Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Works which can't be freely licensed

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:51 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:

 I would actually say: Is there a point to have a prescriptive work
 without ND clause?


Course there is. The text of the CC licenses, for example, is under CC0;
Creative Commons is trademarked and that trademark is used to prevent
misuse (but do not prevent e.g. translations). That is a fairly standard
arrangement for free documents which need to have an official version.

I would turn that question around: is there a point for a prescriptive work
to have an ND clause? If someone wrote their alternative version of the
Normative Grammar of Serbian Language from scratch, without reusing
creative elements of the existing text (keep in mind that non-creative
elements, which for a grammar I imagine is the majority of the content,
cannot be copyrighted), would that be somehow less problematic?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thousands of images on Wikipedia and Commons in danger, action needed

[Gergő Tisza]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 8:16 AM, Newyorkbrad newyorkb...@gmail.com wrote:

 Just out of curiosity, if this legislation were to pass in Europe, and
 (for example) an American tourist took a photograph of a covered
 building in Europe and posted it when he or she arrived back in the
 U.S., would it be deleted on the ground that the image was non-free at
 the site, or kept on the ground that it was free where it was posted?


No one knows for sure. See
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Freedom_of_panorama#Choice_of_law
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thousands of images on Wikipedia and Commons in danger, action needed

[Gergő Tisza]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 5:17 AM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Yes I agree an example of what Wikipedia would look like if this
 regulation passed is an excellent idea. Could we base it on the geo
 tags?


It could be quite hard to figure out what exactly is affected (which is one
of the ways in which this would harm Wikipedia, assuming the change would
be retroactive - and copyright changes usually are - as sifting through all
potentially affected images would be a huge undertaking). For anything
built in the last 150 years, you would have to figure out who designed it
and when that person died. And even if the architect has been dead for more
than 70 years, that still does not necessarily mean the building is not
affected Gustave Eiffel died in 1923, for example, but the Eiffel Tower is
still not free to photograph at night.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Commons-l] TPP - copyright

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Ryan Kaldari  wrote:

> I don't see anything in the TPP requiring retroactive application of
> copyright terms. We'll have to wait and see how the various countries
> choose to apply the new terms. Applying terms retroactively is uncommon,
> but possible. We also have no idea when these countries are actually going
> to apply the new terms.
>

I don't think it's uncommon, the US is the odd one out on this (or almost
out, since in the end it did apply Berne  terms retroactively). For example
the EU Copyright Directive prescribes a death + 70 copyright term so
countries joining the EU restore copyright to all works for which they had
shorter protection. International copyright treaties tend to be retroactive
by default; "works shall be protected for X years after the death of the
author" applies to all works, whether they are in the public domain
currently or not.

From the regulator's point of view this is reasonable; the point of these
treaties is harmonization of the law, and harmonizing the protection term
of one group of works but leaving another group protected in some countries
and unprotected in others doesn't really make sense. The alternative would
be a rule of the shorter term, but the US does not have that, and they are
the driving force behind TPP, so...
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Constants and Low-Interest Posts to the Wikimedia Announcement Newsletter

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 2:52 AM, Gerard Meijssen 
wrote:

> Pete how do you know that Shlomi is the only one who appreciates such posts
> in this way? His point is more relevant than yours because he has a point
> that may be of relevance to many and yours is only a personal opinion and a
> put down to boot.
>

It usually helps to phrase such emails as questions (e.g. "do other
wikimediaannounce-l subscribers find newsletters relevant to this list?")
instead of just assuming that everyone else shares your preferences or
making passive-aggressive threats of unsubscribing.

Personally I do find the newsletters useful, and don't feel that ignoring
five emails a month or setting up an email filter is an undue burden for
those who don't.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> Do you think there is something "shameful" about Wikipedia using the
> Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License?
>
> And if that isn't shameful, why would it be shameful if Wikidata used the
> same licence?
>

There is nothing wrong with BY-SA per se; it's antithetical to the spirit
of the free content movement to pick a license for the reason that it would
prevent (some types of) reuse, which seemed to be where this conversation
was heading. (Just like there is nothing wrong with the GFDL either, but
picking it as a Commons image license for the reason that it is technically
a free license but onerous enough to prevent reuse in practice would be
wrong, IMO.) We have spent enough time to dissuade organizations from
publishing content under NC and ND and similar licences because they were
afraid of losing control over how it will be used; I'd rather we didn't do
that ourselves.
("Shameful" was an unnecessarily confrontational choice of word; I
apologize.)

There is also the practical matter of facts not being copyrightable in the
US, and non-zero CC licenses not being particularly useful for databases
(what you want is something like the GPL Affero for databases and CC does
not have such a license).
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Jimmy Wales' potential conflict of loyalties for Wikia Inc. versus WMF

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Fæ  wrote:

> The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search

engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared

a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes

in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge

Engines / Search Engines.
>

Um, what? The vision for Wikia (then called Wikicities) was a wiki hosting
provider for small communities. See e.g. [1]. (And also, I suppose, to
capture the ad money that could not be captured on Wikipedia, and put it
into MediaWiki development. Today the contributions to MediaWiki from Wikia
are dwarfed by those from Wikimedia but that wasn't always so.)

Search Wikia was a (short-lived and thoroughly unsuccessful) experiment to
create a community of search engine developers and come up with an
open-source, transparent, community-curated Google-competitor. Which was a
nice idea, if unrealistic, and IMO more likely to end up in a new
Wikipedia-style thing than anything profitable to Wikia, given that there
was no lock-in. I'm not even sure if Wikia the company was involved in it
in any significant way, apart from providing the wiki used for discussion
and creating some media attention.


[1] http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/04/Technology/Global_villages_conve.shtml
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] An Open Letter to Wikimedia Foundation BoT

[Gergő Tisza]

Okay, this is stepping over several lines. Can we stick to basic human
decency if nothing else? :(
No one is helped by making vicious personal attacks over assumed
interpretations. Let's try to represent the movement's values (including
civility, and, if not the assumption of good faith, then at least not
assuming the worst) even in difficult times.

