Re: [Wikimedia-l] What is our impact and how do we measure it?

[James Salsman]

Chris,

This paper suggests that Wikipedia has become more influential than a large
proportion of the peer reviewed literature:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/jcdl240-shuai.pdf

On a related note, I tried to reply off-list to the Foundation official who
recently claimed that my assertion that systemic bias in the English
Wikipedia's economics articles has deleterious real-world implications was,
"framed with a leading question," and "filled with a good deal of
speculation," by asking what she thought of the evidence I presented on how
the "Fair Tax" article and the other Mises-influenced walled garden
articles had been successfully gamed into appearing first in the
automatically generated set of "related articles" on articles with an
opposite economic perspective, such as "Making Work Pay tax credit," but
there was no reply.

Do you think this topic is something that the Foundation should study? I've
asked the Chair of the Board of Trustees to do so, but there hasn't been a
reply to that either.

Best regards,
Jim

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 2:57 PM Chris Keating 
wrote:

Hi all,

For a while now I've been thinking about different ways to define and
measure the Wikimedia movement's impact. This started for me with various
conversations about different iterations of the WMF's Global Metrics and
different rounds of FDC bids, but it turns out to be wider than that.

This is a big and thorny topic and one where we seem to have come up with a
lot of implicit answers without spending much time thinking about in any
detail, so I've written up my thoughts as a meta-essay here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:The_Land/Thinking_about_the_impact_of_the_Wikimedia_movement

I'd be really interested to hear other peoples' views!

Chris

(User:The Land)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What is our impact and how do we measure it?

[James Salsman]

Another fact to consider is that both doctors and patients have been
obtaining most of their medical information from Wikipedia for years:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/

Christophe, does the Board agree that the Foundation should study bias
in the wikipedias' economics articles and its impact on society?

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 8:01 AM, James Salsman  wrote:
> Chris,
>
> This paper suggests that Wikipedia has become more influential than a large
> proportion of the peer reviewed literature:
>
> http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/jcdl240-shuai.pdf
>
> On a related note, I tried to reply off-list to the Foundation official who
> recently claimed that my assertion that systemic bias in the English
> Wikipedia's economics articles has deleterious real-world implications was,
> "framed with a leading question," and "filled with a good deal of
> speculation," by asking what she thought of the evidence I presented on how
> the "Fair Tax" article and the other Mises-influenced walled garden articles
> had been successfully gamed into appearing first in the automatically
> generated set of "related articles" on articles with an opposite economic
> perspective, such as "Making Work Pay tax credit," but there was no reply.
>
> Do you think this topic is something that the Foundation should study? I've
> asked the Chair of the Board of Trustees to do so, but there hasn't been a
> reply to that either.
>
> Best regards,
> Jim
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 2:57 PM Chris Keating 
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For a while now I've been thinking about different ways to define and
>> measure the Wikimedia movement's impact. This started for me with various
>> conversations about different iterations of the WMF's Global Metrics and
>> different rounds of FDC bids, but it turns out to be wider than that.
>>
>> This is a big and thorny topic and one where we seem to have come up with
>> a
>> lot of implicit answers without spending much time thinking about in any
>> detail, so I've written up my thoughts as a meta-essay here:
>>
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:The_Land/Thinking_about_the_impact_of_the_Wikimedia_movement
>>
>> I'd be really interested to hear other peoples' views!
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> (User:The Land)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What is our impact and how do we measure it?

[James Salsman]

Gerard,

Are there any other areas where systemic bias on the wikipedias might
reasonably expected to cause serious damage to society? If we are
missing articles on notable women, or rural landmarks, or we have
Japanese islands with Korean names or vice-versa, that is bad, but is
it likely to cause as many actual, real-world problems as, for
example, repeated implications that lowering taxes on the rich will
improve conditions for most people?

The Foundation and volunteers frequently address issues where
individual companies are the subject of organized advocacy. Why
shouldn't socioeconomic class be subject to the same scrutiny?

Researchers have studied the topic, but not in a systematic way. The
few systematic studies of political bias on Wikipedia have either
focused mostly on social issues or geocentric bias, with economics
playing a very small part. It would be great if the Foundation would
fund such more specific studies by independent researchers with a
history of studying bias in economics sources. Mark Blyth and David
Stuckler at Oxford and Sanjay Basu, an M.D. at Stanford, have all done
very good work in this area.


On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 11:39 AM, Gerard Meijssen
 wrote:
> Hoi,
> There are many area's where Wikipedia is biased. Obviously we take the
> gender gap seriously but there is also a bias towards the Western world. It
> is very much in the very basics of our community. Why should we study the
> bias in a field like economics? When we were to study it what kind of
> impact should we study? Remember there is this "neutral point of view" and
> remember Wikipedia is not about "original research" and that is what you
> are calling for.
>
> So consider what is it that makes any subject of relevance so that our
> board has to study this, why could we not leave it to the researchers ...
> or should we not first study the existing bias in our research ?
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
>
> Op do 23 feb. 2017 om 18:24 schreef James Salsman 
>
>> Another fact to consider is that both doctors and patients have been
>> obtaining most of their medical information from Wikipedia for years:
>>
>> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-
>> healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/
>>
>> Christophe, does the Board agree that the Foundation should study bias
>> in the wikipedias' economics articles and its impact on society?
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 8:01 AM, James Salsman  wrote:
>> > Chris,
>> >
>> > This paper suggests that Wikipedia has become more influential than a
>> large
>> > proportion of the peer reviewed literature:
>> >
>> > http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/jcdl240-shuai.pdf
>> >
>> > On a related note, I tried to reply off-list to the Foundation official
>> who
>> > recently claimed that my assertion that systemic bias in the English
>> > Wikipedia's economics articles has deleterious real-world implications
>> was,
>> > "framed with a leading question," and "filled with a good deal of
>> > speculation," by asking what she thought of the evidence I presented on
>> how
>> > the "Fair Tax" article and the other Mises-influenced walled garden
>> articles
>> > had been successfully gamed into appearing first in the automatically
>> > generated set of "related articles" on articles with an opposite economic
>> > perspective, such as "Making Work Pay tax credit," but there was no
>> reply.
>> >
>> > Do you think this topic is something that the Foundation should study?
>> I've
>> > asked the Chair of the Board of Trustees to do so, but there hasn't been
>> a
>> > reply to that either.
>> >
>> > Best regards,
>> > Jim
>> >
>> > On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 2:57 PM Chris Keating <
>> chriskeatingw...@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hi all,
>> >>
>> >> For a while now I've been thinking about different ways to define and
>> >> measure the Wikimedia movement's impact. This started for me with
>> various
>> >> conversations about different iterations of the WMF's Global Metrics and
>> >> different rounds of FDC bids, but it turns out to be wider than that.
>> >>
>> >> This is a big and thorny topic and one where we seem to have come up
>> with
>> >> a
>> >> lot of implicit answers without spending much time thinking about in any
>> >> detail, so I've w

Re: [Wikimedia-l] What is our impact and how do we measure it?

[James Salsman]

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your reply:

>> This paper suggests that Wikipedia has become more influential
>> than a large proportion of the peer reviewed literature:
>>
>> http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~xshuai/papers/jcdl240-shuai.pdf
>
> I am not sure that is the correct conclusion from the paper you mention

I was referring to this passage: "It is apparent that papers, authors,
and keywords that are mentioned on Wikipedia are ranked higher in the
scholarly community than those are not mentioned." My studies of the
time series of rankings of papers cited on popular vital science and
medicine articles early in those articles' development suggests to me
that the causation of that association is heavily bidirectional.

But, if the fact that both doctors and patients are obtaining most of
their medical information from Wikipedia doesn't support the same
conclusion, please let me know why you don't think so.

>> my assertion that systemic bias in the English
>> Wikipedia's economics articles has deleterious real-world implications...
>>
>> Do you think this topic is something that the Foundation should study?
>>
>
> I wouldn't place it high up the list of things WMF ought to be worried
> about.

Can you think of any other subject matter areas where systemic bias
might have more serious real-world implications?

> I remember hearing something vaguely about studies looking at
> "left-right" bias among academic economists and in media coverage
> of economics.

Would you please send citations to those that you know of? I tried to
review them all today, and all that I could find were mostly about
social political issues or geopolitics instead of economics.

Best regards,
Jim

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[Wikimedia-l] 35 year copyright termination

[James Salsman]

This came up the other day and someone emailed me off-list suggesting
it wasn't true. Since we've never had a real discussion about it, I
should explain:

> 17 U.S. Code § 203 - Termination of transfers and licenses
> granted by the author
>
> (a) Conditions for Termination.—In the case of any work
> other than a work made for hire, the exclusive or nonexclusive
> grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under
> a copyright, executed by the author on or after January 1, 1978,
> otherwise than by will, is subject to termination under the
> following conditions:
>...
> (3) Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during
> a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years
> from the date of execution of the grant; or, if the grant covers the
> right of publication of the work, the period begins at the end of
> thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under
> the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution
> of the grant, whichever term ends earlier.

So, we still have 19 years, but, we're almost halfway there.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 35 year copyright termination

[James Salsman]

>... provide a little more context for this thread

Beginning in 2036, Wikipedia editors will obtain the right to demand
either payment for their contributions, or in the alternative if the
Foundation can't replace their edits with non-infringing
substitutions, between $750 and $150,000 per edit.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 35 year copyright termination

[James Salsman]

Michael Snow wrote:
>...
> 17 USC 203 ... provides ... that derivative works prepared before
> termination may continue to be utilized.

I'm not sure if subsequent edits which preserve verbatim text are
derivative works. It's certainly worth figuring out. Section 101 of
the Copyright Act defines "[a] 'derivative work' as a work based upon
one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical
arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version,
sound recording, art reproduction, abridgement, condensation, or any
other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.
"The copyright in a derivative work is independent of, and does not
affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of,
any copyright protection in the preexisting material." 17 U.S.C.
§103(2).

The preexisting material in the original work is part of the
derivative work, but the copyright in the derivative work extends only
to the material contributed by the author of the derivative work, as
distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work. 17
U.S.C. §103(2). The copyright owner of the derivative-work copyright
does not obtain exclusive copyright rights in the preexisting
material.

> There goes my hopes of my pension.

If the year-over-year increase rate at which the Foundation is able to
raise funds stays constant, payment of full "willfully infringing"
damages plus a generous pension for all employees and active editors
would be easily within reach.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

The statements Yair quoted are appropriate unless you believe
"empower" in the Foundation's Mission statement merely means "enable"
or "facilitate," without regard to economic or political power, so I'm
very glad to see them, as I am to see all of the eleven sections in
https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/consider-the-facts.html

Yair omitted mention of the descriptions of how, in each of those
eleven cases, our volunteers are using Foundation projects to address
the identified issues. Those who think discussion of these issues
should be suppressed or are cause to leave could talk with the
volunteers whose work has been profiled so that both sides can
understand the motivations and concerns of the other. Maybe Roxana
Sordo or Andreas Weith are on this list and can address the concerns
raised about the description of their work directly? In any case, free
culture isn't compatible with prohibition of discussion and
censorship. And the impulses toward such suppression aren't rational,
given the extent to which the human endocrine system regulates
personal, group, hierarchical, and reciprocal relationships, as shown
in Table 1 on page 192 of Daphne Bugental's (2000) "Acquisition of the
Algorithms of Social Life: A Domain-Based Approach," in Psychological
Bulletin 126(2):187-219, at http://talknicer.com/Bugental2000.pdf

Regarding the Annual Report financials, it looks like the investment
income the Foundation is earning has fallen below 1%. I don't think
it's fair to donors to hold $47 million dollars in cash and
equivalents as per https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/financials.html
-- Are people waiting for the Endowment Committee to meet before
investing? Does anyone know when the Endowment Committee will ever
meet?


On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Yair Rand  wrote:
> An unscheduled CentralNotice just started running, linking to a rather
> bizarre page [1]. Purporting to be the WMF's 2016 Annual Report, it starts
> off with some text about refugees. "FACT: Half of refugees are school-age",
> followed by some completely unencyclopedic text about the topic: "That
> means 10 million children are away from their homes, their communities, and
> their traditional education. Each refugee child’s experience is unique, but
> every single one loses time from their important learning years. Many of
> them face the added pressure of being surrounded by new languages and
> cultures." The linked page goes on to detail some of Wikimedia's vision and
> how Wikimedia projects aid refugee populations. Following that, we have an
> entire page on climate change and some of its effects, similarly written in
> a style that is not befitting the movement: "In 2015, [Wikimedian Andreas
> Weith] photographed starving polar bears in the Arctic. As the ice
> declines, so does their ability to find food. “It’s heartbreaking,” he
> says." After all that, we finally have some pages on interesting statistics
> about Wikimedia, mixed in with some general odd facts about the world,
> followed by a call to donate. There are also letters from the ED and
> founder linked.
>
> So, this could be a mix of coincidence and bad stylistic choices, and not
> politically motivated at all, but it is getting increasingly hard to assume
> good faith on this, especially with the blog post a month ago specifically
> calling for a change in refugee policy.
>
> Using Wikimedia projects to push politics is not okay. If the WMF does not
> accept this, I suspect many projects will simply block CentralNotices,
> avoid associating with WMF statements, and quite possibly fork/leave.
>
> This is a serious problem.
>
> -- Yair Rand
>
> [1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/?pk_campaign=
> WikiBanners&pk_kwd=AR2016_dsk_short
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 35 year copyright termination

[James Salsman]

Patrik wrote:

>... I'd refer you to Loren, Building a Reliable Semicommons of
> Creative Works, 14 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 271, 318-28 (2007) (arguing that
> section 203 is inapplicable to CC licenses under a suggested doctrine of
> limited copyright abandonment); Armstrong, Shrinking the Commons, 47 Harv.
> J. on Legis. 359, 405-09 (2010) (expressing skepticism as to whether courts
> would adopt Professor Loren's approach, suggesting, alternatively, an
> analogy to the abandonment provisions of the Patent Act to justify limits
> on the termination of open-content licenses); and Greenberg, More than Just
> a Formality, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1028, 1060-63 (2012) (suggesting legislative
> action). All three articles are also freely available online (in one case
> at least in a pre-publication version), at 
> ,
> ,
> and , respectively.

Here is a potentially more accessible popular treatment, which
directly addresses the motivation for expiring copyright grant terms:
 
http://www.kelleydrye.com/publications/articles/1558/_res/id=Files/index=0/1558.pdf

The reason Congress mandated the expiration of copyright grants was
specifically to address the common case of the value of a work far
exceeding the authors' original compensation, for whatever reasons.
Isn't this a very pertinent ethics issue for the Foundation? If the
law of the land is designed to compensate authors' for windfalls in
the value of their effort, do we want to be in support of or opposed
to that goal, and why or why not?

This law review article may be considerably more mainstream than
Professor Loren's:
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/64395/OSLJ_V48N3_0897.pdf

> (None of them are touching upon the derivative work issue, which is a
> rather Wikimedia-specific consideration. It could arguably not provide a
> universal solution to the potential problem, since the availability of a
> derivative work is the exception, rather than the norm, even in an
> open-content world. I have therefore not looked into this.)
>
> Best,
> Patrik
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

> Refugees ... don't have anything to do with the WMF

Someone forgot to tell that to the Foundation volunteers working on

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/24/refugee-phrasebook/

which is directly linked from that section of the Annual Report.

> messages like this "empower" only those who agree with them

Should the Mission be amended to exclude those who government
officials have decided are no longer allowed to have freedom of
movement across borders?

> This sort of thing can be pretty exclusionary and disempowering if
> you do not agree with the rather unsubtle political stances being taken.

Is there any actual evidence of this? People said the same thing about
the SOPA/PIPA protest, but there was no change to editing levels and
the responses from the community and donors were very strongly
positive when they were asked directly. There was just a familiar
vocal minority who were adamantly complaining that the Foundation's
purity of essence had been corrupted.

> It also just provides more fuel for those arguing that Wikipedia is a
> left-wing advocacy organisation rather than a credible, neutral, and
> trustworthy source of bias-free information.

On the contrary, the left-wing is the only source of credible,
trustworthy, and bias-free information on a wide variety of topics
such as climate change.  Equating neutrality with credibility and
trustworthiness is a clear mistake, because political bias is not
orthogonal to factual bias.

> imagine it is October The Comms team begins writing a report. If
> Hillary Clinton had won, it's likely that these would not have looked so
> terribly much like political statements. It may have looked like a normal
> affirmation of acceptable values But America went another direction
> and now things that could have been considered normalish suddenly
> look like a shot fired round the world.

Exactly; well put, Anna!

>  it's ultimately not mission aligned

This, again, is the real dispute, whether the word "empower" in the
Mission means anything about actual power beyond mere facilitation.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

> politics damages our brand in real and serious ways.

Such as how? This assertion keeps being made without any evidence supporting it.

> It's more ammunition for everyone else's distrust and fear of our community 
> and organizational motives.

Are there any actual reasons to believe that such distrust and fear
exists apart from those upset about being on the losing end of some
Wikipedia content dispute?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

>>> It's more ammunition for everyone else's distrust and fear of our community 
>>> and organizational motives.
>>
>> Are there any actual reasons to believe that such distrust and fear
>> exists apart from those upset about being on the losing end of some
>> Wikipedia content dispute?
>
> Surely you haven't missed the spectrum of external criticism of Wikipedia 
> which in no small part claims we have a left bias.

We get the exact same thing from both sides:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/wikipedia-accused-of-us-centric-bias-3039292772/

http://www.beggarscanbechoosers.com/2012/05/how-right-wingers-took-over-wikipedia.html

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-battle-for-wikipedia/

Do you think the side vociferously opposed to scientific consensus
makes the more compelling case?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] March 2: Update on Wikimedia movement strategy process (#9)

[James Salsman]

Hi Katherine,

Where did the projections on the "Internet penetration by 2030"
slide[1] on the process briefing[2] come from? They look very low. The
file summary description says they came from the UN Department of
Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division[3] but they aren't
anywhere in that document which doesn't mention the internet at all.
There don't seem to be any reasons to doubt that everyone who has
cellular phone service today (over 98% of the world population[4] and
about 83% of Bangladeshis) won't have mobile broadband in thirteen
years. London-based IBIS Capital says that the developed world will
have about 90% mobile broadband penetration in just three years.[5]

[1] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:The_World_in_2030_-_Presentation_for_movement_strategy_discussions.pdf&page=30

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/?curid=10184031

[3] 
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/trends/Population2030.pdf

[4] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2

[5] http://wildfirecomms-images.co.uk/img/broadband-1450108646.jpg

On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 5:10 PM, Katherine Maher  wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> Happy March! This week I was in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress
> conference to support the efforts of the Iraqi Wikimedians User Group. The
> community, led by Sarmad Saeed Yaseen and Ravan Jafaar al-Taie, led the
> development of a partnership with a local mobile network operator to bring
> Wikipedia to 12 million people for free. This is significant for a nation
> where mobile penetration is near-universal, but internet penetration is
> around 17%. [0] Congratulations to our Iraq Wikimedians for their efforts!
>
> *Feedback requested*
> There are two items in particular on Meta-Wiki ready for your feedback:
>
>- The briefing document has been expanded; it contains an overview of
>the information that every participant in the strategy discussion should
>know. Please help us improve it or share your thoughts on the talk page.
>   - https://meta.wikimedia.org/?curid=10184031
>- Please also review the basic premises that should be mutually agreed
>upon by all participants and used as the basis of arguments. Once the
>discussions start, the premises will be fixed.
>   - https://meta.wikimedia.org/?curid=10191140
>
> *Track A (Organized groups) and Track B (Individual contributors)*
>
>- The Core Team and Track Leads have posted the draft of the toolkit for
>coordinating community discussions on Meta-Wiki.[1] They will be finalizing
>it with the Community Process Steering Committee this week.
>- The Core Team is developing some basic terminology and simple examples
>for a shared understanding of our intended outcome from the first phase of
>the strategy process. This will be shared with the Community Process
>Steering Committee before posting to Meta-Wiki for feedback.
>- Zack McCune and Blanca Flores from the Communications Department are
>working with  the Core Team on a final graphic image of the process model
>that will be posted on Meta-Wiki next week.
>- Victor Grigas from Communications Department created a short video to
>inspire participants to get engaged and contribute; the final version
>should be available next week and utilized in subsequent announcements.
>- The Core Team researched movement strategy terminology, components,
>examples, and theories, and they continue to work with experts in and
>outside the Foundation to further develop content for the briefing
>document.[2] We expect this work to be complete by the end of this week.
>- The Core Team and Track Leads reviewed the initial plan for Wikimedia
>Conference Strategy track with the facilitators. They are working on a
>detailed agenda, which will be posted on Meta-Wiki in the next two 
> weeks.[3]
>- Nicole and the Core Team are finalizing the materials which will be
>used to facilitate the first Track A discussions being held 10 March to 10
>April.
>- The Core Team and Track Leads are reviewing options for collecting
>research for Tracks A & B.
>- Community Engagement is completing the hiring of language
>liaisons/specialists, and will begin training and onboarding next week.
>
>
> *Track C (Partners and readers in high-reach markets) and Track D (Partners
> and readers in low reach markets)*
>
>- The Core Team met with John Holcombe (Wellspring Insights) and
>discussed the objectives and best methodologies for quick, inexpensive,
>generative research in high-reach markets. His recommendation is an online
>survey that explores awareness, attitudes and usage.
>- The Core Team and Track C Leads spoke with Celinda Lake (President,
>Lake Research Partners) to get her insights on the proposed market research
>and recommendations on firms or contractors (including Lake) who could
>conduct desk and/or generative research.

Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

Yair,

Would you please explain what you mean by damaging?

> To have a huge banner placed over every article on
> the whole project linking to 43px-font blatant political
> advocacy which can't be reverted, is really damaging.

My opinion remains that 43pt blatant advocacy in support of both
personal freedom of movement and scientific consensus disputed by
fossil fuel interests is extremely helpful to the Foundation, its
Mission, and in attracting additional volunteers, especially because
those issues have been disfavored by recent political trends brought
about by political leveraging of xenophobia and lobbyist money.

Why do people think it is reasonable to claim that such advocacy is
damaging without presenting any evidence in support of their opinion?
Clearly many people do, but why?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:49 PM, Leigh Thelmadatter  wrote:
>
> Equally James, how is this advocacy "extremely helpful"? How does it help the 
> building and maintainence of Wikimedia projects? How does it help the many 
> volunteers who work on these projects?

Taking a stand for personal freedom attracts volunteers in support of
free culture, just as supporting scientific consensus opposed by money
in politics attracts those who value accuracy.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

Pine,

Which facts do you think the "facts matter" theme should have emphasized?

Do you think remaining politically neutral is compatible with
remaining accurate?

To what extent does staying focused on mission involve pointing out
issues with freedom and accuracy in society, in your view?


