikitravel are
> ads.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
> __**_
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org 
> Unsubscribe: 
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

If you're serious about seeing it become the next Wikimedia sister 
project,
I'd focus on making a better case for how it falls within Wikimedia's 
scope.


MZMcBride


The scope has been extensively discussed in this thread, and a 
convincing answer has been given. This answer is that travel is an 
avenue of education, possibly a more important one than an encyclopedia 
(since visual impressions are the strongest), and everything which 
promotes educational travel thus falls within the scope of the movement.


There are however other issues which were also discussed.

1. The existence of two projects, Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, with 
unclear position of both communities concerning the unification in 
general, and the unification under the WMF umbrella in particular.


2. A good travel guide usually selects information. For instance, a 
list of all resturants in Paris is useless. A list with comments or a 
star-rated list is more useful, but the most useful is  star-rated 
selection which only contains a very limited number of entries. It is 
not clear whether such selection is compatible with WMF principles, and 
if not, why do we want to have a useless project (which potentially will 
be dominated by the entries of the restaurants themselves). I note 
however that one of the functions of an encyclopaedia is selection of 
encyclopaedic information, and this is why we have these perennial 
battles about notability).


2a. A good travel guide caters to specific audience - e.g. backpackers, 
retirees, or adventure travelers. If it attempts catering to all 
travellers at the same time, it becomes useless.


3. My personal impression (of somebody who has an advanced knowledge of 
a subject) is that Wikitravel is just a very poor travel guide. For 
standard places like Paris it can not currently beat any of the major 
travel series. For non-standard places, it contains nothing. May be this 
is fixable, I do not know. However, the real reason I never contributed 
to Wikitravel are ads.


Cheers
Yaroslav

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] Report about a great collaboration between Wikimedia France and a french ministry

[Adrienne Alix]

Hello,

I want to share with you a very great work made on several Wikimedia
projects in the previous weeks in collaboration between Wikim=C3=A9dia Fran=
ce
and the General Delegation for French Languages and Languages of France (
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9l%C3%A9gation_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_%C3%A0=
_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aise_et_
aux_langues_de_France-
DGLFLF), a department dedicated to the Languages in the French
Ministry
of Culture.
This collaboration is (imho) an example of what we can do with an
administration, and a source for contributors.

In may 2011 Wikim=C3=A9dia France was asked by the DGLFLF to write a report
about french language on the wikimedia projects. Some volunteers of the
chapter have doing this report, which was well received, up to be shared
with all the deputies of the French Parliament (in a general report about
the state of the french language) and frequently cited by the french
ministry of culture to show the importance of being present on the
internets to sustain a language.

After that, we were contacted again by the DGLFLF about the regional and
native languages of France (called "Langues de France" --> Languages of
France). We were invited in a big conference in Cayenne (french Guyana) on
december 2011. I was with Guillaume G., a volunteer, at this conference
called "General estates of the mulilinguism in the overseas" to explain
Wikimedia projects, with conferences and workshops.

The DGLFLF was very interested by our way of work and the philosophy of the
Wikimedia movement. After the conference we have discussed together and
decided to publish the acts of the conference by collaborative work on a
Wikimedia project : Wikibooks. You can see the result here (not totally
finished) :
http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_du_multilinguism=
e_dans_les_outre-mer(and
the linked pages)

We trained to contribute for 10 people from the DGLFLF and other
departments of the Ministry of Culture. They have now more than 500
contributions on Wikibooks, and they contribute on Wikipedia now. The idea
was to publish on Wikibooks to make a lot of links to Wikipedia,
illustrations from Commons etc, to promote the contribution for people
interested for the languages issues : linking to Wikipedia is a good way to
promote the contributions. Content about French overseas territories and
native languages is not so good and we (DGLFLF and WMFR) do a real effort
to promote better contributions.

Since one year, the DGLFLF has decided to publish its content with a free
license, especially made for open-data and open-content for the french
administration, the Etalab license (it is like au CC-BY license). After
they have published the content about the General Estates with this
license, we have uploaded the content on Wikim=C3=A9dia Commons. It is good=
 to
illustrate the Wikibooks, but now it is free for you too, to reuse and
share on the different Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia (to enrich
the articles about languages of France).

* We have all the videos of the Conference : more than 12 hours of
scientifical content about multilinguism and french languages :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_%C3%89tats_g%C3%=
A9n%C3%A9raux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer

* We have content produced by the DGLFLF about the different languages :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Linguistic_card_from_the_%C3%89t=
ats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer

* We also have a great kind of content : 18 audio files with languages of
the overseas (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_du=
_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer
).
Some languages are spoken by a lot of people, especially for the Cara=C3=AF=
b
Islands, but some other are from very little languages, without written,
and with a very little number of locutors, like the "Nemi", a language
non-written from New-Caledonia, spoken by less than 300 people. And we have
a small part of this language now on Wikim=C3=A9dia Commons ! (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nouvelle_Cal%C3%A9donie_Gilbert_Th%C=
3%A9in_Nemi.ogg).
We work to have other files of content about native languages like that.

