[Wikimedia-l] Iberoconf 2012

[Osmar Valdebenito]

(sorry for cross-posting)


Hi,



In the past few days, representatives of different Wikimedia chapters and
working groups met in Santiago de Chile for the Second Ibero-American
Wikimedia Summit (also known as Iberoconf). This event took place between
June 1st and 3rd at the DUOC UC Institute – Campus Alonso Ovalle, with two
representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy,
Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela, and for the first time,
guests from Panama and Peru.



The event was an incredible opportunity for the different groups to share
their experiences from a local and regional perspective and articulate a
common framework for future projects in Ibero America. The use of the
native language of all the participants instead of a foreign language as it
happens in most of Wikimedia events was a



Here is a summary of the main topics of the summit:


   - Recommendations for the creation and development of Wikimedia chapters.
   - Experience of Brazilian and Mexican wikipedians at universities.
   - Discussion on development of projects in indigenous languages.
   - Best practices for grant making , accountability and GLAM projects.
   - Workshop of external communication and social media.
   - Workshop of “Wiki Loves Monument”

In the following days, we expect to release an extended summary of the
event in Meta, and records of the sessions and photos.  Also, every chapter
and working group will upload the slides of their “State of the Chapter”;
some of them are already available at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Presentaciones_en_el_Encuentro_Wikimedia_Iberoamericano_2012



I would like to thank to the Wikimedia Foundation for funding this project
and their representative at the meeting (Samuel Klein as part of the Board
and Matthew Roth as part of the Staff) because their valuable and really
helpful participation at the sessions.  The same to Délphine Menard, who
came as a guest in representation of Wikimedia Deutschland. Thanks also for
all the participants, -some of them even flew for more than 24 hours, and
for those that voted our bid past March.



But, more important, I want to thank to all the members of Wikimedia Chile
that helped to organize this event. We bid in February mainly as a joke and
now we are finally resting after organizing such a big event. It was a
great opportunity to bring closer our members and learn about event
organization. To Juan David, Lily, Daniel, Dennis, Eduardo, Sarah, Rocío
and Marco, thank you!



I’m really happy with this Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit, which is
becoming one of our traditions as a movement and as an example for regional
cooperation activities. We expect anxiously next summit in 2013 and, as a
general recommendation, I public encourage our fellow chapters to start
ambitious projects like this one.



Kind regards,

Osmar Valdebenito Gaete

Presidente de Wikimedia Chile

http://www.wikimediachile.cl
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[Wikimedia-l] The Grant Advisory Committee is expanding!

[Asaf Bartov]

Dear colleagues,

The Wikimedia Foundation would like to expand its Grant Advisory
Committee[1], and we would like you to consider whether you might be
interested in volunteering in that capacity.

The GAC (as it is affectionately known) is an advisory body performing a
double function in relation to the Wikimedia Foundation's Grants Program[3]
-- 

1. The GAC advises grant applicants on how to improve and clarify their
proposals and their plans.  This often extends to advice not just about how
to secure the funds, but how to improve the planning of the project/event
or what precedents to look at, for positive or negative examples.
2. The GAC advises the Foundation on the mission fit, frugality, and
expected impact of grant proposals, expressing support or concerns about
open grant proposals.

If this sounds like something you might want to help with, please review
the description of the GAC[1] and the membership criteria[2].  If you think
you meet the criteria, add your name to the candidates page[4] with a brief
statement demonstrating your meeting the criteria.  This is to be an open
process, and the number of seats on the GAC is not predetermined; we expect
all qualifying candidates to be admitted into the GAC.

Please help us reach potential volunteers by sharing/forwarding this
announcement in appropriate community mailing lists.

Finally, I'd like to thank the incumbent members of the GAC (founded
exactly one year ago), who are putting in their time and experience and
have been making a real difference in our grantmaking this past year.

Thank you,

   Asaf

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee/Membership_criteria
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_Advisory_Committee/Candidates
-- 
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Andrew Gray]

On 4 June 2012 18:00, ???  wrote:

> With access across 24 time zones how do you pick out weekday office hours,
> as opposed to evening access?

Using non-English projects would give a more clear result here, I
think - speakers of, say, Italian or German are more concentrated in a
narrow time-zone band than speakers of English. To a first
approximation, 90-95% of the access by from speakers of those
languages is likely to take place in CET; you might well get the same
results for, say, Japanese.

Using Portuguese or Spanish would give you much less clear results,
comparable to English.

I don't know if anyone has graphed this, but I'd like to see the results :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on IPv6

[Erik Moeller]

Hi folks,

Mark Bergsma just shared the following recap with me, for those who
are interested in the details of what happened at the hackathon and
next steps. tl;dr: If all goes well we'll be ready to launch full
production deployment on Wednesday, starting around 10AM UTC
(MediaWiki engineers will be working closely with the ops team
Wednesday to monitor bugs/issues).

Keep an eye on the server admin log and the puppet repo if you want to
know what's going on in full detail:

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:operations/puppet,n,z

Erik

- - -

The last few days we've worked on getting the software ready (mainly
PyBal/LVS) as well as Puppet support for provisioning of IPv6
addresses to servers and configuration changes for IPv6 connectivity.
That's now 90% done. What remains is mostly to actually roll this out
for all services in all data centers, which we will be doing tomorrow.
Besides that, we have a few "would be nice to haves" left to do, such
as having our own 6to4 and miredo relays.

