date:20130511

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Elections 2013

2013-05-11 Thread Takashi OTA

I have been working on a translation of FDC Ombud election in to Japanese.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/FDC_Ombudsperson_elections/2013

In the section of How to submit your candidacy, it reads:
If you are eligible, you can submit your candidacy by doing the following:

Write a brief summary of no more than 1200 characters stating what you would
do
if you were elected to the Funds Dissemination Committee,

Shouldn't it be if you were elected to the FDC Ombuds(person), not FDC itself?

--Takashi OTA

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Nicole Ebber nicole.eb...@wikimedia.de wrote:
Hey,

thanks for the announcement and all the work the election committee
has done so far.

I have written a kind of lengthy blog post about the elections and
about how and why the communities can or should get involved. It's in
German, but if anyone's interested in translating it, you are more
than welcome to re-use and remix and build upon it (of course... ;)).

https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/04/29/community-wahlt-hochstes-gremium-des-wikimedia-universums-board-of-trustees-der-wikimedia-foundation/

Cheerio,
Nicole

On 2 May 2013 06:29, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are now being accepted for
the 2013 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year, elections are being
held for the following roles:

Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately
responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we value
wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled.
More information about this role can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/Board_elections/2013.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

The Funds Dissemination Committee
(FDC)http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_the_Creation_and_Initial_Operation_of_the_FDCmakes
recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia
movement http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia funds to eligible
entities. There are two positions being filled. More information about
this role can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/FDC_elections/2013.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud

The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process,
investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and
summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an
annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this
role can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/FDC_Ombudsperson_elections/2013.

The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 24 to 23:59 UTC
May 17. More
information on this election can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013.

Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village
pump, or to translate it and distribute it on other Wikimedia movement
mailing lists. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the
talk page
on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list,
board-elections AT wikimedia.org

On behalf of the Election Committee,

Risker
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--
Nicole Ebber
International Affairs

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49 30 219158 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.

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[Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski


Hi all,
for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation 
wiki https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, I 
think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level 
decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been 
stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time).


As far as I know, community members have been helping out maintaining 
this wiki for as long as 2006, spending countless hours of their free 
time on categorising existing pages, importing translations from Meta, 
and recently, deleting unnecessary and broken pages left over by WMF staff.


Apparently, this is something that not only isn't appreciated, but 
unwelcome. Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help 
out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost 
since the very start of the wiki.


Some questions come to my mind right now:

1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members? 
(I'm assuming it was Gayle, but it could've be someone from the 
Communications department for all we know.)

2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed?
3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of 
discussing things with them first?


These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a 
riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a 
correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not 
hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been 
desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?


-- Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Huib Laurens

The same happend to the Wikimedia Blog.

Most of the moderators where volunteers (and the only real active ones
also). My moderator rights where removed and I have to go after that
myself, I didn't got a message or anything.

While I was list administrator for wikitech-l I got the mail also that I
needed to give my password so that the list can be run by the staff. I
didn't respond to that mail (Thought it was spam cause It was send by
gmail). \

It gives me the feeling that we need a bigger fundraiser cause people GET
PAYED for doing things other people DO FOR FREE.

Huib

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:15 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

---
Dear XXX,
Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At this time, we
are formalizing a new requirement, which is that administrator access
is given only to staff and board. I am having administrator access to
accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled, effective
immediately.
Sincerely,
Gayle
--
Gayle Karen K. Young
Chief Talent and Culture Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
415.310.8416
www.wikimediafoundation.org
---

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is that it's
ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the community's web
presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how userrights are
given to staffers on the community wikis; they're distributed as and
when they're needed for a specific task.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community? Has the
position of the legal department changed? or the boards? just randomly
changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately strange.
since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else that falls
under the foundation)

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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--
Met vriendelijke groet,

Huib Laurens
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Craig Franklin

This sort of tone might be appropriate coming from HR in a bank or
something, but I'm tremendously disappointed that something so tactless and
rude was sent out from a senior officer in the Foundation to its
volunteers. I know Gayle is a new hire, so I'm assuming good faith that
she wasn't aware that taking this sort of attitude with volunteers would go
down like a lead balloon.

Someone at the WMF needs to take Gayle into an office and patiently explain
to her that the volunteers whose access she just disabled, effective
immediately are the same ones that keep the websites that per her salary
going.

Cheers,
Craig Franklin

On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Russavia

Having an HR IR background myself, I am most surprised that the
person for managing TALENT and CULTURE would take such a move without
even so much as consulting with the community who keep the WMF's
presence on the internet working, nor without giving them an actual
reason as to why this has occurred.

I can only encourage Karen to either 1) explain why this was an
absolutely necessary step to make, or 2) reverse those actions.

Russavia

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Craig Franklin
cfrank...@halonetwork.net wrote:
This sort of tone might be appropriate coming from HR in a bank or
something, but I'm tremendously disappointed that something so tactless and
rude was sent out from a senior officer in the Foundation to its
volunteers. I know Gayle is a new hire, so I'm assuming good faith that
she wasn't aware that taking this sort of attitude with volunteers would go
down like a lead balloon.

Cheers,
Craig Franklin

On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Russavia

Apologies, I mean Gayle, not Karen.

Russavia

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote:
Having an HR IR background myself, I am most surprised that the
person for managing TALENT and CULTURE would take such a move without
even so much as consulting with the community who keep the WMF's
presence on the internet working, nor without giving them an actual
reason as to why this has occurred.

I can only encourage Karen to either 1) explain why this was an
absolutely necessary step to make, or 2) reverse those actions.

Russavia

Cheers,
Craig Franklin

On 11 May 2013 21:15, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Affiliations Committee 2012 Annual Report

2013-05-11 Thread Federico Leva (Nemo)


phoebe ayers, 01/05/2013 21:54:

Dear Bence and all,

This is a very good report! It is very clear, just the right length and
gives a good picture of all of the activity of the committee -- both
accomplishments and frustrations. AffComm did a lot in 2012! Thank you very
much for all of your and the committee's work on behalf of Wikimedia.


+1

I'm very concerned about this issue, which comes up in many points: 
«[...] failure to come up with a naming guideline to be applied to new 
affiliates that has caused significant delays and uncertainty in 
processing applications [...] unclear situation has caused a number of 
delays in the full roll-out of the new models and finding solutions that 
are faster and less resource intensive on the legal team [...] any name 
that incorporated a Wikimedia trademark would need to be pre-approved by 
the WMF Legal Department [...] until finalised, easier to apply 
guidelines are adopted that can be used independently by the volunteers 
behind proposed affiliates and the Affiliations Committee, the act of 
naming proposed affiliates will be a difficult and lengthy process.»


As usual, process, role and responsibilities as clear as mud.

Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Affiliations Committee 2012 Annual Report

2013-05-11 Thread Bence Damokos

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.comwrote:

 phoebe ayers, 01/05/2013 21:54:

  Dear Bence and all,

 This is a very good report! It is very clear, just the right length and
 gives a good picture of all of the activity of the committee -- both
 accomplishments and frustrations. AffComm did a lot in 2012! Thank you
 very
 much for all of your and the committee's work on behalf of Wikimedia.


 +1

 I'm very concerned about this issue, which comes up in many points: «[...]
 failure to come up with a naming guideline to be applied to new affiliates
 that has caused significant delays and uncertainty in processing
 applications [...] unclear situation has caused a number of delays in the
 full roll-out of the new models and finding solutions that are faster and
 less resource intensive on the legal team [...] any name that incorporated
 a Wikimedia trademark would need to be pre-approved by the WMF Legal
 Department [...] until finalised, easier to apply guidelines are adopted
 that can be used independently by the volunteers behind proposed affiliates
 and the Affiliations Committee, the act of naming proposed affiliates will
 be a difficult and lengthy process.»

 As usual, process, role and responsibilities as clear as mud.

 Yes, to be fair, since the closing of the report, we had made some
progress on this issue (e.g. we've had some user group name templates
pre-approved[1] during a meeting in Milan with Stephen from the legal team
and had clarified the process and responsibilities for names that don't
match those templates for example in the case of thorgs). It remains to be
seen if things do go smoother going forward with these improvements, but
the goodwill is there on each side.

Best regards,
Bence

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Step-by-step_user_group_creation_guidediff=prevoldid=5476169
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Deryck Chan

Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised
by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here.
Go back to meta.

I'll be interested to see how long the WMF wiki will last before they hit
their first massive technical problem happens and they need to call in a
volunteer to fix it.

Deryck

On 11 May 2013 12:15, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Itzik Edri

Can we please give time to the Foundation to response and express their
side before everyone starts to attack them? I think we had enough of that
on Internal-l.

After the first response, or at least 24h, I will understand everyone
feelings about that. (And right now I'm also don't agree or understand
WMF's decision, but I'm waiting to hear them first).

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Deryck Chan deryckc...@wikimedia.hkwrote:

Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised
by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here.
Go back to meta.

I'll be interested to see how long the WMF wiki will last before they hit
their first massive technical problem happens and they need to call in a
volunteer to fix it.

Deryck

On 11 May 2013 12:15, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first, When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?, although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

[1].

https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F

[2].

https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung

[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Deryck Chan wrote:
Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised
by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here.
Go back to meta.

Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to be part of a larger pattern.

* Blog access has been restricted (as noted).
* Bugzilla adminship has been restricted to staff only.
* wikimediafoundation.org adminship is now restricted to staff and Board
Members.
* Shell access has been restricted to staff only (no more volunteer
sysadmins).

Relatedly, the Toolserver is being slowly killed in favor of a controlled
sandbox called Wikimedia Labs and all Wikimedia accounts are being
unified (with forceable usurps/renames) to make it easier to track and
control users across all Wikimedia wikis.

It's very surprising that the Board has been so quiet about all of this.
Generally, a few staff members (notably Philippe and his team) have tried
to create tiers in which paid staff are above volunteers. Even the most
trusted volunteers are no longer allowed to hold positions of trust within
the Wikimedia community. This is very bad. Are there ways to address this?

But to blame this on Gayle is kind of insane. It seems clear to me that
she's being used as a pawn here. There are very few indications that this
has anything to do with her, aside from a few log entries (from...
Philippe) inexplicably pointing to her name. And the curt e-mail she sent
out to affected users. Her involvement with the wiki would charitably be
described as negligible.

The director of _community advocacy_ (Philippe) is stripping nearly every
community member of user rights. And yet there's still no provided
rationale for the change in policy, other than it being based on a series
of private discussions. Meanwhile, the home page of
wikimediafoundation.org stresses how transparent the organization is.

This is a pretty disappointing day. I'd be interested to hear what Gayle,
Philippe, or the Board has to say.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Itzik Edri wrote:
Can we please give time to the Foundation to response and express their
side before everyone starts to attack them? I think we had enough of that
on Internal-l.

After the first response, or at least 24h, I will understand everyone
feelings about that. (And right now I'm also don't agree or understand
WMF's decision, but I'm waiting to hear them first).

I agree that it would be nice to have a full explanation from the
Wikimedia Foundation here (particularly from Philippe and Gayle, who have
apparently conspired).

But I'm not sure I agree that time is needed to evaluate what has
happened. There was certainly no wait before users were stripped of their
user rights. The lack of any emergency makes this rash series of actions
even more upsetting and confusing.

Wikimedia _is_ its community. When a few staff members start to kick out
the community (from the blog, from Bugzilla, from volunteer sysadminning),
it's a pretty awful situation that needs to be immediately addressed, in
my opinion. The alternative is that most volunteers will simply go away.
While that may seem like a victory to certain staff members, I wonder when
they'll realize that it's these same volunteers that keep the projects
running. When the dedicated and trusted volunteers leave, their (paid)
jobs will soon follow. Wikimedia simply isn't sustainable without trusted
volunteers. Slapping them in the face does what?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Leslie Carr

Sent from my mobile. Please excuse the brevity and typos.
On May 11, 2013 4:36 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:

 Deryck Chan wrote:
 Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised
 by this at all. The message is clear - the community doesn't belong here.
 Go back to meta.

 Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to be part of a larger pattern.

 * Blog access has been restricted (as noted).
 * Bugzilla adminship has been restricted to staff only.
 * wikimediafoundation.org adminship is now restricted to staff and Board
 Members.
 * Shell access has been restricted to staff only (no more volunteer
 sysadmins).

Someone better tell that to domas and his ssh key.

As someone tasked with protecting the servers,ssh keys should be restricted
as much as possible, both with staff and volunteers. that is technical and
not political.

 Relatedly, the Toolserver is being slowly killed in favor of a controlled
 sandbox called Wikimedia Labs and all Wikimedia accounts are being
 unified (with forceable usurps/renames) to make it easier to track and
 control users across all Wikimedia wikis.

 It's very surprising that the Board has been so quiet about all of this.
 Generally, a few staff members (notably Philippe and his team) have tried
 to create tiers in which paid staff are above volunteers. Even the most
 trusted volunteers are no longer allowed to hold positions of trust within
 the Wikimedia community. This is very bad. Are there ways to address this?

 But to blame this on Gayle is kind of insane. It seems clear to me that
 she's being used as a pawn here. There are very few indications that this
 has anything to do with her, aside from a few log entries (from...
 Philippe) inexplicably pointing to her name. And the curt e-mail she sent
 out to affected users. Her involvement with the wiki would charitably be
 described as negligible.

 The director of _community advocacy_ (Philippe) is stripping nearly every
 community member of user rights. And yet there's still no provided
 rationale for the change in policy, other than it being based on a series
 of private discussions. Meanwhile, the home page of
 wikimediafoundation.org stresses how transparent the organization is.

