Re: [Wikimedia-l] Brazil

[Milos Rancic]

Since WMF is not interested in the deescalation of the conflict and
actively obstructs the mediation process by doing something it said
just a couple of days it wont' do, I am leaving my role as a mediator
in this dispute resolution.

P.S. This was for your information. I am not interested in your opinion.

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> Chico, Rodrigo and I had a very good meeting today. It lasted one hour
> and half, we were talking about various topics (via Google Hangouts)
> they care of and we've reached the agreement about the initial steps.
> (They've both agreed to lift the communication ban while talking with
> me.)
>
> Before taking mediation to myself, I've asked Patricio to do the same,
> but he is busy these days and he will join it in few months, after he
> comes out the busy days. (Both Rodrigo and Chico agreed with Patricio
> as a mediator, as well.)
>
> At this point of time, we've concluded the following:
>
> * Rodrigo apologized to Chico for harsh words.
> * Chico promised that their group won't raise the issues between the
> groups further.
> * Both of them agreed to treat this as their internal problem they are
> working to solve.
> * At the end of the week I will have separate meetings with Chico and
> Joao on one side and Rodrigo and Henrique on the other.
> * In two weeks, Rodrigo, Chico and I will have the next meeting.
>
> At this point of time and as long as I mediate in this case, I would
> ask WMF to refrain from any actions.
>
> I will inform you about the next steps and let's hope we'll solve this
> situation in the next couple of months.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia movement under DMCA attack!

[Milos Rancic]

On the other hand, I would like see WMF starts fixing harm done by its
cultural neocolonial actions in Brazil and India.

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 10:55 PM, Asaf Bartov  wrote:
> A message from your list moderators:
>
> This thread does not belong on this list.
>
> It is spillover of a long and bitter conflict in the Portuguese community,
> and this list's membership is not well situated to contribute to a solution
> through discussion on this list.  Those particularly interested and able
> can participate in relevant threads on the Portuguese Wikipedia.
>
> However, moving the mutual recriminations onto this list is escalation that
> can only upset people and exacerbate the conflict, and is not an effective
> way to seek help.
>
> As was mentioned, the matter involves allegations of harassment --
> investigated by the Support and Safety team in the Community Engagement
> department at WMF -- as well as legal action.  Both avenues would not
> benefit from partial and probably-biased context shared on this list.
>
> The parties in conflict should continue to seek a modus vivendi on the wiki
> they share, on-wiki, as well as through the channels they are already
> pursuing.  Smearing the other side on this list won't accomplish anything.
>
> Accordingly, *please stop posting on this thread*.  We have also placed the
> Brazilians involved in this conflict on temporary moderation, to prevent
> further escalation.
>
> (putting on my WMF hat for a moment -- As a further point of context, both
> sides have at one point requested WMF intervention in Brazil.  WMF has not
> yet announced whether and how it would intervene, though several
> alternatives have been discussed. Stay tuned.)
>
>  A.
>
> On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 5:47 PM Vi to  wrote:
>
>> This is a very complex long-term "war" which, in my experience, never ends
>> in a "reconciliation".
>>
>> Also, honestly, I don't think how can this comply with wikiversity mission.
>>
>> Vito
>>
>> <
>> https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail
>> >
>> Mail
>> priva di virus. www.avast.com
>> <
>> https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail
>> >
>> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>
>> 2017-11-06 15:30 GMT+01:00 mathieu stumpf guntz <
>> psychosl...@culture-libre.org>:
>>
>> > Thank Chico and Henrique for your reports and related links.
>> >
>> > I encourage both of you to document further this topic. But as the
>> mailing
>> > list format might quickly turn it into a flameware, to avoid list
>> > moderators some disagreeable work, you could preferably find more suited
>> > place to develop your points. Punctual feedback on the list to signal
>> > creation or update of additional external resources is welcome, as far as
>> > I'm concerned.
>> >
>> > You might, inter alia, use wikimedia-timeline[1] to generate an overview
>> > of main statements you are claiming, each linked to related resources
>> which
>> > let reader deepen their inquiry on the topic if they have interest and
>> > resources to do so.
>> >
>> > If you are interested to turn that in a research project as objective as
>> > you might be able to create, I also encourage you to open a research
>> > project on a Wikiversity instance, after a check of how such a project
>> > might be conducted on the selected instance. You might also like to
>> create
>> > and conduct some interviews and publish them on Wikinews.
>> >
>> > I hope that the difficult situation you are passing through will end up
>> in
>> > the most contributive, positive and placid possible resolution.
>> >
>> > Kind regards,
>> > mathieu
>> >
>> > [1] https://github.com/molly/wikimedia-timeline
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Le 06/11/2017 à 11:59, Chico Venancio a écrit :
>> >
>> >> Ended up with out the links, sorry:
>> >> [1]http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/wikibrasil.org.html
>> >> [2]https://www.whois.com/whois/107.180.2.118
>> >> [3]http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/L9610.htm#art24
>> >>
>> >> Chico Venancio
>> >>
>> >> 2017-11-06 7:53 GMT-03:00 Chico Venancio :
>> >>
>> >> To all on the list, *this is characterization is filled with obvious
>> >>> lies.*
>> >>>
>> >>> The DMCA was filed a month ago simply *DID NOT TAKE the site down*.[1]
>> >>> Henrique quickly took down the article offending copyright and Godaddy
>> >>> allowed it to continue to be hosted.[2]
>> >>>
>> >>> Henrique is a paid contractor of the user group Wiki Education Brazil
>> >>> that
>> >>> has repeatedly harassed several members of our user group (Joalpe and
>> >>> myself included). And is probably here acting as a Meatpuppet of
>> another
>> >>> user who is under an Office action interaction ban to interact with
>> >>> either
>> >>> myself or João.
>> >>>
>> >>> That he goes on an international platform to call on the Dean of the
>> >>> university were João works is egregious harassment and WMF should not
>> >>> only
>> >>> impose se

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Closure of Beta Wikiversity

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
> Pretty please, let's not even mention Multilngual Wikisource here. There is
> no plan to close it and it's not related to this discussion at all.
>
> This discussion is only about Beta Wikiversity.

True. The problem is that the request page has been created to cover
both projects and it's full of reasoning which cover Multilingual
Wikisource, as well; so I wanted to be clear that we are not talking
about it :)

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Closure of Beta Wikiversity

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 1:14 PM, Lodewijk  wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer. On the proposal page, I'm missing a somewhat clear
> and straightforward summary of the arguments in favor and against closing
> (why is the request made, and what was considered). That seems like
> valuable information for such discussion.
>
> Would you see the opportunity to summarize your view (or of the views of
> the proposers) on the top of the page?

In a little bit different words, I would say that Wikiversity has big
ratio of embarrassment per language edition (I would avoid naming
them, as they could be easily traced to the particular persons).
Having in mind that Beta Wikiversity is presently the incubator for
those projects, my position is that we should normalize it by moving
the incubating process to the Incubator.

There are other reasons listed here [1], most of which could be
applied for Multilingual Wikisource, as well, but I see no reason why
to the same with it, as the community of Multilingual Wikisource is
doing a good job.

[1] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Move_Beta_Wikiversity_to_Incubator#Arguments_in_favor

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Closure of Beta Wikiversity

[Milos Rancic]

There is the proposal for moving Beta Wikiversity into the Incubator
[1]. According to the Closing project policy [2], the decision about
closing projects is something done by particular members of the
Language committee (while the Board could veto the decision).

However, this is an unusual request with the positive positive outcome
and I would like to hear wider community explicitly again.

My position is -- and unless I get good arguments against I would send
it to the Board -- that Beta Wikiversity should be closed, as it's a
generator of projects lead by lunatics. "Academic freedom" has not
been fruitful and any new request for Wikiversity should pass regular
Incubator rules, inside of the curator environment fully trusted by
the Language committee.

The decision would be to move relevant content to the Incubator and
let Incubator curators decide if any of the Beta Wikiversity admins
should have adminship transferred. Beta Wikiversity would be closed
and after some time (a year or two), it should be deleted.

[1] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Move_Beta_Wikiversity_to_Incubator
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closing_projects_policy

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposed projects

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 5:29 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> Wikigames is not educational so not within scope.

There are many educational games in the wild. They could also make us
less boring.

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Very good news!

[Milos Rancic]

This is an extraordinary news for us! For almost 10 years I was hoping
to see that and, finally, I've seen it!

In short, it seems that we reached the bottom in participation in 2014
and that we are now slowly going upwards.

My claim is based on the analysis [1] of the Eric Zachte's
participation statistics on English Wikipedia [2], but I am almost
sure that the rest of the projects more or less mirror it. But,
anyway, I encourage others to check other projects and other relevant
factors and see if their results correlate with what I have found. The
reasons for the change in trends should be also detected.

If we are looking Eric's statistics from 2010 onwards, it is not
immediately obvious if we are going up or down. We reached the peak in
2007 (German Wikipedia somewhat earlier, other projects later, but
English Wikipedia is approximately 50% of our activity and its weight
is too strong for other projects to balance our overall activity).
After that peak, we went down as quickly as we reached the peak. Then,
in 2010, the trends flattened.

However, it was not a stagnation, but barely visible recession.
However, that "barely visible recession" removed approximately 20% of
the very active editors in the period from 2010 to 2014, while the
"visible one" -- from 2007 to 2010 -- was also approximately 20%. At
that point of time, in 2014, the next 10 years would for sure drive
Wikipedia and Wikimedia movement into insignificance.

Comparing such data is also tricky. It's not just necessary to compare
the same months (January 2010 with January 2011, 2012 etc.), but there
could be "freak" months, which are not following general trends.

That's why I used two methods: One is coloring the months by place in
comparison to the months of the previous years. The other is average
number per year.

There are at least a couple of important conclusions:

1) Negative trends have been reversed.

2) Both 2015 and 2016 were not just better than 2013 and 2014, but
even better than 2012, while 2016 is just a little bit worse than
2011!

3) December 2016 was even better than December 2010!

4) I could guess that the period June-November 2016 was worse than the
same period in 2015 because of the political turbulence. Without them
-- as May and December 2016 likely show -- 2016 would be not just
better, but much better than 2015 and maybe even better than 2010.

I would say that the reversal is still fragile and that we should do
whatever we've been doing the last two years. Yes, detecting what
we've been doing good (or bad) is not that easy to detect. But, yes,
better analysis of all of all of the processes should be definitely
done.

I hope that this shows that we are at the beginning of our
Renaissance, Wikimedia Renaissance and that the Dark Wikimedia Age is
behind us! So, please join me in enjoying that fact, even I could be
wrong. It definitely sounds definitely amazing, even it could be just
my imagination! :)

[1] 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IXYoTI_nCBhhuJAknH5KL450_D3V67KWTHuoEAh6540/edit?usp=sharing
[2] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] don't run away from the mess we've made, fix it (Re: Concerns in general)

[Milos Rancic]

Anna, you are talking about a decade old problems, which are not yet addressed.

There are two exceptions: (1) Board largely stopped making shame
transfer statements; and (2) For the last couple of years, every
interaction with the staff has given impression to me that I deal with
competent professionals.

Although it wouldn't be that significant advancement for an average
organization, having in mind the complexity of the Wikimedia movement,
I have to say that I am in a way content. It was relaxing to me to
realize that, for example, the latest visit do Ghana addressed
everything basically needed.

However, those old problems are still here. Numerous tries to solve
them properly have been mostly implicitly undermined. Sometimes
because of lack of support, sometimes because of making more or less
visible barriers. And it's not about community which blocks it, but
about those in power.

It is extremely important to understand that position of power brings
more responsibility. The position of power doesn't need to be
"absolute" (i.e. Board members; yes, I know it's not absolute, that's
why I used quotes); in many cases, it's very relative and it's
sometimes hard to distinguish (who has more power on English
Wikipedia: a WMF employee or an ArbCom member). However, in the most
of the cases, it's very visible: an ordinary Wikipedia editor, not
willing to be organized in a chapter or a user group, has power to
vote few times per year and power to *edit*. While the first power is
very relative, only real power which that editor has is to edit.

That leads to sticking with the only real power and alienation from
all other segments of the Wikimedia movement. An average active editor
of Wikimedia projects most likely have very negative opinion towards
anyone else than the fellow editors.

Making equation between Board, staff and community is false because
it's about very different levels of responsibility. Urging to the
community to do something won't be treated serious as long as they
have to abandon their rights (even it's about abandoning practically
non-existent rights) as long as all of their power -- to elect the
guardians of their community -- is mostly about broken promises. And
the system has been made in the way that the promises will be always
broken.

The story of WMF (both, Board and staff) reminds me a lot of the story
of US Democratic Party and the centrist parties all over the Europe:
forcing business as usual as long as it is possible, no matter if it's
been done by ignoring the voices, searching for pseudoscientific
conclusions based on techniques that work when you want to sell
marketing services, but not so much when you want to address the
concerns of the population you lead.

Fortunately, we are not in the position that "everything has been
lost" and we could change it. But that would be possible just if there
is political will inside of the WMF to do that.

Last year this time we've witnessed the revolution, the power of staff
to replace ED. Around the end of the event, I was assured that the
staff will be the stakeholder that would lead the change. If there
were changes during the last year, they are invisible.

Long time ago -- at the beginning of this century -- we've invented
large scale constructive participatory democracy. Instead of using it,
instead of nurturing it, developing it, those in power neglected it at
the best, and actively obstructed it at the worst.

There are methods and models how to do that. I have my own
preferences, but I -- and the majority of editors, I am sure -- would
be quite fine with anything which works. And, no, limiting editors to
the decision of which image would be the first on the article about
toilet paper orientation is not one of the viable models. No, limiting
them to make decisions about the rules for deciding which image would
be the first in any article is neither a viable model.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Anna Stillwell
 wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to talk beyond this particular instance or these particular
> protagonists.
>
> I'd like to talk about culture. We've created a culture that is hard on
> people, somewhat punishing of them. We engage in a good deal of public
> shaming.
>
> We need to find a way to turn our culture toward more generative and
> constructive forms of public discourse. If we fail, smart, good, healthy
> Wikimedians will go away and not add their knowledge to our projects.
>
> It’s not even about whose at fault anymore, because we all are. When I talk
> to people across the movement, they're all pretty clear that someone other
> than themselves is the responsible party:
>
>- “It’s the dysfunctional board.”
>- “No, no. it’s the “toxic communities”.
>- “Of course not, its the obtuse staff”.
>
> First, this is not healthy and it is not true. We have smart, brilliant,
> competent people throughout our movement. I’ve met brilliant, generative,
> empathic community members who have performed a deep service by ad

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Concerns in general

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 1:10 PM, Amir Ladsgroup  wrote:
> Yes they are: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/mirrors.html and three out of
> four of them are outside U.S.