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Marc A. Pelletier  wrote:

> That is... downright brilliant.  Pretend to be caring and responsible,
> while at the same time make an underhanded implication that the people who
> left are villains and that you are a poor victim for being unable to speak
> the Truth.  I hope you choke on shame for having the gall to even so much
> suggest that pillars of the staff and community like Siko, Luis, and Anna
> left for any reason other than your "exemplary" leadership.
>
> "Information asymmetry" is right, mind you.  Staffers have shown
> extraordinary restraint in keeping thing quiet and civilized so that what
> has been going on does not reflect too badly on the foundation and - by
> extension - the movement.  After all, as Ori so eloquently pointed out
> earlier, the Foundation is full of passionate and dedicated people who
> managed to do a great deal of good things despite all the "fun" of being
> rudderless, leaderless and without anything resembling a vision.
>
> If you have a single iota of integrity, please leave now before more of
> the foundation crumbles around you.  Even if you were perfectly correct in
> all you did and everyone else was perfectly wrong, any supposed leader that
> has no trust from at least 93% of their staff should realize that - if
> nothing else - they are a bad fit and cannot possibly salvage the situation.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Post mortems

[Gergő Tisza]

One example of the shortcomings of emails as a medium for complex
discussions is how this thread about postmortems continues to be diverted
into discussions about Facebook, despite Pete's best efforts.

At the end of the day, people will prefer tools that work well over tools
that align philosophically. One can sabotage the development of tools that
would both work well and uphold Wikimedia's values, but cannot prevent
important discussions from moving to other venues (which will necessarily
be a worse match for those values). There is a lesson there, although I'm
afraid it will take some more time before we learn it.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Executive transition planning

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 7:54 AM, MZMcBride  wrote:

> Removing a roof without also having a plan for an interim roof is a really

amateur mistake.


Not really if the roof was radioactive, and on fire.

It is entirely a matter of priorities - is it more urgent to fix a
situation that was causing serious unrest amongst staff, and was escalating
quickly, or to compose a nice transition plan? You might disagree with the
board's answer to that question, but there are more honest ways of
criticizing it than attacking them for not doing everything at the same
time.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Account of the events leading to James Heilman's removal

[Gergő Tisza]

Hi Fae,

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Fæ  wrote:

> Not tricky at all. There are *plenty* of other similar organizations
> that have elections for their trustees to their boards, including
> several Wikimedia chapters/affiliates where their boards have oversite
> of many employees and significant sums of money.


can you share a few examples of organizations where board members are
appointed in a binding election and members of the electorate do not have
to identify themselves to the organization?

Or are you suggesting that the WMF should turn into a membership
organization and Wikimedians who are unwilling to share personally
identifying information with the WMF should not be allowed to vote?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Politics

[Gergő Tisza]

After the ban was announced, StackOverflow founder Joel Spolsky posted an
impassioned call to arms [1] to Meta Stack Overflow (the StackOverflow
equivalent of MetaWiki/wikimedia-l). The community was not happy and a
closing discussion was started. In the end the orginial post was closed and
Spolsky agreed to rewrite it as a company blog post [2] instead. The
discussion is IMO worth a read:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342480/should-the-time-to-take-a-stand-question-be-closed-moved

Another discussion that comes to mind is the straw poll [3] on the proposal
to run a banner campaign to protest the imprisonment of Wikipedian and open
source/content advocate Bassel Khartabil by the Syrian government. (The
proposal was closed as lacking consensus.)

Both of these discussions are about community action, and it makes sense
that the WMF would have more freedom in how it expresses itself when
talking in its own name, on its own blog; still, the discussions might
offer some insight into how community members often view political activism
for specific local concerns that's sort of happening in the name of a
global community.


[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a-stand
[2]
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/01/Developers-without-Borders-The-Global-Stack-Overflow-Network/
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_Bassel/Banner/Straw_poll
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Draft Code of Conduct for Technical Spaces

[Gergő Tisza]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 3:59 AM, Steinsplitter Wiki <
steinsplitter-w...@live.com> wrote:

> Apart from that, i see a big COI - the staffer in question is voting at
> the voting sections, striking out votes, defending the code of conduct and
> the he is marking a section as "consensus". Imho the COI is obvious, such a
> behavior wouldn't be possible at dewp or commons.
>

Commons has 30 thousand active editors; dewp has 20 thousand; mediawiki.org
has one thousand. Many smaller wikis don't have the kind of COI rules
around voting that the big ones have, because it's harder to find
uninvolved bystanders who care enough to do the administration. (On huwiki
for example it's customary for the person who proposed the vote to be the
closer.)

In this case every section closed as consensus had clear majority (60%+ by
my count) and all struck votes were made weeks after the given section was
closed, so I don't see anything problematic about that.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Draft Code of Conduct for Technical Spaces

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 4:44 PM, Adrian Raddatz  wrote:

> A lack of other community members participation is perhaps half on a lack
> of advertising, and half on a lack of interest.
>

The drafting process was advertised to the point of obnoxiousness. I count
30 announcements in my inbox from Matt, and that's with Gmail merging
identical emails from multiple mailing lists. There has been a discussion
section in all IRL tech events. There has been an extended talk page
discussion with 126 distinct accounts (36 of which have "WMF" in their
name).

For comparison, AFAIK the largest discussion in the technical community so
far was the one to switch from Bugzilla to Phabricator (something that
affects the average contributor far, far more than the existence of a group
of people who address harassment concerns), which had seen the involvement
of 91 accounts:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator

So IMO neither interest nor participation has been lacking.
I'll also note that I find it unhelpful that this topic is being
forum-shopped here instead of one of the discussion channels of the
Wikimedia tech community (wikitech-l being the obvious one).
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] DEITYBOUNCE and reader logs (was Re: Introducing Victoria Coleman, WMF Chief Technology Officer)

[Gergő Tisza]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 10:19 PM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
> Also I would like to know what "Orwellian philosophy" is
> http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01211002


From the paper (you can find download links with minimal effort): "*George
Orwell tells us of a language so crafted as not to allow the speakers to
think "bad thoughts", thus preventing them from challenging the
totalitarian nightmare of Oceania. This principle, although sinister when
applied to human discourse, is quite benign and we argue beneficial when
dealing with the design of complex artifacts such as real-time computing
systems whose deployment has safety-critical implications.*"

To the extent I understood (which is very limited, I only skimmed it), this
is more of a vague philosophical point which in practice boils down to
"keep the language simple". The technical part of the paper describes an
extension of the classic precondition/postcondition system of program
specification which adds timing information. It does not relate in any way
to surveillance.