 This is a pretty disappointing day. I'd be interested to hear what Gayle,
 Philippe, or the Board has to say.

 MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Federico Leva (Nemo)


K. Peachey, 11/05/2013 16:59:

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 12:56 AM, Leslie Carr lc...@wikimedia.org wrote:

...
As someone tasked with protecting the servers,ssh keys should be restricted
as much as possible, both with staff and volunteers. that is technical and
not political.


That same argument can also be used for restricting all but even a
smaller circle of staff from root. Probably not the best example to
lead with...


Yes, or all the sysops on foundationwiki with 0 edits. :)

Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Leslie Carr wrote:
 * Shell access has been restricted to staff only (no more volunteer
 sysadmins).

Someone better tell that to domas and his ssh key.

As someone tasked with protecting the servers, ssh keys should be
restricted as much as possible, both with staff and volunteers. that is
technical and not political.

That was just sloppy wording on my part, apologies. Shell/root access has
been indeed been restricted to staff only. About four users have been
grandfathered in (Domas, Jens, River, Robert S.). I'll note that these
users have all contributed an enormous amount (for free!) to the Wikimedia
movement. They deserve only our appreciation for the volunteer work
they've done. And they serve as a model of what trusted volunteers can do.
Please don't suggest that this has anything to do with technical
decisions. Even a child can see that this is pure politics.

Leslie, do you agree with these policies that remove all non-staff from
positions of trust? Do you agree with creating tiers between staff and
everyone else?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Leslie Carr

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 4:59 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 12:56 AM, Leslie Carr lc...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 ...
 As someone tasked with protecting the servers,ssh keys should be restricted
 as much as possible, both with staff and volunteers. that is technical and
 not political.

 That same argument can also be used for restricting all but even a
 smaller circle of staff from root. Probably not the best example to
 lead with...


Actually it is the perfect example to lead with -- very few people
with shell access have root.


--
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Leslie Carr

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:04 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:
 Leslie Carr wrote:
 * Shell access has been restricted to staff only (no more volunteer
 sysadmins).

Someone better tell that to domas and his ssh key.

As someone tasked with protecting the servers, ssh keys should be
restricted as much as possible, both with staff and volunteers. that is
technical and not political.

 That was just sloppy wording on my part, apologies. Shell/root access has
 been indeed been restricted to staff only. About four users have been
 grandfathered in (Domas, Jens, River, Robert S.). I'll note that these
 users have all contributed an enormous amount (for free!) to the Wikimedia
 movement. They deserve only our appreciation for the volunteer work
 they've done. And they serve as a model of what trusted volunteers can do.
 Please don't suggest that this has anything to do with technical
 decisions. Even a child can see that this is pure politics.

 Leslie, do you agree with these policies that remove all non-staff from
 positions of trust? Do you agree with creating tiers between staff and
 everyone else?

I have no opinion on all the other policies - my concern, expertise,
and really the only place I think my opinion even matters is for the
servers.

My opinion is that we should restrict any ssh access on the cluster to
those who have demonstrated that they both need it and can handle the
responsibility. If a volunteer has been very responsible in labs and
has a demonstratable need, I'd be fine with that.  The reason that ops
staff get ssh access and root is that we (hopefully) during our
interview and references have demonstrated the ability to handle the
access responsibly, have a need, and on top of that have signed a big
stack of paperwork.  But the more that we can do on labs without ever
touching production, the better off the stability of the cluster.

Also I believe that several analytics folks ( under admins::restricted
in admins.pp ) are not employees but do have some ssh access.


Leslie


 MZMcBride



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--
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Andy Mabbett

On 11 May 2013 14:46, Deryck Chan deryckc...@wikimedia.hk wrote:

 Given the foundation's recent tsunami of centralisation I'm not surprised
 by this at all.

Sad to say, this chimes with the Foundation's recent decision to
consult on changes to en.Wikipedia's method of notifying users that
they have a talk page message, and then to reject the overwhelming
consensus (to return the familiar orange bar, at least while other
options are discussed) of that consultation.

--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Andy Mabbett

On 11 May 2013 15:36, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:

 Yeah, I think you're right. It seems to be part of a larger pattern.

+ Withdrawal of the ability to use WMF logos/ wordmarks in community
projects, such as QRpedia.

--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Marc A. Pelletier

On 05/11/2013 06:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote:
 Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help out with
 running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost since the
 very start of the wiki.

Tomasz, while it seems clear that communications about that move seem to
have been lacking, I think it's unwarranted to ascribe ill-intent to the
WMF staff.  Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you
declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski


Marc A. Pelletier wrote:


Tomasz, while it seems clear that communications about that move seem to
have been lacking, I think it's unwarranted to ascribe ill-intent to the
WMF staff.  Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you
declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?


I cannot tell what was the /intent/ of the WMF when they acted (for 
obvious reasons), but I think that my description of the situation was 
pretty justified — and the message sent to all those desysopped 
volunteers could not have been more clear. If the WMF wants their help, 
why would they desysop them in the first place?


If you had read my e-mail, then I'm sure you noticed that I actually 
asked about the reasons for this decision and its execution, as I am 
unable to find any justification for what happened.


[Yes, I do understand there is a considerable time difference, etc; I'll 
be patiently waiting for a response from the WMF.]


-- Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Theo10011

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski tom...@twkozlowski.net
 wrote:


 [Yes, I do understand there is a considerable time difference, etc; I'll
 be patiently waiting for a response from the WMF.]


Might even have to wait till Monday. This was done on a Friday night I
think.

There doesn't seem to be any method to how these rights are being assigned
and retained. Observations-

1) Only 2 of the current board members (besides Jimmy) have admin rights.
Prob. on the argument that they are community-elected?
2) A few of the current admins that retained their flag have never made a
contribution, or made any in the last year.
3) Phoebe for some reason, retains her right while currently not being on
staff or the board.
4) Only 2 people are prob. assigned on the basis of advisory board
without any explanation. There is no updated list to check who is on the
advisory board this time.

There does seem to be a pattern about how this is being cleaned up, and I
don't think Gayle is the impetus behind this though she is taking the blame
for it.

Theo
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Seb35

Le Sat, 11 May 2013 17:50:18 +0200, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org a  
écrit:

Perhaps you should wait for a response from them before you
declare what their wishes may be or what their reasons were?


At the same time, it’s a very bad timing of doing such a controversial  
action just before weekend, and let people wondering during two days the  
reasons behind this action. So waiting still 2 days..


Sébastien

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Sue Gardner

Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at
responding to this.

The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation
knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all
readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia
Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog).
We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of
community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the
blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and
we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board
bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most
material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes
-- it's corporate in nature, meaning that it is developed by the
Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders,
which includes community members and prospective community members, donors,
readers of the projects, media, and others.