No images/files backup outside of US.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Ray Saintonge has died

[Milos Rancic]

And just to add that his username page is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eclecticology

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> this is really sad news :(
>
> dj
>
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 12:00 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
>> He died yesterday. As he was an important member of our community, I
>> think we should make something appropriate so he would be remembered.
>>
>> --
>> Milos
>>
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>
>
>
>
> --
>
> __
> prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak
> kierownik katedry Zarządzania Międzynarodowego
> i grupy badawczej NeRDS
> Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego
> http://n <http://www.crow.alk.edu.pl/>wrds.kozminski.edu.pl
>
> członek Akademii Młodych Uczonych Polskiej Akademii Nauk
>
> Wyszła pierwsza na świecie etnografia Wikipedii "Common Knowledge? An
> Ethnography of Wikipedia" (2014, Stanford University Press) mojego
> autorstwa http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=24010
>
> Recenzje
> Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
> Pacific Standard:
> http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/killed-wikipedia-93777/
> Motherboard: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-ethnography-of-wikipedia
> The Wikipedian:
> http://thewikipedian.net/2014/10/10/dariusz-jemielniak-common-knowledge
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-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Ray Saintonge has died

[Milos Rancic]

He died yesterday. As he was an important member of our community, I
think we should make something appropriate so he would be remembered.

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Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

My last mail for today, so Anne, just to say that I really appreciate
what you've done, but I'll comment in a bit more detail tomorrow.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
> I'll leave the "defensive" bit aside, and just reiterate that I *still* do
> not understand exactly what problem you're trying to focus discussion on.
> In the piece of text Asaf quoted, you used the words "it" and "reports." I
> don't know what you intend by those words. Maybe for some reason you feel
> it's Asaf's job to clarify that for the rest of the list's readers; maybe
> so. I don't have more to contribute on this point.

The background goes this way...

I've been approached privately two years ago about the issues that
bother significant part of Indian Wikimedian community. As I think
that's in the range of quite solvable issues, my instinct was to talk
with the relevant people inside of the Wikimedia movement (not just
WMF). I thought it's been solved and I forgot for that. However, two
years later I am listening about the same problems. So, I am pissed
off enough to start talking about that on this list.

However, if I say everything I know, I would for sure harm a number of
people. And I am not willing to do that no matter how pissed off or
drunk I am. The situation is not good, but far from being any kind of
catastrophe.

But I want to see the problem solved. So, I am giving quite enough of
information about the problems (cf. my first email, then my response
to Risker) and expect the beginning of communication. The responses
are telling me what's safe to talk about and what's not. I also expect
to be convinced that the most of Indian Wikimedians will be content at
the end of this process.

So, the research is very good thing and I am again positively
surprised by the attitude of WMF. However, that's not enough.

I also want to say that what I said in my first email and in my
response to Risker is the core of the problem. Many particular issues
are not useful (and could be harmful). I understand that many people
on this list don't realize how those issues are important, but they
*are* vitally important to the Indian part of our movement.

In other words, although I am not disclosing all of information I
have, mostly to protect privacy of some people, I am not cryptic at
all. It is just a matter of what's perceived as important to a Western
and what to an Indian Wikimedian.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 7:27 PM, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>>
>> On the rest: being defensive is not useful; being constructive is.
>>
>
> I don't see anything in this thread that looks defensive; what I see (and
> thoroughly agree with) is a request to more clearly define the problem. I'd
> add that some clarity around who "we" are who should do something -- which
> might be several categories of "we" for different kinds of actions -- would
> help, as well.

I didn't say Risker is, for example, defensive; I said Asaf is defensive.

If you have enough information on the issue, constructive approach is
not to pretend to ask for more information, but to talk about what you
know.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:49 PM, Asaf Bartov  wrote:
> (Are "the lower classes" from Serbia represented in Wikimania?)

While I could complain about a number things to WMRS, this is an
obvious exception. Two of three Wikimedians funded by WMRS actually
belong to the economically disadvantaged category.

On the rest: being defensive is not useful; being constructive is.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] On Trump supporters (was: Our problem with India)

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:33 PM, Newyorkbrad  wrote:
> I suggest that we just drop the Trump tangent from the discussion, as
> it is a distraction.

I am sure the politically correct word for that population would be
eventually found and I definitely support the usage of the newly
defined word. In the meantime, I am really talking about present day
Trump supporters and I think it's useful to be scared of them on this
mailing list first, so you could be more calm while organizing an
editathon among them :)

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:01 PM, Risker  wrote:
> Milos, I read the points you are making in your initial post, and I cannot
> tell what actions you are seeking.  I am not even really clear on what the
> problem is that you are "reporting".  The best I can make of it is that you
> don't think there are enough articles in the Wikipedias of the languages of
> the Indian subcontinent, and that somehow it is the WMF's fault.

Yes, it's WMF's fault and the fault of us as a movement. We are not
promoting social diversity in Indian part of our movement and if we
are not doing that, we are cementing the problems they have.

I've written inside of my first email that there were no
representatives of the lower classes of India on Wikimania. That's
something both WMF and the movement can solve by taking care about
diversity. However, Wikimania participation is just a tip of the
iceberg.

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] On Trump supporters (was: Our problem with India)

[Milos Rancic]

Moving this issue out of the thread about India, as it doesn't belong to it.

It seems that my explanation of explanation was not quite useful. Just
the last paragraph was a satire and I've got complaint that
satirically playing with the racist stereotypes could seem racist.
That was the target of the explanation of explanation.

However, your question that it's still not clear to you why I am
talking about Trump supporters is much more important.

If we tend to be an inclusive movement, we should do our best to
include people from as much of society as we are able to do.

The first and the most obvious problem in Wikimedia community was
striking lack of women. And, for a long time we have the programs
which promote inclusion of women in our movement.

Then we have the issue of minorities. Depending on the country, those
processes started sooner or later.

However, as we articulated Wikimedia movement as a progressive one, we
are slowly but surely losing large portions of our societies.

The metaphor for that portion is "a Trump voter", but those people
exist in every society. They do not vote for Trump; they could be even
a progressive force in their society; but, as with Trump supporter,
they've been ostracized from the dominant part of the society as less
worthy.

I've said those parts of the societies are our new underrepresented
groups. In United States it's about middle class people scared of
those who are socially in worse (immigrants) and better position
(among others, us) than themselves, voting for Trump. In Austria, it's
about working class people scared of those in worse and better
position than themselves, voting for FPO. And so on.

And if you are asking me why we should take care about their
incorporation, I will tell you that I was getting quite similar
questions when I raised the problem of lack of participation of women
in Wikimedia movement. It's the wider social role of our movement.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 3:43 PM, Peter Southwood
 wrote:
> Still not clear. Why?
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf 
> Of Milos Rancic
> Sent: Tuesday, 28 June 2016 1:28 PM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India
>
> On Jun 28, 2016 09:58, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:
>>
>> (Hint for American
>> Wikimedians: Trump supporters are your next target for positive
>> discrimination.)
>
> It seems I have to clarify this sentence.
>
> I didn't say Trump, I didn't say Cruz, I didn't say Cruz supporters, I said 
> Trump supporters.
>
> I have in mind very specific population, genuinely scared by the privileged 
> Mexican illegal immigrants, working lazy for the American agricultural 
> industry for $5/h or less and supported by Bay Area hipsters and Jewish lobby.
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-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 4:47 PM, Anders Wennersten
 wrote:
> I have been active in FDC and followed closely all applicants. It works very
> well when it comes to promote small affiliates to grow in a controlled way
> and ensuring that money is spent wisely. The FDC, though, demand an
> elaborate plan, and application, which can be (too) hard as a first step if
> you still is an volunteer driven organisation.  So  since a year the Simple
> annual plan grant now exist, and I have been part in this and its seven
> applicants that has been through that process. And it works wonderfully even
> if there has been quite complicated issues in the application. The
> application formality is much easier and the applicant gets hands-on help by
> both WMF staff and also by a peer from an existing affiliate. And the
> feedback we have received has been very very positive, specially the support
> from peers. And for you Milos who was in ChapCom at the same time as me in
> 2008, you should rejoice as much as me that now also Brazil is on track, so
> the "complicated" affiliates in 2008, Catala, Brazil an US, are now all on
> track.
>
> So we now have process in place that really help and support small groups of
> enthusiastic Wikimedians to grow in a controlled way becoming well
> functioning chapters. We have also since 2008 learnt, from experiences from
> Brazil and India, that to try by "outsiders" to get  a local organisation in
> place that will grow in a good way, just has not worked. These experiments
> just hindered (and delayed) natural good establishment.
>
> So my learning is that it is counter productive to try as an outsider to get
> something happen. We have to await until groups of clever Wikimedians in
> India with the right ambition etc are ready to enter applications to either
> of the grant programs, and then there are mechanisms in place to help them
> evolve

Anders, we've been asked for help at least twice that I know, as I can
witness for those two times. The first time I thought it will be
solved, but it hasn't been solved after two years. Plus, a couple of
previous years of getting informal complaints in relation to the WMF's
behavior in India.

The *problem* is that WMF is actually participating in keeping the
mess in perpetual state. And it's not about bad intentions, but about
incompetence. So, let's start solving *our* problem with India, not
*Indian* problem with us.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

And it seems I need one more note: The last sentence was satirical.
On Jun 28, 2016 13:27, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:

> On Jun 28, 2016 09:58, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:
> >
> > (Hint for American
> > Wikimedians: Trump supporters are your next target for positive
> > discrimination.)
>
> It seems I have to clarify this sentence.
>
> I didn't say Trump, I didn't say Cruz, I didn't say Cruz supporters, I
> said Trump supporters.
>
> I have in mind very specific population, genuinely scared by the
> privileged Mexican illegal immigrants, working lazy for the American
> agricultural industry for $5/h or less and supported by Bay Area hipsters
> and Jewish lobby.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

On Jun 28, 2016 09:58, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:
>
> (Hint for American
> Wikimedians: Trump supporters are your next target for positive
> discrimination.)

It seems I have to clarify this sentence.

I didn't say Trump, I didn't say Cruz, I didn't say Cruz supporters, I said
Trump supporters.

I have in mind very specific population, genuinely scared by the privileged
Mexican illegal immigrants, working lazy for the American agricultural
industry for $5/h or less and supported by Bay Area hipsters and Jewish
lobby.
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[Wikimedia-l] Our problem with India

[Milos Rancic]

Whenever a serious problem raises and after years of hesitation I
finally realize that I have to speak about it publicly, I have a drive
to drink some rakija, feel good and forget all of the stress the new
issue would give to me.

But this is very important and we have to start talking about it.

This issue lasts for years. I was first approached with this problem
during the Wikimania in London. Because of my firm belief into the
random nature of the nature, I thought it would be solved randomly.

Of course my intuition was wrong. Two years later nothing has changed.

Serbia has 7 millions of inhabitants, India has 1.3 billion. In few
years India will have 2000 times more inhabitants of Serbia.

And when I see what a mess good people from the West [1][2] are making
in Serbia, multiply that number with 2000 and realize that I have a
number of Wikimedia friends from India, my anxiety freaks out.

We are not the worst, it's likely we are even the best, but we are
mostly doing the same things that has been proved to be plainly wrong.
Fortunately, it's just "mostly", not "completely", as we have the way
to see what is wrong.

The problem we have there is bigger than any inequality gap we have in
all OECD countries combined, as Wikimedia is doing poor job in solving
any problem for approximately 1.2 billion of humans.

I will start with with the simple fact that Hindi, the fourth language
by number of speakers [3] has Wikipedia at the 58th place by number of
articles [4]. And, no, Hindi Wikipedia is not at all in the category
"smaller number of very good articles".

I will continue with my completely unscientific approximation that 1/7
of the world population has been constantly represented on Wikimanias
by 1/7 Wikimedians if we count genetics and 0 (zero) if we count
social reality.

For those who didn't yet get it, if the upper classes of India consist
even 20% of population, we don't have any representation of 1 billion
of humans.

I could continue here with the background of the issue, various
problems mentioned to me, frustration expressed to me, but I don't
think it's useful at all.

What I think it's most useful is to start fixing the problem *now*. I
want to hear Indian Wikimedians what they see as problems that should
be solved, how they think that they should be solved, as well as WMF
and other Wikimedia movement bodies to start tackling that problem.

This is the part of the bigger problem. All of us have similar
problems in our own societies. And I think everybody should follow the
resolution of this problem and think how to do the similar things in
their own capacities in their own societies. (Hint for American
Wikimedians: Trump supporters are your next target for positive
discrimination.)

[1] 
https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it
[2] 
http://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_listen
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Structuring revolution

[Milos Rancic]

I created the set of pages, starting with [1]. That's the place for
structuring our ideas, thoughts etc. I decomposed the thread "What it
means to be a high-tech organization" and I needed for the whole task
~5 hours.

On the talk page [2] you can find the manual how to help.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_2016
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Revolution_of_2016

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Responsibility during the revolutionary times

[Milos Rancic]

I see that the discussion on this list exploded and I am very happy to
see that. Now we need to capitalize on this enormous engagement by all
of us and make the real changes.

We need the leadership. WMF staff proved to be much more potent than
dysfunctional Board.

So, please, talk to each other, structure this discussion on Meta --
idea by idea, counter-idea by counter-idea --, and call us to
participate there. If you need our help to do this, you have private
and public means to ask for help.

It's your responsibility to yourself and to the rest of us. This is
the right time and you need to do that now!

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] The right time is now!

[Milos Rancic]

I stopped responding to other emails because the significance of this
moment is so large, that we have now we didn't have since the
beginnings of Wikipedia.

We've got the chance to rebuild the movement.

I don't want to talk about the past, I don't want to write about what
I think about particular ongoing events, I don't want to think about
anything else and I urge on all of you to do the same.

Just one small part of the movement -- those personally involved --
see this moment emotionally and could feel the significance of the
moment. The most of the movement, including myself, didn't participate
emotionally and I understand why they could have troubles to get the
perspective.

As mentioned before, for the first time in the decade, we have Board
members discussing the issues with us honestly. But that's just one
part of the story.

The other part, even more significant, is exactly that emotional,
cathartic process lived during the past year by that small part of the
movement, WMF staff.

As I said above, I don't want to talk about my particular position
regarding those events, as they are irrelevant. The relevant part is
their experience, their cohesion, their contemplation of various
issues related to themselves, their colleagues and the movement; their
will to succeed and, eventually, their success.

That changes a lot! We've finally got visible another stakeholder
inside of our movement, stakeholder capable to do things nobody else
inside of the movement can. That also gives them much more
responsibility than they had earlier. It's not anymore just about
their dream jobs, but also about the fate of our movement.

You proved to be capable. Last couple of weeks I read many insightful
emails from you, WMF employees -- some of them I didn't know at all. I
heard thoughts I've never heard before on this list. They've been born
in pain and you mustn't lose them.

Now you have the opportunity to lead *the* change. You are not anymore
just the most organized part of the movement, you've just articulated
yourself as capable to make the change you want to.