(If you are further interested in Orwell's thoughts about the use of
language in politics, Wikipedia has some good articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language )
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Looking for the admin of CentralNotice on meta

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Florence Devouard 
wrote:

> Hello everyone
>
> I am looking for the admin of CentralNotice on meta.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Request
>
> Anyone knows who that might be ? Please ?
>

Are you looking for the list of CN admins? You can filter Special:ListUsers
by user group:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers==centralnoticeadmin=50
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why don't we have a warrant canary?

[Gergő Tisza]

You might be looking for the transparency report:
https://transparency.wikimedia.org/privacy.html#summary
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A new Wikipedia fork: InfoGalactic

[Gergő Tisza]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 11:13 AM, David Gerard  wrote:

> "INFOGALACTIC: an online encyclopedia without bias or thought police"
>
> Home page: http://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
> Announcement: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/10/project-big-fork-
> infogalactic.html
> Roadmap: http://infogalactic.com/info/Infogalactic:Roadmap


In case you don't want to read their (somewhat pretentious) introductory
material, in a nutshell, they focus on US politics (ie. they are mainly
concerned about what bias articles have on a scale ranging from radical
left to radical right), and are trying to create a wiki where different
viewpoints can coexist so editors have no reason to fight edit wars (like
Wikinfo tried in ages past, except they want to take a more software-driven
approach). They want to break up articles into separate parts depending on
how bias-prone they are (pure facts, context, opinions) and use editors'
self-assessment of political POV to show them the page revision just after
the last edit from someone with the same POV.

So far, they don't actually seem to be doing any of that; it's just a copy
of Wikipedia content with people doing random changes in it.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Communicating plans and consultations

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 3:22 PM, Pine W  wrote:

> As I said, some of this is WMF-specific. For example, WMF could coordinate
> its requests for surveys and consultations so that they happen on a
> predictable monthly basis instead of sending what feels like 10+
> notifications every month for separate consultations and surveys


You might be looking for https://meta.wikimedia.
org/wiki/Community_Engagement/Calendar
In any case, it seems a bit tendentious to raise this in the context of the
Code of the Coduct, which (as it has been told ad nauseam) was a volunteer
initiative, organized mostly with resources available to volunteers.
Feel free though to discuss your preferences on notification frequency with
the people who complained all along that insufficient effort is being made
to get the community to participate.
There is a Hungarian saying about a rabbit and a hat, of which these
conversations somewhat remind me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4bd293/til_that_hungary_held_a_contest_to_name_a_danube/d18f4k9/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Using non-free elements vs our values (Apple Maps vs Wikipedia iOS app)

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 7:22 AM, Dan Garry  wrote:

> The size of your app can significantly reduce downloads [1].
> [1]: https://segment.com/blog/mobile-app-size-effect-on-downloads/


That article seems super sketchy. They took a 3MB app, increased it to
100MB+, and interpolated the retention changes linearly. They even point
out that the drop in installs was mostly due to negative reviews (since
they reverted the app size and the installs didn't climb back up) and the
reviews were mostly along the line of "WTF is this simple calculator app a
hundred megabytes?".

The Wikipedia app is 39MB and the SDK seems to add one MB per [2] which
does not sound like a big deal.

[2] https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-mobile-polylines/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcing the Hardware donation program

[Gergő Tisza]

This is one of those cool ideas which seem really obvious, but only in
hindsight. Thanks!
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] a second commons, prevent cease and desist business

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 6:06 AM, Todd Allen  wrote:

> I'm not a German speaker, and I know context and nuance can be lost in
> machine translation. That being said, the one about someone who was
> offering attribution and then got slapped with a bill for a simple
> technical error is very disturbing. Especially since as brought up before,
> a direct link would always lack the attribution contained on an
> accompanying page.
>

I can read some German and looked into a similar case the last time this
came up (the thread was called "harald bischoff advertising to make images
"for the wikimedia foundation" and then suing users"). It involved (amongst
others) an amateur news blog which took an image from the Wikipedia article
of some politician and credited it to "Wikipedia" (with link to the image
description page; but no author or license), and was slapped with a ~$1000
fee. These kind of predatory tactics hurt the reputation and moral standing
of the movement IMO.

I think asking for damages might be acceptable if
- the reuser is a big organization which has its own copyright lawyers
(e.g. a commercial news publisher) and really should have known better
- the reuser refuses to fix the attribution when asked
- the reuser does not even attempt to indicate that the image is from
elsewhere
but when none of those is the case, threatening to sue violates the spirit
of free content, even if it is in accordance with the fine print of the
license.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What to do when the WMF is stingy with the community?

[Gergő Tisza]

Making a bunch of unsupported and mostly unrelated accusations of bad faith
is usually not a great way of raising support for your grant request. Long
rants about how more money would be needed without even a hint of what that
money would be used for are also unhelpful. I recommend letting this thread
die and then starting a fresh one about the mission impact of the Wikidata
conference and how it could be raised by a larger budget.

I would also recommend talking with the other organizers first, as right
now it is unclear whether you are complaining about the WMF not willing to
give a larger grant or about the organizers not feeling the need for one.

(FWIW the WikidataCon budget is ~75.000 EUR, planned to be supported by a
36.000 EUR WMF grant and a 40.000 EUR WMDE grant.)

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 7:52 PM, David Cuenca Tudela 
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Recently the review for the Wikidata conference grant application has
> started, and I have complained that the funds allocated are insuficient to
> cover the needs of the grants. The requested amount for the grants was
> 36,000 EUR, but in my opinion that should be at least 72,000 EUR.
>
> I have the feeling that the WMF is sitting on a pile of money just giving
> breadcrumbs to the community, and the community has to suffer in silence
> about this stinginess.
> What can we do as a community to request with a clear voice the funds that
> we need?
>
> Why are there two standards? One standard seems to be that everything that
> the WMF needs to allocate can go unsupervised, whereas another standard
> seems to apply to community activities where every penny is so supervised
> that it becomes a pain in the ass to organize anything big.
>
> The Wikidata Conference needs more funds to be a success and I think that
> in the grand scheme of things, the money requested is just peanuts compared
> to the money that the WMF has collected from donors.
>
> If things have to be done well, then the community has every right to claim
> the money from the donors. The WMF has no right to appropriate that money
> and use it as a hammer to sabotage events that could have a real impact
> like the Wikidata Conference.
>
> I request that the amount of funds allocated for grants to be increased
> from 36,000 eur to 72,000 eur, and this is an informed request that I
> perform both as a community member and as a member of the Wikidata
> Conference Grants Committee.
>
> The link to my complaint can be found here:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Conference/
> WMDE/WikidataCon#Complaint_about_this_grant_application
>
> The link to the Wikidata Conference Grants Commitee can be found here:
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/
> Volunteer/Scholarships_committee
>
> I hope to have some feedback about this complaint. Thank you,
> Micru
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Widespread perfomance issues