My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing
rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on
the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help
they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki,
and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and we're
grateful.

But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden
decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation
in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the
extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been
one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a
community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do, but
rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to do
as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been
extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the
Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of
the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a
single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the
Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to
accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the
amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I
repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.

So I would say this:

This decision is not about the community versus the WMF. This decision
is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on
the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.
This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the
volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role by
creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth
bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and
volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize
pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I
think having clarity around it is a good thing.

Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young,
everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of
roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation
budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by
volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even
though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a
period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it
wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many
roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like
we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
don't pay staff to edit the projects: staff who edit do it on their own
time, as a hobby or special personal interest. We do pay staff to do things
that are better done by staff than by volunteers, such as managing the
trademark portfolio. Some volunteers (such as Domas) have very special
privileges and powers, because they've proved over time they are
exceptionally skilled. Some volunteers support the Wikimedia Foundation
staff in their work in a variety of ways, because they've proved their
interest and abilities. Some work happens in close partnership between
staff and volunteers, such as production of blog posts, speaking with the
media, and in projects such as the Global Ed one. Sometimes organized
groups of volunteers are created by volunteers and supported by staff (e.g.
ArbCom or AffCom) and sometimes organized groups of volunteers are created
by

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Sue Gardner wrote:
So. People can disagree with this decision, and that's okay. But
ultimately, the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia
Foundation wiki: it's our job to figure out how best to manage and
Maintain it. That's what we're doing here.

wikimediafoundation.org has historically been managed by the Board. Not
Gayle or Philippe.

I'm still waiting on the Board to chime in here. It's my understanding
that several Board members (current and former) wanted to open the wiki to
more editing and cleanup in the short-term and in the long-term re-unite
the wiki with Meta-Wiki at www.wikimedia.org.

This is a step in the wrong direction.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Marc A. Pelletier

On 05/11/2013 12:41 PM, Seb35 wrote:
 At the same time, it’s a very bad timing of doing such a controversial
 action just before weekend, and let people wondering during two days the
 reasons behind this action. So waiting still 2 days..

Yes, IMO that was a faux-pas.  This should have been announced in
advance and not done late Friday, if only to avoid those open questions.

I note, however, that Sue gave an extended response in this thread a bit
ago, so while it may not have been the best of timings, it's been swift.
 :-)

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Tomasz W. Kozlowski

I'm not going to respond to all the points raised in your e-mail, Sue 
(partially because most of them are just too general), so let me just 
mentioned some of them.



The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation
knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all
readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia
Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog).


Then it should perhaps be renamed as the Wikimedia Foundation Blog With 
Guests Post from Community Members.



We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of
community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the
blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and
we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board
bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most
material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes
-- it's corporate in nature, meaning that it is developed by the
Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders,
which includes community members and prospective community members, donors,
readers of the projects, media, and others.


Well, then I am still surprised to see you thank those volunteers for 
their work in this matter—by desysopping them all in one, unannounced 
and not discussed user rights purge.


The most important reason why all those pages that you mention, Sue, are 
maintained and in good shape is that community members have been very 
often driving changes, helping with importing translations, and making 
thousands of small changes (be it typos, categorisation or design-like).


Seeing that there aren't any WMF employees who contributed as much time 
and work as some community members (with the possible exception of 
Philippe and Heather), I'm puzzled to see you make this decision.


This having been written, I would like to reiterate my questions again 
(and add another one):


1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members?
2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed?
3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of
discussing things with them first?
4) /NEW/ Who precisely (what department) is responsible for the 
maintenance of the wiki, and why didn't they perform their roles before?


-- Tomasz

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Nathan

Argh, why do we have to keep going through this over and over again?
I'm sure we're long past the point where Sue and many members of the
staff are convinced that they will be attacked by someone in reaction
to any decision they could make. Maybe that's true, but its no excuse
for transforming such a picayune change into a drama bomb through the
utter failure to manage the implementation of a change that affects
dedicated volunteers. An advanced notice, an explanation, a thank you,
an expression of hope that volunteers will continue to help. That's
all it would have taken to preserve this as what it ought to have
been, a non-issue. Instead, they received a terse and impersonal
notice after the fact that amounted to the corporate version of
ordering someone off your lawn.

Now we have an explanation, but it's a bit late - and it comes in
place of what the first WMF response ought to have been, an apology
for once again bungling an interaction with volunteers. Not all that
long ago the WMF seemed to consider ahead of time the potential
reaction of volunteers, and to tailor actions and communication to
limit the chance of anger, disappointment and hurt feelings among
them. Perhaps it was a natural, and unspoken, priority at a time when
many WMF leaders were volunteers and former volunteers. Maybe we're
past that point, and the WMF needs to begin actively pushing this
ethos into the organizational culture of both staff and volunteer
leadership groups.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Seb35


Thanks a lot for this explanation.

On the other side, wikis not only need content producers (here WMF) but  
also curators (wikignomes) who are sorting the pages, deleting and moving  
pages, typocorrecting, templating things, helping new users in formatting  
texts, etc. (I read some of the Florence’s blogposts :) -- and not being  
admin restricts a lot the possible actions.


And on the example you give about disagreement between two editors (e.g.  
staffer and volunteer), in theory there is no reason the staffer’s  
solution is better or worse than the volunteer’s solution, but perhaps a  
mean solution can be better than any of the two initial solutions; and in  
this case, the spent time is not a waste of time.


Sébastien

Le Sat, 11 May 2013 18:48:38 +0200, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org a  
écrit:

Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at
responding to this.

The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation
knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all
readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia
Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the  
blog).

We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of
community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and  
the

blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and
we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board
bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most
material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes
-- it's corporate in nature, meaning that it is developed by the
Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation  
stakeholders,
which includes community members and prospective community members,  
donors,

readers of the projects, media, and others.

My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic  
editing
rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work  
on

the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help
they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki,
and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and  
we're

grateful.

But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have  
overridden

decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation
in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the
extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been
one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a
community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do,  
but
rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to  
do

as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been
extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the
Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support  
of

the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a
single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the
Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to
accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the
amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I
repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.

So I would say this:

This decision is not about the community versus the WMF. This  
decision
is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work  
on

the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.
This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the
volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role  
by

creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth
bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and
volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize
pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I
think having clarity around it is a good thing.

Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young,
everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of
roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation
budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by
volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even
though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a
period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it
wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many
roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like
we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
don't

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Erik Moeller

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
 small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing
 rights.

Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it
allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because
the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a
dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the
MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that
regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the
reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our
other wikis. There are 600 registered users on the WMF wiki.

While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted,
volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with
extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that
configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked
Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would
continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue
says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki
clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no
disrespect was intended.

The original text on
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in
2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving
all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day
operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while
the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that
delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very
beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the
community governance practices established in other wikis because it
serves a distinct purpose.