On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 11:16 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> Hi Heather,
>
> Thanks for commenting.
>
> The theme of "facts matter" seems good to me, and I generally like Victor's
> video. However, the way that this report comes across to me is that it
> advocates for certain points of view on issues which, however important
> they may be (I happen to think global warming is a very important issue),
> are not integral to Wikipedia's mission. Also, I found it strange that the
> "front page" of the report has a "Facts matter" section that leads off with
> information about refugees and the Earth's temperature trends. On the
> whole, that section comes across to me as being off-message. I would
> encourage revising the report so that it's more consistent with the themes
> and tone of Victor's video.
>
> Social impact in the form of informing public dialogue is a valuable
> attribute to Wikipedia, and I would encourage a more neutral approach to
> articulating that attribute as has been discussed in this thread. It's
> possible to highlight social impact while remaining compatible with NPOV
> and staying focused on mission.
>
> Thanks for engaging here.
>
> Pine
>
> Pine
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 4:50 PM, Heather Walls  wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> This has become an interesting and important conversation. First, many
>> thanks to everyone as they bring their intellect, experience, and
>> thoughtfulness to this topic. And thanks to Zack for many months of work
>> organizing a complex project, with a theme that became increasingly
>> sensitive due to external public discourse, and especially for making a
>> tremendous and honest effort to hear feedback and to respond quickly here.
>> I’d also like to thank all the people who helped read, write, edit, and
>> consider this report.
>>
>> We chose this theme in October, and have used it successfully in messaging
>> since then. It was part of the December English-language fundraising
>> campaign, in emails and banners to donors, and received very positive
>> response. It was the theme of a video, shared in December,[1] that became a
>> featured video on Commons.[2] We also shared our work and development
>> process on this report publicly when we published the Communications
>> department’s check-in slides covering the 2nd fiscal quarter (Sep - Dec
>> 2016).[3]
>>
>> Social impact is a very important part of Wikimedia that is hard to
>> understand from the outside, but that impact is one of the things that
>> makes your work so meaningful, and helps us find contributors and partners
>> around the world. As Zack mentioned, our annual reports are created for an
>> audience that includes ongoing financial contributors and people new to us.
>> They are intended to be timely and relevant to the interests of people who
>> are not as deeply involved in Wikimedia as the rest of us. They tell the
>> story of what Wikimedians have achieved in the context of the world, and
>> are related to topics in international conversations. Some of those stories
>> are efforts supported by the Foundation, and many are celebrations of the
>> importance and timeliness of independent work of members of the movement.
>> Wikimedia is rich and complex, and we revise our theme each year to share
>> new facets. The Foundation has been making these since 2008.[4]
>>
>> Yes, our report was meant to bring up relevant topics for a global
>> audience, and to tie important facts to the work of Wikimedians. It was
>> meant to focus on the range of things people can learn from Wikipedia, from
>> the historical to the social to the controversial. But it was not a
>> response to anything that occurred in recent weeks, or in any one country.
>> We debated the relationship between the theme and public discourse as that
>> discourse changed, but decided that Wikimedia’s relationship with facts
>> hadn’t changed. The report is not perfect, and many people have pointed out
>> excellent alternative directions we might have taken. We’re listening, and
>> we will learn from your suggestions and ideas in our continuing work.
>>
>> I am proud of the intentions, hard work, experience, and many difficult
>> decisions my colleagues on the Communications team and our collaborators
>> across the Foundation and community make every day. I hope the abridged
>> timeline of events, below, will help make some our process more visible to
>> you as well.
>>
>> -Heather
>>
>>
>> [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/12/27/not-post-fact-world/
>> [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_-_
>> FactsMatter2016.webm
>> [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%
>> 3AWikimedia_Foundation_Communications_Q2_(Oct-Dec_
>> 2016)_-_Jan_2

Re: [Wikimedia-l] More politics: "WMF Annual Report"

[James Salsman]

Rogol Domedonfors wrote:
>
> Do you believe truth and accuracy are to be found only
> at one ppint on the spectrum of political belief?

There is a very strong correlation which has, since November, become
much stronger. Compare for example:

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/ (16% "True" or
"Mostly true") with

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/ (48% "True" or
"Mostly true.")

> Do you believe that facts about (how the world is) are
> identical with beliefs about (how the world ought to be)?

No, but if people around the world are misled because we fail in our
mission to collect, develop, and disseminate educational content
effectively, then they are likely to have much different goals than if
they were able to access accurate information.

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[Wikimedia-l] AMD petition

[James Salsman]

Please join me in asking AMD to open-source the PSP (backdoor) in
their chips -- a chance to regain secure x86 hardware.

https://www.change.org/p/advanced-micro-devices-amd-release-the-source-code-for-the-secure-processor-psp

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] AMD petition

[James Salsman]

Recent leaks suggest almost all commercial x86 processors have been
compromised by closed-source back doors which enable eavesdropping and DRM
copy protection which in turn inhibits fair use.

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:41 PM Lodewijk 
wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> Could you clarify the relationship with Wikimedia on this? I'm missing the
> link.
>
> Best,
> Lodewijk
>
> 2017-03-13 23:03 GMT+01:00 James Salsman :
>
> > Please join me in asking AMD to open-source the PSP (backdoor) in
> > their chips -- a chance to regain secure x86 hardware.
> >
> > https://www.change.org/p/advanced-micro-devices-amd-
> release-the-source-code-for-the-secure-processor-psp
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] AMD petition

[James Salsman]

The Foundation is suing the NSA over preventing remote surveillance using
such techniques and has taken positions protecting fair use.

More information:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5z4phx/petition_for_amd_to_opensource_the_psp_backdoor/dev81rx/

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 7:45 PM Craig Franklin 
wrote:

> Hi James,
>
> Again, could you clarify how this is related to Wikimedia?  If there's a
> direct connection I am not seeing it.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>
> On 14 March 2017 at 09:49, James Salsman  wrote:
>
> > Recent leaks suggest almost all commercial x86 processors have been
> > compromised by closed-source back doors which enable eavesdropping and
> DRM
> > copy protection which in turn inhibits fair use.
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:41 PM Lodewijk 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Jim,
> > >
> > > Could you clarify the relationship with Wikimedia on this? I'm missing
> > the
> > > link.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Lodewijk
> > >
> > > 2017-03-13 23:03 GMT+01:00 James Salsman :
> > >
> > > > Please join me in asking AMD to open-source the PSP (backdoor) in
> > > > their chips -- a chance to regain secure x86 hardware.
> > > >
> > > > https://www.change.org/p/advanced-micro-devices-amd-
> > > release-the-source-code-for-the-secure-processor-psp
> > >
> > >
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[Wikimedia-l] Should the Endowment invest in REITs?

[James Salsman]

Joseph Seddon wrote:
>
> You can find out more about the Endowment here:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

I'm very glad to see the asset allocation strategy published, but I
have questions:

1. Does the Foundation intend to benchmark Endowment performance
against the mutual funds marketed by the largest five funds by
capitalization to institutions for the purposes of meeting endowment
investment requirements?

2. Should the Foundation be investing in real estate investment
trusts? Is it ethical for the Foundation to be competing with people
and companies for the ownership of real estate or other fixed assets?

"When upper class earners gain income, they are far more likely to
save or invest in fixed assets or real estate, which does not increase
aggregate demand."
-- 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Economics#Tax_cut_claim_in_Fiscal_policy_section

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Should the Endowment invest in REITs?

[James Salsman]

Can the issue raised in my second question below be addressed by limiting
REIT purchases to the top-N by capitalization? That is, should REIT and
fixed asset allocations be allocated to achieve the rights to information
about REITs instead of small real estate purchases?

Can we do a bias review study on the economics articles, please?

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 9:35 PM James Salsman  wrote:

> Joseph Seddon wrote:
> >
> > You can find out more about the Endowment here:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
>
> I'm very glad to see the asset allocation strategy published, but I
> have questions:
>
> 1. Does the Foundation intend to benchmark Endowment performance
> against the mutual funds marketed by the largest five funds by
> capitalization to institutions for the purposes of meeting endowment
> investment requirements?
>
> 2. Should the Foundation be investing in real estate investment
> trusts? Is it ethical for the Foundation to be competing with people
> and companies for the ownership of real estate or other fixed assets?
>
> "When upper class earners gain income, they are far more likely to
> save or invest in fixed assets or real estate, which does not increase
> aggregate demand."
> --
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Economics#Tax_cut_claim_in_Fiscal_policy_section
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Politics

[James Salsman]

Christophe,

Thank you for your kind words. I tried to take the discussion you quoted
off-list with mixed results, and I do not have permission to publish the
resulting thread. The one unresolved question that I think gets to the
heart of the matter is this:

If you urge restraint and limited political advocacy, you are less likely
to achieve your goals, but more likely to be able to get along with people
who are opposed to your goals. Which is more important?

Back in college, we had something called the "reasonable person policy"
which involved stepping back and asking, "is this a question on which
reasonable people might reasonably disagree," and allowing the discussion
if so. I have recently been told that my "AMD petition" post about removing
the closed source aspects of security co-processors which have been used to
eavesdrop was so far off-topic here and on wikitech-l as to deserve a stern
warning, and my attempt to resolve it resulted in the denial of my
permission to publish the off-list thread continuing what you quoted below.
That is clearly a topic on which reasonable people do disagree, and it
meets multiple criteria in the list charter's topic statement. Therefore I
appeal my warning to you, and ask that you ask the Board to endorse the
"AMD petition" because privacy is a necessary aspect of accomplishing the
Mission, even if you believe "empower" means nothing more than to
facilitate or enable.

Best regards,
Jim

On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 1:34 AM Christophe Henner 
wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I love that thread. Touchy topîc and yet an awesome discussion, Thank you
> so much :D
>
> A few month ago, little time after my election, I asked that question on
> Facebook and provided my own answer. And yes, I do believe that saying
> neutral knowledge should be freely accessible by everyone on the planet is
> kind of a really really really really strong political statement.
>
> I also think that "politic" discussion is hard to have as the word politics
> can bare many different meaning. One of them is derived on how we use it
> regarding national politics. We use politics as a word to include all
> politics (economic, social, education, etc.). And political party, or a
> political organization, will tend to adress all of them (or some).
>
> That is not what we are talking about actually. To me, I mean politic as,
> Asaf will love that, in latin (pertaining to public life). We are a
> political organization, we stand for strong values, but we are not
> political in the sense we're aligned with a specific party or candidate.
> And I don't know about the US, but one thing I love with french wikimedian
> is knowing some of them are so fare away from me on the political scale and
> yet share values (if I had time I would love to explain how I believe this
> is an exemple of why our political systems are broken ^^).
>
> So in the end, to me, the question is where do we draw the line when it
> comes to standing up for our values and, related questions, what are those
> values we should stand up for?
>
> But again, as a movement, we have the potential to have a huge impact on
> the world. That is not neutral, that is a force of change and change always
> is poltical.
>
>
>
> Christophe HENNER
> Chair of the board of trustees
> chen...@wikimedia.org
> +33650664739
>
> twitter *@schiste*skype *christophe_henner*
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 12:23 AM, Asaf Bartov 
> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 2:55 PM James Salsman  wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > The question I have been trying to ask, going back years now in fact,
> is
> > > whether "empower" refers to the political power to secure and retain
> > > the freedoms necessary and sufficent to contribute to the mission, or
> > > some other kind of power.
> > >
> >
> > Well, it's your lucky day: you're finally getting an answer!
> >
> > WMF's de-facto interpretation of "empower" in the [[m:Mission]] does
> *not*
> > include "political power to secure and retain the freedoms necessary and
> > sufficient to contribute to the mission".
> >
> > We do not directly solve people's lacking infrastructure (except
> indirectly
> > via partnerships like Wikipedia Zero), we do not provide computers to
> > billions of people who don't have them, we do not teach literacy to the
> > illiterate, we do not feed the poor so that they may contribute, and we
> do
> > not declare war on North Korea to free its poor people from the awful
> > tyranny they suffer under, to enable them to contribute.  The list goes
> on.
> >
> >
> > The concrete wa

Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's making you happy this week? (Week of 26 March 2017)

[James Salsman]

That makes me extremely happy too, especially since it looks like someone
on the wikitolearn.org team might be working on the Quiz extension.

On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 8:25 PM Pine W  wrote:

Here's a new edition of "What's making you happy this week?"

I'm grateful to see the quantity of people who are interested in
participating in GSOC and Outreachy (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/).

Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation's commitment around our environmental impact

[James Salsman]

A frustrating reason why it is difficult to "use green energy" in general
is because of the secret accords between Franklin D. Rosevelt and King Faud
of Saudi Arabia just after the end of WWII, wherein, according to the BBC
documentary "Bitter Lake," the U.S. agreed to uninterrupted purchases of
Saudi oil in return for regional security in the Middle East. The U.S. Navy
has been sending masters' students to MIT to work on shipboard synthesis of
liquid diesel fuel from the carbonate in seawater since the 1970s, and the
U.S. Strategic "Petroleum" reserve stopped announcing purchases in the
1990s when the number of oilers assigned to carrier groups and their port
fuel purchases both declined sharply. The SPR still frequently announces
sales, however.

Google recently developed a prototype of liquid transportation fuels
synthesis from the dialysis of carbonate in seawater, which incidentally
produces large quantities of fresh water as a byproduct:
http://x.company/explorations/foghorn

Other researchers have developed similar ways to recycle the flue exhaust
from natural gas power plants: http://bit.ly/co2-ccr

Both of these U.S. projects stopped abruptly, supposedly because they were
not economical at the retail cost of power, and the researchers refuse to
discuss the reasons that they did not calculate the cost of their outputs
from off-peak power. I recommend efforts to encourage resumption of these
projects using discounted nighttime wind power (which as per
http://freenights.txu.com is so inexpensive as to be entirely free at
retail in Texas, where some Foundation datacenters are located) as a more
effective means of minimizing environmental impact than merely contracting
for renewable energy.

Merkel's Germany and her neighbors in Europe have developed a vibrant
power-to-gas research and nascent industrial infrastructure which the U.S.
Department of Energy has never yet touched because of the corrupt U.S. "all
of the above" strategy of catering to fossil fuel producers because of
their political power in this political environment where unlimited amounts
of money from any source can be funneled to politicians' campaigns. If the
Bitter Lake accords are in the way of lessening environmental impact,
another approach would be to encourage national leaders to talk about how
the increasing use of non-supply limited renewables and concordant
continued decline in the price of all energy via power-to-gas and
gas-to-liquids infrastructure which is already built out in Europe and
Qatar (the Pearl GTL plant produces about 10% of Royal Dutch Shell's fuel
output) will effect geopolitical crises. I am convinced that Syria would
not have had a refugee crisis if they were producing their own fresh water
as a byproduct of Project Foghorn-style fuel from the carbon in seawater
instead of having to depend on changing weather patterns.

The heart of the question is: can alleviating pressure of scarce energy
resources, and in turn alleviating the scarcity all of the goods and
services in the real economy that energy underpins, provide more
geopolitical security than a 70 year old secret agreement to buy peace by
uninterrupted purchases of oil?

Another important consideration is that recycled carbon can be used for
more than just carbon neutral fuel. Researchers such as those working on
http://co2-chemistry.eu can use recycled carbon as plastic feedstock,
allowing structural plastic fiberglass composite lumber to replace most if
not almost all of the wood timber used in construction, allowing
reforestation.

Could the Endowment be chartered to ask the same environmental
responsibility of the directors and officers of its investments?

Best regards,
Jim Salsman

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 8:10 AM María Sefidari 
wrote:

> Forwading.
>
> -- Mensaje reenviado --
> De: "María Sefidari" 
> Fecha: 29 mar. 2017 15:06
> Asunto: Wikimedia Foundation's commitment around our environmental impact
> Para: , <
> wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org>,
> 
> Cc:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Since early 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation has been evaluating efforts
> and engaging in discussions related to the environmental impact of the
> movement, and specifically the Foundation. During that time, we
> supported improvements to our on-wiki documentation,[1] talked with
> members of the community, and began reviewing internal processes.
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to finding ways to reduce the
> impact of our activities on the environment. We aim to always act as
> responsibly and sustainably as possible, including favoring renewable
> energy where it is available for our operations.
>
> To help clarify and solidify our intentions in this important matter,
> the Board of Trustees has passed an environmental impact
> resolution.[2] This resolution commits the Wikimedia Foundation to:
>
> 1.  Seek out information about our overall impact on the environment
> and then work to minimize it;
>
> 2.  Consider sustainability as an im

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Discovery search efforts and upcoming releases

[James Salsman]

Sam,

How do you feel about searching recent changes? I saw some estimates that
would take a lot more effort than it would.

Also, is Len Tower still in the Boston area? The more we improve the diff
algorithm, the more edit conflicts we can avoid, and that's certainly worth
the money, time, and effort too.


On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 7:07 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Deb, Fantastic.  Really, really great.  And I don't just mean your champion
> footnote selection.
>
> Thanks to you and  Erik for the update!
> SJ
>
> (still dreaming of federated search results from cousin free-knowledge
> projects, and public libraries near you, not just Wikimedia ones :)
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 8:11 PM, Erik Bernhardson <
> ebernhard...@wikimedia.org
> > wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Deborah Tankersley <
> > dtankers...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Michael,
> > >
> > > It's just searching on Wikipedia for now, as the Structured Data
> project
> > on
> > > Commons is just ramping up.
> > >
> > > Also for some clarity, most of the improvements are not limited to
> > wikipedias, for example the work with ascii folding, and language
> analysis
> > chains applies to all projects for a given language. When we improved how
> > we handled the polish language that was for all projects that use polish
> as
> > their content language. Similarly while the sister project search we are
> > rolling out will only be showing on wikipedias, it is explicitly about
> > including content from the sister projects (wiktionary, wikibooks, etc)
> on
> > the search result page to show users that there is great content
> available
> > from these sister projects.
> >
> > Commons search is hard, and we will get there. We will be working closely
> > with the structured data team to improve searching commons with
> structured
> > data.
> >
> >
> > > Cheers,
> > >
> > > Deb
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > deb tankersley
> > > irc: debt
> > > Product Manager, Discovery
> > > Wikimedia Foundation
> > >
> > > On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Michael Maggs 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi
> > > >
> > > > You've mentioned searching on "Wikipedia" there. Did you mean
> > > "Wikimedia",
> > > > or are there still no Commons search improvements as yet?
> > > >
> > > > Michael
> > > >
> > > > Deborah Tankersley 
> > > >> 6 April 2017 at 11:15 pm
> > > >> tl;dr: Search continues to expand functionality by displaying more
> > > >> information on the search results page
> > > >>
> > > >> Ever started searching for something on Wikipedia and
> > wondered—*really*,
> > > >> is
> > > >>
> > > >> that all that there is? Does it feel like you’re somehow playing
> hide
> > > and
> > > >> seek with all the knowledge that’s out there? And...wouldn’t it be
> > great
> > > >> to
> > > >> see articles or categories that are similar to your search query and
> > > maybe
> > > >> some related images or links to other languages in which to read
> that
> > > >> article? Or, maybe you just want to read and contribute to projects
> > > other
> > > >> than Wikipedia but need a jump start with a few short summaries from
> > > >> sister
> > > >> projects.
> > > >> The Discovery Search team has been testing out some really cool new
> > > >> features that will enable some fun and fascinating clicking—down the
> > > >> rabbit
> > > >> hole of Wikipedia.[1] But first, let’s recap what we’ve been doing
> > > >> recently.
> > > >>
> > > >> We've been doing tons of work creating, updating, and finessing the
> > > search
> > > >> back end to enhance search queries. There have been many complex
> > things
> > > >> that have happened, things like: adding ascii-folding and stemming,
> > > >> detecting when a visitor might be typing in a language that is
> > different
> > > >> than the Wikipedia that they are on, switching from tf-idf to BM25,
> > > >> dropping trailing question marks, and updating to ElasticSearch
> > version
> > > 5.
> > > >> [2][3][4][5][6][7] Whew!
> > > >>
> > > >> We have much more planned in the coming months—machine learning with
> > > >> ‘learning to rank’, investigating and deploying new language
> > analyzers,
> > > >> and, after exhaustive analysis, removing quotes within queries by
> > > >> default.[8][9][10][11] We’ll also be working closely with the new
> > > >> Structured Data team in their brand new work on Commons.[12][13]
> > > >>
> > > >> We also want to improve the part that our readers and editors
> > interface
> > > >> with: the search results page! We started brainstorming during the
> > late
> > > >> summer of 2016 on what we could do to make search results better—to
> > > easily
> > > >> find interesting, relevant content and to create a more intuitive
> > > viewing
> > > >> experience.[14] We designed and refined numerous ideas on how to
> > improve
> > > >> the search results page and received lots of good feedback from the
> > > >> community.[15]
> > > >>
> > > >> Empowered by the feedback, we began testing st

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid editing services

[James Salsman]

Is it better to think of the problem as paid editing or organized advocacy
for persuasion at the expense of accuracy regarding all costs and benefits?

Burger King is a commercial enterprise which makes money by mass production
of beef products, which require more water and produce more greenhouse gas
per calorie at retail marked-up prices than more frugal and healthy
alternatives, but their Wikipedia-focused PR budget is tiny compared to
producers of other products which similarly do not have a good cost-benefit
ratio in terms of money or productive years of life.

Some of the strongest such abusers of organized advocacy don't spend a lot
of money on Wikipedia editors, but they do promote a narrative that
anti-science types are suppressing information about them because of
Luddite unreasonableness, which causes the many editors who want to defend
science and their poorly-perceived conceptions of modernity to come to
their defense. But, like Burger King, they often sell products which cost
more than their benefits.

Examples beyond beef include: fossil fuels, nuclear power, neonicotinoid
pesticides, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Luckily, lab grown beef is likely
to soon provide suitable replacements for those who want to eat beef
without the environmental, ethical, and some of the health externalities.
But will it go the way of the texturized vegetable protein of the 1970s? I
recently discussed the solution to the fossil fuels problem on this list.
(Sorry I got the name of the King of Saudi Arabia with whom FDR met wrong,
but I highly recommend the "history teachers edit" of the BBC "Bitter Lake"
documentary on YouTube for those who don't want to watch the whole thing.)
Nuclear simply can't compete in the marketplace against renewables.
Advocacy organizations are telling the story about the true costs of
various pesticides, and those are making their way into MEDRS sources.

But I have no idea if Wikipedia is strong enough to overcome the
self-organizing advocacy for greater income inequality, which is a very
serious health issue as per unopposed MEDRS sources, but the fake news
narrative is being pushed:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-budget-director-wants-high-inequality-not-low-deficit.html

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/Econ_letters.pdf

http://talknicer.com/ehip.pdf (full MEDRS-grade, with no substantial
opposition in other secondary sources.)

My opinion is that when issues like these impact the Mission, including the
extent that we can effectively educate, the Foundation should get involved
and do everything they can to set things right. But are these appropriate
issues for Legal, or Communications?

Would it help if the Communications team did a blog series on solutions
from the last U.S. presidential election prior to 9/11, when Buchanan was
Trump's opponent on the far right, taxes were set to be increased on the
rich by deficit hawks including Trump, and single payer was Trump's
preferred health care plan? Trump has recently signaled a return to his
1999 roots, by demoting Bannon, demanding a superior health care plan
instead of backsliding, and

Yes, these are political issues, but they are about issues which directly
impact the ability to execute the mission, and are only incidentally about
particular candidates. But they are also extremely crucial to restoring our
a civil society from the distopia of the use of state power against the
rights of individuals, and the abuse of the encyclopedia with organized
advocacy for persuasion over accuracy, in persuit of extralegal profits.

