Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Anders Wennersten

Milos Rancic skrev den 2015-06-06 21:00:
I think also that it's valid idea that EC chooses voting system 
according to the needs of particular point of time. For example, this 
time it was about giving opportunity to the new candidates. Next time 
it could be more balanced. If you notice that Board is unstable (for 
example, small number of those with more than two years of 
experience), then Schulze again. 


A very good point!

Anders

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Tomasz Ganicz
Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted in
most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the
results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none of
them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people would
vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result will
be simple exactly the same as if there will be no no votes - in both
methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is just
because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental
objections to vote no. But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad ones)
enough to vote no have much higher impact on the results than the others
- which I think is not good by itslef.

By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only yes and
no, and how many voted yes for only one candidate and no for all
others (the most impact for selected candidate).





2015-06-06 19:15 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com:

 Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one
 for best wishes and similar :)

 Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say
 that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome:
 a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder
 of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English
 Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages
 (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I
 didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed
 decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one
 year to be able to fully participate again).

 When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about
 structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were
 just punished as present board members (some people will always object
 your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack
 of positive votes because of his laziness :P

 The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason
 why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would
 know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of
 democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far
 as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is
 elected).

 Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold
 follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to
 show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those
 who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that
 stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not.
 (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing
 that job perfectly.

 It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not
 democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom
 members are.

 This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable
 for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable
 to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.

 Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of
 two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to
 change Board members every two years.

 I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years
 in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do
 anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the
 term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.

 The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious
 that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one,
 as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.

 While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be
 *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting
 votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes
 have the same weight, it would be more fair.

 With the formula S-O, the results would be:
 1) Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
 2) Maria: 2184-775=1409
 3) Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
 4) James: 1857-578=1279
 5) Denny: 1628-544=1084

 And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of
 the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has
 given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do
 anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had
 significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters,
 which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very
 close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.

 If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could
 easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of
 their candidates as Board members. Instead of vote for, we'd get
 vote against attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system,
 but 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Milos Rancic
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote:
 Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted in
 most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the
 results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none of
 them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people would
 vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result will
 be simple exactly the same as if there will be no no votes - in both
 methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is just
 because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental
 objections to vote no. But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad ones)
 enough to vote no have much higher impact on the results than the others
 - which I think is not good by itslef.

 By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only yes and
 no, and how many voted yes for only one candidate and no for all
 others (the most impact for selected candidate).

Based on the numbers, it's likely that the voting was dominantly like:
I want this candidate or two; I have no opinion about these
candidates; and I really really wouldn't like to see this one or two
as Board members.

I'd say that our democracy depends on such behavior of voters, as at
the end we are getting good people in the Board, no matter who has
been elected particularly. However, it could change and it could have
dramatic consequences, as we are operating with small numbers.

What's more likely to be seen as the outcome of rational voting is
to get one or few candidates with 50% less opposing votes and although
it wouldn't need to be bad in the sense of particular candidates, it
would make very negative consequences to the rest of the community.

First time such thing happens, next time we'd have bitter fight for
every vote. And that would be the changing point: from friendly to
competitive atmosphere. It would also mean that we'd get serious
hidden lobby groups. (We have them now, but it's relaxed and much more
about it would be great if our candidate would pass, than about
serious fights for own candidates.)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Results of 2015 WMF Board elections

2015-06-06 Thread David Cuenca Tudela
Congratulations to the winners!
However I must say that the results of this election are hilarious. The
person with the most support votes doesn't win because of oppose votes :D

El sáb., 6 de jun. de 2015 3:22, Johan Jönsson brevlis...@gmail.com
escribió:

 Congratulations, Dariusz, James and Denny!

 And thanks, of course, to María, Phoebe and SJ for the time they've served
 on behalf of the community, as well as to all the other candidates, who
 were prepared to serve, and to the elections committee.

 //Johan Jönsson
 --

 2015-06-06 1:14 GMT+02:00 Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com:

  Greetings,
 
  The certified results of the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
  election are now available on Meta-Wiki:
 
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Results
 
  Congratulations to Dariusz Jemielniak (User:pundit), James Heilman
  (User:Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (User:Denny), for receiving the
 most
  community support. They will join the Wikimedia Foundation as Trustees,
  after they are appointed by the Board at their July meeting at Wikimania.
 
  These results have been certified by the committee, the Wikimedia
  Foundation's legal department, and the Board of Trustees.
 
  There were 5512 votes cast, with 5167 of those being valid. The 345-vote
  difference comes from recast ballots, where eligible voters recast
 ballots
  to change their votes, and struck votes, of which there were 4.
 
  Additional information is available on the Wikimedia Blog:
  http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/05/board-election-results
 
  More statistics on the elections, a post mortem from the committee, and a
  blog post on the process behind the elections will be published  in the
  coming days. In the meantime, we would appreciate your input—what went
 well
  for you in this election?  What could we do better next time?  These
  reports are crucial to helping future elections be even more successful,
  and we hope that you will offer your feedback and ideas:
 
 
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mortem
 
  The committee thanks everyone that participated in this year’s election
 for
  helping make it one of the most diverse and representative in the
  movement’s history.
 
  Sincerely,
  – 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
  Adrian, Anders Wennersten, Daniel, Gregory Varnum, Katie Chan,
 Mardetanha,
  Ruslan, Savh, and Trijnstel
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?