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

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Katherine Casey

Having read through this entire thread, I have to ask: would there have
been any value in, instead of desysopping non-staff (because there appears
to be a possibly-valid argument that non-staff did most of the
administrative work on the wmf wiki), instead making it clear that unlike
on all other wikis, +staff users had the final say in any
administrative/editing dispute on the wmf wiki? That is, since Sue says a
large part of the problem was non-staff making staff justify themselves and
their decisions endlessly, why not just short-circuit that particular weak
spot and otherwise let work carry on? I guess the operative questions here
would be something like:

   1. Was there actual misuse of admin tools being done by non-staff?
   2. Were there other, non-misuse issues that arose from non-staff having
   +admin (i.e. we already know about too many challenges to staff, but was
   there anything else that made non-staff admins suboptimal? this would
   include even things like it looks weird to outsiders to have non-staff
   changing 'corporate' content)
   3. If there weren't other issues, could the issue of non-staff
   challenging staff decisions have been corrected with a less-drastic
   solution (such as clarifying who had final say in things)
   4. Is it true that non-staff admins do significant portions of the work
   on that wiki, such that their loss will now cause the wiki to go un- or
   more-poorly-maintained?
   5. If 4 is true, what solutions can we/the WMF put in place to pick up
   that slack so the wiki doesn't become worse?

None of these questions are intended to apportion blame or determine who
was right, but they may help us figure out why actions are being done,
how we could have routed around this huge blow-up, and where to go from
here.

-Fluffernutter


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:

  My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
  small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic
 editing
  rights.

 Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it
 allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because
 the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a
 dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the
 MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that
 regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the
 reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our
 other wikis. There are 600 registered users on the WMF wiki.

 While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted,
 volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with
 extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that
 configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked
 Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would
 continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue
 says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki
 clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no
 disrespect was intended.

 The original text on
 https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in
 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving
 all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day
 operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while
 the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that
 delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very
 beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the
 community governance practices established in other wikis because it
 serves a distinct purpose.

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

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread phoebe ayers

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski tom...@twkozlowski.net
 wrote:


 These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a
 riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a
 correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not hold
 any official position within the WMF, and who has not been desysopped in
 yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?


If you're talking about me (I still seem to have admin rights, and no
official position) I'll happily give up my admin flag -- not sure why I was
left out of the batch. At any rate, I haven't edited much on the wmf wiki
since last year; I just had admin rights so i could move files around when
I was board secretary.

As for the whole thing -- it seems like especially poor timing and
communication around the action. It also seems dumb to desysop some of the
users who know the most about how to format and work with wikis. On the
other hand, the WMF wiki is special -- as the home of material from the
organization that basically does not get changed -- and I know there's been
some incidents, as Sue refers to, of reversals of staff decisions that led
to a lot of misunderstandings. I, and I suspect most of us, just take this
in stride because it's happened to us dozens of times; newer staff may not,
however.

Going forward I'd still support merging most of WMF wiki into meta, where
we can use a normal community admin process; and keeping a limited version
of it around for version-of-record documents and whatever technical needs
re: fundraising it fills, and simply being a lot more clear about policies
around that content.

-- phoebe

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at
gmail.com *
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[Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread rupert THURNER

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski
tom...@twkozlowski.net wrote:
 I'm not going to respond to all the points raised in your e-mail, Sue
 (partially because most of them are just too general), so let me just
 mentioned some of them.

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation
 knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all
 readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia
 Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the
 blog).

 Then it should perhaps be renamed as the Wikimedia Foundation Blog With
 Guests Post from Community Members.

uh ... i never noticed this. it seems really that WMF is considering
blog.wikimedia.org as their personal blog. it even says (This is a
guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of the French Wikimedia chapter.) e.g.
here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/10/wikimedia-france-research-award-winner/

while the domain http://www.wikimedia.org/ contents clearly states
Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free
educational content to the world.

i would have expected a movement blog behind this URL, appropriate
to the usage of the domain, but i am not sure if i am completely
misreading this?

rupert, wondering ...

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Jacob Orlowitz

I just want to highlight Nathan's excellent and reasonable point:

The WMF could work on: manag[ing] the implementation of a change that
affects dedicated volunteers. An advanced notice, an explanation, a thank
you, an expression of hope that volunteers will continue to help. That's all
it would have taken to preserve this as what it ought to have been, a
non-issue.

There's a lot of adversarial dynamics between the Foundation and the
Community.  A little bit of courtesy and civility and thoughtfulness would
go a long way towards avoiding antagonism.

Wikipedians are mission-driven and autonomy-craving.  Work with us on that,
respect it, use it to your advantage.

There are pain points in transition, some of them unavoidable, but WMF
should still seek to minimize harm and improve mutual understanding at each
step.  Otherwise, we get situations that take far more energy than a simple
explanation and expression of appreciation from the outset would have taken.

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes: It takes less *time *to *do* a
thing *right*, than it does to explain why you did it *wrong.  Easier said
than done, but a worthy goal nonetheless.*

Jake (Ocaasi)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread David Gerard

On 11 May 2013 19:45, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote:

 i would have expected a movement blog behind this URL, appropriate
 to the usage of the domain, but i am not sure if i am completely
 misreading this?


Comcom has been actively seeking more contributions from people other
than Foundation staff. Most chapters have their own blog, but posts
from them for the Wikimedia blog are in practice heartily welcomed.
(Particularly in multiple languages.) There's even posts about
projects other than Wikipedia or Commons ;-) Matthew Roth can probably
clarify (cc'd).


- d.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Yaroslav M. Blanter


On 11.05.2013 21:26, David Gerard wrote:

On 11 May 2013 19:45, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote:


i would have expected a movement blog behind this URL, appropriate
to the usage of the domain, but i am not sure if i am completely
misreading this?



Comcom has been actively seeking more contributions from people other
than Foundation staff. Most chapters have their own blog, but posts
from them for the Wikimedia blog are in practice heartily welcomed.
(Particularly in multiple languages.) There's even posts about
projects other than Wikipedia or Commons ;-) Matthew Roth can probably
clarify (cc'd).


- d.



At this point I am lost. Comcom is made of the representative of 
chapters, right? (I just happen to know this because the representatives 
of the Russian chapter there have hmm... complicated relations with the 
communities of Russian language projects). Is the blog then the business 
of WMF and chapters?


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Oliver Keyes

No, ComCom is the communications committee. It's made up of people who are
movement spokespeople/otherwise have an interest in communication, by my
understanding. That's obviously going to include Chapters people, but it's
not limited to it.

On 11 May 2013 21:03, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote:

On 11.05.2013 21:26, David Gerard wrote:

On 11 May 2013 19:45, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote:

i would have expected a movement blog behind this URL, appropriate
to the usage of the domain, but i am not sure if i am completely
misreading this?

