>> The people who are loudest in their demands for consensus
>> do not represent the Wikimedia movement.
>
> The voices loudest for the WMF doing something against the
> Trump administration are not representative of the Wikimedia
> movement either
Is the Community Process Steering Committee
On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 12:23 PM, Bill Takatoshi wrote:
>
> I have no suggestion for what a banner might say, but I would like to
> see such proposals from others.
I propose: http://i.imgur.com/3Fb8Zrr.png
Sincerely,
Jim Salsman
On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 1:29 PM, Bill Takatoshi wrote:
>
>... I am sending these links without James's commentary
The part that was deleted from what I had asked to be forwarded
basically said this:
Some of the most senior and respected Foundation leaders have
On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 2:15 AM Yair Rand wrote:
> The Guidelines on Foundation Policy and Political Association
> established by WMF Legal for internal use, specifically bring up the
> issue of "public endorsement or critique" of political policies, listing
> several
Thyge, Craig, Dan, Rogol, Max, Neil, Mike, Ryan, Pete, Yair, and
Leigh, here are some questions I'd like you to answer, neither of
which are rhetorical:
First, what attracts you to the free culture movement?
What freedoms do you personally hold as ideal?
Finally, what does the Foundation's
I can not in good conscience refrain from asking the Foundation management
and Board to please take an exceptional, public, very visible stand in
response to these extraordinarily exceptional circumstances.
Top officials from the US and China say war between the nations is "no
doubt" a
Why are proposals to abandon the US being given more consideration than
those to address the underlying issues?
And from those who have been so concerned about the frequency of discussion
on this topic (amongst dozens of redundant crongradulatory messages which
have never in a dozen years
/forget_protest_trumps_actions_warrant_a_general/
(Except for the Lyft part, because one of its founders is on the
adminstration's transition team.)
On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 12:38 PM James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
Is this more appropriate for the Public Policy or Wikimedia-l list?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/canada-offers-temporary-home-those-stranded-trump-order-221401138.html
I strongly disagree that Bannon is not a if not the primarily
responsible party for both the SSL certificate revocation threats and
the travel ban:
I just spoke with Gerard Meijssen, who gave me permission to quote him
saying that both censorship of the internet and travel of Foundation
employees are within the scope of the issues impacting the Mission,
and that he has posted here with more information:
> I'm alright with the WMF taking a position on issues when they're likely to
> have a serious impact on the core mission of Wikimedia.
> I fail to see how this is one of those things
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National
Intelligence have just been replaced
> No. This is very much a case where the foundation sits and waits.
Please take this survey: https://plus.google.com/+jsalsman/posts/HPav2YWUag3
On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 8:01 AM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Should the Foundation take a position on a general strik
Should the Foundation take a position on a general strike?
https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/825395993789157376
https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/825403294667436033
I know this is an unusual question, but when is the last time that the U.S.
judiciary has deployed Federal Marshals
> there are a lot of resources based in the US that may
> need to be distributed on a wider base including
> personal/private data already collected by the WMF
For editors, but not readers. On November 8 a top
foundation official tweeted that the Foundation would
not store personally identifying
>... there is zero chance that the president will be able to censor
> the private sector.
If you mean the U.S. private sector, you're right. But otherwise, the
U.S. President is allowed to take a whole lot of actions which can
effectively censor non-citizens, and I've got some bad news pertaining
t the controversy is still ongoing but slowly turning in favor
of the MEDRS literature's position:
http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/latest-news
On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:39 AM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone doubt that the English Wikipedia's longstanding,
&g
Does anyone doubt that the English Wikipedia's longstanding,
pervasive, counter-factual, systemic bias towards supply side
trickle-down austerity libertarian objectivist economics due at least
in part to early influence of editors attracted to Jimmy Wales' former
public positions isn't at least
Although it is probably something innocuous such as a recent need to
moderate all comments by default, I am disappointed that my comment on
the recent Wikimedia blog post which I belive should be at
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/01/06/rethinking-digital-property-yale-isp/#comment-124999
has
Christophe, I agree with your statements:
> That resolution provides staff the liberty to do their work more
> efficiently. It doesn't remove our duty of oversight.
Would a requirement to publish policy changes at least, say, a month
before they go into effect along with a complete rationale
I was very glad that the Foundation decided to extend the fundraiser.