You have the means, the organizational infrastructure, not the Board,
which is working properly just under pressure, not C-level management,
which is struggling to find the way between dysfunctional Board and
reality. It's about you, engineers, analysts, managers, designers,
scientists, researchers, advocates, liaisons etc. You've already
changed your culture, it's now your turn to help others to change the
movement culture!

You win your own revolution. It's now time for you to help the rest of
us in your and our common revolution.

I imagine one democratic Wikimedia movement, based on solidarity,
common values and common culture. I imagine all of us have the same
goals and help each other to achieve them. I imagine us as the seed
for the future United Federations of Planets (and, yes, when I come to
San Francisco, I want you to show me Starfleet Command!).

So, please, go back to your revolutionary cells, create your vision of
our movement while listening the input of the rest of us, present it
to us on Meta, lead the discussion, lead the revolution! You've shown
that you are capable to do that.

The right time to do that is now! Please, don't miss this
once-in-lifetime opportunity!

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Transition plans for WMF leadership - Board Reform

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak
 wrote:
> First, my ideas to reform the Board are not incompatible with a
> "senate-like" idea.
>
> Second, I think that I see at least several reasons why a Senate for
> WIkimedia movement may not be the best way to go:
> 1) we already advance bureaucracy. Setting up yet another committee in a
> hope, that it will solve problems rarely works. It is better to improve the
> existing institutions.
> 2) Separating the movement's Senate from the WMF's Board will further
> advance the divide and disengagement.
> 3) We already have bodies, whose responsibility is oversight over the
> movement's resources (the FDC). After four years of lobbying for this idea,
> I'm really happy to see now that the WMF will be treated more like other
> organizations in the movement and will undergo a review. We DO NOT need
> more ideas to separate the WMF from the movement, we need just the
> opposite. In my view, the Board should gradually include oversight of the
> movement, rather than just the WMF.
> 4) The costs of having a 15-20 people Senate that meets in person twice a
> year match the costs of a small chapter. I don't think it makes sense,
> resource-wise.
> 5) Ultimately, Denny's proposal leads to polarizing the field into the WMF
> vs. everyone else. I would very much rather see a situation in which the
> WMF is primus inter pares.

Once again I got instinct to find appropriate literature, which
describes properly contemporary bureaucratic nonsense and doublespeak.
But I will resist this time.

FDC was the product of long-term struggle between chapters on one side
and Board, ED and staff on the other one. That will be always the case
until we get the unified global body, which democratically represents
all of the stakeholders.

Thus, not the senate, but assembly is the right form of our
organization: assembly which would select *paid* Board members.
Besides the load, I want Board members to be accountable to
Wikimedians, not to the for-profit or non-profit entities which give
them money.

Yes, it's scary to be accountable to people you lead. I completely
understand that.

The costs of having 100 people assembly won't be significant at all.
First of all, the most of the people in such large body would be
anyways mostly consisted of those going to Wikimedia Conference and
Wikimania. If you really care about money, scale the initial body to
40-50 and ask all chapters that sending three or more people to those
conferences to contribute expenses for one to such body. If you put
that way, the costs could rise up to ~5%, if they raise at all.

So, please, reconsider your ideas on the line: from speaking about bad
bureaucracy, while in fact increasing inefficient one -- to thinking
about efficient, democratically accountable bureaucracy, with
everybody content by its construction.

It appears in my vision that "more oversight" will practically mean
creation of "Community Oversight Committee", which would be used as
one more excuse, while their members would be politely intimidated not
to talk anything "too hard" to the others, under the excuses of
loyalty to anybody else than the movement itself.

Said everything above, I have to express that I am pissed off by the
fact that the Board members are constructive as long as they are under
high level of pressure. Whenever you feel a bit more empowered, I hear
just the excuses I've been listening for a decade.

Please, let us know how do you want to talk with us in the way that we
see that the communication is constructive.




-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Transition plans for WMF leadership - Board Reform

[Milos Rancic]

> I suppose Jimmy is the most responsible for spreading that. What I can't 
> understand is the fact
> that I don't see that too much (s)elected Board members have integrity
> above Jimmy's rumors threshold.

And the first part, as it wasn't well formatted initially: There is
specific Board culture, transferred from generation to generation of
Board members. The culture of siege, where the community is the
archenemy. As Denny is repeating the same thing I heard from some of
the previous Board members, while Jimmy is the only one with more than
year and half of being in the Board, I suppose it's about Jimmy.

The second option is possibility that that culture is so strong, that
it already assimilated almost everybody else up to the level of being
able to transfer the mythology to Denny.

The third option is possibility that Jan-Bart and Stu have such
powers, that they were able to indoctrinate Denny for six months of
being together in the Board.

I think the first option is the most reasonable one.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Transition plans for WMF leadership - Board Reform

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Florence Devouard  wrote:
>> responsible for spreading that. What I can't understand is the fact
>> that I don't see that too much (s)elected Board members have integrity
>> above Jimmy's rumors threshold.
>
> You are not very clear here Milos. Can you rephrase ? Thanks

OK, likely the influence of my Serbian syntax and semantics...

I wanted to say that there are not a lot (that's a kind of euphemism
for "few"; the only clearly visible of them being Dariusz) Board
members since your and Angela's departure (a decade?) that have
personal integrity which could resist Jimmy's rumors.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Transition plans for WMF leadership - Board Reform

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 2:23 AM, Denny Vrandecic
 wrote:
> - the Board members have duties of care and loyalty to the Foundation - not
> to the movement. If there is a decision to be made where there is a
> conflict between the Movement or one of the Communities with the
> Foundation, the Board members have to decide in favor of the Foundation.
> They are not only trained to so, they have actually pledged to do so.

First, I suppose it's clear to you that you won't be reelected because
of this paragraph. While your legal obligations belong to WMF, your
political obligations belong to those who elected you. And the
paragraph above is far from being politically wise.

Second, this is the exact part of the Board's internal mythology about
the enemies inside of the movement. They've been repeated since
Florance and Angela leaved the Board. I suppose Jimmy is the most
responsible for spreading that. What I can't understand is the fact
that I don't see that too much (s)elected Board members have integrity
above Jimmy's rumors threshold.

Third, may you give to me *one* example of movement being in
confrontation with WMF's legal foundations, thus requiring Board to
react to protect WMF against the evil community?

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Anybody alive?

[Milos Rancic]

OK. There are seven of us (six in this thread and Kevin in the other one).

We need just the rest ~1000 to find.

I think we should find first at least one of the list admins, so we
could find the names of the persons we are searching. Austin?
TheHelpfulOne? Richard (from Australia)?


On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Joseph Fox  wrote:
> Y'know, maybe it's a good thing when this list is quiet. Saves my inbox
> some.
>
> On Wed, 24 Feb 2016 at 18:11 Lydia Pintscher 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 6:44 PM Yaroslav M. Blanter 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On 2016-02-24 18:39, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> > > 8 (eight) hours have passed without any email. Am I the last
>> > > Wikimedian not abducted by aliens?
>> >
>> > No, there are other lists which are active. For example, the last
>> > message on the wikidata-l by Lydia was several minutes ago.
>> >
>> > (May be she is abducted by the aliens though, I do not know).
>> >
>>
>> Haha
>> No, I did grow up watching a lot of the X-Files and have spent a few hours
>> over the past weeks watching the new episodes but so far I have not been
>> abducted by aliens. I think! Hmmm.
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>> Lydia
>> --
>> Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
>> Product Manager for Wikidata
>>
>> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
>> Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
>> 10963 Berlin
>> www.wikimedia.de
>>
>> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
>>
>> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
>> der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
>> Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Anybody alive?

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 6:43 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
> No, there are other lists which are active. For example, the last message on
> the wikidata-l by Lydia was several minutes ago.
>
> (May be she is abducted by the aliens though, I do not know).

Good to know that I am not the only not abducted one.

Maybe Lydia is not abducted because she is not subscribed on this list?

We should make the plan now how to search for others. Any idea?

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[Wikimedia-l] Anybody alive?

[Milos Rancic]

8 (eight) hours have passed without any email. Am I the last
Wikimedian not abducted by aliens?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] An Open Letter to Wikimedia Foundation BoT

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:43 AM, SarahSV  wrote:
> This isn't about how much people know. It's obvious that the KE was just a
> flashpoint. It's about how to move forward without further casualties. I
> don't believe that that isn't possible.

From the point of person who knows just a tinny bit more than the
non-staff non-Board participant of this list (but definitely far less
than staff and Board), I tend to be a misanthrope. You know, the same
answer to the question "Why do wars exist?": Because people are
morons.

But despite of this, I still share your hope as I tend to believe that
Wikimedians are not just ordinary morons.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] An Open Letter to Wikimedia Foundation BoT

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:49 AM, Denny Vrandecic
 wrote:
> Whereas I do not agree with everything you say (but I think those are
> discussions for another time), I wholeheartedly agree with your insight
> that the Board as a whole is dumber than its member on average. Thank you
> for putting this down to words. I would even say, dumber than any of its
> members (including myself, who probably ranks at the bottom).
> ...

Denny, are you ready? Take a deep breath! Relax. It won't hurt :P

Do something!

You know you didn't say anything in your email. It looks like your own
mantra, the product of your need to say something, while struggling
with anxiety caused by thoughts about possible reactions on your
email. But I'll stop criticizing here.

What I see as maybe not that visible change to others, but definitely
a strong sign that something positively has changed inside of the
Board is your willingness to actually think outside of the usual
tropes. That's especially thank to Dariusz and you. Dariusz is doing
something we expected from Sj in the previous life and, yes, your
mantras are honest and I am sure I am not the only one who noted it.
They are expressing your and other Board members' fears, confusion,
lack of understanding the historical significance of your positions,
but also your good will. That's brave, and that's the *change*,
paradigm change.

After you reset the culture of denial, you should now start thinking
how to boot the system again. Forget everything previous, forget the
common excuses for avoiding responsibility.

Stop crying that you are not the movement leaders. You are. You can
like or not that fact, but there is no other person or body in
such position. If your vision is to be just the Board of the Bay Area
NPO, feel free to do that, but just after you make the environment
which would relieve you from the position of the movement leaders.

Now, please get out of your cocoons! And do something! We need you here.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Technical issues of Wikimedia [was: Particular interests and common ground]

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Amir Ladsgroup  wrote:
> You talked about things that I'm in no place to comment but I want to
> emphasize on this part of your email:
> "For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without
> problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain"
> MediaWiki, optimizations etc.)."
> We hear about technical issues of Wikipedia a lot. We hear Wikipedia is
> behind in technology, that it's underperforming. etc. etc. It's not just
> you. It's a lot of people in the community of editors too. I highly doubt
> that I can comment on this matter, there are definitely better people but I
> can't keep it anymore. Maybe my perspective as a non-WMF employee who works
> in technical issues would be worth publishing.
> ...

Just to be clear, as mails like my previous one could be wrongly
understood, obviously.

I said "without problems" vs. "with problems", not "competent" vs.
"incompetent" or "good" vs. "bad" etc. Both money and infrastructure
have been no issues for almost a decade (servers longer than money). I
am not waking up with the thought that Wikimedia won't have enough
money or that servers wouldn't work. (OK, there are some invisible
things, like accounting, which obviously haven't been a problem at any
point of time.)

Everything else has been a kind of problem, but I wasn't going into
details. If we are talking about MediaWiki itself, the core is going
with infrastructure and it's no issue. In relation to the features,
which are the problem, it's related to the articulation of the needed
features and allocating resources to create them. Thus, it's the
problem of upper management. I know we have a lot of quite competent
developers.

But I didn't want to go into this kind of analysis. In some cases the
causes are obvious, in some other they are not. I just wanted to
detect that, besides very limited number of no issues, we have tons of
problems, the most of them being the same as a decade ago.

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[Wikimedia-l] Particular interests and common ground (was: An Open Letter to Wikimedia Foundation BoT)

[Milos Rancic]

I woke up this morning, read emails and felt quite frustrated. I
wanted to write something on Delphine's line, but that Ark B
distracted me enough to make myself content with one more satirical
allegory.

So, thank you very much, Delphine, for writing this and opening much
more important discussion! Much more than the Knight grant is or even
the issues of Lila, James and Arnnon.

For the last 8 years, just two things have been working without
problems in WMF: Money and tech infrastructure (servers, "plain"
MediaWiki, optimizations etc.). Everything else is in the range
between "regular problem we use to deal with" and quite serious
problem.

Unlike Delphine and the most people from chapters, I want to see our
movement as federation, not as confederation. I don't think we are
ready to have loosely connected network of chapters and user groups.
And that's not because of us as Wikimedians but because of us as
humans. It's not reasonable to expect functional decentralized global
movement without more common values than just those based on licenses.
(No, we don't have any other.)

However, it doesn't work if there is no hard democratic influence over
the decision-making process. And everything I heard about increasing
community participation in decision-making processes for the last ~10
years was demagogy and doublespeak.

And, unlike dominant echoing here, I want to say that significant
portion of staff is at least the passive part of that problem. (Keep
in mind that Wikimedia staff are usually not just ordinary employees,
but people with high level of political influence inside of the
movement.) My memory says that I've seen staff talking openly about
any problem just in the most visible and problematic cases. If not, of
course, it was on the line of the Board and ED.

Have you noticed that this is almost exclusively the problem between
significant portion of staff and highly involved American Wikimedians
on one side and ED and Board on the other one? Community and chapters
mostly don't care. Except, of course, that something very wrong is
going on.

That's the product of previous (non-)actions, cultivation of
particular interests, lack of solidarity, lack of articulating common
values and building common culture; the product of "implementing
goals" no matter of their long term price and total failure of the
Board structure.

We are in constant crisis and I find a bit cynical the fact that one
of the most influential groups inside of the movement is detecting it
just when their dream jobs are on stake. Sorry for being harsh, but
that's the fact.

To overcome this fully dysfunctional situation, we need to create the
deal between the major stakeholders of the movement: Community, Board,
chapters and staff (including ED). We have to define what are the
expectations of every group and how to make those expectations
fulfilled in the way that everybody see the value in participating
into the movement if not to see everybody content.

This is something that had to be done a decade ago, but it's better to
be done sooner than later and ever than never. We can't function with
implicit expectations forever.

For example, If staff expects to be able to veto ED or to participate
in selecting her or him -- which I find to be a reasonable
expectation, having in mind the nature of our movement -- it should be
articulated and, if no other stakeholder have anything strictly
against it, we should find the way how to implement that.

But that's just about this ongoing issue. The list of expectations
from various sides is long and we should talk about them one by one.

The process of reaching the common grounds is not easy, not shiny,
requires a lot of work and nerves. Saying to each other "yes" or
"thank you" is not helping, neither. We need to work hard on that.
Useful Strategic Plan for the Board and management is not that, as
well. We need reach the deal, not to achieve one more goal.