Comcom has been actively seeking more contributions from people other
than Foundation staff. Most chapters have their own blog, but posts
from them for the Wikimedia blog are in practice heartily welcomed.
(Particularly in multiple languages.) There's even posts about
projects other than Wikipedia or Commons ;-) Matthew Roth can probably
clarify (cc'd).

- d.

At this point I am lost. Comcom is made of the representative of chapters,
right? (I just happen to know this because the representatives of the
Russian chapter there have hmm... complicated relations with the
communities of Russian language projects). Is the blog then the business of
WMF and chapters?

Cheers
Yaroslav

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--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread James Forrester

On 11 May 2013 13:03, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote:

 At this point I am lost. Comcom is made of the representative of chapters,
 right? (I just happen to know this because the representatives of the
 Russian chapter there have hmm... complicated relations with the
 communities of Russian language projects). Is the blog then the business of
 WMF and chapters?


No. ComCom is made up of community people who take on communications
roles. Some of us are normal volunteers who answer telephones and e-mails
from journalists (this is why I joined in 2005); some are board members or
staff of the WMF or other affiliate bodies.

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal
capacity)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] movement blog, not WMF blog, was: Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread David Gerard

On 11 May 2013 21:03, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote:

 At this point I am lost. Comcom is made of the representative of chapters,
 right? (I just happen to know this because the representatives of the
 Russian chapter there have hmm... complicated relations with the communities
 of Russian language projects). Is the blog then the business of WMF and
 chapters?


No, it's pretty much anyone who is likely to deal with the media as
any sort of representative of Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. So
there's Foundation staff, there's board members, there's chapter
representatives, there's not-formally-affiliated volunteers like me.
(I think that's all the categories, no doubt I've missed someone.)

(So if there's anyone who deals with the media and isn't on the list,
please email Matthew or Jay promptly!)


- d.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Casey Brown

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:
 This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a
bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki
(afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of
blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.

I'm not very active anymore, so it's not really a huge deal, but it's
still bad form to have not gotten any kind of notification at all.

--
Casey Brown (Cbrown1023)
caseybrown.org

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread K. Peachey

(Inline comments most likely, So shoot me)

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 …
 But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden
 decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
 that's ever been a huge problem:
 …

Can you expand on this? I haven't really involved in foundationwiki
and I'm not going to go check all the edits for this, But this seems
like a kindly odd-shaped argument in my view. (The only time I was
involved with a staff-vol spat on wmfwiki, is when the staff member
decided the to need to take it to another wiki and then onto IRC as
well, where I and others had to bug staff members to find out whom
they were reporting to)

I highly doubt volunteers are just randomly undoing edits of staff
just because, We should be looking at the underlining issues behind
this, with what they are trying to fix and improving the workflow of
staff and volunteers. Just /randomly/ revoking seems counter-proactive
and detrimental to this.

 …
 So I would say this:

 This decision is not about the community versus the WMF. This decision
 is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on
 the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.

How many staff members that have jobs that rely on editing
foundationwiki? I did a quick scan of the last ~1000 or so edits and
really couldn't see any examples that stood out, If a volunteer
changes a staff edit, Yes it should be looked at but there is
generally a good reason (I've seen plently of staff members editing
other wikis that are clueless about the wiki world and people have
been fixing up their edits), And just removing admin rights doesn't
seem to have anything to do with that at all, Because the volunteers
can still edit (afaik the only rights they really loose are delete and
protect now)

 …
 This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities…

Not really, It was done randomly and at the end of a Friday when
most of the foundation stops working for the weekend, with lack of
meaningful communication to those involved (or in some cases,
communication at al), Personally it leaves more questions than
anything.

 …
 Personally, I feel like
 we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
 don't pay staff to edit the projects:

I know at least one staff on a project, that has a bit to do with
there work, and has been directed to append staff to all their edit
summaries.

-Crazed ramblings out,
Peachey

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Mono

There's been a long-term conflict with volunteers  staff on
wikimediafoundation.org. As a user, I understand. Each staff member likes
to keep everything their way. They frequently revert changes (take a look
at the discussion and user talk pages, especially for MZMcBride) on 'staff
authority'. This is a logical next step against these users (most likely
MZ) so there's no conflict.

Is this a bad thing? Most likely not. Is the reason behind it a bad thing?
Yes.


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 4:06 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:

 (Inline comments most likely, So shoot me)

 On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:
  …
  But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have
 overridden
  decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
  that's ever been a huge problem:
  …

 Can you expand on this? I haven't really involved in foundationwiki
 and I'm not going to go check all the edits for this, But this seems
 like a kindly odd-shaped argument in my view. (The only time I was
 involved with a staff-vol spat on wmfwiki, is when the staff member
 decided the to need to take it to another wiki and then onto IRC as
 well, where I and others had to bug staff members to find out whom
 they were reporting to)

 I highly doubt volunteers are just randomly undoing edits of staff
 just because, We should be looking at the underlining issues behind
 this, with what they are trying to fix and improving the workflow of
 staff and volunteers. Just /randomly/ revoking seems counter-proactive
 and detrimental to this.

  …
  So I would say this:
 
  This decision is not about the community versus the WMF. This
 decision
  is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work
 on
  the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.

 How many staff members that have jobs that rely on editing
 foundationwiki? I did a quick scan of the last ~1000 or so edits and
 really couldn't see any examples that stood out, If a volunteer
 changes a staff edit, Yes it should be looked at but there is
 generally a good reason (I've seen plently of staff members editing
 other wikis that are clueless about the wiki world and people have
 been fixing up their edits), And just removing admin rights doesn't
 seem to have anything to do with that at all, Because the volunteers
 can still edit (afaik the only rights they really loose are delete and
 protect now)

  …
  This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities…

 Not really, It was done randomly and at the end of a Friday when
 most of the foundation stops working for the weekend, with lack of
 meaningful communication to those involved (or in some cases,
 communication at al), Personally it leaves more questions than
 anything.

  …
  Personally, I feel like
  we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
  don't pay staff to edit the projects:

 I know at least one staff on a project, that has a bit to do with
 there work, and has been directed to append staff to all their edit
 summaries.

 -Crazed ramblings out,
 Peachey

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Nathan

If the conflict was primarily with MZMcBride (which seems to be the
case), then it was a bit cowardly to overhaul the entire scheme on the
site in order to avoid telling him to knock it off.

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote:
 There's been a long-term conflict with volunteers  staff on
 wikimediafoundation.org. As a user, I understand. Each staff member likes
 to keep everything their way. They frequently revert changes (take a look
 at the discussion and user talk pages, especially for MZMcBride) on 'staff
 authority'. This is a logical next step against these users (most likely
 MZ) so there's no conflict.

 Is this a bad thing? Most likely not. Is the reason behind it a bad thing?
 Yes.



