[Wikimedia-l] Re: Movement Charter Drafting Committee elections are now open!

2021-10-17 Thread effe iets anders
This is a horribly problematic election. Not only does it take hours to go
through the candidates if you actually want to rank them, but you would
also need to be willing to spend about a lot of time to enter them into the
broken voting interface (which works great for up to 5 candidates - not for
70).

If anyone is planning to go through anyway - after some experimenting i
found out that the silly random order of the ballot dropdown (making it
impossible to find the candidate to input) can be worked around by clicking
the dropdown, and then typing their first letter several times until the
right candidate is selected. Then hit enter.

This interface was non-userfriendly with the board elections but for this
election it is prohibitively so. With this number of candidates, a 7-member
district would have been much more userfriendly (even if it is suboptimal
from the perspective of a mathematical modeling).

Lodewijk

On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 3:34 PM Guettarda  wrote:

>
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 6:04 PM Mike Peel  wrote:
>
>> Cool. How do we find those pages from the advertised tools? Were they
>> shared here before (sorry if I missed them), or can we still vote on
>> them somewhere?
>>
>>
> The underlying problem is that we ended up with 70+ candidates for the
> MCDC. We were allowed up to 400 words for our statements, so there is a lot
> to work through. In a case like that, there's a tendency to only vote for
> people you know, or only based on regional representation, or tenure, or
> something similar. The Compass was an imperfect tool, and one that was put
> together in response to the problem of too much participation (after all,
> there was uncertainty initially as to whether 19 people would actually put
> their names forward).
>
> I think there was a week at the end of September when people could
> suggest statements (the final tally was 108). After that there was
> another week in which people were able to vote for the statements they
> wanted the candidates to answer. Not everyone got it right - there were
> some responses that made it clear that some people were voting based on
> their own opinions about the statement, rather than what they wanted to
> hear.
>
> Once they were narrowed down, Cornelius created a Google sheet where the
> candidates were able to give our opinions on the statements, based on a
> five-point scale. We were also able to add up to 500 characters clarifying
> our stances. (These were interesting, because it's obvious that some people
> who voted "support" and some who voted "oppose" had pretty much the same
> opinion, once you allowed for nuance.
>
> After that the Compass tool was created. But even that output is too much
> to parse. I put together a Google sheet for myself, where I could split
> people into arbitrary groups - for example, only 54 people gave their
> opinions on the compass, so I decided to separate those from the rest of
> the group. I also split Europe/US/Canada from the rest of the world because
> I want to make sure that I wasn't too biased by *who* I knew well. Being
> able to sort people by tenure (thanks to Andrew's table) also allows me to
> be more cogniscent of my biases (as an old-timer, I'm likely to gravitate
> to people just because I've seen them around for the last 17 years).
>
> Dusan's tool is great because it lets you compare responses to individual
> questions, and lets you see the explanatory statements. Again, as I work my
> way through the list and try to decide between people it helps me check
> responses to individual questions.
>
> I think confirmation bias would be to pick people you know and like (or
> and maybe not like so much, but think the committee could use some
> bomb-throwers). I'm grateful for the tools and summaries that people have
> created. Now if there was only some way to compare pairs of candidate
> statements side-by-side
>
> Ian
>
>
>
>> Or would it be fairer now to the candidates to let their statements
>> stand alone and for people to vote based on those alone, rather than
>> trying to provide 'advanced tools' that are intrinsically biased?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mike
>>
>> On 15/10/21 22:51:21, Guettarda wrote:
>> > Hi Mike
>> >
>> > The questions were selected from this list:
>> >
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Election_Compass/Statements
>> > <
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Election_Compass/Statements
>> >
>> >
>> > People voted and the top ones were chosen. (A few near-duplicates that
>> > ranked at the top were combined by Cornelius, iirc). The raw data
>> > underlying both the Compass and Dusan's tool are here:
>> >
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Election_Compass/Raw_data
>> > <
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee/Election_Compass/Raw_data
>> >
>> >
>> > Ian
>> >
>> >
>> > On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 5:45 PM Mike Peel > > > wrote:

[Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete

2021-10-17 Thread Amir Sarabadani
Well, if we need to have better support for multimedia, first we need to
give some attention to the existing system that is basically falling apart.
Let me give you some examples.