The most important obstacle is prevalent conformism, which destroys
any collective ability to talk about anything "too hard", unless you
are not pissed off by something.

Without our collective willingness to tackle hard and complex
problems, I see business as usual, which means that Board will keep
reacting just with crisis PR, without too much need to address the
real issues and problems. Wikipedia will exist, chapters and others
will be doing their projects.

The only large victim of that approach would be the movement itself.
But, it would be the movement itself who made the suicide.

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 5:17 PM, Delphine Ménard  wrote:
> I believe that Dariusz' comment was somewhat blown out of proportions
> (due in part to difficulties in communication inherent to our
> multicultural movement). I also think that some of the statements he
> made were too "blanket" to let go, so I understand the frustration.
>
> This said, Ori, I want to thank you for what I believe is the most
> daring, heartfelt and bold emails ever written to this li

Re: [Wikimedia-l] What is the Board's HR Committee doing to stem the tide of staff resignations?

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:38 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak 
>>  We have started with an engagement survey, and organizational facilitator
>> analysis. More and more current input can be provided by Patricio or others
>> from the Board's HR Committee, but there is also a lot of work done by the
>> HR department, under its new leadership.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. There is familiar story about Ark B, so
giving just a random conversation from the Chapter 31:

"So what else have you done?" he inquired after the celebrations had died down.
"We have started a culture," said the marketing girl.
"Oh yes?" said Ford.
"Yes. One of our film producers is already making a fascinating
documentary about the indigenous cavemen of the area."
"They're not cavemen."
"They look like cavemen."
"Do they live in caves?"
"Well ..."
"They live in huts."
"Perhaps they're having their caves redecorated," called out a wag
from the crowd.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Elsevier?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 11:37 PM, Lodewijk  wrote:
> that is a perfectly fine opinion to hold, thanks for sharing. However, the
> WMF should, in my opinion, only make political statements like severing
> ties with an organisation that offers something that is useful to the
> editing community, either when legally obligated, or when there is an
> overwhelming consensus.
>
> I don't sense such overwhelming consensus just yet.

Having connection with Elsevier by WMF and not having "overwhelming
consensus" between us on this issue -- after Elsevier started
litigation against Sci-Hub -- are highly hypocritical positions of WMF
and Wikimedia movement.

Similar litigation produced the death of Aaron Swartz. In his case, it
was JSTOR, which initiated the trial.

Fortunately, WMF didn't make any deal with JSTOR but with Elsevier, as
it would be direct attack on Aaron's legacy.

Until few months ago, connection with Elsevier could have been
tolerated as edgy, but useful. However, we are now in completely
different situation. I hear *our* friends are under high pressure
because of this and I just hope all of them are more emotionally tough
than Aaron was.

Now, hypocritical people all over Wikimedia movement think it's fine
to tolerate such connection. Because it doesn't hurt us and they are
giving us cookies. It hurts just people belonging to our wider
movement, whom we accidentally know. Why should we care about them?

Besides being legally obligated or having overwhelming consensus, I
suppose we have some values, some moral obligations and backbone.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Elsevier?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 10:58 PM, Gerard Meijssen
 wrote:
> Anyone can use Sci-Hub. Officially you cannot, legally you should not. The
> WMF makes it possible for those who want to use Elsevier.
>
> No problem; anyone can use Sci-Hub. Move on.

Dear Gerard,

You are again ignoring the point intentionally.

No, WMF shouldn't morally support Elsevier by having any relation with them.

Sincerely,
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Elsevier?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 10:38 PM, Vituzzu  wrote:
> Matter of fact we take informations from a closed system putting them into
> the greater open World. So, imho, we should use even the most closed
> sources.

Wikipedia editors could use Sci-Hub instead of Elsevier. So, that's
not valid excuse.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Elsevier?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 9:49 PM, Andrea Zanni  wrote:
> As much as I'd **love** to see that,
> I think it would be a very bold step from the WMF,
> supporting a heroic BUT illegal operation as Sci-Hub, against a despicable
> BUT legal operation like Elsevier.
> If the WMF does want to be bold, this is a great battle to fight.

There is nothing risky in: (1) dropping all connections with Elsevier
and (2) expressing moral support to Sci-Hub, LibGen and similar
projects.


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Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Elsevier?

[Milos Rancic]

Is WMF or any other Wikimedia organization still engaged with them? If
so, what's the plan to drop that toxic connection and support Sci-Hub,
LibGen and similar projects? EFF did that two months ago [1].

[1] 
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/what-if-elsevier-and-researchers-quit-playing-hide-and-seek

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Reducing the net cost of Wikimania

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 6:06 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> I found this the most interesting part of the recent IdeaLab discussion
> about changing the Wikimania framework.
>   https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Towards_a_New_Wikimania
>
>   "*The total spend by WMF for Wikimania 2014 in London and 2015 in Mexico,
> including all travel, accommodations, scholarships, staff support and
> direct conference expenses, was ~$1 million USD*"
>
> This is a pity. Small grants to support a con is one thing, but this is too
> much.
>
> Please let's stop encouraging conferences that do not cover their own
> costs. A good conference series pays for itself, including its scholarship
> pool. There are plenty of communities our size or larger with wonderful,
> regular conferences of hundreds or thousands of people, which break even or
> turn a small profit.
>
> FUDCons are an interesting case in point.  As I understand it, there was a
> time when RedHat basically sponsored the events, with scholarships for all
> active contributors and extensive grants. This was ok, but skewed
> participation.  Then the lavish sponsorship stopped. Attendance dropped;
> community members felt unloved. Then after a time, this passed, and
> everyone attended again. (Perhaps a core Fedora contributor can describe
> this more accurately!)

I have to say I totally disagree with your approach because of a
number of issues:

* Wikimedia movement is not consisted [solely] of highly paid folk
from the tech industry.
* Wikimania is not an opportunity to find a job or to make business contacts.
* Wikimedia movement is not the group of enthusiasts gathering because
of their hobby, mostly relevant just to themselves.
* Wikimedia movement is consisted of real people, not just of servers
and bytes. Consequently, financially independent Wikimedia
stakeholders (WMF and at least one chapter) should spend money not
just on servers and bytes, but on people, as well.
* While I am not against market per se, our core shouldn't be for
sale. I am sure there are the ways how to make Wikimania more
sustainable, but there are numerous things which shouldn't be done and
it has to be carefully analyzed. (One of those being "we can't support
that much of people".)
* It's expensive to have a global movement. It will be just more
expensive. That's the fact, not something to be negotiated.
* Going into contraction without being inside of the financial crisis
is something very common inside of the Wikimedia movement and utterly
stupid.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Appointment of María Sefidari to Wikimedia Foundation Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
> Another mistake. A lot has happened over the past few weeks. The community
> should have been given a voice, in light of vast changes in circumstances
> since last May.
>
> María, too, might have felt better about joining the board with a clear
> endorsement from the community – an endorsement given now, rather than last
> May. As things stand, her tenure begins under a cloud.

If I remember well (not willing to check), Maria got the most of the
votes on the elections (more than any of the elected members), which
means that it's fair that she becomes a Board member.

At the other side, I'd ask Board members to stop making fringe
decisions. Now. Please!

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Italia recognized as OpenStreetMap chapter

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 11:36 PM, Laurentius  wrote:
> after a long process, today Wikimedia Italia has been officially
> recognized as the Italian OpenStreetMap chapter!

This is great and shows the uniqueness and general value of the
Wikimedia movement! It shows that Wikimedia chapters are capable to
become local umbrella organizations for other free content movements.
That's very important for people involved in such projects, as they
could rely on our infrastructure.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Changes in the Board

[Milos Rancic]

Thank you, Arnnon!

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Patricio Lorente
 wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Throughout the discussion about the appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the
> Board of Trustees, the Board has carefully listened to you and discussed
> internally. Earlier today, Arnnon decided to step down from the Board. To
> paraphrase his words, he doesn't want to be a distraction for the important
> discussions that the community and the Foundation need to face in the times
> to come. We want to thank Arnnon for his ongoing commitment and for helping
> us to move forward.
>
> The Board Governance Committee is working to improve and update our
> selection processes before we fill the vacancy left by Arnnon’s departure.
> We are sorry for the distress and confusion this has caused to some in our
> community, and also to Arnnon.
>
> Patricio and Alice
>
> 
>
> Patricio Lorente
> Chair, Board of Trustees
>
> Alice Wiegand
> Vice Chair, Board of Trustees
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Update from the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:14 PM, Alice Wiegand  wrote:
> the Board has read your messages and is discussing the concerns you have
> raised about Arnnon Geshuri’s appointment. We need to consider all
> information and we have conversations among ourselves. Arnnon and the board
> are listening to your worries and talking with community members,
> considering people's opinions and his own next steps.
>
> In the recent round of appointments, the Board identified that we needed
> support and expertise in two areas: financial oversight and planning, and
> human resources. Kelly and Arnnon were identified through the process,
> reviewed alongside other nominees, and selected as finalists based on their
> expertise and backgrounds. We all agreed they were excellent candidates and
> people, and supported their progress as finalists.
>
> We understand this conversation will continue, and we will continue to
> monitor it. However, we want to be clear that the Board approved Arnnon
> unanimously and still believes he is a valuable member of the team.
>
> Please see this as a brief update. We owe you a more detailed response, and
> we plan to come back to you with more information soon.

I don't understand neither Arnnon nor the rest of the Board.

At the best, one month of this situation means one year less of your
lives because of stress. If Arnnon reaches Wikimedia Conference, every
day will take a year of your lives.

Admitting that you did something wrong is human.

To be honest, I don't think all of you, including Arnnon, are
stubborn. You are likely thinking you are choosing between two bad
things.

I read Arnnon's email and he convinced me. I mean, I am quite
convinced he could be quite good Board member exactly because of his
problematic background, as he would care much more what he is doing.
But he didn't convince 90% of Wikimedians. And that matters.

Just leave it. It's easier for everybody and it's right decision to
say "We are sorry, we did it wrong.". If some of you care about
reelection, it's wise to show human face. If you care about WMF's
integrity, Wikimedia movement is WMF's integrity. And Arnnon could
avoid the title of the most hated WMF Board member ever.

Or you really want to wait for Wikimedia Conference? Not to talk about
Wikimania.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Piloting a Discourse installation for discussion (was: Better thankspam)

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 9:37 PM, Erik Bernhardson
 wrote:
> FWIW, there is a docker role in wikimedia puppet and it's already used as
> part of the labs infrastructure. Not sure how well tested it is yet, but
> it's there.

In this case I see a kind of solution:
* Install Discourse container on Labs per instructions and let it
handle "http(s)://discourse.wikimedia.org/"
* Forward every mail intended to reach wikimedia-l to Discourse as well.
* Forward every Discourse comment to wikimedia-l.

Theoretically, it could work. I mean, under the condition that
Discourse is capable to read properly mail headers, as well as to send
a decent emails back to wikimedia-l.

If it works, everybody who prefers to read emails in the old format
will be able to do that. Those who prefer Discourse web interface
would be able to do that, as well.

I don't expect discourse.wikimedia.org would be a large consumer of
traffic (CPU, RAM) at the beginning.

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 9:46 PM, Vituzzu  wrote:
>> Said so, I am sure there are masochists around, willing to install it :P
>>
> Me neither, but it's worth a try neither me and you will have to handle :p

That's pretty relevant point! It takes time to switch from "No!" to
"Oh, I am not the admin here!".

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Piloting a Discourse installation for discussion (was: Better thankspam)

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 9:22 PM, Andrea Zanni  wrote:
> Why?
> As a user, you would just need to login and participate, Discourse is like
> a website. You don't need to install anything.
> I don't understand your point.

I am speaking as an admin, not as a user :P

In brief, software is not stable. And it's not just that, but the
developers don't know their software well enough to offer a sensible
installation guide. I wouldn't use such software.

Besides that, if there is no Docker environment (and I don't think so
there is a Docker environment in WMF, though my information could be
outdated), you have to create a double layer system just to install it
according to their specification.

Said so, I am sure there are masochists around, willing to install it :P

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Piloting a Discourse installation for discussion (was: Better thankspam)

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Asaf Bartov  wrote:
> I assume many have muted or are ignoring the "thankspam" thread, but it has
> changed topic rather meaningfully, and I think it deserves broader
> attention.

I see now why Discourse is a problem...

I wanted to install it, so we could test it and then move to a WMF
server. I wasn't fully demotivated after I've seen it's written in
Ruby (nothing against syntax, but on infrastructure side it's easier
to install .NET framework on Linux). Then they say the only way they
support installation is via Docker.

No, thanks.

They obviously need to mature and produce a sensible framework for
software installation. Until then, good old Mailman is our most
realistic solution.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Better thankspam

[Milos Rancic]

So, what do we need to start using it? An installation on Wikimedia servers?

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Andrea Zanni  wrote:
> If I'm not mistaken, we recently discussed about this. I'd love using
> Discourse myself...
>
> Aubrey
> Il 15/gen/2016 06:08 "Alice Wiegand"  ha scritto:
>
>> My experiences with discourse in a non-Wikimedia context is great.  Worth
>> a try.
>>
>> Alice.
>>
>> - Ursprüngliche Nachricht -
>> Von: "Samuel Klein" 
>> Gesendet: ‎15.‎01.‎2016 02:46
>> An: "Wikimedia Mailing List" 
>> Betreff: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Better thankspam
>>
>> On Jan 14, 2016 8:35 PM, "Luis Villa"  wrote:
>> >
>> > I agree that thankspam is somewhat irritating, but it is also a good way
>> to
>> > make people feel welcome and appreciated. An alternative is to consider
>> > moving wikimedia-l to a tool like discourse.org
>>
>> Thanks for that idea. Discourse looks great.  Maybe worth testing out
>> casually for some wiki* discussions before deciding whether or not to try
>> replacing a particular list.
>>
>> Sj
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Advisory Board and Board-appointed seats (was: Beyond the Board)

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 6:18 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
> Rather, we need working groups or committees  with authority  in a
> decentralized manner.

Agreed. Which, in turn, means that the Board should articulate which
fields of expertise they need, define the scope of such working groups
or committees, create such bodies and nurture them up to the maturity.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Beyond the Board (was: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google)

[Milos Rancic]

Denny, Dariusz: May you take a look the talk page [1], see the flow of
concerns and ideas in relation to the proposal and comment
specifically what you think it could work and what you think it
couldn't.

Besides that, I created two subpages which deal separately with
Representation and diversity [2] and Scope [3], so we could be more
focused on those issues, as they turned out to be the most discussed
ones. (If anyone sees the need for any other discussion topic, let
them create a separate page, as well.)