I think adding projects outside of the lengthy, formulaic,
overly-committee laden, but necessary in part FDC funding process and
getting a head start on the endowment is essential for retaining the
soul of the Foundation's
I am forwarding my reply to Luis on the Public Policy list here
because the request is for both individual and corporate responses.
-Jim
-- Forwarded message --
From: James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 10:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Publicpolicy] U.S. Cop
> Regarding the external expert for inclusive process you are looking for,
> maybe this article is of help:
>
> https://hbr.org/2016/12/how-employees-shaped-strategy-at-the-new-york-public-library
What did the New York Public Library do that the Foundation doesn't
already do in their ordinary
James Heilman wrote:
>
> I personally invest in stuff that gives 1.5% to 1.7% returns
Whether you call it fake news, disinformation, public relations,
manufactured consent, astroturfing, propaganda, or simply clever
advertising campaigning, bankers are thrilled when people think such
returns
Over the past decade, the Foundation's low rate of return on
investments has been dismal and embarassing, in part because it
reflects poor choices in the use of donors' money and sets a terrible
example. The ease with which the Foundation can raise funds is simply
not compatible with purchasing
Christophe,
Are there any plans and is there any budget and headcount to
measure the effectiveness of the recommendations in Figure 51
on page 46 of
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Harassment_survey_2015 ?
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Here are questions pertaining to policies. I am glad to have the
opportunity to step back and consider these over the long term:
1. When interpreting the neutrality mandate with regards to candidates, but
policy implies support of specific candidates or candidate-associated
action, how are we
>> storing the geolocation of every reader request is not within
>> the letter or the spirit of the Foundation's privacy policy,
>> which explicitly requires consent for the use of geolocation
>
> No, this is not correct. The reasons why this statement is
> incorrect have already been discussed in
Dario,
I assumed that when an affiliated researcher apart from Foundation
staff says, "we have the complete server logs for Wikipedia,"
amounting to 17 terabytes per month, that means they possess the
information. I am glad to be wrong about that, but I object to the
implication that such an
Leila Zia wrote:
>... we are not aware of any reader logs being shipped out of the
> WMF servers.
Page 20 of http://infolab.stanford.edu/~west1/pubs/West_Dissertation-2016.pdf
says, "We have access to Wikimedia’s full server logs, containing all
HTTP requests to Wikimedia projects." Page 19
Does Guideline 3 of https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:
Guidelines_on_potential_conflicts_of_interest
include questions from the community?
Is it ever appropriate to try to negotiate limits to answers to such
questions in private communications?
"Best solutions to avoid conflict of
Katherine Maher wrote:
>
>... If you have further questions about Victoria’s work with the U.S.
> Department of Defense, it is/should soon be a matter of U.S.
> Congressional record. Her findings and recommendations will also
> be a matter of public record, as all government work should be.
>
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
> There are two conflicting approaches to vulnerabilities known
> to"government"; vulnerabilities make government vulnerable
> and therefore they need to be handled properly in code. The
> other approach is that a vulnerability is a vector to attack
Well, the general
Are there any disadvantages to a warrant canary which would outweigh the
corresponding expected increase in improvements from anonymous editors?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
It's great that the CTO position was filled.
The blog announcement's biography omitted these details:
"As Director for Security Initiatives for Intel’s Digital Enterprise
Group [Victoria Coleman] was responsible for defining the company’s
security technology roadmap and translating it to product
I propose that the Foundation hold a symposium inviting the authors of
the following four papers to give a joint talk on formal scholarly
reputation in tenure decision:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/jcdl240-shuai.pdf
Jan,
Regarding my questions on https://transparency.wikimedia.org/
below, it has been three weeks since I forwarded them to you.
Would you please answer them?
Were the five requests for content removal based on the right to be
forgotten included in the 243 requests to alter or take down content?
be informed, respectively.
-- Forwarded message --
From: James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Publicpolicy] WMF Transparency Report
To: Publicpolicy Group for Wikimedia <publicpol...@lists.wikimedia.org>
Very impressive
Dan Garry wrote:
> Reaching out to [Google] is the easiest and quickest way to get
> these kinds of issues fixed
Google is a whole lot better than Altavista was back when their
snippets were taken from title and meta tags or the first words
on the page, but there have been some issues that
Both of the two messages below got encouraging responses off-list, but I
doubt they will get Foundation support without wider discussion, and they
certainly both transcend mere Foundation public policy advocacy concerns.