[Gergő Tisza]

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 11:02 AM, Cristian Consonni 
wrote:

> At Wikimedia Italia have been contacted in the last few minutes because
> Wikipedia seems unreachable and very slow from Italy.
>
> The status pages for servers and services signals several perfomance
> issues:
> https://status.wikimedia.org/
>
> Does somebody know what's going on?
>

Maybe related to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165252 (hardware
problems in one of the caching servers)?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Let's set up a Tor onion service for Wikipedia

[Gergő Tisza]

Now that we have ascertained (again) that wikimedia-l is a ​poor channel
for focused discussions about tech proposals, can we move this to
Phabricator?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Women in red

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 10:42 AM, Keegan Peterzell 
wrote:

> "The nerve of these women, to think that they can write encyclopedia
> articles on women who must inherently be non-notable! There's nothing to
> write about here."
>
> That's basically what your email says. No complaints when the subject is
> anything else from you, when these thematic editing are held on other
> subjects.


Please avoid personal attacks based on hidden motivations you assume other
parties to have; it's contrary to the Wikimedia movement's social best
practices [1] and bound to take discussions in unproductive directions.
When criticizing what someone said, stick to what they actually said.
Especially so if your accusation of bad faith would be essentially
content-free.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Women in red

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 7:02 AM, Gnangarra  wrote:

> I cant believe this
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_
> in_Red/The_World_Contest
> has got WMF funding, the idea of trying to create 100,000 stub articles on
> english wikipedia without any thought to how it'll impact on the
> community.
>
> I find it ironic that a competition is being funded to encourage current
> contributors to do what we wont accept from new editors.  If a new editor
> was to create an article it wouldnt pass through the Articles for Creation
> process because its half the size of the minimum set there. Many of the
> competition articles will just get tagged CSD - A1, A7, A9 even G2
>
> While there is a nice bot that will count the size of the prose, there is
> no automated process for checking copyright violations, checking for
> notability and most importantly checking for BLP with the aim of 100,000
> the community will years to clean up the mess that is about to be created.
>
> ​we are 15 days from this disaster commencing​
>

Women in Red has been doing similar projects on a smaller scale for quite a
while now. If you think this current one will turn out much worse, at a
minimum you should be able to explain how it is different from those.

Anyhow, this contest has been in the works for almost a year and will start
in two weeks. The supporting grant was given half a year ago, after public
review. If there ever was a time when organizers should have taken vague
prophecies of doom into account, it has surely long passed. At this point
all you can achieve is creating a hostile atmosphere for the contest
(especially if you continue using emotionally charged words like "disaster"
or "mess"); please don't push that. If you have constructive advice on how
the ill effects you are worried about can be avoided without putting undue
burden on the organizers or preventing them to run the contest effectively,
focus on that. Otherwise, it's probably best to refrain from discussion for
now.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Defamation of Wikipedia in a Telugu (te) Motion Picture

[Gergő Tisza]

It looks like the publisher created a hoax/in-universe article about the
main character of the movie, which is what the trailer is referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete=Theda+Singh=20170820143048

Not cool but still not a defamation.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Looking for advises regarding a public conference about the Wikimedia movement on the topic "Dissemination of Knowledge: What Limits" [Fwd: Re: Conférence Wikipédia]

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Nov 26, 2017 at 8:32 AM, mathieu stumpf guntz <
psychosl...@culture-libre.org> wrote:

> Also I'm wondering where I could find the nice blue or green background
> that I see used in many first page of Wikimedia presentations
>

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brand > Presentations
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Pixel tracking by Wikimedia

[Gergő Tisza]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 11:43 AM Fæ  wrote:

> It would be much appreciated if anyone can provide a link to an
> official statement given by the WMF that pixel tracking is used on its
> sites outside of fundraising banners, or its supplier's sites, and any
> example cases or reports of where it is happening.
>

I doubt pixel tracking is a useful term here, you should describe more
precisely what kind of tracking you are interested in.
For example, EventLogging (which is fairly well documented) used to use
tracking pixels, but that was replaced with the Beacon API when the browser
support was good enough, but from the perspective of a privacy-concerned
user that changed exactly nothing.
Are you interested in tracking done by third parties? Unique user tracking?
Those are the kinds of things that make important difference from a legal
point of view and are probably outlined in some policy. Tracking pixels are
just a technique that can be used for all kinds of things, and I doubt
anyone is keeping track of where it is used.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?

[Gergő Tisza]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 6:40 AM mathieu lovato stumpf guntz <
psychosl...@culture-libre.org> wrote:

> - Matrix http://matrix.org/
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(communication_protocol)
> 
>
> My experience with the two former don't make feel like they could be
> used for the same purpose as Telegram. I still have to check the three
> later, but please be bold with any feedback and complementary ideas you
> might have on this topic.
>

You might be interested in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T186061
although it's not really related to the topic of this thread as Matrix is a
chat network, not a social network (but then so is Telegram). The
project could definitely use more testers.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 7:39 PM Alex Monk  wrote:

> On 10 July 2018 at 12:06, Bodhisattwa Mandal 
> wrote:
>
> > 1) Not all communities have been informed about this future change (
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Distribution_list/Technical_Village_Pumps_
> > distribution_list
> > )
>
> The plan appears to be to do this, maybe it just hasn't happened yet:
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Creation_of_separate_user_group_for_editing_sitewide_CSS/JS#Announcement_plan


That did happen; I just wasn't aware that list does not go to all wikis.
There doesn't seem to be a distribution list that includes all wikis but
prefers technical discussion spaces over nontechnical ones so I have set up
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Distribution_list/Nonechnical_Village_Pumps_distribution_list
and sent out a notice to the wikis I missed in the first round.

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 8:52 PM Strainu  wrote:

> As someone pointed out on the talk page, there is no real
> reason to hurry the deployment so much.


Unfortunately there is, as attacks based on MediaWiki: namespace editing
privileges have been a regular occurrence in the last few months. The last
somewhat successful one was less than a week ago.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Time to simplify the Bureaucracy ?