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 11:36 AM Risker  wrote:

> I'm just a bit agog at the idea that this article became "advertising" when
> Burger King made the connection using Google Home.  Since its very first
> edit, it has been an advertisement for this product.  It may not have been
> intended that way, but that is the reality.  Now it's almost 4200 words
> long - probably the longest writing on this single product anywhere outside
> of the Burger King home offices - and we're pretending that it isn't an ad.
>
> I know it is terribly disillusioning, but an awful lot of our articles are
> advertisements. There have always been LOTS of paid editors on English
> Wikipedia. It has never meant that the editor was editing primarily in a
> promotional manner - in many cases they were facilitating the ability for
> others to include promotional materials, and I've spotted what in
> retrospect were obvious paid edits going back to 2001. There are people who
> I've identified as likely paid editors who were instrumental in our early
> discussions about notability.  There were people who "worked with" external
> organizations to get access to their commercial repositories of images and
> information - with huge financial benefits to the owners of those
> repositories; sometimes this was innocent, with the editors trying to gain
> access to hard-to-find m

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid editing services

[James Salsman]

P.S. The paragraph ending "instead of backsliding, and" should have been
followed by "proposing cuts to the payroll tax."

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 12:54 PM James Salsman  wrote:

> Is it better to think of the problem as paid editing or organized advocacy
> for persuasion at the expense of accuracy regarding all costs and benefits?
>
> Burger King is a commercial enterprise which makes money by mass
> production of beef products, which require more water and produce more
> greenhouse gas per calorie at retail marked-up prices than more frugal and
> healthy alternatives, but their Wikipedia-focused PR budget is tiny
> compared to producers of other products which similarly do not have a good
> cost-benefit ratio in terms of money or productive years of life.
>
> Some of the strongest such abusers of organized advocacy don't spend a lot
> of money on Wikipedia editors, but they do promote a narrative that
> anti-science types are suppressing information about them because of
> Luddite unreasonableness, which causes the many editors who want to defend
> science and their poorly-perceived conceptions of modernity to come to
> their defense. But, like Burger King, they often sell products which cost
> more than their benefits.
>
> Examples beyond beef include: fossil fuels, nuclear power, neonicotinoid
> pesticides, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Luckily, lab grown beef is likely
> to soon provide suitable replacements for those who want to eat beef
> without the environmental, ethical, and some of the health externalities.
> But will it go the way of the texturized vegetable protein of the 1970s? I
> recently discussed the solution to the fossil fuels problem on this list.
> (Sorry I got the name of the King of Saudi Arabia with whom FDR met wrong,
> but I highly recommend the "history teachers edit" of the BBC "Bitter Lake"
> documentary on YouTube for those who don't want to watch the whole thing.)
> Nuclear simply can't compete in the marketplace against renewables.
> Advocacy organizations are telling the story about the true costs of
> various pesticides, and those are making their way into MEDRS sources.
>
> But I have no idea if Wikipedia is strong enough to overcome the
> self-organizing advocacy for greater income inequality, which is a very
> serious health issue as per unopposed MEDRS sources, but the fake news
> narrative is being pushed:
>
>
> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-budget-director-wants-high-inequality-not-low-deficit.html
>
>
> https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/Econ_letters.pdf
>
> http://talknicer.com/ehip.pdf (full MEDRS-grade, with no substantial
> opposition in other secondary sources.)
>
> My opinion is that when issues like these impact the Mission, including
> the extent that we can effectively educate, the Foundation should get
> involved and do everything they can to set things right. But are these
> appropriate issues for Legal, or Communications?
>
> Would it help if the Communications team did a blog series on solutions
> from the last U.S. presidential election prior to 9/11, when Buchanan was
> Trump's opponent on the far right, taxes were set to be increased on the
> rich by deficit hawks including Trump, and single payer was Trump's
> preferred health care plan? Trump has recently signaled a return to his
> 1999 roots, by demoting Bannon, demanding a superior health care plan
> instead of backsliding, and
>
> Yes, these are political issues, but they are about issues which directly
> impact the ability to execute the mission, and are only incidentally about
> particular candidates. But they are also extremely crucial to restoring our
> a civil society from the distopia of the use of state power against the
> rights of individuals, and the abuse of the encyclopedia with organized
> advocacy for persuasion over accuracy, in persuit of extralegal profits.
>
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 11:36 AM Risker  wrote:
>
>> I'm just a bit agog at the idea that this article became "advertising"
>> when
>> Burger King made the connection using Google Home.  Since its very first
>> edit, it has been an advertisement for this product.  It may not have been
>> intended that way, but that is the reality.  Now it's almost 4200 words
>> long - probably the longest writing on this single product anywhere
>> outside
>> of the Burger King home offices - and we're pretending that it isn't an
>> ad.
>>
>> I know it is terribly disillusioning, but an awful lot of our articles are
>> advertisements. There have always been LOTS of paid editors on English
>&g

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid editing services

[James Salsman]

Should the Communications team hold a contest asking wikipedians to propose
new trademarks for Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods?

Ref.:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/64yf80/labgrown_meat_is_about_to_go_global_and_one_firm/dg6frig/?context=3

On a more serious note, why don't we quantify and balance systemic bias in
favor of far more pernicious threats?

I.e.,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Economics#Tax_cut_claim_in_Fiscal_policy_section

On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 12:36 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> So the Americas favorite burger should have been "America's Favorite
> Burger(tm)". Agreed.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of FRED BAUDER
> Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2017 8:21 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies
> that offer paid editing services
>
> "The Whopper, also known as America’s favorite burger, " is a problem as
> it implies that the Whopper is the favorite burger of the American public.
> Perhaps it is, but that is a trademark, not the result of a survey. The
> other stuff, "a flame-[[grilling|grilled]] patty made with 100% beef with
> no preservatives, no fillers and is topped with daily sliced tomatoes and
> onions, fresh lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served on a soft sesame
> seed bun." happens to be factually true and cannot be said of the products
> of, say, McDonalds where the "fixings"
> arrive in delivery trucks.
>
> Fred Bauder
>
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2017 08:06:50 +0200
>   "Peter Southwood"  wrote:
> > James,
> > Which parts of those statements to you consider factually inaccurate,
> >and which parts do you consider misleading in some other way?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> >From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> >Behalf Of James Heilman
> > Sent: Friday, April 14, 2017 5:32 PM
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing
> >companies that offer paid editing services
> >
> > Wikipedia is not for sale. We are not simply another advertising venue
> >available to the corporations of the world. We have mechanisms for
> >corporations to suggest changes to our content and it is called the
> >talk page.
> >
> > Lets look at the changes likely made by Burger King staff in more
> >detail:
> >
> > In this edit this sentence "The Whopper is a burger, consisting of a
> >flame-grilled patty made with 100% beef with no preservatives, no
> >fillers and is topped with daily sliced tomatoes and onions, fresh
> >lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served on a soft sesame seed bun."
> >
> > >773836335&oldid=773833110>
> > was
> > added not once but twice. And than was added again following its first
> >removal.
> >
> > In this edit this sentence "The Whopper, also known as America’s
> >favorite burger, has a flame-[[grilling|grilled]] patty made with 100%
> >beef with no preservatives, no fillers and is topped with daily sliced
> >tomatoes and onions, fresh lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served
> >on a soft sesame seed bun. Whopper and America’s Favorite Burger are
> >trademarks of Burger King Corporation.
> > <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whopper&diff=773807497&oldid=773585358
> >"
> > was added.
> >
> > One of the accounts did not disclosed their relationship to the
> >company in question. And yes this is spam, so they did spam Wikipedia.
> >See [[WP:PEACOCK]]
> > >#Puffery>
> > and [[WP:NPOV]]
> >, the latter of
> >which is pillar number 2.
> >
> >
> > This is not the first time the marketing department at a multi billion
> >dollar company has tried to adjust our content for the company's /
> >shareholder's gains. A few years back a couple of the heads of
> >marketing at Medtronic
> > >-for-pay/393926/>,  along with a number of physicians one of whom they
> >had paid more than a quarter of a million dollars, tried to remove the
> >best available evidence regarding vertebroplasty, a procedure which
> >medicare spent at the time more than a billion dollars a year on.
> >Half a dozen paid editors working together can easily get a majority in
> >many of our decision making processes.
> >
> > Our readers deserve a Wikipedia which is written independently of the
> >subject mater in question. Our readers have been harmed by undisclosed
> >paid editing in the past. These are individuals typically less savvy
> >and less wealthy than the executives at a large corporation. I am sorry
> >but our readers are the ones that deserve our attention and our
> >protection. We already have the Wifione ca

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality assurance of articles

[James Salsman]

John, the AROWF project GSoC student implemented your proposal last year:

https://github.com/priyankamandikal/arowf/blob/master/backlog.py

She also used WikiWho to suggest review of out-of-date passages, and both
categories and readability metrics to suggest review of unclear passages:

https://github.com/priyankamandikal/arowf/blob/master/recent_script.py


https://github.com/priyankamandikal/arowf/blob/master/copy_edit.py

This year she has agreed to co-mentor a voice-interactive tutorial system
for instructing on the use of her project, with which we plan to
simultaneously coach speech pronunciation.

On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 11:23 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> I wrote a proposal a few years ago on how we could identfy some types of
> bias. The idea was to compare ranking of pageviews, and notify other
> projects about missing articles. I don't think anyone has done any followup
> om that
>
> Den søn. 16. apr. 2017, 19.12 skrev Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Hoi,
> > Humans are overrated. I saw this answer on Facebook [1] and [2] compare
> the
> > two and tell me why we accept the bias in our editors. Why are we
> satisfied
> > with what we write about when there is more to inform about. Remember
> what
> > we aim to achieve. It does not say text, it says share the sum of all
> > knowledge.
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
> >
> > [1]
> >
> >
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Geotagged_articles_in_enWP_map_RENDER_small.png
> > [2]
> >
> >
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/WorldmapGeonamesallCountries.jpg
> >
> > On 16 April 2017 at 18:59, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:
> >
> > > Hello John,
> > >
> > > Article quality is an interesting subject. I guess that it depends
> > > extremely on what is the scientific discipline you come from, and what
> > > questions you want to be answered. A linguist will have a very
> different
> > > approach than a computer scientist, for example. If you ask me, only a
> > > human being can judge an article if it comes to content quality and
> > textual
> > > quality, by the way. Maybe you want to elaborate on what are your
> > > questions?
> > >
> > > Kind regards
> > > Ziko
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > 2017-04-16 9:44 GMT+02:00 Gerard Meijssen :
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > > How can you check for consistency when you are not able to appreciate
> > if
> > > > certain facts (like date of death) exist and are the same? What can
> you
> > > say
> > > > about sources when some Wikipedias insist on sources in their own
> > > language
> > > > and sources in other languages you cannot read? How do you check for
> > > > consistency when we have over 280 Wikipedias with possible content?
> > > >
> > > > Do know that only Wikidata approaches a state where it knows about
> all
> > > our
> > > > projects and we have not, to the best of my knowledge, assessed what
> > the
> > > > quality of Wikidata is on interwiki links.. Case in point, I fixed an
> > > error
> > > > today about a person that was said to be dead because a Commons
> > category
> > > > was not correctly linked.
> > > >
> > > > When you study the consistency of English Wikipedia only, you only
> add
> > to
> > > > the current bias in research.
> > > >
> > > > When you want to know about the half life of an error, you can find
> in
> > > the
> > > > history when for instance a date was mentioned for a first time and
> > find
> > > > the same date in another language. This is not trivial as the format
> > of a
> > > > language is diverse think Thai for instance.
> > > > Thanks,
> > > > GerardM
> > > >
> > > > On 16 April 2017 at 02:08, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > This is more about checking consistency between projects. It is
> > > > > interesting, but not quite what I was asking about. It is very
> > > > interesting
> > > > > if it would be possible to say something about half-life of an
> error.
> > > I'm
> > > > > pretty sure this follows number of page views if ordinary logged-in
> > > > editing
> > > > > is removed.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 12:08 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
> > > > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
> > > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Hoi,
> > > > > > Would checking if a date of death exists in articles be of
> interest
> > > to
> > > > > you.
> > > > > > The idea is that Wikidata knows about dates of death and for
> > "living
> > > > > > people" the fact of a death should be the same in all projects.
> > When
> > > > the
> > > > > > date of death is missing, there is either an issue at Wikidata
> (not
> > > the
> > > > > > same precision is one) or at a project.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > When a difference is found, the idea is that it is each projects
> > > > > > responsibility to do what is needed. No further automation.
> > > > > > Thanks,
> > > > > >GerardM
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On 15 April 2017 at 23:50, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > Are anyone doing any work on automa

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid editing services

[James Salsman]

I've proposed asking wikimedians at large what they think should be done
about paid advocacy editing, as item number 5 on my periodic survey
proposal composed of all the unresolved questions over the last quarter on
this list at:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:James_Salsman#Periodic_survey_prototype

On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 2:50 PM Pine W  wrote:

> >
> > Has there been a recent substantial discussion by the community
> surrounding
> > promotional/biased editting paid or otherwise, which had an outcome
> > resulting in a specific request for assistance or increased action by the
> > WMF?
> >
>
> Aside from the conversation on this list, I'm aware of the discussion on
> Jimbo's talk page. If WMF Legal or the WMF Board wants to take the position
> that it would like to see a community RfC or some other such discussion, I
> imagine that such can be arranged, and I can see how that might be
> beneficial. Of course, anyone is free to initiate such an on-wiki
> discussion.
>
>
> >
> > If there hasn't, I do not see grounds for you to be expecting an official
> > response from Legal to a list whose conversation has for the most part
> > consisted of about 6 people?
> >
>
> I'm not sure why you would be telling other people to whom they can
> initiate requests and the conditions under which they can be made. I
> already have a dim view of WMF's customer service; please don't dig the
> hole any deeper.
>
> Many others, I am sure, would rightly complain if the Foundation
> > unilaterally made decisions in this area.
>
>
> That is possible if WMF were to do something particularly novel, so your
> sense of caution here is well taken. I would hope that WMF would discuss
> its plans with the community and have a conversation before actually
> initiating novel actions.
>
>
> > But please be realistic, this is
> > a coffee table discussion.
>
>
> I have mixed views on this. Wikimedia-l is not a quiet back room with only
> a few people around, but it's true that a consensus here among a small
> number of people who speak up in a particular discussion demonstrates a
> lower level of consensus than an RfC with hundreds of participants. It's
> not clear to me that there is consensus on which tools are appropriate for
> which exact circumstances, and some discussions happen in multiple venues.
>
>
> > The views expressed here are valid but the right
> >
> thing to do would be to further the conversation on wiki and have a proper
> > community conversation.
>
>
> I don't think that there is a single definition of a "proper" community
> conversation.
>
> I have no objection to having an on-wiki RfC (and I can see how a
> sophisticated and well-attended one might produce detailed guidance that
> would be helpful), but neither do I want this thread to be trivialized.
>
> Pine
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikitribune!

[James Salsman]

I have a question: the news about pending Chinese "supply-side structural
reforms" is almost all about matching supply to demand; for example see
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-01/22/c_136004899.htm

But if you look at pp. 42 and 63 here, you see the proposaled legislative
reforms are actually about replacing a progressive income tax with a flat
VAT: http://en.ndrc.gov.cn/newsrelease/201612/P020161207645765233498.pdf

Does the Wikitribune model have a way to make sure that the truth is being
told? How would it work in this particular instance?

On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 6:56 AM David Gerard  wrote:

> On 25 April 2017 at 22:59, Jimmy Wales  wrote:
>
> > Today I announced a new initiative, outside of my Wikimedia activities,
> > to combat fake news. It is important to me that I share directly with
> > all of you information about this new initiative early on.
>
>
> I was one of the Wikipedians at the hackathon days for this, a few
> weeks ago. (And now it's gone live and I can speak of it in good
> conscience!)
>
> The obvious comparison is Wikinews. Now, Wikinews contributors are
> determined that WikiNews is a good project that deserves to live, and
> they also resent Wikipedia for doing news more effectively as a
> sideline than they do as their main thing and the WMF is unfair and so
> forth. But from the outside view, it's important to note that
> approximately nobody cares about Wikinews and it's a failure in
> impact. Or: if WikiTribune turns out to have the content,
> participation and readership of Wikinews, it will have failed.
>
> The question is why Wikinews didn't take off. There's a sort of myth
> that it's too process-heavy - but the rough WikiTribune rules on the
> day (which may or may not be the ones they go live with) were *pretty
> much the Wikinews process*. (I looked them up on the day.) So that
> isn't the missing magic ingredient.
>
> I suspect one big problem is that journalism anyone's interested in
> reading involves gathering dubious information and assessing how true
> it is likely to be. It's pretty much a process of turning bad sources
> into good ones. Actual reporting tends to work like "I talked to these
> three separate sources, none of whose names I can print, but I'll tell
> you my editor." "Yep, looks likely enough to run." Bam, scoop. It's
> hard to do that in a fully transparent manner (put up the recordings,
> etc) without outing your sources. I spoke to one journalist on the day
> and they concurred.
>
> And that's before you get into there being no such thing as neutral
> news, just news that pretends to be. It's not clear that NPOV is even
> a good idea - selection of stories to cover is a huge bias.
>
> There's also the danger of the other failure mode of citizen
> journalism. The example I brought up on the day was BeforeItsNews.com
> - I won't spoil it for you, go there and see what sort of stories it
> covers and what sort of advertising it runs. It turns out you need
> sane editorial control at some level.
>
> It's possible the missing magical ingredient that will let it take off
> will be paid professional journalists - that this will produce a news
> site that's exciting enough, and not just "me too" stories everyone is
> already running, to get subscribers. But again, it'll need some way
> for them to say "This is the story, I'm not revealing my sources, but
> me and x editor concur it's a news story we'd stand by running."
>
> WordPress is probably the least-worst option for a CMS. MediaWiki is a
> horrible CMS for anything that isn't a reference work. You can do
> almost anything with WordPress if you throw enough money at extension
> development. (Which may or may not be a good idea.)
>
> Anyway, I'll be watching closely and probably diving in at least slightly.
>
>
> - d.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Naive questions: what could do the movement with 1B dollars/euros?

[James Salsman]

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 1:19 AM, FRED BAUDER  wrote:

> I think we could hire professional fact checkers and target articles that
> have gotten off track. I don't think a great deal of money would be
> necessary to set an example, and illustrate some of our notorious problems.


This is what the AROWF system from last year's Google Summer of code was
supposed to show how to support:

https://priyankamandikal.github.io/posts/gsoc-2016-project-overview/

This
year the CMUSphinx project is building an interactive voice-response
computer-aided instruction system which teaches people how to use the AROWF
system (and in the process tries to teach how to resolve NPOV disputes, out
of date statements, and a few other backlog categories it tracks) while at
the same time remediating spoken English pronunciation. I am currently
consulting at a company in Beijing which has 23 million customers in
China's K-6 public schools, They have offered to help collect some of the
data required to build this system, and the GSoC student assigned to it has
been doing pretty well.
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[Wikimedia-l] Mozilla, funded by advertisers, starts opposing privacy regulations

[James Salsman]

Here is an interesting quote of a Mozilla Foundation lawyer from
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/11/mozilla_wants_eu_to_slow_down_its_eprivacy_directive_process/

"draft Regulation imposes very specific restrictions on the technology
industry that may challenge the business models of some ISPs. In some
areas, obligations are proscriptive, undermining the principle of
technological neutrality that this legislation needs to withstand the
test of time in a rapidly changing environment"

Is it appropriate for the Wikimedia Foundation to respond to this sort
of thing? Mozilla is almost entirely funded by ad-supported
businesses at present.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Mozilla, funded by advertisers, starts opposing privacy regulations

[James Salsman]

Rogol,

First, it's very well established that privacy is essential to not
just the creation of educational content by Foundation volunteers, but
to the ability of readers to have unfettered access to that content. I
am sure you are aware that the Foundation has been pursuing a lawsuit
for years against the U.S. government to protect readers privacy:
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/23._aclu_appeal_brief_2.17.2016.pdf

The European Commission is seeking the power to fine ISPs for breaches
to their users' privacy, which would certainly strengthen the
Foundation's projects' readers ability to access information without
threat of eavesdropping by commercial interests, such as having their
searches for medical conditions made available for sale to insurance
and marketing companies. If you have any reason to believe otherwise,
please say so.

Secondly, where did you find that mission statement you quoted? It is
not the one at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement


On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 12:02 AM, Rogol Domedonfors
 wrote:
> James,
>
> Could you articulate how, in your view, the implementation of the proposed
> directive, or otherwise, would affect the Wikimedia Foundation's mission of
> "encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free,
> multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of
> these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge," please?  Because
> if you can't, then the answer to your question has to be "No, it isn't".
>
> "Rogol"
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 4:02 PM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
>> Here is an interesting quote of a Mozilla Foundation lawyer from
>> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/11/mozilla_wants_eu_
>> to_slow_down_its_eprivacy_directive_process/
>>
>> "draft Regulation imposes very specific restrictions on the technology
>> industry that may challenge the business models of some ISPs. In some
>> areas, obligations are proscriptive, undermining the principle of
>> technological neutrality that this legislation needs to withstand the
>> test of time in a rapidly changing environment"
>>
>> Is it appropriate for the Wikimedia Foundation to respond to this sort
>> of thing? Mozilla is almost entirely funded by ad-supported
>> businesses at present.
>>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Results of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election

[James Salsman]

Instead of blaming people, I blame the idea that board members should ever
be ejected if they have lost the trust or confidence of other board
members, or because other members feel uncomfortable working with them, or
because they may choose to withhold or be more forthcoming with information
than other members prefer.

Joining a representative body should require a conscious effort to avoid
groupthink, not a suicide pact to abide by it.