I just got the first LVS service running with IPv6, and am now
browsing upload.wikimedia.org over IPv6 (local /etc/hosts entry of
course, not in DNS yet). ipv6 support for LVS in Ubuntu Precise was
the last major uncertain factor on the infrastructure side; besides a
few quick tests in labs we had not really tested this yet in our
production setup. Fortunately, it appears to be working fine. Tomorrow
the remaining (inactive) LVS balancers will be reinstalled with
Precise and made IPv6-ready to support all other services, while the
currently active IPv4 balancers will keep their current setup for some
time to come - so we won't hit any surprises on IPv4 at least.

But, we haven't done any production tests with MediaWiki yet. We can
do some dark testing and actual edits tomorrow. Assuming we see no
surprises there, we can enable it for the all wikis and the general
public on Wednesday.

To conclude, we're on track on the infrastructure side. It is tight,
though. Assuming the MediaWiki side has no unwelcome surprises for us,
I expect to be able to make it.

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

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

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[???]

On 04/06/2012 13:57, David Gerard wrote:

On 4 June 2012 11:23, ???  wrote:


One would, I think need to establish that the work was being used for
educational purposes that 'matter' educationally, and those that had read
the material were better as a result.



AIUI, weekdays office hours are our peak access period, and Wikipedia
generally isn't blocked in offices the way Facebook, etc. often are.
This suggests it's good for *something* economically.




With access across 24 time zones how do you pick out weekday office 
hours, as opposed to evening access?



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Andre Engels]

I'll take another route (although probably just as meaningless as most
others). The normal way of generating money over the net is through
advertisements. How much would Wikipedia make in advertisements, would
they use them? Using a conservative price of 0,5 cents per pageview,
and using the data from
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htm I
get that just the value of having Wikipedia for one month equates 1
billion dollars (American style billions).


-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Andre Engels]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> On 4 June 2012 13:57, David Gerard  wrote:
>> AIUI, weekdays office hours are our peak access period, and Wikipedia
>> generally isn't blocked in offices the way Facebook, etc. often are.
>> This suggests it's good for *something* economically.
>
> It's good for lowering the productivity of offices! I occasionally
> look things up on Wikipedia at work that are actually about my work,
> but usually it's to settle a debate that has nothing at all to do with
> work.

Even then it could be good for productivity, by decreasing the amount
of time you and your colleagues spend over looking up who is right in
their debate (although probably that gained time will be used for more
debates, so the net effect on productivity will be close to zero).

-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 4 June 2012 13:57, David Gerard  wrote:
> AIUI, weekdays office hours are our peak access period, and Wikipedia
> generally isn't blocked in offices the way Facebook, etc. often are.
> This suggests it's good for *something* economically.

It's good for lowering the productivity of offices! I occasionally
look things up on Wikipedia at work that are actually about my work,
but usually it's to settle a debate that has nothing at all to do with
work.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[David Gerard]

On 4 June 2012 11:23, ???  wrote:

> One would, I think need to establish that the work was being used for
> educational purposes that 'matter' educationally, and those that had read
> the material were better as a result.


AIUI, weekdays office hours are our peak access period, and Wikipedia
generally isn't blocked in offices the way Facebook, etc. often are.
This suggests it's good for *something* economically.


- d.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Any studies on economic impact of community-produced open data?

[???]

On 03/06/2012 18:10, Erik Zachte wrote:

I doubt most subscribers to Britannica Online access it almost every
day, at home and at work, for even most mundane information needs.
Wikipedia is much more filled with practical information that helps
us save time and avoid costly mistakes every day. Is Britannica
Online comparable in content to the paper edition? Ask any owner of
that paper edition how often they grabbed a volume from the shelf,
even before Wikipedia came along. Mainly for this reason I doubt
people would mass subscribe to Britannica when Wikipedia
disappeared.



Personally I used the paper version whenever I wanted to check things 
out. That probably wasn't as often as I use the internet to check stuff 
because I didn't have that much need then. I still use the CD version of 
Britannica if I want to be reasonably sure of some idea before 
researching it further.




(still this leaves Thomas argument that money spent does not equal
financial gain)




There is little value to the economy from being able to settle a pub 
bet. Or to furnish an argument on USENET or facebook.


One would, I think need to establish that the work was being used for 
educational purposes that 'matter' educationally, and those that had 
read the material were better as a result.


Unfortunately the coverage of history, philosophy, geography, and arts 
subjects are unreadable and almost worthless.


EXAMPLE:

 Charles IV died in 1328, leaving only a daughter,
 and an unborn infant who would prove to be a girl.

no modern writer writes like that.

EXAMPLE:

The senior line of the Capetian dynasty thus ended,
creating a crisis over the French succession.

There was no crises in France about it. Philip VI took over in the same 
way that Charles IV had succeeded. Both examples come from two 
successive sentences in the 100 years war article. The rest of the 
article is riddled with such stupidities.




At first Wikimania, at Frankfurt, Jimmy gave an estimate how much
money we could have earned from advertisements, and it was already
more than a million per month in 2005.





To Government that would be a net loss as they would otherwise be able 
to collect taxes on profits.




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