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 2:16 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The discussions about declining editor levels started to go quiet in mid
> 2015 after we noticed that numbers had started to rally at the end of 2014.
>

The numbers for English Wikipedia, you mean. For the next four largest
wikis, only French has improved recently; for German the decline got
slightly less steep around 2014 but still ongoing, Dutch has been in a
pretty much linear decline since 2007 and Russian actually started to
decline around 2014.
https://imgur.com/a/OISNg

Many other wikis show the same pattern of decline. Also if you look at
English Wikipedia new editor counts it's not hard to think that whatever
caused the stabilization was a one-off event:
https://imgur.com/a/SEN5e
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF C-level turnover

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 10:34 AM Strainu  wrote:

> Are there any public informations on the C-level average duration of
> employment and turnover levels in WMF compared to other NGOs and/or
> companies in the Bay area?
>

Past and present C-levels can be found at [1] (since 2016) and [2] (until
2017). With some legwork turnover could be reconstructed from that.

For industry in general, some googling brings up [4] and [5] which suggest
a 5-year median / 7-year average CEO tenure. That's not specific to IT,
although per [4] the spread is not huge. I didn't find any numbers about
C-levels / top management teams.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Leadership_team
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries
[4] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/02/12/ceo-tenure-rates/
[5]
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-CEO-tenure-by-sector-and-country_fig1_267757998
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy: Recommendations released, join the conversation

[Gergő Tisza]

Hi Todd,

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 8:06 PM Todd Allen  wrote:

> These are very disappointing. It does not seem like a bit of the feedback
> on earlier versions was taken into consideration at all. Can we expect
> anything we say to matter this time around, or will we once again be
> talking to the wall?
>

having participated in writing some of these recommendations, I can tell
you from personal experience they have been massively shaped by feedback.
That included feedback on the talk pages, feedback at events and
conferences, feedback from strategy salons organized for that specific
purpose, feedback from all kinds of personal conversations... often
conflicting feedback, since, unsurprisingly, different people within the
movement often have opposing views.
Also, at least in the parts of the process I have seen, all feedback was
considered carefully (whether we had the bandwidth to respond or not, with
the latter unfortunately happening a lot more than we'd have liked), but
then of course not all of it could not be incorporated - some was in
conflict with other feedback, some was not in alignment with the strategic
direction, some was infeasible or factually incorrect... but much of the
feedback did end up changing the recommendations.

So if your expectation is that your feedback will be taken in
consideration, you can be confident that that will happen. If the
expectation is that it will be heeded in every case, then you might come
away frustrated; like all large-scale governance projects, our movement's
strategy for the next decade will require a lot of compromise from a lot of
people. For every part of the recommendations that you like, I'm sure there
will be a hundred people who dislike it. So I would urge you (and everyone)
to look at the recommendations through that lens: whether they will be a
positive change for the movement overall, not whether every single detail
is to your liking. If we cherry-pick everything that some group of people
is opposed to, soon nothing would be left.


(I'm one of the writers; this is my personal opinion only. I will certainly
not be in the position to make any decisions based on community feedback
about accepting or rejecting the recommendations. But having seen how much
effort was spent on making sure all feedback is collected and reviewed, I'm
pretty sure this last phase is not going to be any different.)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Face recognition

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 3:55 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> People on another forum says portraits are personal data and use of
> them is a breach of Art. 6 GDPR Lawfulness of processing. This creates
> a problem in most European countries. This is a breach of privacy
> laws, and not a copyright issue.[1]
>

Something that can be used to recognize you face is certainly personal
data, so under the GDPR its operator needs to have a lawful reason to store
or process it. That could be user consent, public interest (e.g. in the
case of the police using it), possibly even a legitimate business interest
- the GDPR is pretty vague on what counts as a lawful reason.


> Not sure how to interpret the local copyright law on this. It can be
> read both as it is legal (even to just repurpose all kind of images no
> matter license) and as it is illegal to do it (it would be similar to
> sampling of previously published music). Seems like you are allowed to
> train a model, but you can't publish it…
>

In the EU, the CDSM directive mandates a copyright exception for data
mining [1] (for scientific research always, otherwise in the absence of an
explicit prohibition from the copyright owner). It is still new and most
member states have not adopted it into their local law yet, so the exact
form that exception will take is still an open question.

[1] see Title II Article 3 and 4 in the EU's crappy un-section-linkable law
page:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019L0790=EN
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Practical implications of Coronavirus

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 9:22 AM Fæ  wrote:

> Separately I prefer Google hangouts for a very bad internet connection
> (under 10 mb/s) which is more forgiving than Zoom or Skype as it seems
> to be better at brown-out conditions. Google hangouts is probably a
> bit easier for the average volunteer to log in to or get running on
> their kit, for example installing Zoom on Ubuntu meant setting things
> up on the command line for me.
>

In my experience Hangouts/Meet is superior to Zoom technically in pretty
much every aspect (saner UI, better A/V quality, less bugs, better handling
of poor connections, also it is just a web page while Zoom's web version is
not really usable). OTOH Zoom has more facilitation features (such as
splitting into subgroups) which might be useful in certain kinds of
meetings.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation and affiliates disclosing salaries on job ads & the effect of this on workplace equity

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 6:25 AM Gnangarra  wrote:

> I'd hope that the WMF when hiring people in what was considered third world
> or in areas of socially deprived wages that it would pay at least to US
> standards as a matter of principle that employees doing similar jobs should
> basically be treated equally regardless of location.  That where the pay
> and conditions exceed the US the WMF should be ensuring that people there
> are being paid comparable salaries for the similar positions in that
> location, US wages and conditions arent the best for many of their
> positions but that should be no excuse for hiring people at lower
> conditions.
>
> Socially the biggest issue is the exploitation of cheap labour because
> companies can, the WMF should be doing better than that if truly believes
> in equality in the movement
>

One could make the argument that the WMF contributes magnitudes more to
global equity by its work on the Wikimedia mission than by paying staff
members, so having half as many staff members for twice the wage in cheaper
regions is an extremely poor trade-off for advancing equity.
(Of course, by the same line of reasoning, San Francisco would be a highly
questionable choice for headquarters.)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Foundation and affiliates disclosing salaries on job ads & the effect of this on workplace equity

[Gergő Tisza]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 2:44 AM Chris Keating 
wrote:

> There's a campaign(1) for nonprofits to disclose the salaries, or at least
> salary ranges, on job ads.
> (...)
> I know practices vary within the movement - I believe the WMF never
> mentions salaries on ads, and I don't know whether the range is disclosed
> to applicants or not - some chapters I know do advertise a salary. However,
> I'd urge all entities within the movement that hire staff to disclose the
> expected salary ranges for posts they are advertising, as part of their
> commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.
>

FWIW, the WMF does at least disclose its salary ranges internally to staff,
which I think does a lot to help with more equitable compensation. I hope
they will disclose publicly some day; until then, if you work at the WMF,
you can help by entering your salary into transparency projects like
Glassdoor [1].