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Casey Brown wrote:
On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:
 This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a
bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki
(afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of
blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.

I'm left a little speechless by this. I've always considered my values to
be largely aligned with Wikimedia's, but more and more, I find myself
distanced from it. I don't really want to be associated with people who
can't treat volunteers with basic respect and dignity. Ultimately, like
every other volunteer, I have to evaluate whether my time is better spent
elsewhere.

It's a really sad day for Wikimedia. You and many others who were
summarily stripped of their user rights were integral to building that
wiki and you deserve to be recognized and appreciated, not thrown out on a
whim without notice or warning. Sue talks so much about stewardship, but
this apparently includes anointing a ruler of the wiki who isn't capable
of caring out her own commands. What does this say about the stewardship
of the wiki? Meanwhile the questions about who will actually keep the site
running go unanswered.

For people like Gayle and Philippe to privately collude and then fire us
at the end of the day on a Friday like we're disgruntled employees was
pretty bad. (Both of whom seemed to have been in such a rush to act, but
now are mysteriously too busy to participate in the community mailing list
discussion about their actions.) Watching Erik and Sue try to defend their
actions has been even more painful to watch. But it's long-time community
members who know that this isn't right and who have chosen to not say
anything that are bothering me the most.

It's unsurprising that you and many others aren't very active anymore. :-/
 You're so much better than they deserve.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread MZMcBride

Nathan wrote:
If the conflict was primarily with MZMcBride (which seems to be the
case), then it was a bit cowardly to overhaul the entire scheme on the
site in order to avoid telling him to knock it off.

What'd I do?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Mono

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:07 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote:
  There's been a long-term conflict with volunteers  staff on
  wikimediafoundation.org. As a user, I understand. Each staff member
 likes
  to keep everything their way. They frequently revert changes (take a look
  at the discussion and user talk pages, especially for MZMcBride) on
 'staff
  authority'. This is a logical next step against these users (most likely
  MZ) so there's no conflict.
 
  Is this a bad thing? Most likely not. Is the reason behind it a bad
 thing?
  Yes.

Nathan wrote:
 If the conflict was primarily with MZMcBride (which seems to be the
 case), then it was a bit cowardly to overhaul the entire scheme on the
 site in order to avoid telling him to knock it off.

 What'd I do?
 MZMcBride


MZMcBride, when I originally wrote this I was referencing nothing in
particular. I was just observing a pattern of reversions and conflicts
between you, me, staff  others. Looking at the history of your talk page
on wmfwiki (and mine), this can be found.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Thomas Goldammer

Wow, this was definitely a huge brick they dropped there... It seems, the
WMF needs to hire someone (a diplomat) to counsel them about actions
towards the volunteers. (Seriously!)
Well, and when we are at it, the volunteer community might need a diplomat,
too, one who counsels them about actions and role of the WMF, before they
start complaining about any of it. :)

Anyway, nothing would have been lost if Gayle had written to the folks a
few weeks before the actual action was performed, informing that this is
the plan and why. It's not necessary, WMF owns the page and can do just
about everything there, but just for politeness it would have been nice.
And yes, the email that - seemingly selectively - got sent out was not
really diplomatic, either, it sounds much like thanks, bye!. Or was there
any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon
explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)

Th.


2013/5/12 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org

 On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote:
  This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

 For what it's worth, this didn't get sent out to everyone. I was a
 bureaucrat and administrator, and have the most edits on that wiki
 (afaik?), and wasn't notified. Like Huib, I was also in the batch of
 blog moderator removals and wasn't notified about that either.

 I'm not very active anymore, so it's not really a huge deal, but it's
 still bad form to have not gotten any kind of notification at all.

 --
 Casey Brown (Cbrown1023)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Mono

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Thomas Goldammer tho...@gmail.com wrote:

 Wow, this was definitely a huge brick they dropped there... It seems, the
 WMF needs to hire someone (a diplomat) to counsel them about actions
 towards the volunteers. (Seriously!)





Or was there
 any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon
 explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)

 Th.


 There was no emergency.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Milos Rancic

Sue (or anyone from staff who is more precisely in charge for this), may
you just revert this and open discussion to reach more sensible solution?

I understand that there could be a good reason for this action, but the way
it's been handled is not the perfect one. And at least permissions on a
wiki are not hard to revert.
 On May 11, 2013 6:48 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 Gayle is travelling today and not online, so I'll take a crack at
 responding to this.

 The editors are responsible for the projects: the Wikimedia Foundation
 knows that, acknowledges it, and is deeply appreciative (as are all
 readers) for the work that volunteers do in the projects. The Wikimedia
 Foundation is responsible for the Wikimedia Foundation wiki (and the blog).
 We are grateful to get community help there, and a small number of
 community members do really good work with us on both the WMF wiki and the
 blog. But ultimately that wiki, and the blog, are our responsibility, and
 we are accountable for making sure that e.g. the staff page, the Board
 bios, the resolution texts, etc., are maintained and in good shape. Most
 material on the WMF is not created via collaborative production processes
 -- it's corporate in nature, meaning that it is developed by the
 Wikimedia Foundation, for an audience of Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders,
 which includes community members and prospective community members, donors,
 readers of the projects, media, and others.

 My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
 small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing
 rights. My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation staff who work on
 the Foundation wiki have been grateful (and are grateful) for the help
 they've gotten from community members in maintaining the Foundation wiki,
 and that we hope they'll continue to help us. They've been great, and we're
 grateful.

 But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden
 decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. I don't think
 that's ever been a huge problem: I don't think we've ever had a situation
 in which extensive discussion hasn't reached an okay conclusion. But, the
 extensive discussions --which, I understand, have typically been
 one-on-one, by which I mean, not a large number of community members or a
 community consensus against something the Foundation has wanted to do, but
 rather one volunteer disagreeing with something staff have been asked to do
 as part of their job --- occasionally, those discussions have been
 extremely time-consuming. That's not good. The staff working on the
 Wikimedia Foundation wiki have jobs they've got to get done, in support of
 the entire movement. If they spend days or weeks needing to persuade a
 single community member of the merits of something they want to do on the
 Foundation wiki, or if they need to modify their plans extensively to
 accommodate the opinions of a single community member, that reduces the
 amount of time available for them to do the rest of their work. Which, I
 repeat, is in the service of the movement overall.

 So I would say this:

 This decision is not about the community versus the WMF. This decision
 is about the WMF staff, and making it possible for them to do their work on
 the WMF wiki with some reasonable degree of efficiency and effectiveness.
 This decision clarifies roles-and-responsibilities. On the projects, the
 volunteers are the editorial leads, and the WMF plays a supporting role by
 creating functionality, maintaining the servers, paying the bandwidth
 bills, and so forth. On the WMF wiki, the WMF is the editorial lead, and
 volunteers can (and do) play a supporting role helping staff organize
 pages, maintain pages, and so forth. That's a reasonable division, and I
 think having clarity around it is a good thing.