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact
[2] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact/Representation_and_diversity
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact/Scope


On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 6:25 PM, Denny Vrandecic
 wrote:
> No, I think the questions of community representation on the Board and the
> creation of an independent body able to represent the communities are
> orthogonal. I do not see anyone suggesting that the Board should not have
> community representatives.
>
> But I see the need for a body representing the communities that does not
> derive its power from the Board, but from the communities directly.
>
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 8:20 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak 
> wrote:
>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Am I the only one who would rather see an independent body represent the
>> > communities than one subordinate to the Board?
>>
>>
>> My concern is that in the long run such a body may lead to excluding
>> community representation from the Board ("since we have a community body
>> already..."). Also, I think that we're lacking a senate, not a government
>> per se.
>>
>> dj
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Beyond the Board (was: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google)

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:17 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter 
>> My impression is therefore that some sort of a preparatory work is needed
>> to avoid these two traps. Ideally, there would be a drafting group with a
>> broad representation (possibly the members of the group will be prohibited
>> to sit in the first edition of the elected body), and the Board will
>> preliminary express an interest (so that the group knows the chances are
>> not zero). Of course we can just agree on electing the representative body
>> witout actually asking the Board, but I am not sure this would be the right
>> way of doing it.
>>
> Agreed. A mixed working group could be a way to go.

From my perspective, anything which would move the situation from the
status quo would work.

Presently, the discussion has been started on Meta and it would be
good to see your input there. I don't see the proposal as anything in
the form take it or leave it, but as the beginning of the discussion
(or reloading it after a lot of time).

Working group could be created based on that discussion; the other
option -- and I'd like to believe in it -- is to create the final
proposal based on completely public discussion.

Significant difference between the previous attempts to do something
like this is the fact that at least three Board members (Denny,
Dariusz and Guy) support something similar to this idea. Previously,
Board was the body which at least passively obstructed the idea. That
means that we have much better chances for success this time.

So, please join the discussion; if you have a different idea as the
whole proposal, write it there, so we could discuss. We could
rearrange the page into the set of relatively coherent proposals and
discuss about the proposals integrally, about their features and
finally find the best possible solution, which would be the product of
as wide as possible consensus.

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[Wikimedia-l] Advisory Board and Board-appointed seats (was: Beyond the Board)

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 4:32 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> I've been also thinking about revitalizing our Advisory Board - the way I
> would like to see it would be dividing it into (a) community (b) tech and
> (c) academic subgroups, available for immediate consulting and feedback.

Long time ago I suggested more structured way to use Advisory Board.
So, here is the draft of the idea again.

I don't think you need too specific "Community Advisory Board", as you
could reach, for example, AffCom, LangCom, stewards, en.wp ArbCom etc.
-- or, if you really need too general advice and there is no assembly
yet, all of them -- if you need a specific advice. Basically, you have
much better granulated "Community Advisory Board", although the Board
is not using it usually.

You definitely need a kind of "Governing Advisory Board", which would
be consisted of the former Board members and people with very good
knowledge of governing and other ways of social organization (NPOs,
business, movements...).

But, on top of that you could structure your needs. You could start it
by imagining any expertise you collectively lack (I could give you one
clear example immediately: relations with formal diplomacy) and start
thinking how to find appropriate people for that group.

Then, you could create an "Innovation Advisory Board", put there all
Jimmy's technolibertarian ubercapitalist friends and ask them about
their ideas. I am sure they could be very useful in such body. They
could also find useful to participate in such body for Wikim/pedia
cause.

And so on. Any of such advisory boards be even more useful if you
could find them not just an advisory role, but a committe-like
("Diversity Committee", with strong advisory role in relation to the
social diversification of Wikimedia bodies, for example -- "strong
advisory role" = people don't do something against their
recommendation without very strong reason) or even more active role
inside of the movement ("Technology Innovation Committee", with the
role to plan long-term technological innovation).

If you have a couple of active advisory boards, you could recruit new
Board members from them, with the specific purpose, based on the
Strategic Plan or other organizational needs. That could give us

After their mandate as Board members, they would still stay inside of
hopefully active Wikimedia bodies and we won't lose their experience.
Actually, if they don't have enough time to fully participate as Board
members and you still have the same focus, you could always replace
them with a fellow  Advisory Board members.

Said so, this is not that straight-forward task and requires active
work per advisory board you create. There should be a need, a
structure and a way how to engage them. Find a person per advisory
board who is willing to lead such body and delegate the creation and
communication of that body to her or him. (That could be Board member,
somebody from the movement or an employee.)

I also don't think it's in collision with the assembly. Those should
be Wikimedia bodies and any Wikimedia body should be able to ask them
for advice. They could be helpful bodies to the future assembly, as
well.

While I wrote the last paragraph, I realized that we badly need one of
those bodies: Legal Advisory Board: the body which could be asked by
any Wikimedia organization or Wikimedian in relation to any legal
issue they are struggling with.


-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Better thankspam

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 6:17 PM, Chris Keating
 wrote:
> To me, "Hello" and "Thank you" are quite under-used words on this list (in
> the movement generally but particularly here) so I would prefer we didn't
> rule these emails out.
>
> After all, if we remove pile-on positive threads that contain little
> information then pile-on negative threads with equally little information
> will probably still remain.

Although I am quite rarely sending "thank you" messages (OK, it's not
just "quite rarely", as I sent it once and it was privately to Cary
Bass), I tend to agree with Chris. This list is quite tough and it's
nice to see thanking and welcoming threads, no matter if I am not
reading them.

As sending those messages is quite controllable -- meaning that people
from WMF/chapters/similar structures are doing that, I think simple
addition into the subject line like "[notification]" would allow those
who don't like to filter such messages.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Beyond the Board (was: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google)

[Milos Rancic]

Denny, thanks for supporting this issue moving on. Before few remarks
I would respond inline, I want to say that the *draft* of the idea to
make community assembly have been published by Pharos:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_Council_Compact

I want to give a small background of our work on the proposal:

Richard approached me immediately after I sent the first email from
this thread, so we started to work on it. It turned out that we had
very different perspectives of what should be done. However, we worked
on creating a synthetic proposal, which would cover both sets of
ideas.

I wanted to make a joke-spoiler, but I want to restrain of it because
I want to see if the differences between our approaches are actually
the differences between different cultural/continental background.

Besides two of us, Lodewijk and Lane contributed, mostly with
comments. It turned out that Lodewijk was on the line I started my
idea in discussion with Richard, while Lane was on the line started by
Richard. Both of them found unacceptable the opposite part.

If so, I'd like to ask everybody to try to understand that our future
assembly should be generally acceptable to everybody, no matter of
cultural differences; which means that we should have to reach
consensus in such issues, not limited on Richard's and my approaches
in particular.

Besides that, it's just a draft of the proposal and everything could
be changed as long as we reach consensus about one final proposal. I
am fine with it as long as Wikimedians get a framework to communicate
and make decisions which matter to themselves.

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Denny Vrandecic
 wrote:
> You write that Board members tend to think of themselves as the governing
> body. At least for myself, I can say that this is not the case. My
> understanding restricts the Board only to the role of being the Board of
> the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation is not the community. The Board is
> not the voice of the community for the Foundation. The community is neither
> lead by the Foundation, nor by the Board. I don't even think there is a
> community - there are numerous overlapping communities.

This is misunderstandings, unless you want to say you don't see Board
as the governing body of Wikimedia Foundation :P

> It seems to me that in open collaborative projects like ours, the amount of
> scrutiny and criticism a governance body receives is negatively correlated
> to the amount of competences it has. Creating or deleting content, banning
> disruptive users from a project, deciding how the energy of the community
> should be spent on creating content? None of these is the business of the
> Board. None of these is the competence of the Board. And that’s good.

This part is very important! There are no "open collaborative projects
like ours". You are not a Board of Reddit with admins controlling
content. Our social structure and civilization implications are far
beyond any of those projects. That's why WMF members -- as long as
there is no community-wide body -- have to have vision, wisdom and
balls. The basis of the most of my criticism of the Board lays in the
fact that it collectively have never shown all three virtues at once.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 3:31 AM, Fæ  wrote:
> Milos, is your email a wind-up?
>
> I find this idea that everything will be okay if we shut up and let
> Jimmy select his mates as our future trustees not just a scenario that
> should stay in Bizarro World, but the opposite of good governance.

You know I didn't say that. However, this process has never changed
and Jimmy's network *is* realistically the best method for reaching
strong candidates inside of the current state of the movement.

There are two better methods for that:

1) Wider community participation in making a wishlist. That has to be
followed by WMF's ability to reach those people from the wishlist. I
am not sure if WMF has that capacity.

2) Good HR agency. Sue found that one and they did good job by finding Bishakha.

> If this is how the WMF actually works, then yes, the WMF really,
> *really*, needs a governance review and changes to ensure trustees are
> appointed who do not have a history of being found in court to be
> acting illegally and get in just because they are exceedingly wealthy,
> a good chap according Jimmy, or have just been hanging out at the
> right parties for rich Californians.

Not checking Arnnon's background is serious flaw by all Board members
at the time of his selection. Otherwise, as I said, he'd be a strong
reinforcement to the Board, on the lines I said above.

Hm. I think we already scared the Board enough. Please, don't mention
governance review, as some of them are close to their 50s and it could
negatively influence their health.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 3:33 AM, Risker  wrote:
> Perhaps before people make random stabs in the dark about the nomination
> process this time around - which wasn't the old NomCom or any other former
> process - they might want to check the archives of this mailing list from
> late September or early October when candidates and nominations were
> solicited, and further follow-up emails about this time's process.

If you are referring to Boryana Dineva's email, that's nothing new.
The "Jimmy's list" wasn't the only list seven years ago. We called for
nominations, if I remember well. I spent the most of my time in
talking with people about their ideas. In relation to the nominations,
the biggest issue was that almost nobody cared about them. I am almost
sure this was the case this time, as well.

However, that list was filled with the best and realistic names --
meaning that anyone from the list could have been reached. Meaning
that from one side some of us wanted high profile names, but they
weren't reachable by the means of Wikimedia Foundation; while from the
other one you can't compete with Jimmy's network if you are not Bono.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 1:37 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> I can, however, generally add that we have not collected any nominations
> from our donors, if this helps.

I can confirm this, as I am sure nothing has changed since NomCom
existence in relation to this issue, except updating the list with the
new names and maybe removing some of those proved to be controversial
(optionally, they are removing controversial ones every time the
process starts).

NomCom failed mostly because of that list. However, Sue's idea to use
HR agency turned out to be the best solution, as we got Bishakha.
(Note for the future: use HR agency; they do the job better than you;
they are professionals.)

Although I never had particular information, it's obvious that the
list is mostly consisted of Jimmy's network. That's not necessary bad
per se. Jimmy has the best connections inside of the Board and while
some of the names if selected would trigger demonstration in front of
the WMF office, it is possible to find good names inside of that list.
However, again, HR agency would do much better job, as they are not
dilettantes.

There is one more thing in favor of Jimmy. Inside of the relations and
structure as it's now, Wikimedia movement should thank him for keeping
the integrity of WMF inside of the sea full of barracudas, sharks and
orcas. There were and are numerous worse scenarios than we have now
and people don't tend to think about them. That's independent of how
vocal he is here or anywhere else.

I want to say it's not about CoI, as mentioned here numerous times.
Jimmy and the other Board members from the community (not elected by,
but from the community; Alice is from the community, too) are not
corrupted for sure and they are majority. It's normal to suggest the
best possible options for your organization if you are able to do
that. Arnnon Geshuri would be strong reinforcement to the Board if
there is no that serious investigation against him.

Board members are not corrupted, but the system is. We see now how
serious mistakes could pass because of that.

That small number of people heavily depend on virtues of every
particular Board member. One of that is long-term institutional
memory, which, with the exception of Jimmy, we likely don't have for a
year or more. I know Stu wanted to leave Board years ago. I also know
Jan-Bart wanted to leave Board at the end of 2014. It's questionable
to me how strong they were involved into the selection process (also,
Stu's Yahoo background could be inhibiting to him to say anything
against candidates of Google background). This situation could have
been avoided if we had pedantic Wikipedian with OCD inside of the
Board, but it turns out that we don't have one.

I could imagine the process of selecting the candidates:

Committee:
- Ideal Board member has to be a woman from a developing country.
- Oh, but see this guy! I never heard about him, but he's working for
Tesla and he was working for Google! Wow!
- OK, the second one then has to be for sure a woman and from a
developing country.
- We have a woman!
- From developing country?
- No.
- OK, it's fair enough. We did the job. Jan-Bart and Stu are pretty
angry as they had to be inside of the Board for one more year.
- True. We don't have time anymore. Done.

Board:
- Dariusz: We have two candidates!
- Stu: Wow, such great candidates! -- while thinking "OMG, Arnnon! He
approached our HR to make some business with us, but our HR was too
drunk to talk with him. Whatever, they promised me I am leaving at the
end of December, so it's not my job anymore."
- Jan-Bart: Great, may I leave now? Patricio is chair, you don't need
me anymore! Hohoho! Oh, I have to vote? OK, I am voting!
- Jimmy: Perfect! -- while thinking "Oh, Arnnon! He is such a nice
guy! I talked to him on Eric Schmidt's yacht. He knows a lot about
wines! ... Hmm... I remember Paul Allen told me something about him...
Never mind, he was just jealous because I am more often on Eric's
yacht. Besides that, I completely forgot what's that about. Nothing
serious, I am sure."
- Patricio: OK. Who will write the statement? My English is not perfect.
- Alice: Guy, he is Japanese!

I don't think this will be an issue for a long time. I think it's
clear to Arnnon himself that he is definitely controversial to us.
However, the pressure, lack of long-term institutional memory and
small number of persons in the Board tend to create an open field for
dilettantism.

On the other hand, I am sure that we could find relevant place for
every non-controversial Jimmy's friend willing to contribute to our
movement. I would like to see, for example, Richard Branson inside of
Wikimedia movement, helping us to create Enterprise. And I am serious.
We have to be bold and we have to be friends with other bold people.
OK, maybe not Enterprise, but Stanford Torus inside of the Earth's
orbit would do the job, as well :)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 12:02 AM, SarahSV  wrote:
> Do we know who suggested
> Arnnon Geshuri
> for a board seat?

Spoiler: As "trust and honesty" are highly valued, his name likely
appeared inside of a list "we compiled in the past".

-- 
Milos

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[Wikimedia-l] Beyond the Board (was: WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google)

[Milos Rancic]

Forking the issue of Board composition.

We tend to think of Board as the governing body of the movement, not just
WMF. Board members tend to think of themselves as the governing body of
WMF, with shiny cool movement supporting it.

We tend to discuss of community representation, they tend to assimilate
anyone who joins them. While "trust and honesty" are noble words, they tend
to be the words of excuse, covering forced imposition of the dominant
position over everybody inside of the group.

The Board composed as it is now has no capacity to overcome this problem. I
am not talking about particular persons inside of the Board, but about the
culture of assimilation, which usually ends in assimilation, but, as we
could see now, it could end in removal of a Board member.

I see two options to overcome this problem and both of them require wide
consensus, including the present Board.