Also, executive compensation is public due to US legal requirements for
charitable organizations, and is tracked on meta [2]. Probably not that
helpful to most candidates, but might be used to calibrate overall pay
levels compared to other organizations.

[1]
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Wikimedia-Foundation-Salaries-E38331.htm
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid API?

[Gergő Tisza]

You can find some more discussion at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Iteration_3/Promote_Sustainability_and_Resilience#Freemium

As I mentioned there, the premise of the recommendation is that the
movement needs new revenue sources; in part because the 2030 strategy is
ambitious and requires a significant increase in resources, in part because
our current lack of diversity (about 40% of the movement's budget is from
donations through website banners, and another 40% from past banners via
email campaigns and such) is a strategic risk because those donations can
be disrupted by various social or technical trends. For example, large tech
companies which are the starting point of people's internet experience
(such as Facebook or Google) clearly have aspirations to become the end
point as well - they try to ingest and display to their users directly as
much online content as they can. Today, that's not a whole lot of content
(you might see fragments of Wikipedia infoboxes in Google's "knowledge
panel", for example, but nothing resembling an encyclopedia article). Ten
years from now, that might be different, and so we need to consider how we
would sustain ourselves in such a world - in terms of revenue, and also in
terms of people (how would new editors join the project, if most people
interacted with our content not via our website, but interfaces provided by
big tech companies where there is no edit button?).

The new API project aims to do that, both in the sense of making it
possible to have more equitable arrangements with bulk reusers of our
content (who make lots of money with it), and by making it easier to reuse
content in ways that align with our movement's values (currently, if you
reuse Wikipedia content in your own website or application, and want to
provide your users with information about the licensing or provenance of
that content, or allow them to contribute, the tools we provide for that
are third rate at best). As the recommendation mentions, erecting
unintentional barriers to small-scale or non-commercial reusers was very
much a concern, and I'm sure much care will be taken during implementation
to avoid it.

Wrt transparency, I agree this was communicated less clearly than ideal,
but from the Wikimedia Foundation's point of view, it can be hard to know
when to consult the community and to what extent (churning out so much
information that few volunteers can keep up with it can be a problem too;
arguably early phases of the strategy process suffered from it). This is a
problem that has received considerable attention within the WMF recently
(unrelated to API plans) so there's at the very least an effort to make the
process of sharing plans and gathering feedback more predictable.
Also, the pandemic has been a huge disruption for the WMF. Normally, by
this point, the community would have been consulted on the draft annual
plan, which is where new initiatives tend to be announced; but that has
been delayed significantly due to so many staff members' lives being
upheaved. Movement events where such plans are usually discussed had to be
cancelled, and so on.

(Written with my volunteer hat on. I was involved in the strategy process
and helped write the recommendation snippet Yair quoted upthread; I'm not
involved in the API gateway project.)
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Welcoming the first round of grants from the Equity Fund

[Gergő Tisza]

One can argue about whether it was a good idea to give 15% of the
Foundation's annual grant budget to largely-unrelated charities as a snap
reaction to a wave of US political protests. But assuming it was - this
happened in the middle of the pandemic, with the WMF operating on extremely
restricted resources (with many staff working half-time, see [1]), and was
trying to react to an unexpected event quickly, so I doubt it could have
been done in a significantly more transparent or participatory manner. And
the community was also stretched pretty thin, there were constant
complaints of being consulted about too many things at the same time, with
the movement strategy discussions, board election discussions, code of
conduct discussions, branding discussions etc. going on, while people's
personal lives were in disarray due to the lockdowns and other
virus-related disruptions; some consultations had to be delayed, even the
board elections had to be delayed. So I doubt the community would have had
the capacity to practice oversight, had it been invited to.

That's not to say those we shouldn't ask for more transparency and
participation *going forward*, as those circumstances are now largely
behind us (at least in the Global North; not sure about community capacity
in the countries which would be the most logical beneficiaries of an equity
fund). But we should acknowledge the severe constraints the WMF was under a
year ago.

(disclaimer: I work at the WMF, in a non-grantmaking-related position. All
of the above is my personal opinion as a long-time community member.)

[1]:
https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/wikimedia-coronavirus-response-people-first-8bd99ea6214b

On Thu, Sep 9, 2021 at 10:21 PM Yair Rand  wrote:

> I haven't yet had time to look over the grantee organizations, and the
> general issue of funding non-Wikimedia efforts has been fairly well-covered
> by statements from all four recently-elected trustees, so I'm just going to
> take a moment to bring up some points about the specific process used here:
> * This was not participatory. Neither the community nor any
> community-elected group were invited to look these over even to give
> advance feedback, much less make a decision.
> * This was not transparent. Even after the fact, no notes were given on
> what the WMF used to judge the options; no metrics, no pros-and-cons
> analysis of each, no general review. Nor was a list of rejected applicants
> made public, as far as I can see.
> * COI concerns: Given the lack of any mentioned standards about this (I
> haven't seen anything resembling the FDC's COI rules, and the WMF's general
> COI policy seems quite lacking for something like this), and given the
> problematic history this Fund in particular has in this area, I must ask:
> Did any staff, trustees, or committee members involved in this process have
> any personal associations to any of the grantee organizations, and if so,
> were they (/would they have been) required to recuse themselves from the
> relevant decisions?
> * The Committee appears to have committed to sharing "terms of each grant
> and updates on their progress" on Meta, per the FAQ. I don't see any links
> to the grant terms. Should we still expect these things?
>
> (A few excerpts from answers given by the recently elected, at the Q on
> the topic of funding non-Wikimedia efforts in general:
> "I don’t think WF has any money to spare for any other causes irrespective
> of their worth. There’s an NGO or 100 for any cause, and WF cause is
> exclusively Wikimedia movement support." - Victoria
> "At this time, I'd be reluctant to start funding projects entirely
> unrelated to Wikimedia projects." - Pundit
> "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to support and empower the
> communities of the Wikimedia projects and the projects themselves. Among
> the many worthy goals that one can set, we choose to pursue this one. [...]
> The Wikimedia Foundation looks relatively big and well-resourced (in terms
> of money, people, etc.), and it is tempting to use some of them for other
> purposes. However, the truth is that the Wikimedia Foundation is not so
> big, and the resources are very limited. If we scatter them in too many
> different places, we will end up achieving nothing - and the Wikimedia
> projects will be the first to pay the price." - Laurentius
> I'm not going to try to clip Rosiestep's answer because I feel like a
> clipped version would risk being misrepresentative of her position. I
> recommend reading the full versions of all four (quite interesting and
> nuanced) answers at
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Candidates/CandidateQ%26A/Question11
> )
>
> (There are, of course, more fundamental problems with the Fund, but let's
> leave that for another time.)
>
> Thank you.
>
> -- Yair Rand
>
> ‫בתאריך יום ד׳, 8 בספט׳ 2021 ב-10:09 מאת ‪Lisa Gruwell‬‏ <‪
> lgruw...@wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> We are 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:04 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out
> because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was
> broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one
> cares about it.
>