On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 8:06 PM Fæ  wrote:

> +1 :-)
>
> The elected candidates are ideal, making me feel confident that the
> values and aspirations of the wider Wikimedia volunteer community will
> be well represented in the coming year.
>
> As previously mentioned, Alice and Jimmy were the main political
> players in excluding Doc James from board discussions. The expulsion
> of James from the board as an //elected// trustee has damaged the
> reputation of the WMF board of trustees, and they must take fair
> personal responsibility for those events. It would be great if both
> Alice and Jimmy could speak up now, perhaps now thanking Doc James for
> having the determination to run again for the board and ensuring the
> community that they will do everything they can to ensure James is
> supported and welcome, or have the wisdom to step down if they feel
> unable to work collegiately and positively with their elected fellow
> trustees.
>
> The historical theme of the WMF board being directed by trustees that
> have never stood for an open election is an embarrassment in the light
> of the unnecessarily policial recent history of the WMF. We are
> overdue for the board to be seen to get their fingers out, do some
> meaningful housekeeping, and re-invent itself as one that is properly
> open, transparent and accountable to volunteers as well as large rich
> donors. Naturally, well intentioned folks who "happen to" benefit from
> their sticky conflicts of interest in directly related commercial
> ventures, such as Wikia and Wikitrubune, should not be anywhere near
> the board, nor should they hold positions of influence on related
> committees and trusts where the potential conflicts of loyalty
> represent financial and reputational risks for the Wikimedia community
> and the Wikimedia Foundation.
>
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>
> On 23 May 2017 at 12:34, Austin Hair  wrote:
> > I normally hate +1s, but I want to congratulate Doc James on his
> > reappointment to the board. I hope we've all learned from his previous
> > term, and can work together to benefit the movement.
> >
> > With love,
> >
> > One of your list administrators, who would rather not have to deal with
> > fiascos.
> >
> > On May 23, 2017 02:12, "Isaac Olatunde" 
> wrote:
> >
> >> Congratulations to the newly elected members and many thanks to members
> of
> >> the election committee.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Isaac.
> >>
> >> On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 3:12 AM, Tito Dutta 
> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Many congrats to all the members. Good wishes and all the best.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > On 22 May 2017 at 11:53, Rogol Domedonfors 
> >> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > Indeed.  It would be appropriate for members of the Board to state
> now,
> >> > in
> >> > > public and for the record, that they accept the democratically
> >> expressed
> >> > > wishes of the community and will reappoint James at the due time.
> >> > >
> >> > >
> >> > >
> >> > > On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 12:18 AM, MZMcBride 
> wrote:
> >> > >
> >> > > > matanya moses wrote:
> >> > > > >Congratulations to María Sefidari (User:Raystorm), Dariusz
> >> Jemielniak
> >> > > > >(User:pundit), and James Heilman (User:Doc James) for receiving
> the
> >> > most
> >> > > > >community support. Subject to a standard background check, they
> will
> >> > be
> >> > > > >appointed by the Board at their August meeting at Wikimania.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > For those wondering, two of the people who supported James'
> removal
> >> > from
> >> > > > the Board of Trustees in December 2015 are still serving: Alice
> and
> >> > > Jimmy.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > And the two people who opposed the resolution (Dariusz and James)
> are
> >> > now
> >> > > > among the three people being reappointed.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > * https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:James_
> >> > Heilman_Removal
> >> > > > * https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees
> >> > > > * https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Former_Board_of_
> >> > Trustees_members
> >> > > >
> >> > > > MZMcBride
> >> > > >
> >> > > >
> >> > > >
> >> > > > ___
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> https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> >> > > > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> >> > > > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> >> > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> > > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/
> >> mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> >> > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Discovery Projects

[James Salsman]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 5:25 AM, Deborah Tankersley
 wrote:
>
> The Discovery team structure has now changed, but the new teams will still
> work together to complete the goals as listed in the draft annual plan.[2]
> A summary of their anticipated work, as we finalize these changes, is
> below. We plan on doing a check-in at the end of the calendar year to see
> how our goals are progressing with the new smaller and separated team
> structure.
>
> Here is a list of the various projects under the Discovery umbrella, along
> with the goals that they will be working on:
>
> Search Backend
>
> Improve search capabilities:
>
>Implement ‘learning to rank’ [3] and other advanced machine learning
>methodologies
>...
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank

How will the Foundation's approach to machine learning of search
results ranking guard against overfitting?

For example, if most searches on "rent" do not pertain to "rent
seeking", then how will the machine learning approach to search
results for "rent" guard against never presenting any results on "rent
seeking"?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Discovery Projects

[James Salsman]

Hi Trey,

Thanks for your very detailed reply. I have a followup question.

How do you determine search intents? For example, if you see someone
searching for "rents" how do you know whether they are looking for
economic or property rents when evaluating the quality of the search
results? If you're training machine learning models from "5, 50, or
500," example you need to have labels on each of those examples
indicating whether the results are good or not.

Do you interview searchers after the fact? Ask people to search and
record the terms they search on? What kind of infrastructure do you
have to make sure you're getting correct intents robust enough to
score the example results? Maybe surveys occurring on some small
fraction of results asking users to describe in greater detail exactly
what they were trying to find?

Best regards,
Jim


On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Deborah Tankersley
 wrote:
> James Salsman wrote:
>
> How will the Foundation's approach to machine learning of search
>> results ranking guard against overfitting?
>
>
> Overfitting, for those who aren't familiar with the term, describes the
> situation where a machine learning model inappropriately learns very
> specific details about its training set that don't generalize to the real
> world. From the point of view of training, the model seems to be getting
> better and better, while real-world performance is actually decreasing. As
> a somewhat silly example, a model could learn that queries that have
> exactly 38 words in them are 100% about baseball—because there is only one
> example of a query in the training set that is 38 words long, and it is
> about baseball. For more on overfitting, see Wikipedia.[1]
>
> We employ the usual safeguards against overfitting. Certain parameters that
> control how a specific type of model is built can discourage overfitting.
> For example, not allowing a decision inside the model to be made on too
> little data—so rather than 1 or 2 examples to base a decision on, the model
> can be told it needs to see 5, or 50, or 500.
>
> We also have separate training and testing data sets. So we build a model
> on one set of data, then evaluate the model on another set. The estimate of
> model performance from the training set will always be at least a bit
> optimistic, but the testing set—which is large enough to be representative
> and which does not overlap with the training set—gives a more realistic
> estimate. We choose the model that performs the best on the testing set.
> Overfitted models will do worse on the testing set, and we won't use them.
>
> We have other methods of validating our models as well.
>
> We have a set of machines and software that we collectively call Relevance
> Forge (a.k.a. RelForge) that we can use to run large sets of queries
> against different versions of the same index. We can compare the before and
> after results, both automatically and manually. RelForge lets us easily
> gauge the *impact* of a change. For example, a 1% net improvement could
> come from making 1% of queries a bit better, or from making 49% a bit worse
> and 50% a bit better. So, we can easily see whether 1% or 99% of results
> change. If we see a 2% improvement but a 99% impact, something weird is
> happening, and we'd investigate more deeply.
>
> We also have many definitions of "results change" that we can evaluate: #1
> result changes, top 3 results change (ordered or unordered), number of
> results changes, number of queries getting zero results changes. And for
> each of these we can manually inspect a random selection of affected
> queries to decide whether the results are generally better or not.
>
> We also run A/B tests, where we let a small sample of users get the
> proposed change, while a similar number get the standard results. We do
> statistical analyses on user engagement with results and various other
> click metrics that let us compare the control and experimental conditions.
> For more on how we test search changes in general, see Testing Search on
> mediawiki.org.[2]
>
> In both of these cases—RelForge testing and A/B testing in
> production—overfitted models would perform poorly, and that would become
> apparent.
>
> For example, if most searches on "rent" do not pertain to "rent
>> seeking", then how will the machine learning approach to search
>> results for "rent" guard against never presenting any results on "rent
>> seeking"?
>
>
> Your wording has left me a bit confused, and I'm not sure whether your
> concern is (a) that a query of "rent" should never return "rent seeking",
> and so the machine learning model should never present i

Re: [Wikimedia-l] July 14: Strategy update - New Voices research, events, and interviews (#21)

[James Salsman]

Hi Katherine,

In March, the topics that the Movement Strategy process described as
to be addressed included metrics:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Topics/Metrics

However, since then the topics list on which metrics were listed have
been removed from all but eight languages' process briefing pages.

Are movement metrics still planned for inclusion in the strategy process?

Best regards,
Jim


On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 9:18 AM, Katherine Maher  wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> For the last few months, we’ve all been talking together - on wiki, and in
> person - about our own personal and community hopes and goals for the
> Wikimedia projects and movement. But while this has been going on, members
> of the strategy team have been doing research into the world outside the
> movement.
>
> This month, during Cycle 3, we’re sharing what we’ve learned from outside -
> from readers, experts, and partners from our New Voices initiative. Right
> now, the focus is on ensuring that the voices that normally aren’t part of
> our strategic discussions are present and well-represented, and that those
> of us in the movement have the opportunity to see into the future, and
> think ahead about the way the world is changing. [1]  One of my recent
> updates
> 
> [2]
> provided a summary of the broader context and goals for Cycle 3. Today, I
> wanted to share some new resources and materials we’ve published in the
> past two weeks, and note that there’s much more to come!
>
> June Wikimedia Foundation Metrics Meeting
> . During the meeting, the New
> Voices team members provided an overview of initial findings from ongoing
> research projects and affiliate-led salons and events. [3]
>
> Considering 2030: Misinformation, verification, and propaganda
> .
> The Foundation is working with independent research consultants to
> understand the key trends that will affect the future of free knowledge.
> This assessment is based on a review of more than one hundred reports,
> articles, and studies, and it includes a framework to discuss and monitor
> trends in misinformation. [4] Please join the conversation on meta or your
> local wiki in the next couple of days. [5]
>
> Discussions with experts on the evolving history of knowledge sharing
> . We
> summarized and published videos and transcripts [6] and outcomes [7] of
> three recent brown bag events with experts in social mobilization, emerging
> communities, and new readers.
>
> WikiWomenCamp 2017
> . At the
> second WikiWomenCamp in Mexico City, attendees discussed challenges and
> opportunities for women participation in the movement (the inaugural event
> was held in Argentina in 2002, and we’re thrilled to see its return). There
> are some excellent published photos [8] from the event to check out as well
> as a summary of the event on our blog [9].
>
> Bene habeas (Latin translation: “May it be well for you”)
>
> Katherine
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Cycle_2/Reach
>
> [2]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Updates/23_June_2017_-_Update_19_on_Wikimedia_movement_strategy_process
>
> [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6nIP4VFIi8
> [4]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/Considering_2030:_Misinformation,_verification,_and_propaganda_(July_2017)
>
> [5]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Participate
> [6]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_brown_bags_-_strategy_-_knowledge_sharing_-_2017
> [7] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/07/brown-bag-knowledge-sharing/
> [8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiWomenCamp_2017
> [9] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/14/wikiwomencamp-inclusivity/
>
> --
> Katherine Maher
>
> Wikimedia Foundation
> 149 New Montgomery Street
> San Francisco, CA 94105
>
> +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
> +1 (415) 712 4873
> kma...@wikimedia.org
> https://annual.wikimedia.org
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement of the Scoring Platform team

[James Salsman]

Rogol, you might want to look at the history of Aaron's talk pages and
e.g. on Jimbotalk and various places on meta. He's been incredibly
receptive to suggestions and ideas from the community, moreso than
perhaps any other Foundation employee.


On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 12:59 AM, Rogol Domedonfors
 wrote:
> Aaron,
>
> You write of "Democratizing access to AI."   But it seems that what you
> mean is publishing the results of your work more widely.  Do you have plan
> to democratize in the sense of involving a wider range of people in the
> decisions about how you work and what you work on – the wider Wikimedia
> Community, for example – and if so, how will you engage with that wider
> decision-making group?
>
> "Rogol"
>
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 7:42 PM, Aaron Halfaker 
> wrote:
>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> This is a little overdue, but I wanted to work with comms to craft a blog
>> post that would help us do a bit of outreach around the announcement of the
>> team.  That just went live.
>>
>> See https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/19/scoring-platform-team/
>>
>> -Aaron
>> Principal research scientist
>> Lead of the Scoring Platform team
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] August 1: Strategy update - Preparing for Wikimania, the strategic direction, and New voices insights (#22)

[James Salsman]

> what proportion of articles at NPP appear paid for?
> And what percentage of socks / sock cases relate to paid editing?

I would sure like to know this.

I would also like to whether the Foundation could, hypothetically,
hire editors to address the COIN and related backlogs (AFC, etc.)
without endangering the safe harbor provisions; and if not, could a
Chapter or User Group, if they were or were not using Foundation
funds. Could the Foundation spin off an organization to address the
issue separately as in WikiEd?


On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 8:51 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
> I find the slide
> 
> about whether or not people feel we are "free of advertising" interesting
> as we only got a 7.3 (with lower scores among younger readers).
>
> We unfortunately are not free of advertising. There is a large and appears
> to be growing industry that sells Wikipedia articles / ads, which are
> mostly created through large groups of sock accounts. They also are
> involved with adding SEO links.
>
> We are struggling to get a handle on this at the COI notice board
> ,
> which has seen over the last couple of days the listing of more than a
> hundred additional articles of concern, at SPI, and at WikiProject Spam.
>
> Would be useful to analysis just how significant this issue is, such as
> what proportion of articles at NPP appear paid for? And what percentage of
> socks / sock cases relate to paid editing?
>
> James
>
> On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Katherine Maher 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all  —
>>
>> Wikimania is coming, but before we get to Montreal, we are publishing many
>> more insights, reports, guides, and research from our work during cycle 3.
>> There's lots of good stuff and interesting insights (did you know Spain is
>> consistently one of the countries with the highest awareness about our
>> projects and community?), and I encourage you to take a look. Here are a
>> few new updates:
>>
>> *New voices synthesis report.*[1] Are you looking to better understand
>> New Voices projects? Start with this overview report — it summarizes our
>> work across many teams: insights from research, a summary of 58 expert
>> interviews, expert convenings hosted by the Foundation and affiliates,
>> design research findings, briefings on major trends that will impact the
>> community like misinformation and emerging platforms, further reading, and
>> (of course!) references.
>>
>> *July Wikimedia Foundation metrics meeting.*[2] During our July 27
>> meeting, we reviewed new research on brand insights about why people do
>> (and do not) read Wikipedia, research that focuses on high-awareness
>> countries as part of New Voices initiatives.
>>
>> *Strategic direction committee update.*[3] We are working to consider
>> what we have heard from the community and learned from research to identify
>> what we want to achieve as a movement by 2030. We will share our first
>> draft of the strategic direction with all of you in advance of Wikimania.
>> We’re looking forward to your thoughts on the talk page!
>>
>> *Wikimania movement strategy and events.*[4] Speaking of Wikimania, the
>> Foundation is preparing 6 sessions related to the strategy process in the
>> official program. We will also offer you a physical location for engaging
>> with the strategic direction: the Movement Strategy Space, open from
>> Thursday through Sunday. The Space will host different working sessions,
>> discussions, and the chance to re-energize for the coming weeks and months
>> (we have some special things in store!). The conference organizers are also
>> preparing a remote attendee plan with live video and content for the
>> conference overall, so you will be able to participate if you’re not able
>> to come to Montreal. Please note that online registration ended July 31;
>> after that you can register on-site starting August 8.[5]
>>
>> ভালো থাকবেন। (Bengali translation: “Stay well”)
>>
>> Katherine
>>
>> PS. A version of this message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.[6]
>>
>> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_
>> movement/2017/Sources/New_Voices_Synthesis_report_(July_2017)
>> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
>> metrics_and_activities_meetings
>> [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_
>> movement/2017/People/Drafting_Group
>> [4] https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2030
>> [5] https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration
>> [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_
>> movement/2017/Updates/23_June_2017_-_Update_19_on_Wikimedia_
>> movement_strategy_process
>>
>> --
>> Katherine Maher
>>
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> 149 New Montgomery Street
>> San Francisco, CA 94105
>>
>> +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885>
>> +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873>
>> kma...@wikimedia.org
>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France

[James Salsman]

Can Katherine Maher as Foundation Executive Director decide and
announce a new policy that the continuation of the WMFR Charter is
contingent on the September General Assembly agenda including
particular items which they may not otherwise be inclined to agendas,
please?



On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 6:33 PM, Devouard (gmail)  wrote:
> The current situation at Wikimedia France is ABSOLUTE NON SENSE
>
>
> After MONTHS spent trying to figure out what was going on, collecting data,
> finding witnesses, fighting fears of being sued...
> we succeeded to mobilize 25% of Wikimedia France members to vote to request
> a General Assembly. That was a challenge. It took us several weeks to
> achieve that.
>
>
> Now... the General Assembly is scheduled 9th of September. But per bylawys,
> the current board decides of the agenda of the meeting. Topics not on the
> agenda can not lead to any votes... Being generous (sarcasm on), the current
> board will open the floor for discussion AFTER the General Assembly. Which
> somehow defeats the whole process as the discussion should occur BEFORE the
> vote. Also, some of us would like some resolutions to be voted upon, such as
> request of a financial audit...
>
>
> According to our bylaws, discussion points and decisions propositions may be
> made by the members and will be added to the agenda IF at least 25% of the
> membership ask for them. And this should be approved one month before the
> actual assembly. Which is just in a few days...
>
>
> But to make things easier for us...
> * some members memberships requests and renewals were rejected, thus
> decreasing the number of potential voters. Of course, the memberships
> rejected were from opponents to the current board... who would have voted
> for the new agenda...
> * in the same time (2 weeks...), the membership increased from 275 to 300
> members. No idea who those 25 new members are. But increased number of
> members is making it even tougher to reach the 75 votes to request additions
> to the agenda.
> * the main mailing list of the association is still closed... which means we
> can NOT reach out to ALL members. We have no means to contact them. I
> managed to get a public list opened just a few days before the closure of
> the internal mailing list and to send a call for registration. So the most
> active members actually joined that public list and are within reach. But
> all the other members... the ones who did not reach to that new public
> list... we have NO MEANS to contact them.
> How are we supposed to get members to be given the chance to vote on an
> agenda when they do not KNOW about this agenda ? We can't tell them about
> it.
>
> How serious and honest from our current board is that ? This is beyond
> shameful behavior.
>
> So, friends, I would like to ask you help.
>
>
> If by any chance, you joined the association in the past 2 weeks... please
> vote.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimédia_France/Assemblée_générale/septembre_2017/Points_à_ajouter_à_l%27ordre_du_jour
>
>
> Please, do realy our call in your network.
>
> If you know anyone who might by chance be a member of Wikimedia France,
> please tell them about the vote. It is here :
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimédia_France/Assemblée_générale/septembre_2017/Points_à_ajouter_à_l%27ordre_du_jour
>
> Or RELAY in social networks. For example that tweet
> https://twitter.com/photos_floues/status/892731233784008704
>
> Or DROP A WORD to current board members and tell them about how wrong they
> behave by not giving a chance to democracy
> Something like "please inform all Wikimedia France members about the vote
> opened for the new agenda : "
>
> The current board members
> * Secretary : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EdouardHue
> * the President : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Authueil
> * the vice President : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisatrice:AlienSpoon
> * The treasurer : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Floflo
> * and the former president who is now regular member:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ShreCk
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Florence
>
>
>
> Le 02/08/2017 à 20:09, Pierre-Selim a écrit :
>>
>> The passing of Louise is really sad :(
>>
>> On the other fronts, Edouard it feels like you're not telling things the
>> way
>> they really are.
>>
>> "The board acknowledge..." means the board has been forced to a new AGM by
>> 25%
>> of the member. Our bylaws dictate that.
>>
>> The board has published a shameful "Right of reply" [1], full of
>> inexact/false
>> statements that are on the same line than the email sent by the board
>> on July 11th (and shared here by Chris [2]).
>> This Right of reply even "use" Louise passing ... For shame!
>>
>> In an uncollaborative way, the board has not listen to the
>> community/member
>> for
>> the agenda which forces the members to a new vote [3] to add items to the
>> agenda
>> ... during the summer ... and Wikimania.
>>
>> I hope the board will have again to "Acknowlege" 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France

[James Salsman]

Peter, in this situation I think it is completely appropriate and
preferable for the Foundation Director to make the continued existence
of the Chapter contingent on their agendizing the specific questions
of audit, transparency, and recall in the General Assembly which the
members who have called the assembly are trying to call, especially
since there are suddenly so many new members and the Chapter
leadership has deliberately censored the only means for the membership
to communicate with each other.

Frankly, I think removing the restriction and moderation on the
chapter mailing list is the very first thing that the Foundation
should require of the Chapter at this point. The choice is apparently
between a few people getting more email than they want and complete
dysfunctional takeover.

Ting, can you please say how that, "can open a door to do a lot of
harm to the movement"?

Sincerely,
Jim


On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 9:36 PM, Peter Southwood
 wrote:
> Are you requesting her to do this, or asking if she has the 
> rights/power/authority to do this?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf 
> Of James Salsman
> Sent: Thursday, August 3, 2017 1:11 PM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List; Katherine Maher
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France
>
> Can Katherine Maher as Foundation Executive Director decide and announce a 
> new policy that the continuation of the WMFR Charter is contingent on the 
> September General Assembly agenda including particular items which they may 
> not otherwise be inclined to agendas, please?
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 6:33 PM, Devouard (gmail)  wrote:
>> The current situation at Wikimedia France is ABSOLUTE NON SENSE
>>
>>
>> After MONTHS spent trying to figure out what was going on, collecting
>> data, finding witnesses, fighting fears of being sued...
>> we succeeded to mobilize 25% of Wikimedia France members to vote to
>> request a General Assembly. That was a challenge. It took us several
>> weeks to achieve that.
>>
>>
>> Now... the General Assembly is scheduled 9th of September. But per
>> bylawys, the current board decides of the agenda of the meeting.
>> Topics not on the agenda can not lead to any votes... Being generous
>> (sarcasm on), the current board will open the floor for discussion
>> AFTER the General Assembly. Which somehow defeats the whole process as
>> the discussion should occur BEFORE the vote. Also, some of us would
>> like some resolutions to be voted upon, such as request of a financial 
>> audit...
>>
>>
>> According to our bylaws, discussion points and decisions propositions
>> may be made by the members and will be added to the agenda IF at least
>> 25% of the membership ask for them. And this should be approved one
>> month before the actual assembly. Which is just in a few days...
>>
>>
>> But to make things easier for us...
>> * some members memberships requests and renewals were rejected, thus
>> decreasing the number of potential voters. Of course, the memberships
>> rejected were from opponents to the current board... who would have
>> voted for the new agenda...
>> * in the same time (2 weeks...), the membership increased from 275 to
>> 300 members. No idea who those 25 new members are. But increased
>> number of members is making it even tougher to reach the 75 votes to
>> request additions to the agenda.
>> * the main mailing list of the association is still closed... which
>> means we can NOT reach out to ALL members. We have no means to contact
>> them. I managed to get a public list opened just a few days before the
>> closure of the internal mailing list and to send a call for
>> registration. So the most active members actually joined that public
>> list and are within reach. But all the other members... the ones who
>> did not reach to that new public list... we have NO MEANS to contact them.
>> How are we supposed to get members to be given the chance to vote on
>> an agenda when they do not KNOW about this agenda ? We can't tell them
>> about it.
>>
>> How serious and honest from our current board is that ? This is beyond
>> shameful behavior.
>>
>> So, friends, I would like to ask you help.
>>
>>
>> If by any chance, you joined the association in the past 2 weeks...
>> please vote.
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimédia_France/Assemblée_générale/se
>> ptembre_2017/Points_à_ajouter_à_l%27ordre_du_jour
>>
>>
>> Please, do realy our call in your network.
>>
>> If you know anyone who might by ch

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France

[James Salsman]

As a general question, Pine, what do you think is the optimal amount
of time that the Foundation should allow a chapter agreement to
persist when, as in this case, allegations of financial impropriety
and use of the trademarks to  enrich chapter officials' side projects
are followed by removal of access to the chapter mailing list and
refusal to agendize an audit and recall?

Do we have a healthier movement if the Foundation signals, by lack of
action, that they will tolerate such conditions  and require the
ordinary membership to do so much extra legwork to organize the muted
membership?

Would requiring the ordinary membership to form an alternative
organization in order to address this issue encourage other chapters'
officials to use the trademarks for their personal benefit, too?