One option is to restructure the Board itself, the other one is to create
new cover organization, with WMF as one of its institutions.

It's obvious to me that Wikimedia is not an ordinary organization or even
an ordinary movement. The importance of Wikimedia movement is on the level
of smaller country. Our needs are on the level of a city-sized society. And
our governance should be so.

At the moment, we have a kind of a mix which works because of that culture
of assimilation and because WMF makes enough money. Destroying any of those
corruptive powers would destroy WMF itself. So, if we want to change
something, we have to reorganize the structure, not to fix it.

What every organized social group? Yes, assembly (or whatever the name is
inside of the particular structure). If it's about business, it's the
assembly of shareholders. If it's about democratic institutions, it's about
the assembly which represents all members of the society.

WMF Board is quasi-assembly, quasi-government. It will always has partial
excuse that it's about community-elected members, but also that it needs
"an expertise" as a governing body. It's no surprise that the turnover on
the best elections (the last one) was around 10%. Not a lot of Wikimedians
think they are able to change anything and they are right.

I suggested few times that we should create assembly as a real democratic
institution. Such assembly could then appoint the Board as a governing body
or leave to ED and staff to be executive body of the movement.

The other option is to create assembly outside of WMF and make the relation
between them later.

As long as we don't talk about this issue, we will have the same stories
again and again. The set of mistakes Board could make is not finite. And
whenever something odd or harmful happens, we will be talking the same
stories.

By moving it into openly political discourse, we will avoid secrecy and
Wikimedians will be able to influence decisions, outside of closed groups
and personal connections.

(At the end, I am wondering why I am repeating this, as nobody responded to
this idea previous few times. Not even with "this is bad idea because
of...".)

-- Forwarded message --
From: "Todd Allen" 
Date: Jan 9, 2016 19:34
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in
anticompetitive agreements in Google
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" 
Cc:

> There is still a significant problem the Board does have, though.
> "Chapter/thorg selected seats" are not community seats. And we've recently
> found out that none of the seats at all are actually considered to be
> community-selected, and that a community elected board member can be
> removed without referendum to the community.
>
> A majority, at least six seats, on the Board, should be directly elected
by
> the Wikimedia community. (Not "chapters", the entire community). And
> "directly elected" should mean that the member cannot be removed
> involuntarily except by vote of that same electorate, whether by
referendum
> or the community's own initiative.
>
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Risker  wrote:
>
> > On 9 January 2016 at 10:09, Fæ  wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > 
> > >
> >
> >
> > >   We are well overdue for a major turnover of board members.
> > > Fae
> > > --
> > >
> > >
> >
> > While I have largely kept out of this thread to this time, this
statement
> > needs to be rebutted.  There are ten seats on the board.  Five of them -
> > all three "community-selected" seats and two of the four board-appointed
> > seats - have changed hands in the last six months.  An additional
> > board-selected seat changed hands not long before Wikimania last year
(Guy
> > Kawasaki).  That means six of the 10 board members have less than a
year's
> > experience in the role.  (One of those has now been removed, but that
still
> > means half the board has very limited experience.)
> >
> > Of the remaining seats, two are "Chapter/Thorg-selected" seats that
will be
> > contested in the near future. Historically, only one of the incumbents
of
> > those seats have been reseated, and I make no pr

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 9:48 AM, geni  wrote:
> On 9 January 2016 at 02:07, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>> On top of that, unlike Sue, Lila is a geek. And geeks have troubles in
>> understanding the social impact of their actions, especially inside of
>> the extraordinary complex environment of Wikimedia movement.
>
> You aren't seriously trying that argument are you? in any case it doesn't
> really help since people skills are a job requirement for WMF ED.

I tried to shorten the explanation, but, obviously it didn't work :)

The position of WMF ED is likely the most complex position inside of
the Wikimedia movement. Board is a collective body and they are rarely
involved in lower than policy level decision making. ED has to care
about the effects of her decisions not only on practical level, but
about their political implications inside of the movement: What would
say editors of English Wikipedia? What would say Wikimedia Germany?
What's going on on wikimedia-l? Signpost? Any independent Wikimedian
who's position could affect many others? Ideally, WMF ED should have
skills of one prime minister.

Besides that and unlike in the most of the organizations, WMF
employees are not just regular employees, but their voice is also very
important inside of our movement, as their contribution to the
movement itself is extraordinary significant. WMF ED doesn't lead
ordinary employees, with whom she can act in the traditional
capitalist way.

WMF Board never searched for a person with "skills of one prime
minister". Their decision is to have either a Bay Area "we are saving
the world" NPO or Bay Area "Elon Musk is God" NPO. Bad side of the
approach is that it will never cover all necessary things; good side
of the approach is that Wikimedia movement is fairly decentralized and
the rest of us could cover what's missing. And I think that it's
easier to cover social than technological part, as technological part
assumes highly structured workflow which volunteers can't implement.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 1:54 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> I think we should have you use only UseModWiki for a few months and then
> you can come back and tell us whether we've actually made any improvements
> to our technology stack since 2001. :-)
>
> In parts, our sites certainly look staid, dated, or even boring, but we
> have a number of cool new features, with more to come, of course. Briefly
> putting all of this recent drama and in-fighting aside, the most vital
> part of the Wikimedia Foundation's responsibilities, keeping the sites
> running fast, reliably, and securely, is being appropriately handled.
> The world continues to be able to read and contribute to our shared free
> content and for that I'm grateful. The rest is commentary, as they say.

I never said that WMF engineering team did bad job during the last 15
years. Besides that, I am completely aware that there were and are a
lot of good ideas, some of them invisible for the end user, some of
them never implemented because of lack of capacity of higher
management and stubbornness of Wikipedia editors.

Thanks to Sue, we are far away from struggling with money for servers
and operations. And your position -- we are fine as Wikimedia servers
are up and running -- is serious and widespread issue among the
Wikimedia veterans, which affects the whole movement. I remember the
time when I was personally highly anxious because it wasn't that clear
that WMF would have had money for the servers next year, too. I am
relieved by the fact that that's a non-issue for at least five years,
too.

But that reasoning -- we were struggling for food, we have the food
now and that's the top achievement of our lives -- is something which
have put us as a movement into the prolonged state of melancholy. Not
that we are not attractive to new generations, we are not attractive
even to ourselves.

You have to be hungry, remember vividly hungry times, be very
imaginative or high on drugs to be excited when you open a
refrigerator full of food. As I don't think any of us remember vividly
the time before approximately 2010, as well as being very imaginative
is not that common trait, we have to be high on drugs to be excited by
the fact that WMF has enough money to pay bills for a lot of servers
and people maintaining them.

We need to go further because we can. And that's not just an empty
phrase. We already feel the effects of not going further. People tend
to be demotivated and we depend on the motivation of volunteers.

The time of financial stabilization passed. Wikimedia movement is now
financially stable. We should use that stability to move forward. And
making visible and important technological advancements is something
we need for a long time.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Please sign your posts

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 3:32 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 3:21 AM, billinghurst  
> wrote:
>> To those who have fallen out of the habit of signing your posts,
>> please fall back into the habit of good netiquette. For those of us
>> who read the digest mode it is troublesome to have unsigned posts, and
>> then need to flick back to the digest ToC to find the poster. Thanks.
>
> Thanks! After more than 20 years on internet, I've learned something
> new. Created my signature :)

Sorry, I am new on the Internet. Deleting everything below the text
produces deleting the signature, as well.

-- 
Milos

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Please sign your posts

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 3:21 AM, billinghurst  wrote:
> To those who have fallen out of the habit of signing your posts,
> please fall back into the habit of good netiquette. For those of us
> who read the digest mode it is troublesome to have unsigned posts, and
> then need to flick back to the digest ToC to find the poster. Thanks.

Thanks! After more than 20 years on internet, I've learned something
new. Created my signature :)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 12:43 AM, Nathan  wrote:
> I hope some day someone will be bold enough to tell the rest of us what
> this is all really about. I'm sure I'm not alone (though perhaps in the
> minority!) in not having inside staff contacts to provide the straight
> dope.

I think it's quite clear what's going on. Signpost [1] and Liam's post
[2] have good descriptions (with some of the positions) of what
happened. Plus, James was on the side of the discontent part of staff
(which seems to be the majority) and didn't articulate his position
well.

And as I suppose this is the ongoing general-type thread, I'd say few
words in relation to that.

Our technology is based on the concept from 1990s, implemented in 2001
and slightly changed up to the moment. The only major technology which
catches 2005 (Visual Editor) is in alpha or beta stage, depending on
how harsh QA process would be implemented.

Something should be done with that. While I would be much more happy
with a social and gaming platform, I think anything towards technology
innovation is good, as during the last 15 years our technology
innovation was around zero. The most important Sue's impact on
Wikimedia is financial stability. I expect that the most important
Lila's impact on Wikimedia will be moving it from technologically
passive organization to an active one.

Restructuring one organization is hard process. I mean, if I found
myself feeling offended because of moving coffee machine away from the
door of my office and putting it on more appropriate place, I
completely understand that any larger change could produce significant
discontent.

On top of that, unlike Sue, Lila is a geek. And geeks have troubles in
understanding the social impact of their actions, especially inside of
the extraordinary complex environment of Wikimedia movement.

The only solution for such situations is constructive communication.
And constructive communication. And more constructive communication.

[1] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-06/News_and_notes
[2] http://wittylama.com/2016/01/08/strategy-and-controversy/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF trustee Arnnon Geshuri and part in anticompetitive agreements in Google

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 9:43 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 3:16 PM, Pine W  wrote:
>> Dariusz, you said in your statement that was published in the Wikimedia
>> Blog that WMF "considered dozens of candidates from all over the world,
>> with not-for-profit and technology experience, and the highest professional
>> standards.” I would be interested to hear how you reconcile "highest
>> professional standards" with the prior actions of Arnnon,
>
> I have read about these allegations today, and I am going to follow up on
> that. I don't have an opinion formed, as jumping to conclusions is
> definitely not just to people. I can assure you that in the whole process
> Arnnon's expertise, professionalism, as well as technological connection
> were clearly outstanding (but obviously we have not discussed this case).

Sorry for being harsh, but this is very lame.

The process of selecting Board-appointed seats has significant flaw,
which has the basis in very limited number of people involved in that.
This was true during the NomCom existence, as well.

The main problem with involvement of small number of people in the
selection procedure is related to the question how one person would
react if not selected. However, if it's totally open process, with
defined rules, I don't think anyone would feel particularly offended.

I suggest you the next procedure:

1) Define what you want from those four seats. Let's say: Seat one
should deal with HR, seat two should deal with climate change and
animal rights, seat three should deal with... Three of four selected
seats should be women (as we tend to elect men). And so on.

2) Give community a framework to propose, discuss and order the
candidates per seat. Find a curator, who would eliminate inappropriate
candidates (Election Committee?). For example, if you really care
about climate change and animal rights, it would be inappropriate to
select one of the Koch brothers in that place.

3) Invent a fair algorithm how to approach those people, ordered
inside of the list.

And you won't be surprised with issues like this one is.

Optionally, you could have typed his name into Google and browse to
the bottom of the first page. However, that requires super powers and
it's not reasonable to require that from the Board members. Thus,
sticking with the plan described above should work better.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Something

[Milos Rancic]

So Signpost discovered what is Something. (I didn't follow all the threads,
but I suppose it's been written in some of them.)

From my perspective and according to some anecdotal data I have, I would
suggest WMF staff and C-level management to start talking with each other.

I can confirm that at least in one case it turned out that fears had no
basis in reality. But I was a bit surprised that I was the best informed
person inside of the triangle.
On Jan 3, 2016 09:41, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:

> We should start talking about Something.
>
> Something is the raising issue of our movement. Its properties are not
> yet known, but all of us feel the consequences of Something.
>
> To tackle the problem, we should define it, first. Yes, we know it's
> called Something, but besides the name, we know just a little bit
> more. So, I ask you to help me define Something. Crowdsourcing is the
> term defined thanks to our movement and I am sure we are capable to do
> so. All of us have a little piece of knowledge about Something and we
> could compile those pieces to create a clear picture.
>
> My knowledge about Something is very obscure. From occasional
> discussions with some of WMF employees, I know that "Something is
> wrong". I am quite serious about that. I got impression that employees
> are not content with the Board decisions during the recent years.
> However, I couldn't define quite well the matter of that discontent.
>
> I am not able to understand what's the difference between the Time of
> Something (ToS, not to be confused with TOS, Star Trek, The Original
> Series) and the Time before Something (TbS, not to be confused with
> tbs, ISO 639-3 code for Tanguat language).
>
> I don't see any particular difference, except I think Board is not
> making mistakes it made previously. (To be fair, it's not that big
> achievement, as "mistakes" are not a final set.)
>
> What I do see are the consequences of Something: Something creates
> particular dynamics inside of the core of our movement and we feel the
> consequences of that dynamics.
>
> However, I am living in a countryside of Wikimedia movement, far away
> from our capital, Bay Area. Thus, I admit I am not just not that well
> informed, but I am also probably not that capable to understand the
> basic concepts of Something.
>
> But I am sure there are some of you capable to fathom the deep mystery
> of Something.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Something

[Milos Rancic]

On Jan 3, 2016 09:56, "John Mark Vandenberg"  wrote:
>
> Something is covered in NDAs.

I heard quite general notes, that they couldn't be inside of NDAs. And they
weren't personal, but related to the WMF and WMF leading position inside of
the movement.
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[Wikimedia-l] Something

[Milos Rancic]

We should start talking about Something.

Something is the raising issue of our movement. Its properties are not
yet known, but all of us feel the consequences of Something.

To tackle the problem, we should define it, first. Yes, we know it's
called Something, but besides the name, we know just a little bit
more. So, I ask you to help me define Something. Crowdsourcing is the
term defined thanks to our movement and I am sure we are capable to do
so. All of us have a little piece of knowledge about Something and we
could compile those pieces to create a clear picture.

My knowledge about Something is very obscure. From occasional
discussions with some of WMF employees, I know that "Something is
wrong". I am quite serious about that. I got impression that employees
are not content with the Board decisions during the recent years.
However, I couldn't define quite well the matter of that discontent.

I am not able to understand what's the difference between the Time of
Something (ToS, not to be confused with TOS, Star Trek, The Original
Series) and the Time before Something (TbS, not to be confused with
tbs, ISO 639-3 code for Tanguat language).

I don't see any particular difference, except I think Board is not
making mistakes it made previously. (To be fair, it's not that big
achievement, as "mistakes" are not a final set.)

What I do see are the consequences of Something: Something creates
particular dynamics inside of the core of our movement and we feel the
consequences of that dynamics.

However, I am living in a countryside of Wikimedia movement, far away
from our capital, Bay Area. Thus, I admit I am not just not that well
informed, but I am also probably not that capable to understand the
basic concepts of Something.