So the reason to share with you this very nice collaboration is double :

* First I want to share a project which is - for me - an example of what we
can do with an administration when they are open to free culture and free
share of knowledge. It is a real pleasure for me to work like that and
share this good experience with you. And I hope that it could be benefit
for you and your discussions with your administrations to have an example
of a good project, in an other sector than GLAM or education, about free
knowledge.
* Secondly I wanted to share

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia mobile application development

[MZMcBride]

Thank you very much for the detailed and insightful reply.

Tomasz Finc wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 9:37 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>> Mobile seems to have two branches these days: (1) the mobile versions of the
>> sites; and more recently (2) specific mobile applications. Branch 1 is
>> fairly understandable. What I'm having difficulty understanding is branch 2.
> 
> While mobile has two branches, I wouldn't slice it that way. The way
> that we look at it is either
> 
> * Smart phone development - editing, image uploads, mobile web, apps,
> mobile frontend, etc
> * Alternate access methods - S40 (J2ME), SMS/USSD, & Zero

Okay, I think that's sensible. In my opinion, initiatives such as Wikipedia
Zero are exactly the type of work that can only really be done at the
Wikimedia Foundation-level and great progress has been made there that I
don't think would have been possible with volunteers. And in a lot of ways,
being able to host and maintain the mobile sites is something that only the
Wikimedia Foundation is capable of doing. The mobile application development
was the part that I saw as possibly being ripe for outside organizations,
but as you explain below, that may not be the case for a variety of reasons.

>> The idea behind free and open content is that the content can be taken and
>> reused and redistributed by others without issue. That's part of the great
>> beauty of Wikimedia wikis. With a vibrant app market for both Androids and
>> iPhones, why is Wikimedia getting involved in mobile application
>> development? Isn't this something best left to third parties (which, as I
>> understand it, have already filled the "Wikipedia app" niche with a variety
>> of options for both platforms) or interested volunteers?
> 
> No, its really not and we've heard from countless people that it
> wasn't working. There are a number of reasons that my team was asked
> to do mobile apps and i'll list some of them below
> 
> * Whenever we talk with carriers about partnering with us they want to
> see a suite of products they can provide on our behalf. These can
> range from a basic bookmarks on the mobile web, sms access, to a
> listing our app within their own markets. Any one thing missing ends
> the conversation pretty quickly. I suggest reading the original blog
> post from January http://bit.ly/IFoti4 to gain more insite. Kul &
> Amit can elaborate more on this.

I'm a bit confused about the relationship between mobile applications and
carriers. As I understand it, carriers in this context refers to cell phone
service providers (Verizon, AT&T, et al.). The mobile applications are
generally at a different layer (Apple's iTunes Store, Google's Android
Market, etc.), aren't they? Is this strictly about pre-installed
applications on devices sold through these carriers?

I'd encourage anyone interested to read both the blog post _and_ the
comments below it, where some of these same questions are asked (and
answered!).

> * Were constantly getting asked about why "insert new Wikipedia app
> name" in "new app store" has ads, is not free, and in general doesn't
> provide a polished experience. Users are confused why the foundation
> would provide so many bad offerings in each of the apps stores because
> they associate most apps in the market with something that the
> foundation has done. I've had users approach me and ask why the
> foundation puts ads inside their apps and even after explaining that
> we have no affiliation they insist that its a poor reflection of our
> projects. No matter how we look at it ... were being judged on behalf
> of any app that is showing people data from Wikipedia. Rather then
> having to explain why there are so many bad ones we decided to provide
> a better solution then the rest to raise awareness that you a) dont
> have to see ads b) don't have to pay for basic features like saving
> pages and c) have control in the future direction of the project.

Aha! This is a very interesting point. I hadn't realized that this was an
issue. Ad blindness seems to have not affected mobile device users as much
as it has desktop users (yet).

> * It's a great way to eat our own dog food. Apps should always be
> decoupled and with the next release of both of our apps we'll have
> learned a ton about how our API's are deficient. By better
> understanding these use cases we've extended functionality for such
> things as loading articles into small chunks and our mobile web
> projects will soon be receiving the same benefits. Re-using code like
> this is key to making both our projects better and third party apps
> faster.
> 
> * People use them. No matter if your a fan of apps or not they've
> replaced the function of bookmarks for most mobile users. They provide
> a faster and easier way of accessing content and our stats are
> starting to show it. In just under a month of metrics we've already
> seen 20+ million page views from the official android app and growth
> is continuing.
> 
> * Code re-use. Whe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] World Bank adopts CC licensing

[Richard Symonds]

CC-BY is my favourite licence by far. Is there any plan to bring some of 
this content across into Wikisource etc?