2015-06-06 Thread Pine W
I felt that this year's elections went remarkably smoothly. I believe that
we have the Elections Committee and its tireless leader Varnet, project
manager James Alexander, and the SecurePoll devs to thank. There were a few
technical issues but overall I feel that everyone did a very fine job.

Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Results of 2015 WMF Board elections

2015-06-06 Thread Anders Wennersten


David Cuenca Tudela skrev den 2015-06-06 09:01:

However I must say that the results of this election are hilarious. The
person with the most support votes doesn't win because of oppose votes :D

Why hilarious? We had a full consensus in the election Committee to go 
for S/N/O voting, it is a kind of standard procedure in the Wikimedia world.


For the algorithm (S/(S+O)) it has been used several times, but for me 
it was new and I initiated a deeper look into it.


I looked into the alternative (S-O) which in this case would have made a 
difference between Raystorm and Denny. But I also found that the 
algorithm (S-O)/(S+O)  actually gives the same result as the one we 
used. So in the end I believe the algortihm used makes very good sense.


As with everything it could of course be debated, and any comment on 
this would be welcome in


https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mortem


Anders

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[Wikimedia-l] Quality for Wikidata

2015-06-06 Thread Gerard Meijssen
Hoi,

When we are to assess the quality of Wikidata, there are a few criteria we
need to assess.

   - accuracy
   - bias
   - timeliness
   - completeness

Arguably Wikidata needs to improve a lot on all four points.Whatever
approach we take all four criteria are essential. Making Wikidata more
complete is done by adding data we do not have from sources that are
reliable enough. Timeliness needs attention from people as well. Increased
accuracy can be achieved by comparing our data with the data from others
and researching the differences. Bias.. do not know what to suggest except
for making our data more complete, timely and accurate.

We do not need to wait for anything. We certainly should not insist on
sources for each statement as this will not bring us anything re the four
criteria.

The reason for this post is that our priorities are flawed because of
Wikipedia think. Wikidata may be used on Wikipedia and it makes sense when
Wikidata data fulfils the four criteria mentioned above,,

Please discuss this and consider the merits of the argument.
Thanks,
 GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/06/wikipedia-its-tyranny-of-sources.html
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Results of 2015 WMF Board elections

2015-06-06 Thread Dariusz Jemielniak
many thanks! I extend my warm congratulations to Denny and James, and would
like to sincerely thank SJ, Maria, and Phoebe, and hope to be able to draw
on their tremendous experience and knowledge.

best,

dj

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:14 AM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Greetings,

 The certified results of the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
 election are now available on Meta-Wiki:
 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Results

 Congratulations to Dariusz Jemielniak (User:pundit), James Heilman
 (User:Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (User:Denny), for receiving the most
 community support. They will join the Wikimedia Foundation as Trustees,
 after they are appointed by the Board at their July meeting at Wikimania.

 These results have been certified by the committee, the Wikimedia
 Foundation's legal department, and the Board of Trustees.

 There were 5512 votes cast, with 5167 of those being valid. The 345-vote
 difference comes from recast ballots, where eligible voters recast ballots
 to change their votes, and struck votes, of which there were 4.

 Additional information is available on the Wikimedia Blog:
 http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/05/board-election-results

 More statistics on the elections, a post mortem from the committee, and a
 blog post on the process behind the elections will be published  in the
 coming days. In the meantime, we would appreciate your input—what went well
 for you in this election?  What could we do better next time?  These
 reports are crucial to helping future elections be even more successful,
 and we hope that you will offer your feedback and ideas:

 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mortem

 The committee thanks everyone that participated in this year’s election for
 helping make it one of the most diverse and representative in the
 movement’s history.

 Sincerely,
 – 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
 Adrian, Anders Wennersten, Daniel, Gregory Varnum, Katie Chan, Mardetanha,
 Ruslan, Savh, and Trijnstel
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-- 

__
prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak
kierownik katedry Zarządzania Międzynarodowego
i centrum badawczego CROW
Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego
http://www.crow.alk.edu.pl

członek Akademii Młodych Uczonych Polskiej Akademii Nauk
członek Komitetu Polityki Naukowej MNiSW

Wyszła pierwsza na świecie etnografia Wikipedii Common Knowledge? An
Ethnography of Wikipedia (2014, Stanford University Press) mojego
autorstwa http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=24010

Recenzje
Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
Pacific Standard:
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/killed-wikipedia-93777/
Motherboard: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-ethnography-of-wikipedia
The Wikipedian:
http://thewikipedian.net/2014/10/10/dariusz-jemielniak-common-knowledge
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Results of 2015 WMF Board elections

2015-06-06 Thread Chris Keating
Congratulations to the new Board members - I am sure you will do a great
job. And commiserations to those who will be leaving the Board - thank you
for all your hard work over many years.

Also it is good to see a much higher turnout in this year's elections than
in 2013 - well done to those involved :)

On the subject of voting systems, though...

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se
wrote:


 David Cuenca Tudela skrev den 2015-06-06 09:01:

 However I must say that the results of this election are hilarious. The
 person with the most support votes doesn't win because of oppose votes :D

  Why hilarious? We had a full consensus in the election Committee to go
 for S/N/O voting, it is a kind of standard procedure in the Wikimedia world.


Many people looked at voting systems before the Wikimedia movement existed
and virtually none of them settled on the system we ended up with. Perhaps
this should tell us something!