That is patently untrue. The book renderer (OCG) was, due to the lack
of maintenance, increasingly causing problems for the operators of
Wikimedia production services, and the approach it was based on (converting
wikitext to LaTeX) resulted in an endless stream of discrepancies in the
PDF output. It was replaced with another PDF rendering service that used a
headless browser - an approach that resulted in much more faithful
rendering (basically it outsourced the cost of maintaining a good PDF
generator to browser vendors) but didn't scale well and wouldn't have been
able to handle large collections of articles.

I'm not fond of that decision but it obviously wasn't about disabling
something that worked before, just for fun. The Foundation had to choose
between risking platform stability, a significant time investment to
modernize the service (at the detriment of other projects that time could
be invested into), and shutting down a feature that saw relatively little
use, and chose the third.

FWIW there was a volunteer-maintained service doing LaTeX-based
multi-article book generation which might still be functional:
https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage

[Gergő Tisza]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:14 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> We may differ in what was first: abandoning it or closing it, but the
> process is available at phabricator.
>

What was first was regular production incidents caused by OCG, which would
have required a rewrite (and to some extent rearchitecting) to operate
smoothly. That would have been a major project, plus the service had a
constant maintenance cost (it was a node.js service, and node is relatively
maintenance-heavy), and the WMF did not want to maintain two different
renderers forever.


> We migh also have a different view on priorities, but a Foundation with
> 100 million dollars in a vault can pay for someone to solve this issue, no
> doubts.
>

Yes, or the money (probably a quarter-year work for a team, at least, so
that might be something like $300K?) can be used on something else. There
are a huge number of things to spend money on, and IMO it's hard to argue
for the strategic importance of PDF book rendering. It wasn't used much, it
would have been work-intensive to maintain  (every new wikitext feature
would have required special handling for the LaTeX transformation, and
there are all kinds of wikitext/HTML constructs which are not easy to
express in LaTeX), and there isn't much value in a PDF of Wikipedia
articles when the originals are freely available over the internet (and for
people with difficulties accessing the internet, there are better
alternatives).
(Personally, I don't think Proton was worth the investment, either - it
doesn't give much value beyond the PDF generation that most browsers are
already capable of doing.)


> By the way: the Proton PDF render is also failing if the article has a
> gallery. But no one cares about it. It used to work, it was broken, and no
> one was responsible for the fail.
>

I assume that refers to T209837 ?
The drawback of Proton is that since it uses a headless browser for PDF
rendering, there isn't much room to influence how the rendering goes
(beyond CSS tweaks or upstream bug reports), so issues like that might not
be easily fixed. (OTOH it at least displays galleries, which OCG didn't
.)
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: WIKIMOVE Episode #2- Share news from your affiliate and ask questions to our guests in our next podcast

[Gergő Tisza]

Thank you for fostering conversations around movement strategy!

Are there any plans to make the content accessible to standard podcast
players (e.g. Google Podcasts)?
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Gergő Tisza]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:52 PM Amir Sarabadani  wrote:

> Even if you don't want mediawiki for various reasons, you can set it up in
> Wikimedia Cloud. We already hosted Discourse there for years.
>

Cloud is 1) not exactly an improvement

in terms of privacy, 2) a drag on human resources as it will take
significant time of an employee or community member (who is likely
unskilled at operating Discourse) to keep the site running. If it seems
likely that the forum will be around for long, it might be worth moving it
to internal hosting (which will be a lot more expensive in relative terms
but still not really significant compared to the Wikimedia movement's
resources, I imagine). In the short term, just buying hosting while we see
how well the new thing works out is a very reasonable approach. Our
community's hostility to experiments is one of the biggest obstacles to
adaptation and addressing long-present problems (such as using discussion
technology that was considered pretty good forty years ago).


> Even if you can't host in WMCS for other reasons, you still can have
> internationalized discussions in mediawiki. The Desktop improvements team
> does this in mediawiki.org (For example
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements/Fourth_prototype_testing/Feedback)
> and while not as great as auto-translate, it works.
>

No it doesn't, which is why you almost never see multilingual discussions
on meta. It "works" in the same sense that two pieces of stick work as a
lighter: it can be used for the same purpose with sufficient effort, but
that effort is so high that almost no one will use it in practice.

Language barrier is a problem but so is privacy, there is a reason we host
> everything onsite. For example, I don't know the details of how it uses
> Google Translate but it is possible we end up sending some data to Google
> that are either not anonymized or can be de-anonymized easily. Not to
> mention the cloud provider hosting the website having access to everything
> and so on. And not to mention auto-translate is not perfect and can cause
> all sorts of problems in communication.
>

While that's a good point and something to consider if we keep Discourse
around, the current reality is that discussions mostly happen on Facebook,
Telegram and Discord, all of which are worse in terms of privacy than a
Discourse site hosted by a contracted organization. These discussions
remind me of the trolley problem a bit - is it really preferable to let
five times more people get run over, just because that way we can wash our
hands afterwards and say we didn't officially approve of either option?
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 8:22 AM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> + Automatic translation of discussions is essential, tangibly useful for
> our communities, and very satisfying.
>  --> how can we bring this to Mediawiki?  This is a core question for
> community health, movement development, and tech.  It is a straightforward
> concept, not exclusive to Discourse, and we should learn from it.
>

I filed T309920  a while ago, it
has some technical details. IMO it's doable (although things usually turn
out harder than they look when they have to be built on top of an
unstructured soup of wikitext, but AIUI the Editing team has done some
great foundational work to make MediaWiki discussion pages more manageable,
so maybe these days that's less of an issue) but it would be a largish
project that would have to be slotted into the WMF's annual planning.