But I am sure there are some of you capable to fathom the deep mystery
of Something.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 7:02 AM, Greg Grossmeier  wrote:
> 
>> Then he tells to some of them: "This is going to happen. As you don't
>> want that to happen, you should try to make pressure on Board members.
>> I suggest you to do that in this way." I have to say that I did that
>> numerous times on committee level in relation to the community needs:
>> "Look, this is not going to pass Gerard. Our options to do that are
>> those. You should do this, I will do that."
>
> Asaf's comment disagrees with this point. I can confirm that with myself
> as well. James never promised me anything specific was going to happen
> and never made a recommendation on what I should do.

It was clear from James' statement that he didn't promise anything and
I didn't say that.

Whatever else he said is a part of normal communication and I don't
see that as something bad.

While I really have no idea what exactly happened, I could see two
separate issues:

Obviously, there is one significant issue (or a couple of smaller)
over which Board has disagreement with James and (a part of) staff. We
don't know what it is and I'll start separate topic in relation to
that. That's relevant and we should talk about it.

The other issue, the one which triggered James' removal, is connected
to it, but formally quite different. I am quite sure that making one
action against the collective decision isn't something which would
trigger his removal. On the other hand, repeating those actions and
stance (which, I am sure, is quite ethical), could produce development
like this one.

Said so, I don't have an opinion in relation to James' removal; I just
gave description of what I see as the most probable reason. If I am
right, I am happy it's not a product of serious political
disagreements, as well as, on the other side, I don't like the timing.
Otherwise, I have no position and it's not because I want to be
"neutral" (I am sick of those willing to be "moderate", "neutral",
"balanced" [1]).

This problem should have been solved much earlier, without escalating
it to the point of Board member removal. I am also sick of thinking
about problems created in the past (months, years) because of lack of
cognitive abilities of participants at that point of time. The problem
is that it's always easier not to actively tackle solvable issues. And
it's endemic to our movement.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLqKXrlD1TU

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board

[Milos Rancic]

This event puzzled me a lot, as I suppose it puzzles all of
Wikimedians who don't know what was happening inside of the Board last
couple of months.

On one side, although I am not active English Wikipedian, it's obvious
to me that James' integrity is on the mythical level. On the other
side, I know well seven of the other Board members and I am quite sure
they wouldn't do anything that stupid like removing community elected
Board member because differences in the vision of WMF future.

Patricio's and Dariusz's responses didn't help a lot. I was quite
angry on them because I just saw demagogy in their emails. Initially.

Then I read this Dariusz email and became angry again. But a cigarette
after I understood his political discourse. You know, politicians tend
to tell you so much nonsense around the information, that you simply
can't understand the information. But they do transfer the
information, as Dariusz did it.

After reading Daridusz's response, I read again Patricio's email from
December 31st and it definitely supported my understanding of the
situation.

The answer is not spectacular at all. It's about inner dynamics of the
Board and it could happen inside of any Board composition and with any
of the Board members, no matter of the vision of particular Board
member.

Before I tell you that quite unspectacular "truth", I want to say that
I completely understand both sides. From one perspective, I could
imagine myself in James' position; from the other one, the decision of
other Board members to protect Board's integrity seems quite
reasonable.

Imagine a situation when majority of Board members make one decision,
which staff don't like. That decision was a product of weeks or months
of discussion and it's almost certain that all the arguments were
processed very well.

James doesn't agree with that decision, as he sees that it could harm
some of the employees: it could be about layoffs or it could be just
about making things odd enough for some of the employees, that they
won't feel well doing their job anymore.

Then he tells to some of them: "This is going to happen. As you don't
want that to happen, you should try to make pressure on Board members.
I suggest you to do that in this way." I have to say that I did that
numerous times on committee level in relation to the community needs:
"Look, this is not going to pass Gerard. Our options to do that are
those. You should do this, I will do that."

I suppose the situation could be more fuzzy: Board was preparing
decision; James saw some employees would be strongly against it; he
told that to them to try to influence the rest of the Board. It's
quite an issue to draw the line between transparency and disclosing
confidential information in such situations. And, as I told above, I
could easily do the same thing as James did.

What I see as a bottom line here is that the issue wasn't about
strategic or political disagreement, but about dynamics of one group,
which happened to be WMF Board. From that perspective, decision is
definitely up to that group, as well as I understand now James'
statement from the December 29th: "My fellow trustees need no reason
beyond lack of trust in me to justify my removal. No reason beyond
that is needed per our board by laws."


On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I wanted to send a note to all of you, that shares my perspective on the
> recent Board decision. These are my own thoughts, as a community-selected
> Board member who voted in the minority for the recent resolution. However,
> I also want to be clear that I support the outcome and the majority
> decision, and look forward to a new community Trustee. I hope that, even
> though you may continue to have questions, you will too.
>
> From my own perspective, the issue of "trust" had nothing to do with James’
> personal integrity. The Board however must ensure that members follow their
> duties and obligations in their roles as Trustees. My personal (not
> organizational) trust in James is 100%, in the sense that I would buy a car
> from him, and leave him the keys to my house without hesitation. James is
> an exceptional individual and an amazing Wikipedian. I feel privileged to
> know him.
>
> Yet, when governance is involved, things work out a bit differently. I can
> explain to you how I understand the results of the vote. I myself
> considered voting in favor of the resolution. I also believe that others
> reasonably considered their vote. James himself recognized his errors and
> admitted that he made mistakes and stepped out of process for a Board
> member. Our collective decision was carefully thought through. I also
> understand well the reasons of many Board members who voted as they did.
>
> I do want to comment on one point very important to me: This decision does
> not signal a shift on the Board’s attitude towards community
> representation, and does not alter our commitment to an active role for the
> community 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Free Basics

[Milos Rancic]

Thanks! I see it's from November. Somebody could point earlier to this and
spare us u couple of emails of this month quota :P
On Jan 2, 2016 09:20, "Bodhisattwa Mandal" 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just got the link of the official statement of WMF regarding
> internet.org.
>
>
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero/Development#Regarding_Internet.org
>
> Regards,
> Bodhisattwa
> On 2 Jan 2016 05:01, "Kim Bruning"  wrote:
>
> > Hi Milos,
> > Happy new year to you!
> >
> > I thought your mail to the list was very thoughtful.
> > I've replied inline below.
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 01, 2016 at 06:50:16AM +0100, Milos Rancic wrote:
> > > I don't think the pure form of net-neutrality is sustainable. Many
> > > businesses already have deals with other businesses to provide
> > > something for free or "for free" or for reduced price via their
> > > infrastructure.
> >
> > Hmm, this example has little to do with net neutrality as I understand
> > it though.
> >
> > Net neutrality means that you pay your ISP to allow you to send and
> > receive packets to/from anyone without discrimination to source or
> > destination. (In other words you're paying for actual internet access
> > without let or hindrance).
> >
> > Previously this is how the market worked.
> >
> > Without going into details here, many sources tell us that the
> > market is now threatening to shift towards a winner-takes-all walled
> > garden model. (if not already there)
> >
> > It's going to be a challenge to keep open source and open content
> > operating and relevant in such an increasingly hostile environment this
> > coming decade.
> >
> > > Neither I think the initiative will really create a permanent
> > > underclass. People in underdeveloped regions will eventually become
> > > richer and they won't need this kind of service.
> >
> > We can ask them whether they want to continue having such a service at
> > any time. Or we can set some participation threshold above which we
> > would accept a petition to stop. (It is always wise to have
> > pre-prepared go/no-go safety checks at particular points in time)
> >
> > > * Finally, we belong to the movement which promotes net neutrality as
> > > one of the core values. No matter how realistic it is, we should
> > > support it. Wikipedia Zero is not net-neutral, but Wikimedia projects
> > > are of such significance that it could be tolerated. Going further
> > > into abandoning that principle would create definite divide between us
> > > and the rest of our global super-movement.
> >
> > *Nod* We have to beware of fouling our own nest. Even though Wikipedia
> > zero appears to help our own cause now, we need to be careful we don't
> > hurt the people we depend on in turn.
> >
> > People such as the open source community and internet standards
> > organisations might prove quite sensitive to changing Internet rules.
> > We should put our ears to the ground and listen carefully to what
> > representatives of these groups may be saying to us.
> >
> > sincerely,
> > Kim Bruning
> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Free Basics

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Marcin Cieslak  wrote:
> You might want to check out some discussions surrounding the Wikimedia Zero 
> initiative.

From my perspective, there is significant difference between Wikipedia
Zero (along with similar, free of charge services) and Free Basics.
The first group positively discriminates some websites, the second
group negatively discriminates a part of population.

I don't think the pure form of net-neutrality is sustainable. Many
businesses already have deals with other businesses to provide
something for free or "for free" or for reduced price via their
infrastructure. The classic examples are Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola:
they make a deal with a fast food restaurant to give you their
products for reduced price. And when we come to bits and bytes,
"reduced price" could be zero.

On top of that, we have a number of Internet services of strategic
importance. Wikimedia projects are one of such services. Yes, a number
of Google services and Facebook are such services, as well, along with
a number of services covering similar needs (Yandex and VKontakte in
Russia, for example). It's good to have such services for free (before
or after you spend your data limit).

However, when it comes to limiting access to particular services, it
creates an underclass, capable to participate just in one segment of
Internet. That's quite serious.

I don't think think Zuckerberg's initiative has such idea behind. It's
Coca Cola-like marketing campaign. When you become that big, your
marketing approach becomes big, as well. Familiarizing people with
their products is clever strategy. We know that from three decades of
Microsoft's tolerance of piracy in countries without enough of people
capable to buy their software.

Neither I think the initiative will really create a permanent
underclass. People in underdeveloped regions will eventually become
richer and they won't need this kind of service.

Wikimedia projects will be included inside of such plans even without
WMF's approval. And even if we theoretically could block access, we
shouldn't do that, of course.

There is one more important issue here: It's Facebook's initiative,
but it's also a cartel-like approach to the market. Facebook is not
the only company behind the initiative and the initiative could become
quite powerful and could grow behind giving free access to limited
internet just to the poorest inhabitants of the Earth. It could slip
into a worldwide option, served as default in many settings.

So, there are at least three important reasons why Wikimedia
organizations shouldn't participate in such initiative:

* Most importantly, while I don't think Free Basics will create a
permanent underclass, nobody could guarantee such thing. My position
is based on external factors, not on the design created by the
companies participating in Free Basics. They could work hard on
preserving a kind of status quo by gradually increasing access to
various services, while keeping zero price. In a nightmarish scenario,
we could get two Internets: one censored and one not censored. And
Wikimedia shouldn't support such possible future.

* It's Facebook's business, not ours. I don't think Wikimedia
organizations should be outside of any business deal with for-profit
companies, but I don't think our voice in such initiative could be
relevant.

* Finally, we belong to the movement which promotes net neutrality as
one of the core values. No matter how realistic it is, we should
support it. Wikipedia Zero is not net-neutral, but Wikimedia projects
are of such significance that it could be tolerated. Going further
into abandoning that principle would create definite divide between us
and the rest of our global super-movement.

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[Wikimedia-l] Free Basics

[Milos Rancic]

Today I've learned about it. And I think WMF is the perfect prey for such
initiative.

I hope nobody sane is taking that seriously.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF Board of Trustees

[Milos Rancic]

This is not good. I suppose Board will give us an explanation of what
happened, so we could discuss it here.

On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Kevin Gorman  wrote:
> Dr James, thank you for your  work in Wikimedia governance (and for that
> matter, management so far.)  I really hope a full, thoughtful, and
> defensible statement in support of his decision will be coming from the
> rest of the board shortly.  I'm a little bit disturbed to see a respected
> community member who was elected with a significant mandate removed from
> the board without there being something like allegations of financial
> malfeasance, etc, involved.  The Wikimedia Foundation board does
> (literally) directly control the projects, and does (literally) directly
> have the ability to appoint and dismiss board members at its will, but I
> would hope that such power would be exercised with extreme discretion,
> especially with regards to a community member generally as well-respected
> and with as solid judgement as Dr. James has.
>
> ---
> Kevin Gorman
>
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 2:43 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> On Dec 28th 2015 I was removed from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
>> Many thanks to all those who gave me their support during the last
>> election. I have worked in the last six month to honor the trust placed in
>> me by advocating for our values, communities, and projects.
>>
>> Sincerely
>> James Heilman
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>>
>> The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
>> www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Branislav Jovanovic, User:BraneJ in critical condition

[Milos Rancic]

Brane died today. He read your messages and it mattered to him. I am
content as we sent him the message while he was alive and able to feel it.

Thanks to all of you who made him feel better during the last days of his
life.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why are we so boring?

[Milos Rancic]

First of all, it's obvious that the part of our movement already
suffers from the "old grey man" illusion, although the most of us are
not old nor grey.

That's typical modernist paradigm, which brought many achievements to
our civilization, but also removed decision-making power from the
majority of population: women + minorities consist definitely more
than 50% of population.

We have to move from that point. Yes, it's hard as our main product is
of modernist nature, but I think we are clever enough to overcome it.

Participation in Wikimedia movement requires a lot of time. That's the
reason why we have to have fun while working on it. Otherwise, anyone
not willing not to have fun during significant portion of their
everyday life wouldn't be excited to be with us. And there are many
reasons why we need them.

And not just that. I am sure I am not the only Wikimedian
significantly demotivated to work on important things for our movement
just because we are boring. It's exhausting to work on various issues
if the only set of benefits is consisted of "Thanks! This is
important!" and similar more or less elaborate variants. I want to be
eager to do those things, to expect fun after spending time on doing
"important things". Although my beard is partially grey, I definitely
don't strive to be an "old grey man", emotionally fulfilled
exclusively by the fact that I did something important.

Think about what we are offering to any of us, as well as to newcomers:
* You are working on an epochal project.
* You have to have all "serious" qualities to do that.
* If you are suffering from OCD, you'll find that it's extremely fun
to correct typos and categorize pages.
* You could become a member of your own local organization and spend a
lot of time arguing with other people suffering from OCD. You know,
it's a kind of fulfilling.
* We are more and more important and you'll find it's fun to
participate in official ceremonies and cocktails with important
people.
* 

Basically, we tell us and newcomers that we have to work an unpaid and
boring part time job because we'll be more successful in doing other
boring things. It is important, but it works for just a small part of
population. And, of course, it's not fun.

* * *

But let's go to the brighter side... From your responses, including a
couple of them sent to me privately, I'd conclude the next and call
for action.

* There is one thing I missed while writing this. Obviously, some
Wikimedians do have fun anyway. It could be because of different
cultural expectations, but also because some of you know and
practicing something the rest of us don't. So, please, share with us
how you have fun during Wikimedia meetings and conferences! Let's
start here, then we could create a Meta page for sharing ideas.

* There are a number of fixable things and they are related to what
Chris said: event management and meeting skills. I think we are mature
enough to find a way how to get and share the knowledge on those
topics.

If WMF requires from chapters and other affiliate groups to develop
strong formal procedures, it could also at least offer help in making
our events and meetings more interesting.