To my mind the key problems with the present system are:
1) Oppose votes have greater weight than support votes. In this case, Maria
would have needed 136 additional support votes to win, or 46 fewer oppose
votes. In effect an Oppose vote was worth 2.96 times as much as a support
vote for her. As a result, being non-opposed is much more important than
being supported. The penalty for doing anything controversial is
significant.

2) There is nothing in the process to produce any diversity in the result.
Say that there was a 2/3 to 1/3 split in the electorate on some important
issue. The right answer would surely be that you elect 2 people with one
view and 1 with the other. However, in this voting system you would likely
end up electing 3 people from the majority point of view. Because the
Wikimedia movement is much more complex than this it is difficult to
conclude that there was any particular issue like this that would have
affected the result, but still, the point applies. The voting system builds
in homogeneity not diversity.

Regards,

Chris
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 11, Issue 21 -- 27 May 2015

2015-06-06 Thread David Parreño Mont - Comunicació
Hi,

Just for your information, the last issue of The Signpost has been quoted
in an article in *El Periódico*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Periódico_de_Catalunya about gender gap
;)

http://www.elperiodico.com/es/noticias/opinion/mujeres-wikipedia-4249746

David Parreño Mont
Communications
Amical Wikimedia

El ds., 30 maig 2015 a les 4:27, Wikipedia Signpost (
wikipediasignp...@gmail.com) va escriure:

 News and notes: WMF releases quarterly reports, annual plans

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/News_and_notes

 In the media: Scrubbing Parliamentary biographies; Wikipedia's invisible
 history

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/In_the_media

 Recent research: Drug articles accurate and largely complete; women
 slightly overrepresented; talking like an admin

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/Recent_research

 Traffic report: Summer, summer, summertime

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/Traffic_report

 Discussion report: A relic from the past that needs to be updated

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/Discussion_report

 Featured content: When music was confined to a ribbon of rust

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/Featured_content

 Technology report: MediaWiki blows up printers

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27/Technology_report


 Single page view
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2015-05-27

 PDF version
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-05-27


 https://www.facebook.com/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost
 --
 Wikipedia Signpost Staff
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] ContentTranslation gets to 2000

2015-06-06 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
Hi Jane,

Thanks for trying ContentTranslation and providing feedback. Replies inline.

 I decided to translate a short article from Spanish to English

Currently the extension is configured for translation *from* English, but
not *to* English. This will probably be changed soon to allow translation
to English, but there will be a proper separate announcement about this.

 Then I tried to enable it for my 'Dutch userpage and
 got the extension up and running for Spanish-Dutch but couldn't find which
 link was the from link and the to link (a couple of tries and I got
the
 dashboard up and running).

The easiest ways to open the dashboard are:
1. Hovering over the Contributions link at the top personal bar and
clicking Translations.
2. Opening the article that you want to translate and finding the language
into which you want to translate in the interlanguage links list. (It's
guessed automatically; for example, it's suposed to appear there if you
selected it in ULS.)

 Then I found myself in the Visual editor

It's not *the* VisualEditor, but *a* visual editor - a very simple WYSIWYG
editor. (It's possible that in the future it will be *the* VisualEditor,
but there's no solid plan for it yet.) There are several reasons for doing
it this way, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Documentation/FAQ .

 and tried to wikify some text with no luck.

It doesn't support wiki syntax, as explained above. It supports simple
formatting and adding links (the links support is being rewritten right now
to be more stable and intuitive). Because it is not supposed to be a
full-fledged article editing environment, it only provides the most basic
formatting tools. For full-fledged wikification you can use the wikitext
editor or the VisualEditor, whichever you wish.

 I then clicked on one
 of the reference links and lost my work.

This is definitely a bug! Usually references work pretty well. Sorry about
that. Which article was it?

 I restarted the page and saved
 some basics, but was disappointed that there was no translation of the
 infobox or the image, which was what I was hoping for.

We don't support infoboxes yet. It's very challenging technically, so for
now we just ignore them, but we hope to have support for them in the
future. Currently, ContentTranslation is mostly for the articles' prose,
links, categories and images.

It is supposed to support images. In fact, in the real-life demos that I'm
doing it's the feature that experienced Wikipedians usually love the most.
Unfortunately, it cannot support an image that is a part of an infobox.

 Thanks for all of your work on this, because I do believe translating
 existing content is a direction that I personally want to take in the
 Wikiverse in general.

Thank you very much again for the testing and the feedback! We'll do our
best to address the bugs.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2015-06-05 12:41 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com:

 Amir,
 This tool is great in theory and sounds wonderful but I am personally
 having some trouble putting it into practice.The short video was VERY
 helpful, but I am afraid I still ran into some problems on my second
 attempt at a translation. Here is a roundup of links:

 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Content_Translation_Screencast_%28English%29.webm

 I decided to translate a short article from Spanish to English but since my
 Spanish is almost zero I first tried to change the translation interface to
 English but no luck. Then I tried to enable it for my 'Dutch userpage and
 got the extension up and running for Spanish-Dutch but couldn't find which
 link was the from link and the to link (a couple of tries and I got the
 dashboard up and running). Then I found myself in the Visual editor
 (yikes!) and tried to wikify some text with no luck. I then clicked on one
 of the reference links and lost my work. I restarted the page and saved
 some basics, but was disappointed that there was no translation of the
 infobox or the image, which was what I was hoping for.