On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Pine W  wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> A matter of concern is that WMF is far from having an exemplary record of
> good governance and transparency. It's problematic for WMF to be pointing
> fingers at other organizations and telling them to improve their governance.
>
> On the other hand, based on my limited understanding of the facts, it seems
> to me that the situation with WMFR shouldn't be allowed to continue
> indefinitely. Pulling the chapter agreement should be an option, although I
> would prefer that that option be exercised by someone other than the WMF
> staff and/or WMF Board. I don't think that the Affiliations Committee would
> be a good option either, at least not with its present form, since it is an
> advisory committee to the WMF Board and it relies on a charter from the WMF
> Board for its authority, which means that the Affiliations Committee could
> be easily manipulated by the WMF Board and in any case a decision from the
> Affiliations Committee would need the approval of the WMF Board.
>
> I think that most people would prefer that the existing WMFR organization
> be returned to good health, but if that doesn't happen in a timely manner,
> then there are a lot of difficult choices to be made, unfortunately.
>
> Pine
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 6:20 PM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
>> Peter, in this situation I think it is completely appropriate and
>> preferable for the Foundation Director to make the continued existence
>> of the Chapter contingent on their agendizing the specific questions
>> of audit, transparency, and recall in the General Assembly which the
>> members who have called the assembly are trying to call, especially
>> since there are suddenly so many new members and the Chapter
>> leadership has deliberately censored the only means for the membership
>> to communicate with each other.
>>
>> Frankly, I think removing the restriction and moderation on the
>> chapter mailing list is the very first thing that the Foundation
>> should require of the Chapter at this point. The choice is apparently
>> between a few people getting more email than they want and complete
>> dysfunctional takeover.
>>
>> Ting, can you please say how that, "can open a door to do a lot of
>> harm to the movement"?
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Jim
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 9:36 PM, Peter Southwood
>>  wrote:
>> > Are you requesting her to do this, or asking if she has the
>> rights/power/authority to do this?
>> > Cheers,
>> > Peter
>> >
>> > -Original Message-
>> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
>> Behalf Of James Salsman
>> > Sent: Thursday, August 3, 2017 1:11 PM
>> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List; Katherine Maher
>> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France
>> >
>> > Can Katherine Maher as Foundation Executive Director decide and announce
>> a new policy that the continuation of the WMFR Charter is contingent on the
>> September General Assembly agenda including particular items which they may
>> not otherwise be inclined to agendas, please?
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 6:33 PM, Devouard (gmail) 
>> wrote:
>> >> The current situation at Wikimedia France is ABSOLUTE NON SENSE
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> After MONTHS spent trying to figure out what was going on, collecting
>> >> data, finding witnesses, fighting fears of being sued...
>> >> we succeeded to mobilize 25% of Wikimedia France members to vote to
>> >> request a General Assembly. That was a challenge. It took us several
>> >> weeks to achieve that.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Now... the General Assembly is scheduled 9th of 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update on Wikimédia France

[James Salsman]

Rogol,

What content protected by safe harbor provisions would the Foundation
be exerting editorial control over by requiring governance standards
of a Chapter?

Is there some French law that requires charities to be more
independent of their international affiliates than would be under such
a requirement?

The chapter agreements already contemplate this sort of control,
because they state, "The Chapter agrees ... to refrain from ...
engaging in any activity that might negatively impact the work or
image of the Wikimedia Foundation," and are revocable upon three
months notice.


On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 2:38 PM, Rogol Domedonfors  wrote:
> If the Foundation is seen to be directing the activities of a chapter at
> the proposed level of micro-management then it would jeopardise the legal
> status both of the Foundation (in terms of their safe harbour status) and
> of the chapter (as an independent and charitable body).  The Foundation is
> free to fund or not fund, to recognise or derecognise.  But not to control.
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] August 1: Strategy update - Preparing for Wikimania, the strategic direction, and New voices insights (#22)

[James Salsman]

On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 5:04 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
> IMO we need to work on the issue of undisclosed paid editing from a number
> of different sides:
>
> 1) We need to get the word out to the wider world that paying someone to
> write your Wikipedia article is inappropriate. We also need to publicly
> state which companies have been banned / blocked from editing Wikipedia for
> breach of our policies. This will hopefully direct people away from these
> companies if they search for a company to hire.

How effective can this possibly be? That companies hire paid Wikipedia
editors is old news and what would have been huge scandals about it
ten years ago don't make headlines today. Setting up a name-and-shame
system would simply lead to an arms race with paid editors offering
premiums for stealth measures. That can't be what anyone wants.

> 2) We need to improve detection. Part of this may include running more CUs
> when concerns are present, AI to pick up the pattern of paid editing /
> spamming, and creating a group of functionaries to address private details
> pertaining to UPE. Improving CU tools would also be useful.

This is another arms race that we can't win. VMs make even the most
sophisticated fingerprinting easily avoidable, and paid editors
already use per-account port forwarding to bespoke proxies on
residential ISP customers. As a machine learning task, I do not
believe this is feasible.

Are you opposed to the idea of a separate organization to address paid
advocacy for any particular reason?


> James
>
> On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 2:03 PM, Pine W  wrote:
>
>> Hi Rogol,
>>
>> Here are a few thoughts:
>>
>> 1. I tend to think that WMF would need to worry about its legal protections
>> if WMF provided grants for content work. I am wondering if there is a way
>> to work around that difficulty by having a separate organization do the
>> fundraising.
>>
>> 2. A separate organization that raises funds could not only address COIN
>> but could provide financial support for other areas of community work that
>> WMF won't fund, such as other kinds of administrative work, and potentially
>> content development and translation.
>>
>> 3. However, I'm not sure that a new organization's funding and governance
>> could be made solid, reliable, and trustworthy. That's a difficult design
>> challenge.
>>
>> I'd be interested in thoughts from Doc James and others about how to scale
>> up English Wikipedia's capacity to address COI issues.
>>
>> A lot of problems would be solved if we could significantly increase our
>> numbers of highly skilled, good-faith Wikimedians. I believe that WMF is
>> starting to work on this problem again; I'd like to be optimistic but I
>> think that we should also plan for the possibility that these efforts will
>> be unsuccessful.
>>
>> Pine
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Rogol Domedonfors 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Pine
>> >
>> > If the objects of the affiliate are compatible with those of the
>> > Foundation, then you could ask for a grant.  If they are not, why would
>> the
>> > Foundation even consider letting you raise funds on their sites.
>> >
>> > "Rogol"
>> >
>> > On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 10:12 PM, Pine W  wrote:
>> >
>> > > I wonder if WMF would be willing to let a non-WMF affiliate put up
>> > > fundraising (which I consider to be another form of advertising, and
>> > > perhaps some survey respondents did too) banners to get funds for COIN
>> > and
>> > > related backlogs. Perhaps if the fundraising was done by a separate
>> > > organization, then these efforts could be funded while minimizing the
>> > risks
>> > > to WMF's legal protections.
>> > >
>> > > Pine
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 2:20 AM, James Salsman 
>> > wrote:
>> > >
>> > > > > what proportion of articles at NPP appear paid for?
>> > > > > And what percentage of socks / sock cases relate to paid editing?
>> > > >
>> > > > I would sure like to know this.
>> > > >
>> > > > I would also like to whether the Foundation could, hypothetically,
>> > > > hire editors to address the COIN and related backlogs (AFC, etc.)
>> > > > without endangering the safe harbor provisions; and if not, could a
>> > > > Chapter or User Group, if they were or were not using Foundation
>> > > > fun

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [African Wikimedians] What's making you happy this week? (Week of 16 August 2017)

[James Salsman]

Hi Felix, I was very happy when I saw you announced as the Wikipedian
of the Year. I think you are a great choice.

This week I am also happy that Foundation staff are increasing their
engagement with the community.

Last week I was happy that the automatic speech recognition for
pronunciation assessment project can now predict intelligibility with
greater than 97% agreement with Amazon Mechanical Turkers, for both
words and phrases, and I'm still thrilled about that. I hope we can
convince the Wiktionary projects to adopt for intelligibility
remediation. I hope if a bunch of different developers customize the
javascript for it, then the Wiktionary community will probably like at
least one.

Also I am happy that Doc James is back on the Foundation board.

Best regards,
Jim

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 1:35 AM, Felix Nartey  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am excited for being awarded the Wikipedian of the year!
>
> The amazing Wikimania video from South Africa tells me the wiki world will
> be blown by what Africa has to offer in 2018. More grease to your elbow,
> organizers of Wikimania 2018!
>
> I am also very delighted about the response of the L2K and the ripple
> effect of the L2K in the movement.
>
> Cheers,
>
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 3:05 PM, Isaac Olatunde 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am happy this week because a Wikimedian from Africa, Felix Nartey was
>> named Wikipedian of the Year 2017 in Montreal.
>>
>> What's making you happy this week?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Isaac
>>
>> ___
>> African-Wikimedians mailing list
>> african-wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/african-wikimedians
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> *Felix Nartey*
> *Cofounder/Director Finance & Admin*
> *Open Foundation West Africa *
> *+233242844987 | +447440959477*
> *Skype:Flixtey*
> ___
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> 

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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Publicpolicy] We need your vote for our panel for SXSW 2018!

[James Salsman]

Forwarding this message from publicpolicy list which could benefit
from a larger audience:


-- Forwarded message --
From: Jan Gerlach 
Date: Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:09 AM
Subject: [Publicpolicy] We need your vote for our panel for SXSW 2018!
To: Publicpolicy Group for Wikimedia 


Hello everybody

Some of you may know SXSW ("South-By-Southwest"), an annual
tech/music/film festival in Austin, TX. For next year's event, held in
March 2018, we have submitted a proposal for a panel that will discuss
a worrying trend: countries increasingly enforce their national laws
globally to take down content from the internet.

We believe that this trend causes harm to the internet and access to
knowledge. (See our blog posts about this problem in the context of a
case in Canada and another one in France.) The panel will address how
countries that enforce their national laws globally online threaten to
break the internet into pieces and hurt fundamental rights. We're very
happy to have secured the participation of three fantastic speakers:

Nani Jansen Reventlow (a Dutch freedom of expression litigator)
Malavika Jayaram (a privacy researcher and the Executive Director of
the Digital Asia Hub)
Carlos Affonso Souza (Director of the Institute for Technology and Society, Rio)

Now, before the proposal is considered for the official program, it
has to go through a voting process. Everybody can vote (after creating
an account on the SXSW website):
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/70062

We need your help to get as many votes as possible. Please vote for
our panel, help spread the word, share with your friends and networks.

THANK YOU!

Best,
Jan

==



Jan Gerlach
Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
jgerl...@wikimedia.org

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] RFC on wikimedia-l posting limits

[James Salsman]

Why are we having this RFC prior to the survey which was discussed at
length less than a year ago?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:James_Salsman#Periodic_survey_prototype

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 1:05 AM, Robert Fernandez
 wrote:
> Since Rogol has followed through on his threat he should be banned from the
> list, or we should have a public statement from the moderators regarding
> why they will not do so.
>
> I can't imagine many actions that would have a more chilling effect on
> participation here than one of this list's most frequent posters contacting
> your employer because he disagrees with what you have to say.
>
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 7:57 AM, Joseph Seddon 
> wrote:
>
>> Since you kindly emailed my line manage Rogol, I wanted to confirm that my
>> choice of words were very carefully chosen.
>>
>> And I stand by them.
>>
>> Seddon
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:25 PM, Rogol Domedonfors 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Joseph
>> >
>> > I chose my wording quite carefully, and suggest that you do so too.  I
>> said
>> > that the proposal "involves", not "is equal to" real-life identity  To
>> the
>> > extent that real-life identities are involved, it is reasonable to ask
>> how
>> > that personal information is going to be handled.  For some reason, you
>> > seem keen to derail that part of the discussion by elevating a quibble
>> over
>> > your hasty misunderstanding of my wording into an accusation, which I
>> > reject, of generalised misconduct.  If you have some comment to make
>> about
>> > the handling of personal information, please do so.
>> >
>> > May I suggest that you withdraw your original posting, apologise to the
>> > membership of this list for the unconstructive nature of your posting,
>> and
>> > to me for its aggressive, insulting and incorrect content.
>> Alternatively,
>> > perhaps you would prefer me to ask your line manager whether this is the
>> > sort of behaviour that she expects you to exhibit in a public forum.
>> >
>> > Reginald
>> >
>> > On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Joseph Seddon 
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > Real identity does not equal real-life identity. You can mask your
>> > > pseudonymous identity and pose as a third party similarly pseudonymous
>> > > individual.
>> > >
>> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)
>> > >
>> > > Seddon
>> > > ___
>> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
>> > > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
>> > > wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > > 
>> > >
>> > ___
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>> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
>> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > 
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Seddon
>>
>> *Advancement Associate (Community Engagement)*
>> *Wikimedia Foundation*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Funding the endowment

[James Salsman]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 1:38 AM, Lisa Gruwell  wrote:
>... regarding the Endowment:
>
> 1) I met with Lukas at Wikimania regarding SRI and the endowment.  As James
> indicated, the endowment is invested through the Tides Foundation and this
> is one of the areas of expertise.  We have been looking at environmental,
> social, and governance (ESG) ratings as well as how funds perform against
> the benchmarks financially.  We are going to be publishing more information
> about this soon.

I am very much looking forward to that. I hope the recommendations
will be congruent with https://imgur.com/a/Op5UT

When I look at 
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/what-you-need-to-know-about-ethical-investment/
I am not always inspired that the managers' goals are to maximize
years of productive life.

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[Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week: meta:Training modules/Documentation

[James Salsman]

While it was very hard to click through the link on the slides in the
Metrics and Activities meeting video :-) this is truly awesome:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Training_modules/Documentation

Props to the Support and Safety team and Joe Sutherland in particular!

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How can we fix the two-stage page loading problem?

[James Salsman]

Can't we render each gadget in a Foundation-controlled  with a
height taller than the gadget ever typically flows to?



On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 12:00 AM, Krinkle  wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> Unexpected page jumps are never fun. They tend to be known as a "reflow" or
> FOUC [1], and are common all over the web at different times.
>
> Unfortunately, while there may be multiple gadgets / features exhibiting
> this undesired behaviour, it is not a general problem or limitation. As
> such, at the infrastructure level, no amount resourcing can make this class
> of bugs go away.
>
> In a nutshell, there are two primary ways to modify the page of a web site:
>
> * Styling rules (CSS): A declarative way to define rules for how certain
> page elements should look. (E.g. any "header" should be "blue".)
> * JavaScript programming (JS): A way to provide and execute any arbitrary
> program code. Including the ability to create new elements, create
> interactions, and even build entirely new applications.
>
> The styling rules are declarative and can be loaded and applied by the web
> browser before any content is shown. They apply continuously and
> retroactively. As such, most websites (including MediaWiki) do made the
> decision that it is worth delaying the initial show of article content by
> first loading all style rules (including those from Gadgets). That way, the
> initial show will consider all style rules from the start. (Instead of
> starting with unstyled plain text from the top left corner, and
> progressively applying each style as we go).
>
> The program code, on the other hand, is by design mostly asynchronous and
> cannot happen "instantaneously" (much like downloading something, or
> starting an application, or performing a computationally involved action).
> The program itself is in control of how and what it shows visually. It is
> in charge of whether to show individual pieces directly as they complete,
> or to insert everything at once after everything is complete. That is up to
> individual programs to decide.
>
> For developers, it is best practice to never insert or modify visual
> elements on the page from program code, unless their layout space is
> reserved ahead of time from HTML or CSS - precisely to avoid reflows. To my
> knowledge, there are no reflows on regular article views caused by
> MediaWiki core, nor any of the Wikimedia-maintained extensions (with the
> notable exception of certain CentralNotice banners, tracked as [2]).
>
> Some experimental Beta Features may have shipped in the past with a reflow
> bug, but these can (and for the most part, have) been addressed.
>
> That leaves Gadgets, and in that context, this is mostly limited by
> volunteer resourcing and program quality. Finding the right balance between
> style rules and program code is not always easy. It is typically easier to
> write program code without style rules. And as such, some users do it
> without. I've been in that situation myself as volunteer developer. With
> limited time, I can either spend time making the actual feature work better
> after you click it, or spend time avoiding a reflow. With more time,
> eventually things improve. But this is a bug for individual features or
> gadgets to address. There is not much we can do about it at the
> infrastructure level. When the style rules aren't there, they aren't there.
> And when a program later adds an element to the page, you'll want the web
> browser to show that in the same way as if it was there all along - which
> means other content essentially moves or jumps out of the way.
>
> For common use cases (like adding sidebar links or tabs), it may be
> possible to establish conventions that are easy to re-use so that people
> don't have to spend as much time thinking up new style rules. But overall,
> each use case will require its own style rule one way or another.
>
> -- Krinkle
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content
> [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52865 - CentralNotice: Page content
> shifts
>
> Michael Peel wrote:
>>
>> This is possibly the most annoying feature of the Wikimedia projects at
> the moment. You access a page. Then you start reading or editing it. And
> then suddenly the page jumps when a fundraising banner / central notice /
> gadget / beta feature loads. So you have to start reading the page again,
> or you have to find where you were editing again, or you have to undo the
> change you just made since you made it in the wrong part of the page.
>> I understand that this isn't intentional. Presumably there is a
> phabricator ticket about this. But how can we fix this - does this need
> more developer time, is this an external problem that we need someone else
> to fix, or is this a WONTFIX?
>> Thanks,
>> Mike
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC

[James Salsman]

Wow, first there was solid evidence that tourism is causally
influenced by Wikipedia, and now science. The English Wikipedia's
Economics article still says "Tax cuts [boost] aggregate demand."
Isn't it time that potentially harmful biases in economics articles
are tempered as carefully as those in medical articles?

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:53 AM, Sarah R  wrote:
>
> The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, September
> 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
>
> YouTube stream:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk
>
> As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
> you can watch our past research showcases here
> .
>
>...
>
> Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial
> By Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley
>
> As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it
> is not surprising that Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific
> knowledge. However, Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in
> the world, including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the
> potential to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating
> ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the
> scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways:
> correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally
> through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content to
> Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational relationship is
> causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping effect on science. Our
> findings speak not only to the influence of Wikipedia, but more broadly to
> the influence of repositories of scientific knowledge. The results suggest
> that increased provision of information in accessible repositories is a
> very cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains
> are equity-improving, disproportionately benefitting those without

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC

[James Salsman]

That example is only the most visible tip of the iceberg. Now that
there is evidence of multiple causal influences from Wikipedia's text
to real life consequences, I repeat my suggestion that the Foundation
should help editors organize a more careful and concerted effort
towards authentic neutrality in economics and political economics
articles which are likely to influence fiscal policies, just like it
helps support the Medical and Women's user group affiliates today. I
have no illusions that if I were part of such a formal effort it would
be less successful than if it were composed entirely of Enwiki editors
in good standing, and I will not be correcting the specific mistake in
the Economics because I want to know how long it will stand,
especially now that good alternatives have been proposed on its talk
page (for several months!) There are plenty of others very much like
it in other articles.


On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:14 PM, Peter Southwood
 wrote:
> So fix it,
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf 
> Of James Salsman
> Sent: Tuesday, 19 September 2017 2:53 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 
> 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC
>
> Wow, first there was solid evidence that tourism is causally influenced by 
> Wikipedia, and now science. The English Wikipedia's Economics article still 
> says "Tax cuts [boost] aggregate demand."
> Isn't it time that potentially harmful biases in economics articles are 
> tempered as carefully as those in medical articles?
>
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:53 AM, Sarah R  wrote:
>>
>> The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday,
>> September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
>>
>> YouTube stream:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk
>>
>> As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research.
>> And, you can watch our past research showcases here
>> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#September_2017>.
>>
>>...
>>
>> Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control
>> Trial By Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley
>>
>> As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it is not surprising that
>> Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge. However,
>> Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in the world,
>> including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the potential
>> to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating ideas
>> into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the
>> scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways:
>> correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally
>> through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content
>> to Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational
>> relationship is causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping
>> effect on science. Our findings speak not only to the influence of
>> Wikipedia, but more broadly to the influence of repositories of
>> scientific knowledge. The results suggest that increased provision of
>> information in accessible repositories is a very cost-effective way to
>> advance science. We also find that such gains are equity-improving,
>> disproportionately benefitting those without
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC

[James Salsman]

The paper is at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505

From page 35: "even with many conservative assumptions, dissemination
through Wikipedia is ~1700x more cost-effective than traditional
dissemination techniques"


On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 11:39 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> To clarify, WPMEDF has self organized without direct WMF involvement. While
> we are a member of the WM movement and support has been provided for a
> couple of members to attend WMCON, we has never applied for or received
> specific funding from the WM movement.
>
> Individuals, associated with WPMEDF, have applied for and received
> individual engagement grants. In other words all these opportunities are
> avaliable from the movement for those interested in improving Wikipedia's
> economics coverage.
>
> Best
> James
>
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:29 AM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
>> That example is only the most visible tip of the iceberg. Now that
>> there is evidence of multiple causal influences from Wikipedia's text
>> to real life consequences, I repeat my suggestion that the Foundation
>> should help editors organize a more careful and concerted effort
>> towards authentic neutrality in economics and political economics
>> articles which are likely to influence fiscal policies, just like it
>> helps support the Medical and Women's user group affiliates today. I
>> have no illusions that if I were part of such a formal effort it would
>> be less successful than if it were composed entirely of Enwiki editors
>> in good standing, and I will not be correcting the specific mistake in
>> the Economics because I want to know how long it will stand,
>> especially now that good alternatives have been proposed on its talk
>> page (for several months!) There are plenty of others very much like
>> it in other articles.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:14 PM, Peter Southwood
>>  wrote:
>> > So fix it,
>> > Cheers,
>> > Peter
>> >
>> > -Original Message-
>> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
>> Behalf Of James Salsman
>> > Sent: Tuesday, 19 September 2017 2:53 AM
>> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
>> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Research Showcase Wednesday, September 20,
>> 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC
>> >
>> > Wow, first there was solid evidence that tourism is causally influenced
>> by Wikipedia, and now science. The English Wikipedia's Economics article
>> still says "Tax cuts [boost] aggregate demand."
>> > Isn't it time that potentially harmful biases in economics articles are
>> tempered as carefully as those in medical articles?
>> >
>> > On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:53 AM, Sarah R  wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday,
>> >> September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
>> >>
>> >> YouTube stream:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk
>> >>
>> >> As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research.
>> >> And, you can watch our past research showcases here
>> >> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/
>> Showcase#September_2017>.
>> >>
>> >>...
>> >>
>> >> Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control
>> >> Trial By Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley
>> >>
>> >> As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it is not surprising that
>> >> Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge. However,
>> >> Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in the world,
>> >> including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the potential
>> >> to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating ideas
>> >> into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the
>> >> scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways:
>> >> correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally
>> >> through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content
>> >> to Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational
>> >> relationship is causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping
>> >> effect on science. Our findings speak not only to the influence of
>> >> Wikipedia, but more broadly to the influence of repositories of
>> >> scientific knowledge. The results suggest that increased provision 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia

[James Salsman]

Jean-Philippe, yes, absolutely:

http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/how-well-represented-is-the-mena-region-in-wikipedia/

As biases go, omitting notable subjects in the global south doesn't
have the deleterious real-world consequences that reenforcing
erroneous economic hegemony does.