Richard Symonds
Office&  Development Manager
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 207 065 0992
--
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company
Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th 
Floor, Development House,  56-64 Leonard Street,
London EC2A 4LT.
Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit
organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for
its contents.


On 11/04/2012 00:03, aude wrote:

FYI: The World Bank is adopting CC-BY licensing for it publications and
content.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23164491~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/terms-of-use

Cheers,
Katie



___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[David Gerard]

On 11 April 2012 12:09, Tom Morris  wrote:

> It also fixes the whole death anomalies thing: if someone dies, we can
> update the Wikidata entry, rather than having conflicting information
> on different language versions of Wikipedia. I would think some of our
> more fanatical BLP adherents would rather like that. ;-)


The Atlantic article is arguing against consensus reality existing,
and against NPOV rather than article forks. (This is quite aside from
the writer not understanding the feature and extrapolating from his
misunderstanding.)


- d.

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[Tom Morris]

On 11 April 2012 11:25, Gerard Meijssen  wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is interesting that people consider the potential negative aspects and
> forgets about the positive.
>
> For me the big thing is that translatable info boxes is a perfect method of
> populating relevant information in stub articles. This is of particular
> relevance to the smaller Wikipedias, the projects where people are actively
> building something up. I noticed on the Zulu Wikipedia that they are
> working hard on doing something like this. Being able to translate the
> labels, some words relating to the content.
>

It also fixes the whole death anomalies thing: if someone dies, we can
update the Wikidata entry, rather than having conflicting information
on different language versions of Wikipedia. I would think some of our
more fanatical BLP adherents would rather like that. ;-)

Of course, I think the primary thing for me with Wikidata is the uses
that it can be put to that don't actually involve Wikipedia.
Governments are putting out thousands of datasets: complex
spreadsheets with often confusing or obscure information about the
societies we live in. Having a central place to store and improve that
information is something people have been trying to imagine for a
while: projects like CKAN and LinkedGov. It'd be interesting if we
could get a productive, drama-free community of people to maintain and
curate public government data, as this would enable all sorts of usage
both inside and outside the Wikimedia projects. "Data driven
journalism" is something that's actually flourishing pretty well
without much in the way of open source and free culture, it'd be
interesting from a long-range strategic kind of view how the Wikimedia
projects fit in.

-- 
Tom Morris


___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
It is interesting that people consider the potential negative aspects and
forgets about the positive.

For me the big thing is that translatable info boxes is a perfect method of
populating relevant information in stub articles. This is of particular
relevance to the smaller Wikipedias, the projects where people are actively
building something up. I noticed on the Zulu Wikipedia that they are
working hard on doing something like this. Being able to translate the
labels, some words relating to the content.

There is also the notion of NPOV. Yes, sometimes people will fight over the
numbers but this will benefit the whole of Wikipedia.
Thanks,
 Gerard

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2012/04/wikidata-and-what-it-can-do-for.html

On 11 April 2012 10:09, Denny Vrandečić wrote:

> I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of
> his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not
> permalinkable).
>
> Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate
> information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users
> coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language
> edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that
> Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation,
> or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated
> system?
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
>
>
> 2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe 
>
> > I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and
> > thought it highly relevant.
> >
> > Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation
> and
> > manipulation of information here.
> >
> > Andreas
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine 
> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham,
> who
> > > "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears
> on
> > > The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his
> > views
> > > but I found this to be an interesting read.
> > http://www.theatlantic.com/**
> > > technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/<
> >
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/
> > >
> > >
> > > __**_
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org 
> > > Unsubscribe:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
> > >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Project director Wikidata
> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 Berlin
> Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
> der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
> Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[Denny Vrandečić]

I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of
his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not
permalinkable).

Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate
information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users
coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language
edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that
Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation,
or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated
system?

Cheers,
Denny



2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe 

> I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and
> thought it highly relevant.
>
> Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation and
> manipulation of information here.
>
> Andreas
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine  wrote:
>
> >
> > Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who
> > "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on
> > The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his
> views
> > but I found this to be an interesting read.
> http://www.theatlantic.com/**
> > technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/<
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/
> >
> >
> > __**_
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org 
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
> >
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>



-- 
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] Wiki Travel Guide

[James Heilman]

@ MZMcBride I just assumed that most would see travel content as
educational in nature but have added this clarification to the proposal in
in question. If most accept that travel is educational in nature, resources
that help with travel would thus be educational resources and within the
scope of the Wikimedia Foundation.

@ John Vandenberg A recent copy of Wikitravel have been put aside and it is
ready to be adding into a mediawiki site.

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

[Wikimedia-l] teaching people how to edit Wikipedia

[Heather Ford]

Have a quick question for some work I'm doing on Wikipedia literacy: 

What resources are folks using to teach others how to edit Wikipedia? At 
Wikipedia Academies etc? 

Thanks in anticipation :)

Best,
Heather.


Heather Ford 
Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver
http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org 
@hfordsa on Twitter
http://hblog.org

___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l