 Here's the original:

 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_sala_del_concejo_del_ayuntamiento_de_%C3%81msterdam
 Here's the result (all I got was the Wikidata item link, lead sentence and
 the category)
 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raadskamer_in_het_stadhuis_van_Amsterdam

 Wikimagic added the Dutch infobox already, but shouldn't this be possible
 to do from the dashboard?

 Thanks for all of your work on this, because I do believe translating
 existing content is a direction that I personally want to take in the
 Wikiverse in general.
 Jane

 Thanks,
 Jane

 On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Amir E. Aharoni 
 amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

  [ cross-posted to MediaWiki-i18n, Wikimedia-L and Wikitech-L ]
 
  Dear Wikimedians,
 
  The 2000th article that was written using the ContentTranslation
 extension
  

[Wikimedia-l] Board diversity

2015-06-06 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
[ Split from Results of 2015 WMF Board elections‏ ]

2015-06-06 13:19 GMT+03:00 Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com:
 2) There is nothing in the process to produce any diversity in the result.

Indeed. I don't see much active effort to encourage diversity in gender,
professional skills, economic background, language or region.

Though I'm sincerely happy about the results according to the current
system, I'm not happy at all about the system. I would love to see a Board
that is more diverse in the above points. I'd love to see a board with
people who speak languages that are important, but weakly represented in
Wikimedia projects (e.g. Hausa, Indonesian, Hindi[1]) and who are closer to
the social, cultural and economic realities of the areas where they are
spoken.

Unless I'm missing something,[2] in the whole history of Wikimedia, there
was one board member from India, one from China, and zero from Indonesia,
Russia and *all of Africa*. This doesn't seem quite right for a movement
that is supposed to be global. Efforts to encourage editing outside of the
global North bore little fruit till now - maybe it has something to do
with such a low board representation? Maybe board seats for representatives
of different regions could be reserved for more diversity and less
self-selection?

I know very little about non-profit management, so maybe I'm naive, but it
bothered me for a long time.

[1] I would also argue for Russian and Arabic even if Wikipedias in them
are quite large.
[2] Please correct me if I'm missing something!


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?

2015-06-06 Thread Derk-Jan Hartman

 On 6 jun. 2015, at 17:25, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 
 Hi, just in case you have missed this thread in Wikimedia where I mentioned 
 you, and now SJ asks.
 
 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Sam Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu mailto:sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu
 Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:26 AM
 Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?
 To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org 
 mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 
 
 Quim writes:
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378 
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378  (33 hackathon events)
  Experiment with video.js was basically a one-person-three-day [TheDJ
 special]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106 
 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106
 
 Very neat.  Does this work with popcorn?

I guess with popcorn, you mean popcornjs.org http://popcornjs.org/. In that 
case, no, it works with https://videojs.com https://videojs.com/
The point was to show how easy it would be to replace what we have now, with 
something better and I just wanted to get something of the ground and 
demonstrable.

I picked the most popular/active github project, and that seems to be 
videojs.com http://videojs.com/ at this moment in time. I did also consider 
popcornjs actually, but it seems more an experiment with temporal events, then 
focusing on being a good extensible player that everyone wants to use (no 
offense to that team, but that was the first impression).

Anyway, both of them would still require significant time to get it to 
production. But both of them will be easier to maintain than (fixing) what we 
have right now.

Ideally, I think we will want to make sure that players can be used 
interchangeably, just based on the the information in the DOM. I’m looking at 
defining some extensions hooks, so that we can decouple players from the 
TimedMediaHandler extension.

And we will need brion’s ogv.js https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ 
https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/ work to support browsers without 
OGV/WebM support.

DJ


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] ContentTranslation gets to 2000

2015-06-06 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
 Again, the same problem with the infobox and lead image, but there
 was a gallery that popped over and I was quite pleased with that.

I'm glad to hear, thank you :)

 I published the article with no categories, because the categories didn't
 line up this time as they did in the Spanish-Dutch case.

Yes - categories adaptation works only if directly corresponding category
pages can be found in both languages. We may make it smarter in the
not-so-far future.

 Thinking over my experience, I would prefer you incorporate the Wikidata
item info to build the infobox, rather than the source article.

Using Wikidata for infoboxes would be ideal, of course. This requires
better adaptation of infoboxes to Wikidata, and this must be done by the
communities, but some work is being done in that direction.

 I was working on a painting, but a generic biography infobox has already
been done with the PrepBio tool (from Magnus) so you could use that:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/prepbio.php

Thanks, I'll consider it. (We are already using another tool by Magnus in
the dashboard, if you haven't noticed ;) )


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2015-06-06 20:28 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com:

 Thanks for your thoughtful answerrs, which are certainly enlightening. I
 tried it again today, this time to translate an article from English to
 Dutch. Again, the same problem with the infobox and lead image, but there
 was a gallery that popped over and I was quite pleased with that. I
 published the article with no categories, because the categories didn't
 line up this time as they did in the Spanish-Dutch case. Thinking over my
 experience, I would prefer you incorporate the Wikidata item info to build
 the infobox, rather than the source article. This would be a good trigger
 for people to update the Wikidata item should they notice any differences.
 I was working on a painting, but a generic biography infobox has already
 been done with the PrepBio tool (from Magnus) so you could use that:
 https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/prepbio.php

 On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Amir E. Aharoni 
 amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

  Hi Jane,
 
  Thanks for trying ContentTranslation and providing feedback. Replies
  inline.
 