 Slightly more broadly: when the Wikimedia movement was very young,
 everybody did everything and there wasn't much division of
 roles-and-responsibilities. I remember when the Wikimedia Foundation
 budgets were prepared by volunteers, when the trademarks were managed by
 volunteers, and so forth. That was appropriate for the time, and even
 though it was messy, it was kind of great. Then we all went through a
 period in which roles-and-responsibilities were utterly unclear -- it
 wasn't at all obvious who should do what, and many
 roles-and-responsibilities were hotly disputed. Personally, I feel like
 we're moving into a period now in which things are getting clearer. We
 don't pay staff to edit the projects: staff who edit do it on their own
 time, as a hobby or special personal interest. We do pay staff to do things
 that are better done by staff than by volunteers, such as managing the
 trademark portfolio. Some volunteers (such as Domas) have very special
 privileges and powers, because they've proved over time they are
 exceptionally skilled. Some volunteers support the

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Craig Franklin

Yes, this.

I must admit, it's tremendously demotivating and makes me quite upset that
people like Aphaia, Anthere, Danny B. and Thehelpfulone, people who have
put hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort into this movement without
asking for a single cent, over many many years, are treated as risks to be
eliminated rather than assets to the movement whose input is to be
treasured.

My main objection is not to the actual act of removing these rights
(although as pointed out above by others, it seems to be a solution looking
for a problem), my main objection is the remarkably callous and hamfisted
way that it was executed.  In particular, I think that making a potentially
controversial change, and referring questions about that change to a
staffer who is heading out of town and will be unresponsive for a few
days is probably not good practice at all.

Does anyone from the Foundation honestly think this has been handled well?
 What lessons are there to be learned from this?

Cheers,
Craig



On 12 May 2013 10:31, Thomas Goldammer tho...@gmail.com wrote:


 Anyway, nothing would have been lost if Gayle had written to the folks a
 few weeks before the actual action was performed, informing that this is
 the plan and why. It's not necessary, WMF owns the page and can do just
 about everything there, but just for politeness it would have been nice.
 And yes, the email that - seemingly selectively - got sent out was not
 really diplomatic, either, it sounds much like thanks, bye!. Or was there
 any sort of emergency that made an immediate action indispensable? (A soon
 explanation by Gayle would certainly be helpful there.)

 Th.


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Elections 2013

2013-05-11 Thread Philippe Beaudette

This is fixed, thank you. :-)

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Philippe Beaudette
Director, Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

415-839-6885, x 6643

phili...@wikimedia.org

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Takashi OTA
supertakot+foundatio...@gmail.com wrote:

I have been working on a translation of FDC Ombud election in to Japanese.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/FDC_Ombudsperson_elections/2013

In the section of How to submit your candidacy, it reads:
If you are eligible, you can submit your candidacy by doing the
following:

Write a brief summary of no more than 1200 characters stating what you
would do
if you were elected to the Funds Dissemination Committee,

Shouldn't it be if you were elected to the FDC Ombuds(person), not FDC
itself?

--Takashi OTA

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Nicole Ebber nicole.eb...@wikimedia.de
wrote:
Hey,

thanks for the announcement and all the work the election committee
has done so far.

https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/04/29/community-wahlt-hochstes-gremium-des-wikimedia-universums-board-of-trustees-der-wikimedia-foundation/

Cheerio,
Nicole

On 2 May 2013 06:29, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are now being accepted
for
the 2013 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year, elections are being
held for the following roles:

Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately
responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we
value
wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled.
More information about this role can be found at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/Board_elections/2013
.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

The Funds Dissemination Committee
(FDC)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_the_Creation_and_Initial_Operation_of_the_FDC
makes
recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia
movement http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia funds to eligible
entities. There are two positions being filled. More information about
this role can be found at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/FDC_elections/2013
.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud

The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process,
investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and
summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on
an
annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about
this
role can be found at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/FDC_Ombudsperson_elections/2013
.

The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 24 to 23:59
UTC
May 17. More
information on this election can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013.

Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's
village
pump, or to translate it and distribute it on other Wikimedia movement
mailing lists. Any questions related to the election can be posted on
the
talk page
on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list,
board-elections AT wikimedia.org

On behalf of the Election Committee,

Risker
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--
Nicole Ebber
International Affairs

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49 30 219158 26-0

http://wikimedia.de

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

2013-05-11 Thread Nathan

It's also worth noting this wasn't a last minute decision at all; its
foreshadowed in a number of comments by Philippe going back to
seemingly mid-March, and there may be warnings of it earlier. So the
WMF staff have been discussing this change internally for at least 6
weeks or so. That's a long time to not think up a better plan for
rolling it out.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 110, Issue 27

2013-05-11 Thread Romaine Wiki

It doesn't sound like a smart decision to me. From my own experience I know
that many office people in the Wikimedia movement do a great job, but are
terrible in maintaining a wiki. While volunteers are mostly good at this
because of their experience.

Why removing the tools that experienced people are good in using them if
needed?

The signal this give the the community is: fuck off, we know better. I really
hope the office doesn't actually want to give that signal but want to work
alongside with the community.

Please think things through...

Romaine

Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 21:15:02 +1000
From: K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com
To: tom...@twkozlowski.net,
Wikimedia Mailing List
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki
at least)
Message-ID:
CADnECnX4O9Ma=uhvemcvmbehgvj8ha4n-to_vkxsc+wdksz...@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

This is the email that got sent out to everyone,

---
Dear XXX,
Thank you for your work with the Foundation wiki. At
this time, we
are formalizing a new requirement, which is that
administrator access
is given only to staff and board. I am having
administrator access to
accounts that are neither staff or board be disabled,
effective
immediately.
Sincerely,
Gayle
--
Gayle Karen K. Young
Chief Talent and Culture Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
415.310.8416
www.wikimediafoundation.org
---

Gayle's response (which was the first time she has edited
the wiki in
~5 months[2]) seems lacking[1] in general and the subsequent
responses
about knowing what these people do on the wiki

Another interesting fact is that Mz got desysoped first,
When you
would expect it to be done in alphabetically order.

We've been discussing this for awhile, and the thought is
that it's
ultimately the Foundation's web presence, not the
community's web
presence. A useful parallel to consider might be how
userrights are
given to staffers on the community wikis; they're
distributed as and
when they're needed for a specific task.

Um, Rights for staff on wikis are given out like candy?,
although not
as much thee days but it still happens.

Also, How is the foundation wiki not apart of the community?
Has the
position of the legal department changed? or the boards?
just randomly
changing without any imput or discussions seems utlimately
strange.
since it is actually their wiki (just like everything else
that falls
under the foundation)

[1].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?diff=91857oldid=91855#Users_stripped_of_rights.3F
[2].
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributionstarget=Gyoung
[3]. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Log/rights

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