On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 7:30 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland
 wrote:
> Good day,
>
> This is not related to gender bias, but an observation I made from reading
> this paper. Table 1 shows the different percentage of overlap between
> different languistic versions of Wikipedia with the English Wikipedia. Do
> anybody know if there are studies or reports focussed on that?
>
> For example, I notice that the Wikipedia with the less overlap from the
> above-mentioned table is the Arabic Wikipedia. To me, it seems to indicate
> another sort of bias on the English Wikipedia and other "Western" language
> Wikipedias in not necessarily including biographies from those parts of the
> world. Or maybe there is another "glass ceiling" not based on gender,
> meaning that somebody from the Middle East for instance needs to be more
> notable in average to be included on the English Wikipedia comparatively of
> somebody in North America or Europe. Do we have any analysis of that? Is
> that a question that is brought up in reflexions about bias?
>
> Thank you,
>
> JP
>
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 3:55 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> The article was discussing the proportion of articles about specific
>> gender and possible reasons why this situation exists. What I
>> mentioned was simply one among many potential explanation.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Eduardo Testart 
>> wrote:
>> > Hi again,
>> >
>> > I think the article is not related to paid editing, if you wish to
>> discuss
>> > that subject, you should probably open another thread.
>> >
>> > It would be nice if the discussion and comments can be kept on topic :)
>> >
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> >
>> > El sept. 22, 2017 3:49 PM, "James Heilman"  escribió:
>> >
>> > How do we know? Those who work extensively in this topic area and are
>> > good at picking up paid editing make an educated guess. There are well
>> > known patterns that represent paid editing. We could likely build a
>> > tool that could look at all BLPs and give a numerical value to the
>> > percentage that are most likely written for pay. If you look at a
>> > random group of new BLPs at WP:NPP you will also get a decent idea.
>> >
>> > James
>> >
>> > On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 12:22 PM, Andy Mabbett
>> >  wrote:
>> >> On 22 September 2017 at 18:24, James Heilman  wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> We know that a sizable proportion of articles
>> >>> about people are paid for by the individual themselves or their
>> >>> representative.
>> >>
>> >> We do? How? And what size is that "sizable proportion"?
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Andy Mabbett
>> >> @pigsonthewing
>> >> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>> >>
>> >> ___
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>> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > 
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > James Heilman
>> > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>> >
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>>
>>
>> --
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>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
>
> [image: Wikimedia Canada] Vice-président — Wikimédia Canada
> , chapitre national
> soutenant Wikipédia
> Vice president — Wikimedia Canada
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia

[James Salsman]

For example, whether or not a notable town in in the global south, for
instance, has an article is unlikely to affect the quality of life of
its residents as much as whether infrastructure businesses in that
town have access to credit. If global finance policy makers believe
the typical positions of English Wikipedia economics articles, instead
of the WP:MEDRS grade sources on the topic which are not well
represented in Wikipedia, such as http://talknicer.com/ehip.pdf or
http://talknicer.com/egma.pdf for example, that can do real harm to
the likelihood that the global financial system will as readily extend
inexpensive credit to the developing world.

As we get more and more information about the causation from Wikipedia
to real world decisions, I hope that there is some concerted effort to
address this specific issue.



On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 2:31 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland
 wrote:
> "As biases go, omitting notable subjects in the global south doesn't
> have the deleterious real-world consequences that reenforcing
> erroneous economic hegemony does."
>
> How so? I don't want to go into politics topics, but with what we see
> recently we clearly see the danger of thinking "less" of those cultures of
> people...
>
> JP
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 3:31 PM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
>> Jean-Philippe, yes, absolutely:
>>
>> http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/how-well-represented-
>> is-the-mena-region-in-wikipedia/
>>
>> As biases go, omitting notable subjects in the global south doesn't
>> have the deleterious real-world consequences that reenforcing
>> erroneous economic hegemony does.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 7:30 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland
>>  wrote:
>> > Good day,
>> >
>> > This is not related to gender bias, but an observation I made from
>> reading
>> > this paper. Table 1 shows the different percentage of overlap between
>> > different languistic versions of Wikipedia with the English Wikipedia. Do
>> > anybody know if there are studies or reports focussed on that?
>> >
>> > For example, I notice that the Wikipedia with the less overlap from the
>> > above-mentioned table is the Arabic Wikipedia. To me, it seems to
>> indicate
>> > another sort of bias on the English Wikipedia and other "Western"
>> language
>> > Wikipedias in not necessarily including biographies from those parts of
>> the
>> > world. Or maybe there is another "glass ceiling" not based on gender,
>> > meaning that somebody from the Middle East for instance needs to be more
>> > notable in average to be included on the English Wikipedia comparatively
>> of
>> > somebody in North America or Europe. Do we have any analysis of that? Is
>> > that a question that is brought up in reflexions about bias?
>> >
>> > Thank you,
>> >
>> > JP
>> >
>> > On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 3:55 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
>> >
>> >> The article was discussing the proportion of articles about specific
>> >> gender and possible reasons why this situation exists. What I
>> >> mentioned was simply one among many potential explanation.
>> >>
>> >> James
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Eduardo Testart 
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > Hi again,
>> >> >
>> >> > I think the article is not related to paid editing, if you wish to
>> >> discuss
>> >> > that subject, you should probably open another thread.
>> >> >
>> >> > It would be nice if the discussion and comments can be kept on topic
>> :)
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > Cheers,
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > El sept. 22, 2017 3:49 PM, "James Heilman" 
>> escribió:
>> >> >
>> >> > How do we know? Those who work extensively in this topic area and are
>> >> > good at picking up paid editing make an educated guess. There are well
>> >> > known patterns that represent paid editing. We could likely build a
>> >> > tool that could look at all BLPs and give a numerical value to the
>> >> > percentage that are most likely written for pay. If you look at a
>> >> > random group of new BLPs at WP:NPP you will also get a decent idea.
>> >> >
>> >> > James
>> >> >
>> >> > On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 12:22 PM, Andy Mabbett
>> >> >  wrote:
>> >> >> On

[Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week: the offline app

[James Salsman]

I'm skeptical that the online mobile apps are a good use of resources,
with their very meager usage, especially relative to the several
engineers tasked to support them, their questionable accessibility
aspects, declining app store ratings, and other issues involving
content substitution which have recently come up on this list, not to
mention breaking the cross-platform nature of the web. I note that
it's currently impossible to find online mobile app usage statistics
on the analytics we pages, dashboard or reportcard, where they last
measured 0.0006% of pageviews in 2015:

https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportUserAgents.htm

However, I wholeheartedly support this new offline app project, and
hope that it will be the primary focus of the Foundation's app-not-web
efforts going forward:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESP20HGPiE

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_support

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_support/V1_User_research

Huge thanks to whomever directed this pivot!

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week: the offline app

[James Salsman]

Yes, mobile app page views are much closer to 1.5% than 0.0006%, my
mistake, I used the WAP row with 116,000 page views in 2015 instead of
the 784,000,000 pageviews of the mobile app.

I caught the error after pressing "Send", but I decided that it didn't
need to be corrected, given that the Strategic Direction document
still says, "in the next 15 years, the languages that will be the most
spoken are primarily those that currently lack good content and strong
Wikimedia communities," citing a table which predicts the most widely
spoken languages in 2050, which in turn cites a report which says
nothing about 2050, but does say, "Mandarin is the most spoken
language globally."

Mandarin is not the most widely spoken language:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/1510B15-languages-most-speakers-english-chinese-chart.png

And it's growing much more slowly than English is:
https://revolutioninlearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/14j3i4hyjvi88-0p0ofe-english-speakers-learners-1.jpg

I would have corrected the error promptly if there was evidence that
respect for the truth was more highly regarded.


On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:04 AM, Legoktm  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Nuria Ruiz  wrote:
>> You have data about app pageviews in several places, the most popular tool
>> to see that kind of data has numbers, for example app pageviews
>> for en.wikipedia.
>>
>> The notion of what is an app pageview fluctuates more than what is a web
>> pageview, but numbers are quite far away from being less than 1%
>>
>> https://tools.wmflabs.org/siteviews/?platform=mobile-app&source=pageviews&agent=user&range=latest-20&sites=en.wikipedia.org
>
> Using the tool you linked, I selected "All projects", and then divided
> the number of mobile app views by the total views to get: around 1.5%.
> Is that figure accurate for the amount of page views coming from
> mobile apps?
>
> -- Legoktm
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week: the offline app

[James Salsman]

Good point. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box made me
even happier, and getting to explain to wikipedians-since-2003 in
person that the work they have done is literally equivalent to
thousands of years working on traditional academic literature made me
happier still.

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 7:35 PM, Lodewijk  wrote:
> Hey James,
>
> I'm glad to see that something made you happy this week.
>
> I'd like to note that the whole idea of 'what made me happy this week' is
> to also have some positive conversations about things that excite us. Which
> kind of becomes moot when you start the message with complaints of what you
> don't like (which then takes over the whole message).
>
> I hope you can next time focus on the positive component, and restrain
> yourself from sharing all the things you don't like - at least from threads
> that start with "what made me happy this week" :)
>
> Thank you,
> Lodewijk
>
> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 2:45 AM, James Salsman  wrote:
>
>> Yes, mobile app page views are much closer to 1.5% than 0.0006%, my
>> mistake, I used the WAP row with 116,000 page views in 2015 instead of
>> the 784,000,000 pageviews of the mobile app.
>>
>> I caught the error after pressing "Send", but I decided that it didn't
>> need to be corrected, given that the Strategic Direction document
>> still says, "in the next 15 years, the languages that will be the most
>> spoken are primarily those that currently lack good content and strong
>> Wikimedia communities," citing a table which predicts the most widely
>> spoken languages in 2050, which in turn cites a report which says
>> nothing about 2050, but does say, "Mandarin is the most spoken
>> language globally."
>>
>> Mandarin is not the most widely spoken language:
>> https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/
>> 1510B15-languages-most-speakers-english-chinese-chart.png
>>
>> And it's growing much more slowly than English is:
>> https://revolutioninlearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/
>> 14j3i4hyjvi88-0p0ofe-english-speakers-learners-1.jpg
>>
>> I would have corrected the error promptly if there was evidence that
>> respect for the truth was more highly regarded.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:04 AM, Legoktm 
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Nuria Ruiz  wrote:
>> >> You have data about app pageviews in several places, the most popular
>> tool
>> >> to see that kind of data has numbers, for example app pageviews
>> >> for en.wikipedia.
>> >>
>> >> The notion of what is an app pageview fluctuates more than what is a web
>> >> pageview, but numbers are quite far away from being less than 1%
>> >>
>> >> https://tools.wmflabs.org/siteviews/?platform=mobile-
>> app&source=pageviews&agent=user&range=latest-20&sites=en.wikipedia.org
>> >
>> > Using the tool you linked, I selected "All projects", and then divided
>> > the number of mobile app views by the total views to get: around 1.5%.
>> > Is that figure accurate for the amount of page views coming from
>> > mobile apps?
>> >
>> > -- Legoktm
>> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[James Salsman]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Leinonen Teemu  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
>
>> On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller  wrote:
>> And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
>> is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
>> Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
>> transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
>> to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
>> safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
>> a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
>
> Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary service 
> providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content 
> to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live 
> Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?

That is a fantastic idea! CC-BY-SA says, "You must attribute the work
in the manner specified by the author or licensor."

Is there anything preventing us from specifying attribution in a
manner that makes clear the revision date?

I would love to see the re-users have to do that. Are there any downsides?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Women in red

[James Salsman]

There are still over 2,700 known notable women scientists without stubs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Missing_articles_by_occupation/Scientists

And those are just the women scientists who made it on to Wikidata but
not Wiktionary somehow. The old ISI/Thompson Reuters Web of Science
list was a lot longer. I don't think 100,000 stubs is an unreasonable
number.


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.
>
>
> This looks like a wondeful initiative, not a disaster.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wmfall] New Developers Quarterly Report's first edition

[James Salsman]

Brian Wolff wrote:

> [The developer retention rate is] now 5%, but this time last year it was 12%.

It's currently 8% per
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers/Quarterly/2017-10#Key_findings

And the time series is the third graph under
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers/Quarterly/2017-10#Key_findings

...the first two of which are more important and solid. The variance
of the retention rate is high, so its downward trend isn't too
serious, but it would be nice if we could increase it.

Speaking of new developer retention, Brian, would you be willing to
mentor Brij Mohan at
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2017/August#Pronunciation_evaluation_gadget_for_Wiktionary:_GSoC_2017
? I would prefer that an experienced developer take over because I
have little experience with gadget scripting.

Best regards,
James

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The other side of the crisis at WMFR

[James Salsman]

> Legal threats are surely the universal language of bad faith

That assumes that legal threats are never legitimate. If there are
criminal allegations of which the Foundation has not yet been made
aware, they should be emailed to the appropriate officials and role
accounts. Abuse of process is the bad faith subset.

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 7:06 AM, Gabriel Thullen  wrote:
> Thank you Katherine for your long and thoughtful message on this difficult
> subject. I feel that the Foundation took the necessary steps to ensure that
> all parties concerned were treated fairly. I also tend to trust the
> Foundation board when they say that there was "no merit to the charges".
>
> This appears to be a classic case of "claims and counter claims" which the
> Foundation has settled. Now that the smoke screen has been cleared, we now
> need to address the other issues that are plaguing Wikimedia France.
>
> Once again, thank you for setting the record straight in such a calm and
> measured fashion. I sincerely hope that we will now be able to answer our
> member's grievances and get to the bottom of this mess, with the
> Foundation's help, experience and guidance,
>
> Best regards
> Gabriel
>
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 3:56 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> On Oct 19, 2017 7:41 PM, "Richard Farmbrough" 
>> wrote:
>>
>> I think it very clear that these allegations were the last gasp of an
>> ancient regime,
>>
>>
>> Legal threats are surely the universal language of bad faith.  And I have
>> complete trust in Pierre-Selim and Caroline.
>>
>> Thanks Katherine, for sharing details of what has been happening.
>>
>> Sam.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[James Salsman]

Erik,

Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services
relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to
attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the
transluded content is derived?

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing
>> discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
>
> Tensions between different communities with overlapping but
> non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like
> Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically
> reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to
> benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more
> expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few
> examples include:
>
> - Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
> - Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
> - Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene Wiki
>
> This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of
> maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of
> conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability
> challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like
> templates, which shift information out of the article space,
> disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is
> constructed from its parts.
>
> I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single
> biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for
> Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has
> already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective
> propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and
> notifications. Much more will need to follow.
>
> With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
> already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
> information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
> Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
> provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
> considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
>
>> If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling
>> users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback
>> form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
>
> I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
> "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
> certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
> However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
> that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
> requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
>
> Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
> shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
> the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
> https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
>
> I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
> document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
> community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
> "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
> these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
> develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
> applications, tabular data, and so on.
>
> Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
> compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
> to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
> from "here's what we recommend".
>
>>> Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about
>>> a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The
>>> more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in
>>> an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country
>>> population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate
>>> representation of the source material. Even when a large source
>>> dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say),
>>> you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of
>>> copies.
>
>> Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
>
> At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal
> data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated
> database reports as well as on-demand lookup via
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks
> in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field,
> or mark a country as female.
>
> There is a project un

Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[James Salsman]

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 4:11 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:51 AM, James Salsman  wrote:

>> Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services
>> relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to
>> attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the
>> transluded content is derived?

> I don't think there's a sufficiently strong justification for
> modifying the manner of attribution specified in the "Terms of Use",

If the requirement to attribute "Through a list of all authors" when
hyperlinking isn't possible, such as with read-only displays or audio
output, were replaced with requiring to say that the content is from a
Wikipedia article with a given title and date, that would certainly
give more information about the actual authorship than a list of
mostly pseudonyms.

> which in any case would only apply to re-use of future revisions of
> CC-BY-SA/CC-BY content that's not also exempted by "fair use".

I don't think it would be difficult to convince content reusers to go
along with that. It would protect them against liability from hoaxes,
provide actual attribution information for those who want or need it,
and 30 years down the road when free license grants start expiring

> As a best practice, I do believe including timestamp or version
> information is helpful both for re-users themselves and for end users.
> [[Progressive disclosure]] keeps such information manageable. In my
> own re-use of CC-0 data from Wikidata, Open Library and similar
> sources, I do include timestamp information along with the source.
> Example re-use from Wikidata:
> https://lib.reviews/static/uploads/last-sync.png

If only our brand ambassadors were as interested in best practices! I
know they are, and once fundraising season rolls around there's going
to be the usual press barrage of interviews. Let's give them something
good to say so that would-be editors know we're the kind of people who
want to protect them from unattributed hoaxes.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[James Salsman]

Hi Erik,

I get the feeling you would question my identity if I didn't follow up
by asking you whether they asked you to endorse the possibility that
Mandarin could eclipse English?

Best regards,
James


On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The
>> Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from
>> Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at
>> all, was raised on this list in July for example.
>
> There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of
> all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include
> basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems
> worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it
> really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):
>
> https://imgur.com/a/vchAl
>
> I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory
> snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license
> statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely
> doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely
> unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of
> the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal
> action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which
> WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.
>
>> If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily
>> shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
>
> Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to
> attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such
> attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing
> providence/citations is a good idea.
>
>> An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information
>> available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across
>> a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for
>> immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might
>> gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information
>> overload).
>
> It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to
> externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the
> point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in
> degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if
> [[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over
> that edge. :P
>
> That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make
> a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning
> platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language
> learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community,
> etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some
> of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to
> knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of
> transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for
> knowledge or our need to develop new skills.
>
> I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly
> effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and
> appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect
> of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and
> excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be
> habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more
> addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social
> media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that
> keep you coming back.
>
> In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in
> STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly
> impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain.
> While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to
> reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused
> enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.
>
> I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask
> whether it results in people getting better learning experiences,
> through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I
> think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge
> equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think
> about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are
> some things that I think might help develop better learning
> experiences on Wikipedia:
>
> - a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration,
> timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and
> text
> - better support for writing/finding articles that target different
> audiences (beginners/experts)
> - tec

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Movement Strategy: Endorse the strategic direction today! #wikimedia2030

[James Salsman]

I am also withholding my endorsement until the assertion that Mandarin
could overtake English is corrected, and I endorse the "harmony is not
unison" description of views other than mainstream, towards fringe.


On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 6:22 PM, mathieu stumpf guntz
 wrote:
>
>
> Le 27/10/2017 à 16:57, Nicole Ebber a écrit :
>>
>> Hello again,
>>
>> I have taken the unclear wording from the meta page. As I said, no one
>> will be excluded from phase 2 conversations.
>>
>> I would also like to point out that this endorsement page is intended
>> to work like a show of approval and support instead of an RfC. We are
>> asking people to support it, to show that they agree upon the outcomes
>> and intent to contribute to the following process in good faith. It's
>> a group exercise that is also meant to show what unites us as a
>> movement.
>>
>> It is no surprise that not everyone will like everything in the
>> direction, that's probably in the nature of such a document, and in
>> the nature of a strategy process. For those of you who have expressed
>> concerns and wonder about the clarity of the direction, phase 2 will
>> be the the space for all these conversations.
>
> Well, harmony is not unison, and we promote diversity so it would be
> actually strange to *not* hear some dissonance here and there.
>
> I found the previous process interesting to look and participate at, but
> either individual should not be asked to endorse it, or it should be
> permitted to also be clearly neutral and opposed to it.
>
> That is, either the foundation
>
>  * is trying to identify a direction built and assented by the
>community¹, which is fine;
>  * or is trying to push some direction, while taking more or less into
>consideration feedback from the community, which – as far as I'm
>concerned – is fine too.
>
> But you can't play both sides while throwing a unified façade at the face of
> the world. When you have (as I'm writing) 1 explicit {{neutral}}, 9 explicit
> {{opposed}}, 8 explicit and 68 implicit {{support}}, I don't see the point
> of hiding disagreements. All the more, if endorsement don't play any role in
> participation in future phases, and that there is in fact no actual way to
> oppose to its adoption as is as a base for the next phase. What the point of
> this endorsement at all? Why don't run phase 2 after phase 1 just like have
> been done for cycles?
>
> Finally, where is "knowledge equity" when endorsement requires that people
> "are endorsing the original English version"?
>
> Also, endorsement by groups is a different point, as groups can (and do)
> discuss pros, cons and uselessness of such an endorsement. It would be
> interesting to know at the end of the endorsement how much groups expressed
> endorsement compared to the number of group that the foundation or some
> chapter officially recognize.
>
> And to end on a more positive not, I want to recall that I did deeply
> appreciate participating in this strategy process so far, which produced
> interesting debates both off line and on line, and I already met two people
> making social science works who manifested interest for the archived
> discussion it generated.
>
> Ĝis baldaŭ
>
> ¹ That is, from the extreme minority within the community which do care to
> give an answer and pass all the technical/language barrier to do so.
>
>
>
>>
>> I will now restore the original status of the sections for organized
>> groups and individual contributors, without any sorting order but the
>> time the endorsement has been made.
>>
>> Best,
>> Nicole
>>
>> On 27 October 2017 at 15:59, Peter Southwood
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Nicole.
>>> That is not the message we are getting from the endorsement page.
>>> Cheers,
>>> Peter
>>>
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
>>> Behalf Of Nicole Ebber
>>> Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 10:50 AM
>>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
>>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Movement Strategy:
>>> Endorse the strategic direction today! #wikimedia2030
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> By endorsing, people and organizations state that they agree that the
>>> direction is the right way for us as a movement to move forward, and that
>>> they commit to participate in phase 2 conversations in good faith. And in
>>> phase 2, we will discuss how to fill this direction with life. The next
>>> steps will will be designed as an inclusive process, but we won't "oblige"
>>> anyone to contribute to phase 2, nor will we "ban" people from it. A look
>>> into our FAQ can further clarify:
>>>
>>> "How you use the outcomes of this discussion is up to you. Some
>>> individuals or organizations may use it to inform programmatic or
>>> organizational strategy. Others may see it as a way to connect with the
>>> broader movement and invite others to contribute to Wikimedia.
>>> Some may not use it at all – and that’s okay!
>>>
>>> Practically, this does not mean that voluntee

[Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week

[James Salsman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=150&v=Eijc2tGe-zM

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week

[James Salsman]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else remember the controversy from 2010?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/aug/11/newport-state-of-mind-youtube

I was happy that YouTube put the video back as a protected derivative work,
but posting it to this list apparently made them take it down again. I
would normally not be made happy by that, but in this instance it makes me
happy because it's a perfect opening to ask Google to petition the
Copyright Royalty Board to adjust the compulsory royalties so that
distribution to artists falls i. The same incidence as it did in the 1970s,
prior to the advent of mass consumer copying, when artists, authors, and
performers earned about three times the median of what they do today, and
the top publishing conglomerates earned proportionally less.

If this something the Foundation can support?

On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 2:36 AM quiddity  wrote:

> My mistake, there is a one line reference to Wikipedia in the lyrics.
> (The time_continue parameter didn't work on my first play through, but
> I checked again to be sure and then I heard the reference.) Sorry for
> the mistake. My other points stand. 
>
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 6:29 PM, quiddity  wrote:
> > James, that video does Not seem to have any connection to the
> > Wikimedia movement. (I checked the credits, but didn't watch the whole
> > song).
> > Please don't distract the hundreds of subscribers here with irrelevant
> content.
> > Bare links without any explanation are also an anti-pattern to avoid.
> > Thanks.
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 6:13 PM, James Salsman 
> wrote:
> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=150&v=Eijc2tGe-zM
> >>
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[Wikimedia-l] non-technical community wish: Invitational essay authorship contest

[James Salsman]

I offer $50 USD first prize and $25 for the runner-up for the best
twelve paragraph essay on the topic of whether college students are
likely to pay more in income taxes over their lifetime than the
present value of the entire amount of their college tuition, room, and
board expenses.