   I decided to translate a short article from Spanish to English
 
  Currently the extension is configured for translation *from* English, but
  not *to* English. This will probably be changed soon to allow translation
  to English, but there will be a proper separate announcement about this.
 
   Then I tried to enable it for my 'Dutch userpage and
   got the extension up and running for Spanish-Dutch but couldn't find
  which
   link was the from link and the to link (a couple of tries and I got
  the
   dashboard up and running).
 
  The easiest ways to open the dashboard are:
  1. Hovering over the Contributions link at the top personal bar and
  clicking Translations.
  2. Opening the article that you want to translate and finding the
 language
  into which you want to translate in the interlanguage links list. (It's
  guessed automatically; for example, it's suposed to appear there if you
  selected it in ULS.)
 
   Then I found myself in the Visual editor
 
  It's not *the* VisualEditor, but *a* visual editor - a very simple
 WYSIWYG
  editor. (It's possible that in the future it will be *the* VisualEditor,
  but there's no solid plan for it yet.) There are several reasons for
 doing
  it this way, see
  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Documentation/FAQ .
 
   and tried to wikify some text with no luck.
 
  It doesn't support wiki syntax, as explained above. It supports simple
  formatting and adding links (the links support is being rewritten right
 now
  to be more stable and intuitive). Because it is not supposed to be a
  full-fledged article editing environment, it only provides the most basic
  formatting tools. For full-fledged wikification you can use the wikitext
  editor or the VisualEditor, whichever you wish.
 
   I then clicked on one
   of the reference links and lost my work.
 
  This is definitely a bug! Usually references work pretty well. Sorry
 about
  that. Which article was it?
 
   I restarted the page and saved
   some basics, but was disappointed that there was no translation of the
   infobox or the image, which was what I was hoping for.
 
  We don't support infoboxes yet. It's very challenging technically, so for
  now we just ignore them, but we hope to have support for them in the
  future. Currently, ContentTranslation is mostly for the articles' prose,
  links, categories and images.
 
  It is supposed to support images. In fact, in the real-life demos that
 I'm
  doing it's the feature that experienced Wikipedians usually love the
 most.
  Unfortunately, it cannot support an image that is a part of an infobox.
 
   

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Craig Franklin
I think this is dancing around the perceived problem.  You can either have
open, democratic, and fair elections with a result that represents the will
of the electorate, or you can have a group of people who are diverse in
terms of nationality, gender, ethnicity, etcetera.  Not both.  And I don't
think that tinkering with the formula for election and board composition is
really going to do anything to address that.

Seeing the candidates that stood, I think that the real problem is the lack
of female candidates for us to elect.  And that is a cultural problem,
exacerbated by the fact that unfortunately Wikimedia projects can be quite
a hostile place for women, and understandably many women don't want to make
themselves targets for harassment.  Once there is a more even number of men
and women running, I think that this particular problem will take care of
itself.

Cheers,
Craig

On 7 June 2015 at 04:58, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the
 diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure
 is in order, for example we could have:

 1. One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
 2. Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
 3. Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.

 Thoughts?

 Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread MF-Warburg
I still think it was a big mistake (of the electcom? I don't remember, but
/someone/ pushed it through without discussions) in the 2013 election to
abolish the Schulze method.
Am 06.06.2015 19:16 schrieb Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com:

 Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one
 for best wishes and similar :)

 Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say
 that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome:
 a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder
 of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English
 Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages
 (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I
 didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed
 decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one
 year to be able to fully participate again).

 When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about
 structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were
 just punished as present board members (some people will always object
 your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack
 of positive votes because of his laziness :P

 The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason
 why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would
 know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of
 democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far
 as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is
 elected).

 Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold
 follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to
 show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those
 who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that
 stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not.
 (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing
 that job perfectly.

 It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not
 democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom
 members are.

 This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable
 for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable
 to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.

 Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of
 two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to
 change Board members every two years.

 I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years
 in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do
 anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the
 term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.

 The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious
 that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one,
 as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.

 While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be
 *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting
 votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes
 have the same weight, it would be more fair.

 With the formula S-O, the results would be:
 1) Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
 2) Maria: 2184-775=1409
 3) Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
 4) James: 1857-578=1279
 5) Denny: 1628-544=1084

 And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of
 the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has
 given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do
 anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had
 significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters,
 which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very
 close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.

 If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could
 easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of
 their candidates as Board members. Instead of vote for, we'd get
 vote against attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system,
 but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting
 groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow
 Wikimedians.

 So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it
 would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid
 negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would
 be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get
 much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences
 for our culture.

 On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  I have a lot of personal opinions on the method, questions process, etc.
  Many of them will be shared in the committee's post mortem (others I will
  be discarding as I now process the 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Anders Wennersten
The result could also be interpreted as a thundering success for the 
voting method being used.


We have now the last year and two seen major improvement in 
professionalism in  WMF (thanks Lila) and the chapters and their boards 
(thanks local ECs and boards, FDC members, Katy and Winnifred). But the 
professionalism of the Board has not really improved correspondingly, 
and is in my view the weakest link in the movement just now. And the key 
is here of course the recruitment to the Board.