Please share your thoughts!
-- Forwarded message --
Date:
ikely to hire someone involved in
anticompetitive labor market abuse crimes."
Best regards.
Jim
-- Forwarded message --
From: *James Salsman* <jsals...@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Subject: Sue too! (was Re: please keep Katherine)
To: "edsea...@
Dr. Heilman wrote:
>... we need someone who has excellent communication and people skills.
> Technical skills can be hired for at other levels of the organization while
> people skill cannot typically be taught.
>
> Katherine, our current interim ED, appears to have these qualities. If
> she is
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
> The one reason why we would pay it is because the industry that prevents
> people from finding citations is morally corrupt
We need randomized anonymous double blind review for anything like this to
be suitable for paid proofreaders.
Frankly, the category
it would destroy what we are and
> how we do things for no obvious benefit.
As long as we don't measure the benefit, we have no way to know whether
it's positive and will forever remain non-obvious.
> On 23 April 2016 at 16:02, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> &g
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
...
> I categorically oppose paying people for content. Enabling them to create
> content is different. Citations is content and its quality is relevant but
> only that.
Why categorically? We already pay hundreds of people for work in support of
the projects,
How do people feel about a few of the larger the Chapters funding pilots to
have professional researchers do https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en
and a few other main languages?
It would be great to measure the quality of results of different payment
incentive models and rates, but this is
> You're suggesting that counsel spend their time writing to
> agencies ... when we know almost nothing about them.
Again, if there is another way to find out, I'd like to learn it.
>> Therefore I think it would be worth writing a letter asking that the
>> BOLT, SMISC, and CSFV be returned to
am mistaken or if anyone thinks it is not a good idea to ask for
this, please let me know.
On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 7:53 AM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> we have absolutely no idea ... about the technological
>> stack [or] how much progress was made
>
> C
> we have absolutely no idea ... about the technological
> stack [or] how much progress was made
Can anyone think of another way to find out?
> covert HUMINT or surveillance technology
If we publish the code, it's not covert anymore. We all deserve to see the
mentions of Wikipedia which
Re https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/2016-April/001335.html
Should the Foundation mount a campaign to rescue BOLT from whomever
took it down from the DARPA site?
"The Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program is aimed at
enabling communication with
Hi Olatunde,
All the WikiProjects are individually responsible for accuracy, because of
Good Article criteria 2 and 3 taken together. However, I agree with your
sentiments.
Please see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Update_Watch (inactive)
Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
>... as far as I know, high-end networking hardware is not
> available with Libre OSes
Are the FreeBSD-based pfSense C2758 series in the Foundation's throughput tier?
https://www.pfsense.org/products/product-family.html#c2758
Marc *Pelletier / Coren* wrote:
> I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every external supplier
> is all-FLOSS. For one, the movement would be pretty much stuck
> without hardware, networking gear, and power at the very least.
Is there a list of equipment that WMF uses without viable
> we could start with a smaller step: get the agenda
> published within 5 days after any meeting
"I would support as best practice the public posting of agendas for
routine board meetings. I would support that minutes be posted
promptly - but before the next meetings agenda is finalized
>... board meetings are confidential so board members under duress can
> always claim they tried to do whatever they were told to but got voted
down?
Board votes are published.
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Wikimedia Australia has recorded their Board meetings, e.g. at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYnlRWxFpX0
If accurate minutes are too hard, this solution seems a lot easier.
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At this juncture, I would like to repeat my recommendation that
Foundation employees to immediately join the Union for Non-Profit
Workers, IFPTE Local 70:
http://ifptelocal70.org/home/
Furthermore, the discussion concerning innovative ways to fund the
best long term editors through, for
Sorry, http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:59 PM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> SarahSV wrote:
>>
>>... how does a tech organization nurture and support its unpaid
>> workforce of mostly writers and researchers?
>
SarahSV wrote:
>
>... how does a tech organization nurture and support its unpaid
> workforce of mostly writers and researchers?