This contest is open only to the top 50% of participants in the
Wikimedia Education Program or WikiEd Foundation's student editors.

If there are any objections to this contest, please let me know. If
there are any reasons it shouldn't be communicated to the eligible,
please let me know. I ask both foundations to match my award, taking
the prizes to $150 and $75 if they agree. Thank you!

Sincerely,
James Salsman

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] non-technical community wish: Invitational essay authorship contest

[James Salsman]

The Wikipedia Education Program is shared by both the Wikimedia
Foundation and the WikiEd Foundation, and I am asking both to
participate.


On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 9:48 AM, Joseph Seddon  wrote:
> How is this relevant to wikimedia-l?
>
> Seddon
>
> On 21 Nov 2017 09:28, "James Salsman"  wrote:
>
>> I offer $50 USD first prize and $25 for the runner-up for the best
>> twelve paragraph essay on the topic of whether college students are
>> likely to pay more in income taxes over their lifetime than the
>> present value of the entire amount of their college tuition, room, and
>> board expenses.
>>
>> This contest is open only to the top 50% of participants in the
>> Wikimedia Education Program or WikiEd Foundation's student editors.
>>
>> If there are any objections to this contest, please let me know. If
>> there are any reasons it shouldn't be communicated to the eligible,
>> please let me know. I ask both foundations to match my award, taking
>> the prizes to $150 and $75 if they agree. Thank you!
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> James Salsman
>>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] non-technical community wish: Invitational essay authorship contest

[James Salsman]

> Where does this idea come from, especially the topic selected?

I selected the topic.

> How "the best" will be determined, and by who?

I am happy to defer to either of the two foundations or take their
instructions for as many nominations as they like if they want me to
propose a panel.

> What the goal of this proposal in the first place?

I would like to see the Education Program encourage beginning editors
still in academia to organize thoughts in essay format.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Education] non-technical community wish: Invitational essay authorship contest

[James Salsman]

Thanks, Lucas. I am happy to discuss the idea.

I believe that there is strong evidence against the proposition that
the best editors are skilled in writing articles but not essays.

LiAnna and Tighe, do you have any reasons to believe that editors
skilled in composing both articles and essays are not superior to
editors skilled in articles only? Is there a false dichotomy in
believing that one or the other could be preferable to both?

Best regards,
Jim


On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 6:18 PM, Lucas Teles  wrote:
> Maybe you should first discuss any contest like this with community and
> then come with a suitable idea.
>
> Your willingness to invest on this is something valuable and should be used
> on a project that fits with WMF goals.
>
> Teles
>
> Em ter, 21 de nov de 2017 às 14:19, Tighe Flanagan 
> escreveu:
>
>> To echo LiAnna and Wiki Education's take, the Wikimedia Foundation's
>> education team support activities that get students to contribute to
>> Wikimedia projects as part of their learning. While the contexts may vary
>> from country to country and classroom to classroom, the students contribute
>> according to Wikimedia project norms (neutrality, citations, etc). This
>> type of proposed assignment/competition seems out of scope and we could not
>> support it on our end either.
>>
>> Best,
>> Tighe
>>
>> --
>> Tighe Flanagan
>> Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> tflana...@wikimedia.org
>> education.wikimedia.org
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 11:52 AM, LiAnna Davis  wrote:
>>
>> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 1:27 AM, James Salsman 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > I offer $50 USD first prize and $25 for the runner-up for the best
>> > > twelve paragraph essay on the topic of whether college students are
>> > > likely to pay more in income taxes over their lifetime than the
>> > > present value of the entire amount of their college tuition, room, and
>> > > board expenses.
>> > >
>> > > This contest is open only to the top 50% of participants in the
>> > > Wikimedia Education Program or WikiEd Foundation's student editors.
>> > >
>> > > If there are any objections to this contest, please let me know. If
>> > > there are any reasons it shouldn't be communicated to the eligible,
>> > > please let me know. I ask both foundations to match my award, taking
>> > > the prizes to $150 and $75 if they agree. Thank you!
>> > >
>> >
>> >
>> > No. At the Wiki Education Foundation, we focus on teaching students to
>> > write neutral, fact-based encyclopedia articles instead of essays; our
>> > asking them to write essays would be counterproductive given the mission
>> of
>> > our program, our organization, and the Wikimedia movement. We will not
>> > support this effort, and ask that you do not reach out to them on your
>> own.
>> >
>> > LiAnna
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > LiAnna Davis
>> > Director of Programs; Deputy Director
>> > Wiki Education
>> > www.wikiedu.org
>> > ___
>> > Education mailing list
>> > educat...@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
>> >
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>
> --
> Steward for Wikimedia projects. Administrator at Portuguese Wikipedia and
> Wikimedia Commons.
> Sent from mobile. Please, excuse my brevity.
>
> +55 (71) 99707 6409
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Education] non-technical community wish: Invitational essay authorship contest

[James Salsman]

Hi Mathieu,

I was heartened to read your questions and conclusions:

> If you take that into consideration, how might you even begin to consider
> that there are any consensual ordering possible? ...
> you can not provide a well-order[ing.]

Referring to why I want to offer eligibility in the essay contest to
the top half of student editors, I agree with you that any assessment
of overall student rank from any set of metrics will not be a scalar
value, but a confidence interval or a central tendency and variance.
Therefore, since my actual intent was to offer eligibility to the top
35%, I nominally offer it to the top 50%.

The present value of outcomes is not always equal to nominal values,
e.g. in societies which could die of preventable communicable diseases
arising among the poor and thus would all be better off if the rich
are taxed to pay for the healthcare of the poor -- thereby increasing
the actual wealth of everyone including those whose nominal wealth
decreases -- but the proportion of optimal transfer incidence relative
to the expected amount of charity and philanthropy is another matter
for a future essay proposal.

> what if "the best" essay writer in the pool you are targeting will be on the 
> contrary repelled by such a contest?

That is a risk well worth taking.

> I'm not against fostering the idea of writing orignal essays around and within
> the Wikimedia movement
> maybe a dedicated project for essays might make some sense.

I am only proposing a periodic contest, to be archived e.g. on Meta. I
look forward to further engagement from the foundations. Back when I
was the only one arguing for market rate Foundation staff salaries,
some of the most fervent opponents were in the Foundation. It is not
uncommon to see people voting against their own interests
occasionally. It's quite common in some parts of the U.S. Thank
goodness the foundations have a higher grade of thinkers.

Best regards,
Jim


On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 1:57 PM, mathieu stumpf guntz
 wrote:
> Saluton,
>
> To my mind, this whole discussion doesn't make any sense as it is all
> grounded on suspect hypotheses.
>
> First, what do you call an essay? I think that for such a work the author
> must instill selfness in it. As say Montaigne "c’eſt moy que ie peins". If
> you take that into consideration, how might you even begin to consider that
> there are any consensual ordering possible? Actually, a "commissioned essay"
> sounds more like an oxymoron than anything else.
>
> Concerning the proposed subject, I would advise any person considering
> answering such a tricksy question to first question its premises. You might
> even explore the strict opposite question: can any institution ever give
> enough to a person for all the time dedicated into integrating its
> expectations? All this time that nothing will ever give back, and not spent
> in other life experiences that the said institution might not care about but
> that would be far more enjoyable.
>
> So, to answer the last question, that's not simply your dichotomy which is
> false, it's the whole underlying premise set your are pushing that is total
> nonsense. No, you can not provide a well-order relation on any set for any
> property.
>
> Moreover you seems to think that it suffices to drop money to achieve
> attracting "the best possible essay" in the scope of your nonsense contest.
> But what if "the best" essay writer in the pool you are targeting will be on
> the contrary repelled by such a contest?
>
> Now, I'm not against fostering the idea of writing orignal essays around and
> within the Wikimedia movement. Currently, I don't think we have a clear
> dedicated project for that, although I come across some of them which are
> usually stored on Meta, in user namespaces, or on Wikibooks (for example A
> Lecture on the Limits of Human Knowledge). So maybe a dedicated project for
> essays might make some sense.
>
> Eseete,
> mathieu
>
> Le 22/11/2017 à 19:05, James Salsman a écrit :
>
> Thanks, Lucas. I am happy to discuss the idea.
>
> I believe that there is strong evidence against the proposition that
> the best editors are skilled in writing articles but not essays.
>
> LiAnna and Tighe, do you have any reasons to believe that editors
> skilled in composing both articles and essays are not superior to
> editors skilled in articles only? Is there a false dichotomy in
> believing that one or the other could be preferable to both?
>
> Best regards,
> Jim
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 6:18 PM, Lucas Teles  wrote:
>
> Maybe you should first discuss any contest like this with community and
> then come with a suitable idea.
>
> Your willingness to invest on this is somethin

[Wikimedia-l] What made me happy this week

[James Salsman]

https://f-squared.org/whovisual/

As seen on 
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/11/29/research-newsletter-august-2017/#Other_recent_publications

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Appointment of Esra’a Al Shafei to Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

[James Salsman]

> But clearly my worry isn’t significantly shared by others, so I’ll park this 
> here.

It's shared by me, but first let me agree with you on this:

> to be clear, I think Esra’a is an excellent addition to the WMF board.

I do too. The problem with the photography restriction is that we've
had a substantial number of deliberately anti-social detractors over
the years, including moderately well-organized trolls, many of whom
are still active, and a few of whom that have managed to consolidate
substantial power among the alt-right and would love to humiliate the
WMF and Ms. Al Shafei. What reasons are there to think that the state
actors from whom we are trying to hide Ms. Al Shafei's  images would
not be prompted by her appointment to try to obtain such photos, too?

I would prefer that we go a bit further than simply asking people to
refrain from taking photographs, and provide some sort of measures to
prevent them. I have no idea of the pros and cons of different
solutions, but a few that come to mind, roughly ordered from easiest
to most difficult, are: veils, room-dividers or opaque audio booths in
group events, photography-capable-equipment-at-the-door social rooms,
private entrance/exit accommodations, and security details.

If you simply ask people to refrain from taking photos, not everyone
will comply, some out of spite, and some because it may be their job.

Sincerely,
Jim

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[Wikimedia-l] Terrehaven's Bauer named chief day shift manager

[James Salsman]

The Terrehaven, New Hampshire contingent of the international Wikimedia
projects' editors' community is happy to announce the appointment of
George S. Bauer, Jr. as chief day shift manager at a major fast food outlet
less than four kilometers from his parents' home, the identity of which is
being withheld to protect Bauer's interests in editing early 1930s and
1940s
baseball card frequency statistics in several English Wikipedia articles
which Bauer hopes may some day include citations to reliable sources.

"I tell you, last week there was nobody replying to my requests for the
Cincinnati Rhino's back bench. Something's gotta give," the 17 year-old
white male was heard to exclaim while walking with a close confidant down
his neighborhood's suburban middle class streets, en route to the home of
his median wage-earning white middle class parents forced by economic
circumstance to the brink of any semblance of stability.

At press time calls to the nominating committee have not been returned.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wmfall] Leadership of Wikimedia Foundation's Communications department

[James Salsman]

Heather,

While I agree in large part with Sam Klein's expression (I would
characterize my feelings as quintuple joy or above) I have to ask:
will this allow you more or fewer time and resources to focus on my
outstanding request of you at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Heatherawalls#Design-blocked_technical_community_wish
?

Best regards,
Jim

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 10:55 PM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> Double joy.
>
> On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 4:57 PM, Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig <
> mfitzh...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> This is great! Welcome Kui and Heather Congrats! I am excited about the
>> direction the team is taking and look forward to working with you both!
>>
>> MFC:)
>>
>>
>> --
>> 
>> Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig
>> Wordsmith | Communications
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> 1 Montgomery St., Suite #1600
>> San Francisco, CA 94104
>> *mfitzh...@wikimedia.org *
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Katherine Maher 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi everyone,
>> >
>> > I am excited to share with you all the results of our search for
>> permanent
>> > leadership of the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications department.
>> >
>> > Our own Heather Walls will transition from interim Chief of
>> Communications
>> > to leading the department full-time, in the newly created role of Chief
>> > Creative Officer. She will be joined by a new Vice President of
>> > Communications, Kui Kinyanjui, who will join us from her home in Nairobi,
>> > Kenya in early March. Please join me in congratulating Heather and
>> > welcoming Kui!
>> >
>> > *The new roles*
>> >
>> > As Chief Creative Officer, Heather will remain at the Leadership team,
>> > with responsibility for the Communications department operations, and a
>> > mandate that focuses on helping people better understand our values and
>> > mission through our brand. She will oversee the organization and
>> movement’s
>> > voice, tone, and visual assets, and how they are incorporated into
>> > everything from our recent awareness videos to our press statements. What
>> > do we sound and look like? How do you feel when you interact with us, as
>> an
>> > editor, a reader, a donor? How do we spread and share our values? She
>> will
>> > be responsible for new and creative initiatives that seek to expand the
>> way
>> > people think about Wikipedia and Wikimedia, not only as an encyclopedia
>> but
>> > an essential part of the way we understand the world.
>> >
>> > As Vice President of Communications, Kui will report directly to Heather
>> > and oversee our traditional and digital communications efforts. She will
>> be
>> > responsible for our overall media positioning and coverage, critical
>> issue
>> > management (also known as crisis communications), extending our digital
>> > media strategy, products, and presence, and supporting organizational
>> > leadership, such as myself, the Leadership team, and the Board, with
>> > effective and clear public communications. Kui also brings new and
>> valuable
>> > skills that we’re sure to appreciate: first, a background in internal
>> > communications, which should help with improved information flows in our
>> > ever-more distributed organization, as well as a deep background in
>> > communications, campaigns, and marketing for emerging markets -- sure to
>> be
>> > a critical skill for our efforts around improving awareness about
>> Wikimedia
>> > in places where we want to reach more people.
>> >
>> > *About Heather Walls*
>> >
>> > Since joining the Foundation in 2011, Heather has been a driving force in
>> > our creative and brand efforts at the Foundation. Under her stewardship,
>> > the Foundation has dramatically reduced barriers to community usage of
>> the
>> > trademarks under our care while also helping increase consistency in
>> their
>> > usage. A member of the team before Communications was its own department,
>> > Heather was one of the first people I met and worked with when I joined
>> as
>> > Chief Communications Officer. She graciously stepped in as leader of the
>> > department when I transitioned to Executive Director and has since grown
>> > into the role while making it her own. During that time, she has helped
>> > find the organization's place in the growing social media channels,
>> > modernized the Foundation’s brand, bringing it into greater alignment
>> with
>> > our movement's values and workflows, and overseen pioneering
>> > community-supported awareness campaigns.
>> >
>> > Prior to joining the Foundation, Heather worked in design roles at
>> > organizations across California, Massachusetts, and the Midwest. She
>> > developed a special collections room and exhibit for California Academy
>> of
>> > Sciences, and her work has been included in Architectural Record and
>> > exhibited at Harvard as well as Detroit and New York.
>> >
>> > *About Kui Kinyanjui*
>> >
>> > Kui will join the Foundation in March after concluding her current
>> > position as Head of Corporate Communications for Safaricom Limit

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy Phase 2

[James Salsman]

Anthony,

I've been working on
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2030/Process_planning which
is where I believe the Phase 2 process is starting from.

I am particularly interested in your opinion as to whether survey
metrics should be added to traditional metrics.

Best regards,
Jim


On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 7:40 AM, Anthony Cole  wrote:
> Now that the movement direction has been decided on and the endorsement
> process seems to be complete, can anyone tell me where we are at with
> regard to phase 2 of the process - "The main goal of phase 2 will be to
> answer the question "How do we implement the strategic direction", which
> means identifying the resources needed for execution, and the activities it
> involves." [1]
>
> Anthony Cole
>
> 1.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction/Endorsement
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The 2016-2017 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report

[James Salsman]

Thanks, Zack.

Does anyone know what interest rates the $56 million short-term and $6
million long-term investments earn?

Are the CFO and the Endowment benchmarking their performance against
commercial institutional endowment-grade mutual funds? I recently wrote the
below to regulators; I hope it helps explain this question:

--- excerpt ---

...Regarding the extent to which index funds may be siphoning wealth
very sharply upward because of questionable inefficient practices in
capital services, you know index funds comprise a huge portion of
consumer savings and investment. I noticed that they have reliably
been underperforming mutual funds such as institutional endowment
funds which aren't required to rebalance, but follow the same general
investment strategy

https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/EndowmentsPaperPartII.pdf

https://institutional.vanguard.com/iam/pdf/EndowmentPerformanceResearch.pdf

https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/s342.pdf


On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 12:35 AM, Zachary McCune 
wrote:

> Hello all-
>
>
> Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received more than 6 million donations
> to support free knowledge. Today, we would like to share the Foundation’s
> 2016 - 2017 Annual Report which helps document how those donations were put
> to use. [1]
>
> This Report is meant mostly for donors, but it may be of use to any
> audience looking to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation, our
> activities, and our community support.
>
> In (very) brief, last year:
>
> * We worked on building safer communities with new tools like Abuse Filter
> and Mute to reduce harassment on Wikipedia.
>
> * We improved our services for mobile devices: making images smaller and
> articles load faster, streamlining our apps to assist users.
>
> * We partnered with international organizations to add missing languages
> and knowledge to our sites.
>
> Over 2017, our grants team disbursed 392 grants totaling more than 7
> million dollars. More than half of these grants went to emerging
> communities. [2]
>
> We also began to plan the future of our movement, holding months of
> discussions with thousands of volunteers. We were guided by a recurring
> phrase that has become the theme of this year’s Annual Report: Knowledge
> belongs to all of us.
>
> Everything listed and linked above is possible because of you, the
> Wikimedia movement. Y’all are great.
>
> So please take a look at the 2016-2017 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report,
> and if you are moved- share it with a friend.
>
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> - Zack McCune, Danny Kaufman, Lena Traer, Heather Walls, María Cruz, Ravi
> Ayyakkannu, Caitlin Cogdill (the 2017 Annual Report team)
>
>
>
> [1] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/
>
> [2] https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/community.html
>
> --
> Zachary McCune
> Global Audiences
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> zmcc...@wikimedia.org
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Publicpolicy] Update on FISA 702 reauthorization

[James Salsman]

How much would it cost to replace the servers and switches with open
source hardware?

Stephen, when do you expect to have the FEC requirements of organized
advocates for US political candidates researched?


-- Forwarded message --
From: Stephen LaPorte 
Date: Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 2:23 AM
Subject: [Publicpolicy] Update on FISA 702 reauthorization
To: Publicpolicy Group for Wikimedia 


Hello All,

Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation, along with a coalition
of 43 civil liberties, civil rights, and transparency organizations,
signed a letter urging Congress to reform Section 702 of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that allegedly authorizes the
mass surveillance challenged in our lawsuit, Wikimedia Foundation v.
National Security Agency. In the letter, we urged Congress to oppose a
straightforward reauthorization of the law and to support meaningful
reforms.

On January 11th, the U.S. House of Representatives quashed the
opportunity for those reforms by voting to reauthorize Section 702
with minimal changes. The bill then went to the U.S. Senate for
further consideration. Despite opposition in the Senate from both
major political parties, on January 16th, a filibuster to block the
bill narrowly failed. Yesterday, the bill cleared the Senate, and it
was signed into law today.

Although we are deeply disappointed in this result, the Wikimedia
Foundation will continue to fight for user privacy, including in
Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA. We will keep you updated on further
developments.

Best,
Stephen

--
Stephen LaPorte
Legal Director
Wikimedia Foundation

NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and
ethical reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer
for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal
capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal
disclaimer.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Publicpolicy] Update on FISA 702 reauthorization

[James Salsman]

> 1) I don't quite see how your question about servers and switches relates
> to Stephen's statement. Could you explain for us mere mortals how you link
> the two?

The NSA surveillance which was reauthorized by Congress can not depend
on eavesdropping alone with new HTTPS cyphers. It needs compromised
hardware to work, such as has been included in Dell servers since the
Foundation started purchasing them, and the design of which was
overseen by the Foundation's CTO, who worked then at Intel. This
provides us with the know-how, a teachable moment, and an excellent
opportunity to specify and acquire replacement open source hardware
which doesn't have the DIETYBOUNCE / System Management Mode OOB / iAMT
and related backdoors.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/nsa_exploit_of.html

> 2) I somehow missed the commitment by the WMF to research "FEC requirements
> of organized advocates for US political candidates' or anything that
> suggests that the WMF may advocate for specific political candidates (which
> seems a change of course that would be hard to sweep under the rug). Could
> you quote?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Conflict_of_interest&diff=prev&oldid=815460492#Note_from_Wikimedia_Legal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Slaporte_(WMF)#Research_topic_request

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Publicpolicy] Update on FISA 702 reauthorization

[James Salsman]

> the WMF doesn't have the resources to prevent a
> state level actor from gaining access to its servers.

Do you think merely avoiding the most mass-produced and arguably
widest backdoor is a step in the right direction?

> Switching to little used, little supported and more expensive
> hardware simply weakens the WMF position even further
> since attackers no longer have to factor in the risk of burning
> a valuable exploit.

That they need not risk losing their prized exploit capabilities
because they can't use them against open source hardware
makes us safer or less safe than if they could use them but
we spent less money?

> What about moving to another country? Still not an option?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_225#Wikimedia_can_become_fully_independent_of_any_legal_jurisdiction

> the FTC and the FEC are very different organizations?

They both impose speech and behavior restrictions on paid advocates
trying to push their products, services, or candidates. Those
restrictions govern what is legal in the US on Wikipedia pertaining to
COI issues.

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Publicpolicy] Update on FISA 702 reauthorization

[James Salsman]

Let me just suggest, again, that we should find out how much it would
cost to avoid the most widely "baked in" vulnerabilities which are
known to state and non-state actor. I can't imagine why that wouldn't
be worth it. If the NSA wants private Foundation data, they could send
a National Security Letter, ordinary subpoena, or bribe Zimbabwean
police to send a subpoena from their Interpol FAX.