And while I have the highest respect for the members now leaving, and 
see them worthy of praise, I personally think we anyway need stronger 
candidates more experienced in running this type of business. And I 
actually see the new ones having stronger background to enabale the 
necessary improvement in professionalism. This by the way include a more 
more professional election process, including a (standing) Election 
Committe (that exists well before the five days that was given before 
having to get into operational mode that was the case this time ...).


And is it not perfect that the used algorithm enables a balancing of the 
benefit for the existing Boardmembers of being well known with a 
disappointment they do not live up to the high(er) exceptions (or need 
of changed profiles in Board)?


Anders



Milos Rancic skrev den 2015-06-06 19:15:

Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one
for best wishes and similar :)

Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say
that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome:
a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder
of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English
Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages
(BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I
didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed
decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one
year to be able to fully participate again).

When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about
structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were
just punished as present board members (some people will always object
your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack
of positive votes because of his laziness :P

The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason
why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would
know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of
democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far
as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is
elected).

Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold
follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to
show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those
who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that
stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not.
(If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing
that job perfectly.

It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not
democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom
members are.

This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable
for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable
to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.

Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of
two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to
change Board members every two years.

I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years
in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do
anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the
term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.

The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious
that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one,
as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.

While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be
*that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting
votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes
have the same weight, it would be more fair.

With the formula S-O, the results would be:
1) Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
2) Maria: 2184-775=1409
3) Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
4) James: 1857-578=1279
5) Denny: 1628-544=1084

And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of
the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has
given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do
anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had
significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters,
which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very
close, while Denny wouldn't reach support 

[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 11, Issue 22 -- 03 June 2015

2015-06-06 Thread Wikipedia Signpost
News and notes: Three new community-elected trustees announced, incumbents out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/News_and_notes

Blog: How Wikipedia covered Caitlyn Jenner’s transition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Blog

Discussion report: The deprecation of Persondata; RfA – A broken process; 
Complaints from users on Swedish Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Discussion_report

Special report: Towards Health Information for All: Medical content on 
Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Special_report

In the media: Anonymous Australian editing targets football player, shooting 
victim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/In_the_media

Traffic report: A rather ordinary week
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Traffic_report

Featured content: It's not over till the fat man sings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Featured_content

Technology report: Things are getting SPDYier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03/Technology_report


Single page view
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2015-06-03

PDF version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-06-03


https://www.facebook.com/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost
--
Wikipedia Signpost Staff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Ilario Valdelli

On 06.06.2015 20:30, Risker wrote:


I find it interesting that nobody seems all that worried about the FDC
election (where 5 of 11 candidates got seats) or the FDC Ombud election
(where both candidates came forward in the last 24 hours before nominations
closed).  These two elections suggest some pretty big underlying problems
as well.  Nobody seems all that upset that fewer than 10% of all the
candidates for the 2015 elections were women - one of the lowest
percentages ever - and that not a single woman was elected to any role for
the first time in any election where more than one candidate was being
elected.  On the whole, despite having a fair number of candidates outside
of the US and areas represented by large national chapters, not a single
non-white, non-male candidate, not a single Asian, African or Latin
American candidate was elected.  We're pretty good at talking about
diversity, but very poor at implementing it.

Risker/Anne



The election's discrepancies  of FDC and Ombud can be justified. The two 
committees are much technical and require some specific experience.


But it's important to stress that, excluding the two women looking for a 
re-election, there were 0 new women within the candidatures.


Even there were new candidates for different areas, probably with a low 
wikimedian experience, but what is really important is that no women 
submitted a new candidature even white, global north living, English 
speaker.


Regards

--
Ilario Valdelli
Wikimedia CH
Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre
Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera
Switzerland - 8008 Zürich
Tel: +41764821371
http://www.wikimedia.ch


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Pine W
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the
diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure
is in order, for example we could have:

1. One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
2. Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
3. Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.

Thoughts?

Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Milos Rancic
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 8:26 PM, Anders Wennersten
m...@anderswennersten.se wrote:
 The result could also be interpreted as a thundering success for the voting
 method being used.

Just to be clear: I think you (Election committee) did very good job.
Inside of the stable circumstances, like they are now, It's very
useful to use a voting system which would prefer new people. I just
said that this system is likely to be harmful if used for the future
elections.

On the long run, Schulze stability (basically, electing the
mainstream) vs. this variant of approval by selection gives more
weight on Schulze. But I am sure that the standing EC will find
something more appropriate for the next elections.

I think also that it's valid idea that EC chooses voting system
according to the needs of particular point of time. For example, this
time it was about giving opportunity to the new candidates. Next time
it could be more balanced. If you notice that Board is unstable (for
example, small number of those with more than two years of
experience), then Schulze again.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Chris Keating
I basically agree with the whole of Risker's post but want to expand in
this bit:

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 7:30 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:

   There are not very many systems, though,
 that are specifically designed to give multiple winners when one of the
 conditions is that they *not* be running on a shared ticket.


One of them that is well-adapted to our circumstances is the Single
Transferable Vote system.

As in Schulze, voters put candidates in order of preference. However, the
STV system is designed to produce diversity of opinion among an election
for several people (it was originally designed as a proportional system for
public elections in circumstances where there weren't party lists).