I remain convinced that http://wikimedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_review can
solve this problem through a new spinoff such as WikiEd Foundation,
but that's still probably at
Given the initial attribution of the Foundation Board of Trustees
indicating that they considered the appointment of an anti-competitive
hiring blacklist enforcement manager as a "public relations check"
problem, I recommend that Foundation employees immediately join the
Union for Non-Profit
Re
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Strategy/Community_consultation#The_questions
and given
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strategy_consultation_qualitative_comment_categories.png
was already published from previous answers, I prefer to answer here:
> What major trends would you
pointment should also resign immediately. There
is absolutely no reason that the Foundation should even present the
appearance of endorsing such attacks on technology workers.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
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. The Foundation does that for monthly meetings, why not the Board
too?
Regards,
Jim
On Tuesday, December 22, 2015, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, December 20, 2015, Brian Wolff <bawo...@gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','bawo...@gmail.com');>> wrote:
On Sunday, December 20, 2015, Brian Wolff wrote:
> If you want to get Dispenser his hard disk space, you should take it
> up with the labs people, or at the very least some thread where it
> would be on-topic.
>
The labs people are so understaffed that two extremely important
Were there any objections to my request below?
Can we also please hire additional database, system, and if necessary
network administration support to make sure that the third party spam
prevention bot infrastructure is supported more robustly in the future?
On Monday, December 14, 2015, James
Hi Giles,
I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as scheduled.
In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This
One thing the Foundation could do to help with climate change and
water issues other than move office locations, and which is on topic
because the Foundation has chosen to purchase renewable energy through
contracting with suppliers in the past, is if the Foundation attempted
to secure desalinated
... The license requires only that the credit be implemented in
any reasonable manner. [Also note that the _text_ of our projects,
while also licensed under CC-BY-SA, is licensed in way that
explicitly states that a sufficient attribution is [t]hrough hyperlink
(where possible) or URL to the
If Harald Bischoff has defrauded Commons reusers by requiring stricter
attribution than the community requires, does the Foundation have standing
in Germany to require him to return the money to his victims in proportion
to the extent that their attribution was improper?
James Heilman wrote:
We need to make our current Wikipedias simpler. Yes I know it is
an uphill battle but we just need more people working on it.
That is why, as I have announced previously, I will soon begin raising
money for the human fact-checkers and proofreaders necessary for the
GerardM,
Which do you think would end more language discrimination: a WMF
co-headquarters in Belgium, moving the WEF to Germany, or a Simple language
Wikipedia for the top-25 languages?
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Wasn't there some time a few years back when the PCI consortium and some
~40 digit hexadecimal number were making Philippe have to do around doing
revels or such? Can we vote against that please?
://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2015-May/031684.html
I have a new contract through the end of the year and will be unable to
devote the time I had planned. Thank you.
Best regards,
James Salsman
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dictatorships use Wikipedia Zero for propaganda
purposes, but I am not sure how much of a problem that is relative to the
advantages.
Best regards,
James Salsman
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, and
causing their own organizations, whether they be foundations or
nations, to be less effective because of it, and I'm proud I am one of
the very few who do.
On Saturday, 14 February 2015, James Salsman jsalsman at gmail.com wrote:
Rachel diCerbo wrote:
...
Community Engagement is continuously
by co-mentoring the accuracy
review GSoC proposal. It shouldn't take more than a few hours per
week over the summer.
Best regards,
James Salsman
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Are there any surveys of active female editors which have asked how
they started editing?
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with fuschia blinkmarquee text on a epileptic
seizure-inducing background and auto-play audio than have the
fundraising director claim that donations are decreasing to help
justify narrowing scope.
Best regards,
James Salsman
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-inclusive cryonics
solutions. I understand that supercooling vitrification freezers such as
those manufactured by ABI, Ltd. of Chiba, Japan called CASfresh or Cells
Alive System may be of some interest.
Best regards,
James Salsman
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Wil Sinclair wrote:
...
I'm wondering if there is a place where the lighter side of
individual Wikimedians ... stuff like funny stats about our
wikiprojects surfaced through clever metrics, the weirdest
of the weird factoids that we uncover in the process of
documenting our universe,
Wil Sinclair wrote:
Flow needs a deep and broad community consensus
to what would probably amount to the biggest single
change in the history of the project for the day-to-day
collaboration amongst editors that is so vital to our success.