On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 12:45 AM, Craig Franklin
 wrote:
> I think, as Geni says, that even that isn't going to provide any effective
> barrier.  If the NSA or other US Government spooks want to get into the
> servers, they will, regardless of what hardware it's running on, what
> software it uses, or what jurisdiction it is located in.  Anything that the
> Foundation does to "protect" itself is just going to be security theatre.
> Anyone doing anything that the current or future American administrations
> might object to should keep that in mind.  I assume that every place I go
> on the Internet is already compromised and act accordingly.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>
> On 21 January 2018 at 19:13, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
>
>> What about moving to another country? Still not an option?
>>
>> Cheers
>> Yaroslav
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 8:38 AM, Lodewijk 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > 1) still don't see the relevance. If better technology is needed, it's
>> > needed - that should be independent of any lobbying preferences. It looks
>> > like you're just pushing tangents again.
>> >
>> > 2) You do realize that the FTC and the FEC are very different
>> > organizations? But again, it seems you just used this statement as an
>> > opportunity to push a tangent.
>> >
>> > Please don't do that.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Lodewijk
>> >
>> > On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 2:43 PM, James Salsman 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > > 1) I don't quite see how your question about servers and switches
>> > relates
>> > > > to Stephen's statement. Could you explain for us mere mortals how you
>> > > link
>> > > > the two?
>> > >
>> > > The NSA surveillance which was reauthorized by Congress can not depend
>> > > on eavesdropping alone with new HTTPS cyphers. It needs compromised
>> > > hardware to work, such as has been included in Dell servers since the
>> > > Foundation started purchasing them, and the design of which was
>> > > overseen by the Foundation's CTO, who worked then at Intel. This
>> > > provides us with the know-how, a teachable moment, and an excellent
>> > > opportunity to specify and acquire replacement open source hardware
>> > > which doesn't have the DIETYBOUNCE / System Management Mode OOB / iAMT
>> > > and related backdoors.
>> > >
>> > > https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/nsa_exploit_of.html
>> > >
>> > > > 2) I somehow missed the commitment by the WMF to research "FEC
>> > > requirements
>> > > > of organized advocates for US political candidates' or anything that
>> > > > suggests that the WMF may advocate for specific political candidates
>> > > (which
>> > > > seems a change of course that would be hard to sweep under the rug).
>> > > Could
>> > > > you quote?
>> > >
>> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_
>> > > talk:Conflict_of_interest&diff=prev&oldid=815460492#
>> > > Note_from_Wikimedia_Legal
>> > >
>> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Slaporte_(WMF)#
>> > > Research_topic_request
>> > >
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>> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>> > >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright enforcement?

[James Salsman]

Attribution is often considered impractical, but providing the source
date along with e.g. the article name can be used to derive the
attribution, so it should be required. It's not just a good idea to
require this information from content re-users like Amazon, Apple, and
Google, but doing so will help encourage those who find issues to
edit.

If the Foundation doesn't make attribution or at least article date a
requirement, then they are actively opposing editor recruitment.


On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 7:34 PM, The Cunctator  wrote:
> The copyright requirement isn't attribution; it's attribution and copyleft
> retention for derived works.
>
> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 12:28 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> It search result only contains a snippet (and thus is fair use). Plus
>> Google provide attribution in a lot of their results.
>>
>> J
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 1:03 PM, geni  wrote:
>>
>> > On 5 June 2017 at 18:32, The Cunctator  wrote:
>> > > Both Google and Graphiq are using pretty much the entire Wikipedia
>> corpus
>> > > for their results.
>> >
>> >
>> > However due to the way their output is structured it falls under "you
>> > can't copyright facts".
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > geni
>> >
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>> > 
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>>
>> The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
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[Wikimedia-l] omnibus questions for Katherine Maher (was Re: Copyright enforcement?)

[James Salsman]

Thanks, Jonathan. Do you think we can convince Katherine Maher to
agree to enforce the Creative Commons Attribution requirements? There
is no doubt it would aid both editor recruitment, and as you point
out, morale too.

I also want to ask her about:

(2) survey metrics:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_2030/Process_planning&diff=17657673&oldid=17628160

(3) benchmarking investment performance against institutional
endowment-grade mutual funds and studies of endowment performance:
 https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/EndowmentsPaperPartII.pdf
and e.g., 
https://institutional.vanguard.com/iam/pdf/EndowmentPerformanceResearch.pdf
Related: endowment size required for full sustainability;

(4) testing replacing the pencil icon with the word "[edit]" on mobile;

(5) intelligibility remediation on Wiktionary as a Foundation
technology development project;

(6) systemic review of bias in economics articles; and

(7) an ongoing top performers' invitational essay contest for the
Education Program.

Katherine, what are your opinions on those recommendations?

Can (6) and (7) be combined?

Best regards,
Jim


On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 10:50 PM, Jonathan Cardy
 wrote:
> I wouldn't express it quite so bluntly, but agreed at a time when editing 
> seems to have stabilised again after the 2015/16 rally, shifting the 
> Foundation to a strategy of promoting compliance with both BY and SA would 
> address a lot of problems. It is probably demotivating for editors to see 
> their work used without attribution, and whilst a link back to Wikipedia is 
> not as going to be as good as an edit button, we are greatly limiting 
> ourselves if we rely on people coming directly to our sites and treat every 
> extract from our sites as CC0 or Fair Use.
>
> A few legal letters and maybe a court case a year should be easily affordable 
> for the WMF and an excellent investment.
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan
>
>>
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2018 00:12:43 +
>> From: James Salsman 
>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright enforcement?
>> Message-ID:
>>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>>
>> Attribution is often considered impractical, but providing the source
>> date along with e.g. the article name can be used to derive the
>> attribution, so it should be required. It's not just a good idea to
>> require this information from content re-users like Amazon, Apple, and
>> Google, but doing so will help encourage those who find issues to
>> edit.
>>
>> If the Foundation doesn't make attribution or at least article date a
>> requirement, then they are actively opposing editor recruitment.
>>
>>
>>> On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 7:34 PM, The Cunctator  wrote:
>>> The copyright requirement isn't attribution; it's attribution and copyleft
>>> retention for derived works.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Fake news ‘vaccine’: online game may ‘inoculate’ by simulating propaganda tactics

[James Salsman]

Here is a good example of instructional software to solve a systemic
communication issue:

https://www.getbadnews.com/

Ref.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220093555.htm

How can we sustain progress towards resolution of the issues?

Also, does the date by which Titan is likely to be colonized correlate
with the extent to which progress has been achieved? This is not the
first time I have asked this question here, and I hope the answer is
as clear to everyone else as it is to me: it correlates inversely.

I wonder if the Foundation could afford to have David Attenborough
narrate the interaction between Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge
University. They would if they'd start investing in unskimmable
endowment funds. Make donors' money work hard, with a screening for
sustainability.

Bring back the regular email to donors suggesting other organizations
worthy of their money, and tell them how to avoid being skimmed by
high frequency traders, too, please.

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's making you happy this week? (Week of 18 February 2018)

[James Salsman]

I am happy about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpmRWCE7F_I&t=30m30s

Aaron Halfaker describes optimized ways to refine backlog presentation.

But I am unhappy that his first slides are missing and I hope he will
post the whole deck.

Also I would love to see the Turkish Wikipedia in InterPlanetary File
System, or at least its dumps.


On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 3:12 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> What's making me happy this week is Isarra's persistence in working on the
> Timeless skin. Timeless is based on Winter. [0] [1]
>
> For anyone who would like to try Timeless, it's available in Preferences
> under Appearance / Skin.
>
> What's making you happy this week?
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>
> [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Timeless
> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

>...  make sure people are taking the work seriously and not
> simply using Google translate

People are likely to start with Google Translate whether they are
taking the translation seriously or not, so it would still help if we
could get Google to provide numeric per-word translation confidence
scores.

So please star the request for those at:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/73830349

Thank you!

Best regards,
Jim

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:18 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
> One further case, some of the translations we did into Swahili had funding
> associated with them. Few people in the country have easy access to a
> computer and cellphones are not as suitable for translation work. Basically
> TWB has a brick and mortar translation center in Nairobi with computers.
> They have staff that keep an eye on the center. People were recruited,
> provided instruction, provided access to the computers, and provided cell
> phone credits for their involvement. What they worked on helped them
> develop a CV.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:30 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> Meant to write "more than 5 million words translated". Apologies.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:26 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>>
>>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>>> started back in 2011:
>>>
>>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>>
>>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>>> we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>>> English articles.
>>>
>>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>>
>>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
>>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
>>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>>> volunteers.
>>>
>>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>>>
>>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>>> years. The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn
>>> how to use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001
>>> (one for each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into
>>> Content Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name
>>> and password to the account.
>>>
>>> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
>>> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
>>> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
>>> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
>>> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
>>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>>> teaching high school students.
>>>
>>> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
>>> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
>>> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
>>> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
>>> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
>>> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
>>> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
>>> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
>>> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
>>> make it more social.
>>>
>>> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
>>> James
>>>
>>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 This discussion is going to be fun! =D

 A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
 the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

 What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
 are
 several lists of su

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fake news ‘vaccine’: online game may ‘inoculate’ by simulating propaganda tactics

[James Salsman]

Here is a tweet describing a problem with social media recommendation systems:

"The algorithm I worked on at Google recommended Alex Jones' videos
more than 15,000,000,000 times, to some of the most vulnerable people
in the nation." - @gchaslot

What should the penalty for that be? A fine? Enough for the Foundation
to hire all my Google Summer of Code students to add pronunciation
remediation to Wiktionary?

If you think that's bad, most of the recommendation system damage is
from the vanity of fame instead of political schemers. Almost all of
the post-Myspace social media had a bias towards usually undeserved
fame. Luckily, the damage is merely memetic and can be repaired with
literature. But the schemers turn into fraud cases, so they get more
attention than they should relative to the larger, general problem.

Best regards,
Jim

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 11:27 PM, James Salsman  wrote:
> Here is a good example of instructional software to solve a systemic
> communication issue:
>
> https://www.getbadnews.com/
>
> Ref.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220093555.htm
>
> How can we sustain progress towards resolution of the issues?
>
> Also, does the date by which Titan is likely to be colonized correlate
> with the extent to which progress has been achieved? This is not the
> first time I have asked this question here, and I hope the answer is
> as clear to everyone else as it is to me: it correlates inversely.
>
> I wonder if the Foundation could afford to have David Attenborough
> narrate the interaction between Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge
> University. They would if they'd start investing in unskimmable
> endowment funds. Make donors' money work hard, with a screening for
> sustainability.
>
> Bring back the regular email to donors suggesting other organizations
> worthy of their money, and tell them how to avoid being skimmed by
> high frequency traders, too, please.
>
> Best regards,
> Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

> wonder if creating dynamic articles from Wikidata is better
> than creating static articles

Not for years to decades.

https://twitter.com/AustenAllred/status/967842020151603200



On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 3:02 AM, John Erling Blad  wrote:
> I wonder if creating dynamic articles from Wikidata is better than creating
> static articles. Because we lack tools for this, it is easier to do this
> offline, and as a consequence we get the static bot-articles.
>
> Den søn. 25. feb. 2018, 16.26 skrev Gabriel Thullen :
>
>> I should have joined in this discussion a little earlier. I work a lot with
>> the French Wikipedia, and we do not just translate articles from English (6
>> million articles) to French (only 2 million articles). The French community
>> is large and active, and provide a unique local perspective on the
>> different articles that are written. And when I say local, I mean that
>> things are seen differently in France than in the French speaking part of
>> Switzerland or Belgium.
>>
>> I think that we are ignoring something very important here: putting it
>> simply, Wikipedia contributors do two things. They add information to the
>> encyclopedia by improving articles or writing new ones, and they curate or
>> check the existing articles. All this talk about machine translation does
>> not address the second aspect of what the volunteer contributors do.
>> This means that we could have hundreds of thousands of articles in a
>> language with  very few active contributors. Will that small community be
>> able to oversee so many articles ?
>>
>> For example, have a look at the list of Wikipedias ordered by number of
>> articles:
>> 1. English - 5,578,081 articles - 138,479 active users - 1,230 admins
>> 2. Cebuano - 5,383,108 articles - 162 active users - 5 admins
>> 3. Swedish - 3,784,331 articles - 2,929 active users - 65 admins
>> 4. German - 2,157,495 articles - 20, 085 active users - 194 admins
>>
>> When I have some time, I will look into different ratios like number or
>> articles/active users or number of articles/number of native language
>> speakers... Now I am not saying that our Swedish friends have abused
>> machine translation of articles, but I definetly that something is not
>> quite right about the Cebuano wiki...
>> Gabe
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 4:06 PM, Anders Wennersten <
>> m...@anderswennersten.se
>> > wrote:
>>
>> > I am very happy to follow this thread as I believe it is addressing a
>> very
>> > relevant issue.
>> >
>> > In my mind we can divide up the different language version into 5
>> > categories:
>> >
>> > 1.Enwp,
>> >
>> > 2.the next 6-7 (de,fr, es,jp,pt,ru..)
>> >
>> > 3.the next 20 or so, where the basic workprocesses are applied
>> >
>> > 4.the next 40-50 which are struggling to generate more input then what is
>> > vandalised
>> >
>> > 5.the rest which in reality is no viable online encyclopedias
>> >
>> > And for me no 1 priority is to accept that there are these categories,
>> and
>> > that what is applicable for cat 1 and 2 is not so for 4 and 5.
>> >
>> > I believe the grant model could easily make room for subsiding good
>> > initiatives addressing the problem for cat 4 and 5 (and perhaps 3).
>> >
>> > And I think it is very presumptuous to start talking of what technique to
>> > use and things like translation. If we open up for creative brainstorming
>> > (among the ones having the need) I think very many other ways can turn
>> up.
>> > Myself I am deeply impressed what you can create using Wikidata as a base
>> > source of info, and being from a version of type 3 I see how much my
>> > homeversion improve content with wikidata created infoboxes
>> >
>> > Anders
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Den 2018-02-24 kl. 13:51, skrev John Erling Blad:
>> >
>> >> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>> >>
>> >> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k
>> articles,
>> >> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>> >>
>> >> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
>> are
>> >> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
>> >> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
>> thousand
>> >> articles from the expanded list[2].
>> >>
>> >> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
>> $1
>> >> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
>> >> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
>> >> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
>> >> good translation tools.
>> >>
>> >> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
>> >> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
>> >> at
>> >> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating
>> well-referenced
>> >> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
>> >> Perhaps
>> >> we should also identify good source articles, that wou

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

Languages are taught by authoritative dictionaries (after people, and
ahead of almost all other similar reference books.)

Wiktionary has multiple teaching functions whether we want it to or
not: 
https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/efe362e1-fe80-4c90-bc1e-4ab2d9bbae20/1/

Have you seen how much Wiktionary has been growing in Brazil?
https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2018/02/14/seo-world-rankings-2018/

Amir, you know it would not be losing focus because of what you said
in your talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_xJaqQV71s

Best regards,
Jim


On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
> Well... Not that teaching languages—big or small—is bad, but wouldn't we be
> losing focus if we got into it?
>
> Wikibooks and Wikiversity can theoretically be places for teaching. Are
> they good at it? Probably not. Should they be made better? Maybe.
>
> בתאריך 27 בפבר׳ 2018 19:52,‏ "Jean-Philippe Béland" 
> כתב:
>
> Amir,
>
> I agree with everything you said, especially that languages are knowledge
> in themselves, but I must say that Wikimedia is not doing much in an effort
> to teach languages to people. Why isn't there more effort at the WMF or as
> a movement to try to develop a platform to teach languages?
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President and Programs Coordinator, Wikimedia Canada
> Coordinator, Wikimedians of North American Indigenous Languages User Group
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

> I was not trying to say that everybody
> should learn English. The point I was
> trying to make there is that knowing
> English is a privilege and that it is easy
> to not notice it.

I agree with that, too. How is teaching language different relative to
the Foundation Mission than teaching subjects of encyclopedia
articles?


On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
> 2018-02-27 21:23 GMT+02:00 James Salsman :
>
>> Languages are taught by authoritative dictionaries (after people, and
>> ahead of almost all other similar reference books.)
>>
>
> ... Yeah, and building an authoritative dictionary is considerably harder
> than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia. Despite, I have
> enormous respect for Wiktionary, and great (great!) hopes about Lexical
> Wikidata.
>
>
>> Wiktionary has multiple teaching functions whether we want it to or
>> not: https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/efe362e1-fe80-4c90-
>> bc1e-4ab2d9bbae20/1/
>>
>
> Why not :)
>
>
>> Amir, you know it would not be losing focus because of what you said
>> in your talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_xJaqQV71s
>>
>
> Um... thanks for the publicity :)
>
> But no, that's not what I said. I was not trying to say that everybody
> should learn English. The point I was trying to make there is that knowing
> English is a privilege and that it is easy to not notice it. Of course, if
> that point didn't come through, it's my fault.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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[Wikimedia-l] knowing English is a privilege (was Re: Paid translation)

[James Salsman]

> building an authoritative dictionary is considerably
> harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia.

What reason is there to think that? My any measure of editor hours, or
the amount of money it would take to replicate the effort, or the
maintenance load going forward, I'm sure that even a three shelf foot
encyclopedia is harder than a 100,000 word dictionary.

> We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles.

What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia
article and teaching it? Encyclopedias are not written to be
accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. We even teach how to
write them, to students, in schools, and the students often if not
almost always get academic credit for their work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators

Knowing any language is a privilege, and suggesting that there is any
reason to narrow the Foundation's focus away from language instruction
seems completely absurd to me.

> Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki articles.

Why? We are already the best at that. Why not make the wiki articles
in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words,
which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting
that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they
are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording
gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides

I'm serious that I think the Foundation should hire all my Google
Summer of Code students to support doing that, because it will take
about that many people to set it up so that volunteers can complete
the work for all languages, not just English.

There is no reason that the Foundation can't both pay to translate
Wikipedia articles and pay to up Wiktionary's language instruction
game at the same time. That would have made sense ten years ago, and
the budget is much larger now. We are at a juncture in aligning our
long term strategy to the mission, so I hope both projects get funded.
If it has to be proposed budget-neutral to be compelling, then get rid
of the mobile app and mobile web versions except on platforms where
they are genuinely easier for editors, not just readers, to use.

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] knowing English is a privilege (was Re: Paid translation)

[James Salsman]

> Wikidata's Lexeme project is progressing slowly, but its direction is right.
> It will finally build a technical platform that is actually good for a 
> dictionary.

A wiki article is a very similar type to dictionary presentation of lexemes.
The best dictionaries also cover morphemes, e.g., "grammar" on the top
line of https://dictionary.cambridge.org

http://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile/egp-online

Those are the intermediate English morphemes, and these are their lexemes:

http://www.englishprofile.org/wordlists

I wonder if there is a Wikidata word number mapping for all ~6,500 of
those (level A1-C2) words.

Thanks all!

Best regards,
Jim


On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 2:10 AM, mathieu stumpf guntz
 wrote:
> Le 02/03/2018 à 00:46, Jean-Philippe Béland a écrit :
>>
>> I think this is à propos in this discussion about how authoritative can be
>> the Wiktionary... here a scientific article starts by using a definition
>> from the Wiktionary:
>>
>> http://theconversation.com/de-facebook-au-developpement-des-plantes-quand-les-reseaux-sen-melent-90891
>>
>> JP
>
> Actually one point that wasn't indicated so far, is the Wiktionnaries have
> indeed not a equal quality for every single article, but where quality is
> there it outstand easily any other single dictionary out there. Also there
> are a growing number of words for which no definition is given outside the
> Wiktionary. I think that conjugated, it might easily accustom people to
> directly go look up in Wikitonary when they need a definition, whatever its
> authoritative level might be.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

Pine, why not ask your namesake?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating_5057_btc_to_charitable_causes/

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 7:13 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> On the subject of paid translation, I could imagine this being included in
> the scope of work for a "Wiki Community Foundation" or "Wiki Content
> Foundation" that would do work that WMF doesn't do and/or shouldn't do. I
> have a number of activities in mind for this kind of organization.
> Unfortunately, I do not know how to fund it. I think that this organization
> should get most of its funding from non-WMF sources, and WMF has such
> strong fundraising capabilities that I think that competing with WMF for
> funding from readers and grant-making organizations would be very
> difficult. If WMF would like to have conversations about how the community
> could raise funds directly from readers and non-WMF foundations, I for one
> would be very interested in having that conversation.
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

If the Foundation Endowment paid for translations of articles across
Wikipedias, it would still be like a Foundation Grant in terms of the
legal effect on the DMCA safe harbor provisions and the practical
effect on whether mistakes could bring the Foundation into disrepute.

Maybe the Foundation could pay for translations, as long as a much
smaller independent third party was reviewing them for fidelity and
freedom from bias under conditions where a group of people are trying
to confound the paid reviewers by including a constant but small
proportion of intentionally inaccurate and biased proposed
translations to make sure that the reviewer quality is sufficient.

If that doesn't work, then the independent third party anti-bias QA
organization could grow to do the translation, perhaps as a thematic
organization supported by both outside and less than half internal
Foundation grants.

Best regards,
Jim

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 2:53 AM, WereSpielChequers
 wrote:
> Pine, there is one possible way to fund such translation in the future; The
> Foundation is building up an endowment. When that endowment has grown to
> the point where the annual return is sufficient to fund the Foundation,
> then you could re-purpose the annual fundraiser from collecting money to
> host Wikipedia, to collecting money to make Wikipedia available in other
> languages.
>
> If I'm correct in thinking that part of the problem for many of our widely
> spoken languages with weak wikipedias is that the more educated people who
> speak those languages are more likely to contribute edits in what is to
> them a  higher status or more language or one more useful to their career,
> then maybe we should test using fundraiser  type advertising to ask our
> English readers in places like India to translate articles from English to
> Indic languages.
>
> In some parts of the world where incomes are generally very low and
> financial donations reflect that perhaps we have little to lose by shifting
> now from asking for funds to asking for content donations, especially in
> the language of that area.
>
> WereSpielChequers
>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:13:38 -0800
>> From: Pine W 
>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
>> Message-ID:
>> > gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>>
>> On the subject of paid translation, I could imagine this being included in
>> the scope of work for a "Wiki Community Foundation" or "Wiki Content
>> Foundation" that would do work that WMF doesn't do and/or shouldn't do. I
>> have a number of activities in mind for this kind of organization.
>> Unfortunately, I do not know how to fund it. I think that this organization
>> should get most of its funding from non-WMF sources, and WMF has such
>> strong fundraising capabilities that I think that competing with WMF for
>> funding from readers and grant-making organizations would be very
>> difficult. If WMF would like to have conversations about how the community
>> could raise funds directly from readers and non-WMF foundations, I for one
>> would be very interested in having that conversation.
>>
>> Pine
>> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
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[Wikimedia-l] Ask Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft to state wiki article source dates in voice?

[James Salsman]

I wanted to share this because it's pertinent to issues with large
companies using our information without complying with the license
terms:

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_amazon_apple_facebook_and_google_manipulate_our_emotions

One discussions I've had with both Erik Moeller online and Katherine
Maher in person is about whether voice browsers should share the date
of CC-BY wiki articles when their speech synthesis devices quote from
them.

Are there any reasons that would be bad? It would help encourage new
editors by raising awareness of the ultimate source of "AI" answers.

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Ask Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft to state wiki article source dates in voice?

[James Salsman]

> I don't think it's particularly user/design friendly

How does the Foundation choose between presentation advantages for
commercial users, and advantages for attracting and retaining editors?

Is the request to try the word "edit" instead of a pencil icon on
mobile a good example of the Foundation's general disposition of such
questions?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2017_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Archive/Replace_or_supplement_mobile_pencil_icon_with_%22edit%22_in_square_brackets_and_A/B_test_editing_uptake

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Heatherawalls#Design-blocked_technical_community_wish

> On Wed, 7 Mar 2018, 16:22 James Salsman,  wrote:
>
>> I wanted to share this because it's pertinent to issues with large
>> companies using our information without complying with the license
>> terms:
>>
>>
>> https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_amazon_apple_facebook_and_google_manipulate_our_emotions
>>
>> One discussions I've had with both Erik Moeller online and Katherine
>> Maher in person is about whether voice browsers should share the date
>> of CC-BY wiki articles when their speech synthesis devices quote from
>> them.
>>
>> Are there any reasons that would be bad? It would help encourage new
>> editors by raising awareness of the ultimate source of "AI" answers.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Jim
>>
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