There are also a couple of systems which try to combine the theoretical
advantages of Schulze with the practical advantages of STV and they should
be looked at as well, but STV has the advantage that it is computationally
simple (you can run an election with pen and paper, unlike Schulze or
anything related to it; there are a number of software packages that
perform counts for you; and it must be pretty easy to code as well...)

Regards,

Chris
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Risker
On 6 June 2015 at 14:58, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the
 diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure
 is in order, for example we could have:

 1. One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
 2. Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
 3. Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.

 Thoughts?




How many continents will get to have candidates?  Six? Seven? Eight?  There
was some pretty significant discussion in the current election that Europe
isn't really a unified continent, and that Eastern or Eastern/Central
Europe shouldn't be considered the same thing as Western Europe. And I'm
pretty sure we don't have anyone currently resident in Antarctica who would
meet even minimal requirements for election and who would willingly be a
candidate.

I've never really heard a good argument for the existence of the chapter
seats, which are essentially community seats elected by representatives of
less than 10% of the active community.

And I do not understand why appointed seats should not be renewable,
although I agree that term limits should apply to all seats.  These may be
the only way to ensure some diversity.


Illario mentioned before that there was only one new woman candidate for
any of these elected positions, and the only two women candidates for the
board were the incumbents.  The strong push for candidates outside of the
traditional areas may play a role here. Several women I approached to
consider candidacies said quite bluntly that the activities they were
working on or were planning to work on were more likely to make a
difference in the movement than having a seat on the board would have, and
certainly would be making more difference than being on the FDC would
have.  I think there's a fair amount of truth in that.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] ContentTranslation gets to 2000

2015-06-06 Thread Jane Darnell
Thanks for your thoughtful answerrs, which are certainly enlightening. I
tried it again today, this time to translate an article from English to
Dutch. Again, the same problem with the infobox and lead image, but there
was a gallery that popped over and I was quite pleased with that. I
published the article with no categories, because the categories didn't
line up this time as they did in the Spanish-Dutch case. Thinking over my
experience, I would prefer you incorporate the Wikidata item info to build
the infobox, rather than the source article. This would be a good trigger
for people to update the Wikidata item should they notice any differences.
I was working on a painting, but a generic biography infobox has already
been done with the PrepBio tool (from Magnus) so you could use that:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/prepbio.php

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Amir E. Aharoni 
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

 Hi Jane,

 Thanks for trying ContentTranslation and providing feedback. Replies
 inline.

  I decided to translate a short article from Spanish to English

 Currently the extension is configured for translation *from* English, but
 not *to* English. This will probably be changed soon to allow translation
 to English, but there will be a proper separate announcement about this.

  Then I tried to enable it for my 'Dutch userpage and
  got the extension up and running for Spanish-Dutch but couldn't find
 which
  link was the from link and the to link (a couple of tries and I got
 the
  dashboard up and running).

 The easiest ways to open the dashboard are:
 1. Hovering over the Contributions link at the top personal bar and
 clicking Translations.
 2. Opening the article that you want to translate and finding the language
 into which you want to translate in the interlanguage links list. (It's
 guessed automatically; for example, it's suposed to appear there if you
 selected it in ULS.)

  Then I found myself in the Visual editor

 It's not *the* VisualEditor, but *a* visual editor - a very simple WYSIWYG
 editor. (It's possible that in the future it will be *the* VisualEditor,
 but there's no solid plan for it yet.) There are several reasons for doing
 it this way, see
 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Documentation/FAQ .

  and tried to wikify some text with no luck.

 It doesn't support wiki syntax, as explained above. It supports simple
 formatting and adding links (the links support is being rewritten right now
 to be more stable and intuitive). Because it is not supposed to be a
 full-fledged article editing environment, it only provides the most basic
 formatting tools. For full-fledged wikification you can use the wikitext
 editor or the VisualEditor, whichever you wish.

  I then clicked on one
  of the reference links and lost my work.

 This is definitely a bug! Usually references work pretty well. Sorry about
 that. Which article was it?

  I restarted the page and saved
  some basics, but was disappointed that there was no translation of the
  infobox or the image, which was what I was hoping for.

 We don't support infoboxes yet. It's very challenging technically, so for
 now we just ignore them, but we hope to have support for them in the
 future. Currently, ContentTranslation is mostly for the articles' prose,
 links, categories and images.

 It is supposed to support images. In fact, in the real-life demos that I'm
 doing it's the feature that experienced Wikipedians usually love the most.
 Unfortunately, it cannot support an image that is a part of an infobox.

  Thanks for all of your work on this, because I do believe translating
  existing content is a direction that I personally want to take in the
  Wikiverse in general.

 Thank you very much again for the testing and the feedback! We'll do our
 best to address the bugs.


 --
 Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
 http://aharoni.wordpress.com
 ‪“We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

 2015-06-05 12:41 GMT+03:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com:

  Amir,
  This tool is great in theory and sounds wonderful but I am personally
  having some trouble putting it into practice.The short video was VERY
  helpful, but I am afraid I still ran into some problems on my second
  attempt at a translation. Here is a roundup of links:
 
 
 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Content_Translation_Screencast_%28English%29.webm
 
  I decided to translate a short article from Spanish to English but since
 my
  Spanish is almost zero I first tried to change the translation interface
 to
  English but no luck. Then I tried to enable it for my 'Dutch userpage and
  got the extension up and running for Spanish-Dutch but couldn't find
 which
  link was the from link and the to link (a couple of tries and I got
 the
  dashboard up and running). Then I found myself in the Visual editor
  (yikes!) and tried to wikify some text with no luck. I then clicked on
 one
  of the 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Ricordisamoa

Negative votes exist for a reason.
Or, let's make voters choose between support and support?