> + Forum threading and features (tags, emotes) are nice, beloved by some.
>

They aren't "nice", they are essential for scaling discussion. Just like
you can't manage thousands of articles without some kind of category
system, you can't manage thousands of discussions without some kind of
tagging system. And likes or reacjis allow scaling up the number of
participants without excluding anyone from the discussion who is unwilling
to spend several hours a day on reading new comments - they both cut down
on the number of comments, and allow software to highlight the most
important or most representative comments.


>  --> how might we support integrating discourse into a) mediawiki, b)
> interwiki links? (so that a forum post could link to *m:Power_structure*,
> and a meta post could link to *f:Wikischool*)
>

MediaWiki is concept-addressable; forum software aren't because they need
to deal with more and messier content. You could have something with like
*f:123* but I'm not sure it adds value over plain links.


> – Wikimedia Space was closed after a year, and its links no longer resolve.
>

I apologize for that. Space needs to be migrated from Debian Stretch to
Buster as part of a generic upgrade of Wikimedia Cloud infrastructure. I
volunteered to do it but it turned out to be non-straightforward, or
possibly I've been going at it wrong, I ran out of time, and then kinda
forgot about it. I'll try to wrap it up soon.


>  --> how can we add discourse into current versioning + archiving
> workflows?
>

A good question regardless! There was some discussion in T235235
, but it didn't go far.

See also T262275 , which is
about a different Discourse site (which I didn't think was worth keeping
up), but it shows a minimal-effort solution for keeping discussion content
available and links working in perpetuity, although in a rather ugly format.

~ what it might look like for this to later become a more standard part of
> our wikiverse (e.g., *forum.wikimedia.org/c/strategy
> *).
>

There's a bunch of discussion at
https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-proposed-name-and-domain/53
on why a *.wikimedia.org domain is unlikely to be used anytime soon.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reflecting on my listening tour

[Gergő Tisza]

On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 7:49 AM AntiCompositeNumber <
anticompositenum...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreed. It has long been the case that infrastructure critical to the
> operation of the various wikis has been left without a clear
> maintainer, or has been maintained only in the volunteer time of a
> single staffer already fulfilling a full-time role. Teams would be
> dissolved or reassigned to completely different projects after
> completion, without the ability and/or willingness to even review
> patches. That assumes that the team doing the work wasn't made up of
> contractors who departed the Foundation when the project was
> "completed", taking their knowledge of it with them.
>
> This was a major factor in causing the technical debt problem, and
> must be addressed to have any chance of solving it.
>

At some point we will have to admit that we have created a feature set many
times larger than we have the capacity to actively maintain and improve.
Either we make software development cheaper somehow (move the WMF to
Romania or something), or we cut some of the non-software spending (but we
already spend 50%+ of movement funds on software, and we'd have to increase
capacity way more than by a factor of two to maintain all our code), or we
undeploy most current features, or we'll have to put up with most things
being unmaintained, which is the status quo. That's not to say we can't be
smarter about it (e.g. microservices are a great way to have maintenance
overhead spin even more out of control) or that maintenance efforts
couldn't be better prioritized (e.g. the lack of maintainership of our
authentication stack is somewhat wild), but fundamentally changing the
current mode of operation (where most things are deployed and
then abandoned to work on the next thing) is a pipe dream IMO.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Chat GPT

[Gergő Tisza]

Just to give a sense of scale: OpenAI started with a $1 billion donation,
got another $1B as investment, and is now getting a larger investment from
Microsoft (undisclosed but rumored to be $10B). Assuming they spent most of
their previous funding, which seems likely, their operational costs are in
the ballpark of $300 million per year. The idea that the WMF could just
choose to create conversational software of a similar quality if it wanted
seems detached from reality to me.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: [Announcement] Establishment of Wikimedians of the Asia Pacific User Group

[Gergő Tisza]

It's good to have ambitions, but a user group that strives to span 25
countries (between them containing maybe half of the Earth's population)
while currently has 8 members is maybe a bit too ambitious.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong

[Gergő Tisza]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 1:57 PM Ori Livneh  wrote:

> If we're collecting exemplars, I'd like to add Bartosz
> Ciechanowski's superlative articles ,
> like the ones on bicycles  and sound
> . His articles are the best examples I know
> of interactive content that complements long-form text content.
>

This concept was popularized by Bret Victor under the name "explorable
explanations ". There is a
whole Wikipedia article
 on it. There are
some great examples on his website, and there are some websites for
collecting similar content, such as explorabl.es and an awesome list
. I agree they are really
cool but...


> The critical issue is *security*. Security is the reason the graph
> extension is not enabled. Security is the reason why interactive SVGs are
> not enabled. Interactive visualizations have a programmatic element that
> consists of code that executes in the user's browser. Such code needs to be
> carefully sandboxed to ensure it cannot be used to exfiltrate user data or
> surreptitiously perform actions on wiki.
>

I think it's fundamentally a human scaling problem. Being able to create
good interactive content is just a much more niche skill than being able to
create good text content. Interactive animations were very much part of
Yuri's vision
 for the
Graph extension, but during the decade Graph was deployed in production the
number of such animations made was approximately zero. Granted Vega is
probably not the easiest framework for creating animations, but I don't
think there are other tools which would make it much easier. You could just
write arbitrary Javascript and package it as a gadget; but no one did that
either. Instead, both gadgets and Graph usage are mostly focused on very
basic things like showing a chess board or showing bar charts, because
those are the things that can be reused across a large number of articles
without manually tailoring the code to each, so the economics of creating
them work out.

Security is a challenge but could be worked around via iframes. But it's
hard to justify the effort required for doing that when there is no
community of animation makers interested in it - there are plenty of
volunteers who want to *have* animations, but it's not very clear that
there are any who want to *make* animations. This is the same problem geni
mentioned for videos - a lot of people say "we should have more videos",
but it's not very clear who would make them. If platform support were the
bottleneck here, I think the platform support would happen. But as things
look now, it would just be a poor investment of resources IMO (compared to
e.g. the Gadgets extension or Toolforge or Scribunto which do sustain
vibrant volunteer ecosystems which are significantly held back by the
limitations of these platforms).
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