Thumbor, the software that builds small sizes of the images is on
deprecated infrastructure, on EOL python version (python2), uses an
extremely old fork of the upstream and does not have an owner. And this is
a pretty critical software, if it goes down, virtually no image can be
shown in all of Wikipedia (including all SVG files). Because of that, we
can't move it to a newer infrastructure (kubernetes), make it use a more
modern python version or upstream code, to make it use a more modern
version of svg converter to fix countless svg bugs the current system has
[1]. It in itself is blocking adding more features on all of Wikipedia. For
example, as a certified science nerd, I want to add support for chemical
markup files (.bxr, etc.) that would enrich our chemistry articles [2] but
well, it's blocked on thumbor being unmaintained.

The old video player, kultura, is still in production and used quite
heavily. The replacement media player exists but has some bugs that are
rather easy to fix and unblock further rolling out. But because no one is
on this task, it's basically a group of volunteers (including yours truly)
struggling to find the time to work on it. [3]. It would give a slightly
more modern look to our media player.

This is mostly fixed but worth mentioning, the image table in commons was
bigger than 300GB compressed (and 600GB uncompressed), it would take 15
hours to take a simple backup and basically a ticking bomb given how
heavily it is used. Commons went readonly and caused a big outage so
technically it was a bomb that exploded already once. The problem was
metadata of pdf files and djvu files were massive, the pdf files got fixed
by Tim Starling and I (I did it in my volunteer capacity) which in turn
reduced 200GB from it. And now we are working on fixing djvu. [4] Again in
volunteer capacity. This work is actually blocking redesign of the image
table to make it more useful [5] or practically any change that would
impact size of tables in commons.

The problems have passed the point of blocking improvements and adding more
features, they are reaching the point of actually bringing down our systems
and bleeding to the rest of our systems. And it all boils down to not
having a dedicated team on multimedia but in all fairness, it's not
something you can fix overnight. You need to grow, hire, plan, etc. etc.

Best
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193352#5984544
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T18491
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T248418
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T275268
[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T28741

On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 1:08 PM Juergen Fenn  wrote:

>
>
>
> Am 16.10.21 um 16:25 Uhr schrieb Yaroslav Blanter:
> >
> > In a few years, there will be tools for editing video. If by that time
> > we are not ready to incorporate video at full scale to Wikimedia
> > projects, we will be where AOL is now.
>
>
> We already _are_ there. When we tried to relaunch German Wikiversity
> almost ten years ago we sadly had to shrug and decline offers to bring
> converted classroom scenarios to Wikiversity because Commons did not
> accept mp4 videos and we could not include frames from YouTube where it
> all happens. Period. That was the end of online learning with Wikimedia.
> (Fair enough, there were more reasons why we did not succeed.)
>
> BUT: When we incorporate multimedia content at full scale it should be
> clear that Wikimedia is NOT YouTube. We won't accept everything. We need
> high qualitity educational content. Only.
>
> Regards,
> Jürgen.
> ___
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-- 
Amir (he/him)
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete

2021-10-17 Thread Juergen Fenn



Am 16.10.21 um 16:25 Uhr schrieb Yaroslav Blanter:
>
> In a few years, there will be tools for editing video. If by that time
> we are not ready to incorporate video at full scale to Wikimedia
> projects, we will be where AOL is now.


We already _are_ there. When we tried to relaunch German Wikiversity
almost ten years ago we sadly had to shrug and decline offers to bring
converted classroom scenarios to Wikiversity because Commons did not
accept mp4 videos and we could not include frames from YouTube where it
all happens. Period. That was the end of online learning with Wikimedia.
(Fair enough, there were more reasons why we did not succeed.)

BUT: When we incorporate multimedia content at full scale it should be
clear that Wikimedia is NOT YouTube. We won't accept everything. We need
high qualitity educational content. Only.

Regards,
Jürgen.
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
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To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org