Il 06/06/2015 19:15, Milos Rancic ha scritto:

Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one
for best wishes and similar :)

Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say
that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome:
a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder
of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English
Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages
(BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I
didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed
decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one
year to be able to fully participate again).

When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about
structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were
just punished as present board members (some people will always object
your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack
of positive votes because of his laziness :P

The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason
why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would
know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of
democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far
as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is
elected).

Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold
follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to
show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those
who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that
stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not.
(If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing
that job perfectly.

It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not
democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom
members are.

This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable
for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable
to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.

Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of
two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to
change Board members every two years.

I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years
in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do
anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the
term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.

The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious
that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one,
as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.

While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be
*that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting
votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes
have the same weight, it would be more fair.

With the formula S-O, the results would be:
1) Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
2) Maria: 2184-775=1409
3) Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
4) James: 1857-578=1279
5) Denny: 1628-544=1084

And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of
the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has
given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do
anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had
significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters,
which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very
close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.

If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could
easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of
their candidates as Board members. Instead of vote for, we'd get
vote against attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system,
but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting
groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow
Wikimedians.

So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it
would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid
negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would
be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get
much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences
for our culture.

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote:

I have a lot of personal opinions on the method, questions process, etc.
Many of them will be shared in the committee's post mortem (others I will
be discarding as I now process the last several weeks).

Also, we are beginning to post some statistics that folks may find helpful:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Stats

We 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Voting system (was: Results of 2015 WMF Board elections)

2015-06-06 Thread Risker
The Schulze method that was being used is the one that is specifically
intended  to give only one winner; probably most people don't know that
Schulze also created a separate system that was intended to give multiple
winners.  It is a very confusing system and many people unintentionally
gave support to candidates they did not believe should have a chance.

One of the things that really becomes obvious using the S/N/O system is the
number of *non-votes* or neutral votes:  almost all of the candidates had
more neutral votes than support and oppose votes combined.  The effect of
not requiring voters to decide how to classify each candidate (in Schulze,
to rank the candidate; in S/N/O, to support or oppose) has radically
different effects in the two systems.  In S/N/O, the neutral votes have no
effect at all on the outcome.  In the Schulze system, not ranking a
candidate is the equivalent of an oppose vote; every candidate who is
ranked (even if they are ranked at a level well below the number of
candidates) is ranked higher than a candidate who is not ranked at all.
This is counter-intuitive and gives no effective way for people to
differentiate between candidates that they really really do not think
should be on the board and candidates about whom they have not formulated
an opinion, or even candidates about whom they are indifferent.  It is a
serious weakness in the Schulze system.  Nonetheless, the S/N/O system has
significant weaknesses as well, as others have pointed out.

There are other systems that allow only as many supports as there are seats
open, which might be worth considering. There are systems that only allow
support votes and no opposition.  There are not very many systems, though,
that are specifically designed to give multiple winners when one of the
conditions is that they *not* be running on a shared ticket.

We did not have enough time in 2013 (nor, to be honest, the interest
amongst Election Committee members) to do a thorough review of
multiple-winner voting systems. That year, we had to develop all of the
processes for electing FDC members and FDC ombuds, which was a lot of
work.  This year, the committee barely had enough time to do the tasks that
were absolutely required just to make the election happen, and in order to
incorporate the specific instructions of the board with respect to
outreach, seeking of diverse candidates, and increasing voter participation
(all of which proved very worthwhile), they didn't have time to fine-tune a
lot of the processes that were already developed.  I would have loved to
see changes in the way that questions are handled, and a rethinking of the
voting methodology, for example.  But there simply was not time to come up
with a well-considered *better* way.

So...yes, I agree with Milos and many others that a Standing Election
Committee is needed to re-examine the way that Board candidates are
elected, and to re-examine the entire framework on which the elections are
based - indeed, I recommended it after the 2013 election.

I find it interesting that nobody seems all that worried about the FDC
election (where 5 of 11 candidates got seats) or the FDC Ombud election
(where both candidates came forward in the last 24 hours before nominations
closed).  These two elections suggest some pretty big underlying problems
as well.  Nobody seems all that upset that fewer than 10% of all the
candidates for the 2015 elections were women - one of the lowest
percentages ever - and that not a single woman was elected to any role for
the first time in any election where more than one candidate was being
elected.  On the whole, despite having a fair number of candidates outside
of the US and areas represented by large national chapters, not a single
non-white, non-male candidate, not a single Asian, African or Latin
American candidate was elected.  We're pretty good at talking about
diversity, but very poor at implementing it.

Risker/Anne

On 6 June 2015 at 13:55, MF-Warburg mfwarb...@googlemail.com wrote:

 I still think it was a big mistake (of the electcom? I don't remember, but
 /someone/ pushed it through without discussions) in the 2013 election to
 abolish the Schulze method.
 Am 06.06.2015 19:16 schrieb Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com:

  Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one
  for best wishes and similar :)
 
  Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say
  that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome:
  a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder
  of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English
  Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages
  (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I
  didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed
  decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one
  year to be able to fully participate again).
 
  When I