Wouldn't it be easier to achieve such consensus if
Where does the idea that user interface changes to the system which
has already produced the most monumental reference work in the history
of humanity are going to help with its only actual problem, that
people aren't sufficiently inclined to stick around and maintain it?
If there was any
Today the Society of Professional Journalists updated its Code of
Ethics in two ways pertinent to wikimedians and Wikimedia projects:
1. The term journalist has been replaced with references to
journalism in areas that were seen to perpetuate the idea that the
practice of journalism requires
Is there a list somewhere of all currently active Foundation
initiatives for attracting and retaining active editors? I am only
aware of the one project, Task Recommendations, to try to encourage
editors who have made a few edits to make more, described starting at
Andre Engels wrote:
...
When choosing between unwittingly accepting tainted money
and forcing people to give up their complete financial privacy, I
find the first option the least morally repugnant one.
forcing people to give up their complete financial privacy happens
when people donate with
Given this news about BGP hijacking used to mine hundreds of thousands
(if not millions) of dollars worth of bitcoins per year, as a
practical matter concerning donations, is there any way to accept
bitcoin payments without risking accepting stolen property?
Steven Walling wrote:
The community liaisons put in a lot of blood, sweat,
and tears to advocate not only *to* the community,
but *for* it within the Foundation.
How is the effectiveness of their advocacy of the community measured?
Back when I was the only wikimedian speaking out in support
other engineering effort undertaken so
far to improve community engagement.
Best regards,
James Salsman
[1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Community_Engagement_.28Product.29
[2] http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft
[3]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki
Kevin Gorman wrote:
Regarding the IA: they have a significant interest in working with the
Wikimedia projects, a lot more experience than the Wikimedia projects have
caching absolutely tremendous quantities of data, a willinness to handle a
degree of legal risk that would be inappropriate for
conflicts of
interest back on it? Was all of that Terms of Service amendment only
for show?
Can the Foundation please hire an information theoretician familiar
with the hyperbolic space embedding of splay trees?
Best regards,
James Salsman
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throwing a tantrum because WMF won't give him 24TB of
storage for a project that has legal questionablity
If society depended on lawyers for determining the parameters of their
inverted indices, you would all be using WAIS for the last five years
of corporate press releases for your reference
... His demands for the storage are for a new version of
the tool he is yet to write that is meant to actually cache
the external link's webpages...likely to need Legal to look into
Just like any search engine keeps a reconstructable representation of
the indexed text. There is absolutely no
... I am glad that there is at least some sanity checking
On my happy planet, sanity means taking historical progress into
account when telling people that they have to fill out a form and wait
for committee review when making a reasonable request for an obvious
need.
There is so much more that
/Proposal:Develop_systems_for_accuracy_review
Is that a fair deal?
Best regards,
James Salsman
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://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dispenser/Toolserver_migrationdiff=prevoldid=615356734
My offer stands.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
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Wikimedia-l
I don't think it's a donation if you're getting something (a survey) in
return.
How could the Foundation possibly not benefit from understanding
contributors' opinions about general strategic goals for improving
participation?
I also want development of accuracy review. If there are any
... the standard category of a programmer who doesn't work well
with non-programmers and sucks at writing specs/documentation.
That is an extremely rude way to characterize a volunteer who has
single-handedly saved volunteer-centuries of time and then taken a
principled, non-zero sum stand to
indirectly. It would be like a visual editor for Yo with bronies
versus brogrammers fighting over graphical styles when what people
really want is adaptive rate voice buffering.
Please do not contribute to the perpetuation of the business cycle. Thank you.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
Erik Moeller wrote:
... My own focus will be on fleshing out the overall narrative,
aligning around organization-wide objectives, and helping to
manage scope
Steven Walling wrote:
The Wikimedia Foundation does not write nor edit content
on Wikipedia
Newyorkbrad wrote:
... The
There are several backlogged queues on English Wikipedia
at the moment, and I would be interested in hearing ideas
for how to shrink the backlogs.
I've been observing task clearance from WP:BACKLOG (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BACKLOG ) for eight years. By far
the most effective
(non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit button,
basically went Gak! No way!
Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the
1960s-1990s had to deal with, and they had a much better gender
balance.
Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only computer science
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