If contemporary progressive companies all over the world are able to
make things a bit more shiny with all of those "team buildings" and
similar bullshits, I am sure it would be much easier to achieve that
inside of our, mostly volunteering environment. Mostly, we are not
here to do boring things; we are here to have a kind of fun, no matter
how weird it could look like. So, it shouldn't be hard to get positive
outcome if we implement some of the contemporary straight-forward HR
and organizational methods.

* Software. How hard is to implement XMPP-based web chat? I see a
number of contemporary free software web platforms offering it. Yes,
we are a decade late, but it's better sooner than later anyway. Other
social features? Any *really* *interesting* and educational game
around? And, of course, opt-in only because we have "old grey men"
which would be offended by the idea that serious work could be also
fun and social.

* The level of our culture is the most complex one. Bad news is the
fact that there are no howtos for making a culture more fun. Good news
is that it's not hard to have fun and to spread it around yourselves.
And that should help. And, yes, everything above counts in changing
the culture from being boring to being fun.

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[Wikimedia-l] Why are we so boring?

[Milos Rancic]

We are. It's not about particular thread on this list, it's about our
existence. Initially I thought it's because the level of our
responsibility, but eventually I've realized we are simply boring and
nobody bothers about that.

Our meetings and conferences look like the meetings of a regional branch of
German Social Democratic Party at the best. In regular occasions they are
more like the meetings of a village cell of a communist party from an East
European country during the 80s.

This enormous distance between the value of our work and ideals and
presenting ourselves to *us* in the range between shiny snake oil merchants
and demagogues nobody trusts is quite striking. (OK, there is one more end,
thus making a triangle: highly specialized topics which require highly
specialized knowledge to participate.)

The distance is also quite striking because the most witty people I ever
met are from the Wikimedia movement itself.

It's endemic. From local Wikimedian meetings to Wikimania. The most
interesting part of such events is talking with other Wikimedians.
Listening talks, lectures and ceremonies is the worst option. Workshops and
collective decision making are like gambling: it could be constructive, but
it could also be not just wasting time but occult session with the only one
goal: to drain the energy from the participants.

On average, I would rather spend two times more time talking with a
Wikimedian than listening her or his lecture or talk.

There are some straight forward techniques. For example, we could work on
making our talks much better. We could also ask HR professionals how to
make our live interaction better.

However, being boring is somehow quite deeply rooted inside of our culture.
While trying to become "serious", we lost our ability to be playful.
Creativity is something we treat as the least important of our activities.

This is not something which could be fixed quickly. There is no a pill to
magically cure it. But we could start thinking about this as a problem and
start implementing various ideas to tackle it.

I wouldn't say that our revolution forbids us to dance. (Whenever somebody
from Bay Area is DJ-ing, we dance and it's beautiful, no matter how trashy
the music is.) But I am sure we can do better.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-hub

[Milos Rancic]

Wikimedia is in the position to work with many institutions not
committed to open access, free software etc. That's not the problem.
The position of Wikimedia movement is in such position that it's not
just about free knowledge, but about common good of the whole
humanity. And (the most of) legitimate representatives of humanity are
outside open access, free content etc.

I've followed the issue of linguists vs. Elsevier. Although I don't
know the whole background, I could say that that particular
confrontation is not something we should react differently than giving
more prominence to open access journals.

However, this issue is a game changer. Elsevier attacks a member of
our own wider movement. And we are the only entity inside of that
wider movement capable to make a proper response. Which means that we
have to do that, as our responsibility in particular is related to our
wider movement.

If we send clear message, anyone willing to make that kind of pressure
to any entity inside of our wider movement would have to have in mind
that we will respond, as well.

If we fail to send such messages in the situation like this one, we
gamble with being perceived as weak.

As per John, it's not about removing references, as we are doing our
job and closed-source journals are one of the valid sources of
information. However, it is about formal relations between Wikimedia
Foundation, other Wikimedia organizations and Elsevier.



On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Andrea Zanni  wrote:
> I don't really mind WMF working with closed-access publishers, if that
> works.
> What I think is that we don't put the same effort  indoing something with
> the openaccess world: all the initiatives I know are volunteer-based.
>
> Two pop up in my mind:
> the Signalling Open Access project, aimed to put an icon aside every
> reference in Wikipedia, to signal if the article is OA or closed. Ask
> Daniel Mietchen for updates.
>
> The other one is the possibility of uploading thousands of articles in
> wikisource, directly in HTML. Remember, we have Wikipedia Zero: putting
> stuff onWikisource means having a free digital library to everyone. In the
> recent Wikisource conference in Vienna we talked about that too,  and rhere
> is an ongoing discussion in the English Wikisource.
>
> Both these two projects could have a huge impact on open access and in
> general for our mission, but they rely on the good will and free time of
> few individuals, and have done for years now.
>
> Aubrey
> Il 01/dic/2015 03:54 "John Mark Vandenberg"  ha scritto:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>> > May we actually stop having anything with these pest?
>> >
>> > http://custodians.online/
>>
>> I dont believe we can stop using closed access journals, as that would
>> reduce the quality of our projects, but we can use links to them as an
>> opportunity to educate the public.
>>
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28idea_lab%29#Solidarity_with_Library_Genesis_and_Sci-Hub
>>
>> However WMF should discontinue its relationship with Elsevier and
>> Taylor & Francis via the 'Wikipedia Library'.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Elsevier_ScienceDirect
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taylor_%26_Francis
>>
>> --
>> John Vandenberg
>>
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[Wikimedia-l] In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-hub

[Milos Rancic]

May we actually stop having anything with these pest?

http://custodians.online/
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Branislav Jovanovic, User:BraneJ in critical condition

[Milos Rancic]

Pine asked me a good question: Where to express support? I think
whatever you think is the most appropriate. This thread works, as
well. His email is bra...@gmail.com. You have the link to his Facebook
page via WMRS photo. He is using Twitter, as well @branej.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> At some point of time, the best you could do is to reach for a
> superstition and hope it will work. It doesn't matter how it will be
> explained after, but at this point of time, it's only that
> superstition which matters.
>
> My particular superstition is that Brane would be able to see his
> eulogy and that we'll be able to laugh together. You know, it's a rare
> opportunity to see how your eulogy would look like, so I hope I am
> giving it to him.
>
> An hour ago I heard that he is in critical condition. At first, I was
> thinking what should I write after he dies. Then, I realized that I
> should write it now and post it after. Then, it's come into my mind
> that I should send it immediately as, at least, I could think about
> reading with him this eulogy and your comments after he recovers.
>
> Since August 2014 he is struggling with bone cancer. His curse is that
> his body is so strong, that chemotherapy is not working yet.
> Paradoxically, we hope that his body is weak enough now that it will
> finally accept chemotherapy. Monday would be crucial day for him.
>
> He is one of those "invisible" Wikimedians who actually contributed
> significantly to our movement. Some of you, mostly those who visited
> Belgrade, know him.
>
> He is one of the founders of Wikimedia Serbia. It's a pity that he is
> in this condition while WMRS is preparing to celebrate its 10th
> anniversary. Here is our photo from the founding assembly [1].
>
> Presently, he is a board member of Wikimedia Serbia.
>
> His epic fight for copyright correctness on Serbian Wikipedia created
> the foundations of the present day strict copyright rules. It's a
> great achievement for a project of such size and it was possible just
> because of him.
>
> While he was active editor, he was highly trusted Wikipedian and he
> was administrator, bureaucrat and checkuser on Serbian Wikipedia, as
> well as on a number of of other projects in Serbian language.
>
> Alpha software for transliteration between Cyrillic and Latin scripts
> of Serbian language in MediaWiki was his work. That was the basis for
> the future implementation. It was the first software of that kind
> implemented in one web engine.
>
> He is my close friend. Besides a lot of things which he did, which
> will be mentioned at appropriate time, I want to say that many things
> which I did wouldn't be possible without his contribution.
>
> He is now very exhausted and he won't be able to read this today or
> tomorrow. However, I am sure he will be able to read it on Monday,
> after he recovers a bit. So, your support matters, no matter of my
> superstitious reasons for sending this email.
>
> [1] 
> https://www.facebook.com/wikimedia.rs/photos/a.826279217387658.1073741828.294923960523189/1198903920125184/

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[Wikimedia-l] Branislav Jovanovic, User:BraneJ in critical condition

[Milos Rancic]

At some point of time, the best you could do is to reach for a
superstition and hope it will work. It doesn't matter how it will be
explained after, but at this point of time, it's only that
superstition which matters.

My particular superstition is that Brane would be able to see his
eulogy and that we'll be able to laugh together. You know, it's a rare
opportunity to see how your eulogy would look like, so I hope I am
giving it to him.

An hour ago I heard that he is in critical condition. At first, I was
thinking what should I write after he dies. Then, I realized that I
should write it now and post it after. Then, it's come into my mind
that I should send it immediately as, at least, I could think about
reading with him this eulogy and your comments after he recovers.

Since August 2014 he is struggling with bone cancer. His curse is that
his body is so strong, that chemotherapy is not working yet.
Paradoxically, we hope that his body is weak enough now that it will
finally accept chemotherapy. Monday would be crucial day for him.

He is one of those "invisible" Wikimedians who actually contributed
significantly to our movement. Some of you, mostly those who visited
Belgrade, know him.

He is one of the founders of Wikimedia Serbia. It's a pity that he is
in this condition while WMRS is preparing to celebrate its 10th
anniversary. Here is our photo from the founding assembly [1].

Presently, he is a board member of Wikimedia Serbia.

His epic fight for copyright correctness on Serbian Wikipedia created
the foundations of the present day strict copyright rules. It's a
great achievement for a project of such size and it was possible just
because of him.

While he was active editor, he was highly trusted Wikipedian and he
was administrator, bureaucrat and checkuser on Serbian Wikipedia, as
well as on a number of of other projects in Serbian language.

Alpha software for transliteration between Cyrillic and Latin scripts
of Serbian language in MediaWiki was his work. That was the basis for
the future implementation. It was the first software of that kind
implemented in one web engine.

He is my close friend. Besides a lot of things which he did, which
will be mentioned at appropriate time, I want to say that many things
which I did wouldn't be possible without his contribution.

He is now very exhausted and he won't be able to read this today or
tomorrow. However, I am sure he will be able to read it on Monday,
after he recovers a bit. So, your support matters, no matter of my
superstitious reasons for sending this email.

[1] 
https://www.facebook.com/wikimedia.rs/photos/a.826279217387658.1073741828.294923960523189/1198903920125184/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

[Milos Rancic]

Offtopic: Gerard, during the last half an hour or so, I am just
getting emails from you inside of this thread (including wiki-research
list). I thought my phone has a bug. It's useful to write a larger
email with addressing all the issues. Besides other things, with this
frequency, you'll spend your monthly email quota for this list the day
after tomorrow.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen
 wrote:
> Hoi,
>  quality is different things  I do care about quality but I do
> not necessarily agree with you how to best achieve it. Arguably bots are
> better and getting data into Wikidata than people. This means that the
> error rate of bots is typically better than what people do. It is all in
> the percentages.
>
> I have always said that the best way to improve quality is by comparing
> sources. When Wikidata has no data, it is arguably better to import data
> from any source. When the quality is 90% correct, there is already 100%
> more data. When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the same,
> you only have to check 15% and decide what is right. When you compare with
> two distinct sources, the percentage that differs changes again.. :) In
> this way it makes sense to check errors
>
> It does not help when you state that either party has people that care or
> do not care about quality. By providing a high likelihood that something is
> problematic, you will learn who actually makes a difference. It however
> started with having data to compare in the first place
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
> On 20 November 2015 at 14:50, Petr Kadlec  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
>> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside
>> > world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there
>> are
>> > already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia
>> quality
>> > because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.
>> >
>>
>> Right. When some users blindly dump random data to Wikidata, not
>> communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation
>> becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikipedia that
>> argue not to bother about Wikidata quality because in their view,
>> Wikidatans do not care about its own quality.
>>
>> For instance, take a look at
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM/Archive_1
>>
>> Erm
>> -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paris

[Milos Rancic]

Also, non-French Wikimedians currently in Paris: May you contact WMFR and
tell you are OK? (For WMFR: What's the best way to do that?)

I see on Facebook one Wikimedian currently in "affected area" not "marked
as safe", so I suppose there could be others, as well.
On Nov 14, 2015 11:50, "Milos Rancic"  wrote:

> Christophe, thank you for the update! It's good to hear that all of you
> are well!
> On Nov 14, 2015 11:26, "Christophe Henner" 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> Sorry didn't thought of coming here (long night for me had to work).
>>
>> Nathalie, WMFr ED, checked all staff in.
>> From all we could gather over the last hours, so far all parisians
>> wikimedians are ok. Can't be 100% sure as we have some who still have to
>> answer but so far so good.
>>
>> Thank you all for your kind words. It was a long night, will be a long
>> week-end and hard time... for the second time in the year.
>>
>> Thanks again.
>>
>> Take care of you and the people you love
>>
>> --
>> Christophe
>>
>> On 14 November 2015 at 09:51, Giuliana Mancini <
>> direttore-gener...@wikimedia.it> wrote:
>>
>> > Dear Nathalie,
>> > I want to express our solidariety from Italy with all of you for the
>> awful
>> > things that happened yesterday.
>> > If we can do anything, here we are.
>> >
>> > Giuliana
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Il 14/11/15 04:09, Sydney Poore ha scritto:
>> >
>> > Alex, thanks for sharing this information. My thoughts are with
>> Wikimedians
>> >> and their family and friends.
>> >>
>> >> Take care,
>> >> Sydney
>> >>
>> >> Sydney Poore
>> >> User:FloNight
>> >> Wikipedian in Residence
>> >> at Cochrane Collaboration
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Alex Cella 
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> All the staff is safe, I'm in touch with them.
>> >>>
>> >>> Thnaks for asking.
>> >>>
>> >>> --
>> >>>
>> >>> *Alex Cella*
>> >>> Finance Fellow
>> >>> ace...@wikimedia.org
>> >>> LinkedIn <http://fr.linkedin.com/in/alexcella>
>> >>>
>> >>> Wikimedia Foundation
>> >>> 149 New Montgomery St., San Francisco, CA., 94105
>> >>> www.wikimediafoundation.org
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Milos Rancic 
>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> May WMFR coordinate efforts to inform us if all Wikimedians from Paris
>> >>>>
>> >>> are
>> >>>
>> >>>> live and well?
>> >>>> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paris

[Milos Rancic]

Christophe, thank you for the update! It's good to hear that all of you are
well!
On Nov 14, 2015 11:26, "Christophe Henner" 
wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> Sorry didn't thought of coming here (long night for me had to work).
>
> Nathalie, WMFr ED, checked all staff in.
> From all we could gather over the last hours, so far all parisians
> wikimedians are ok. Can't be 100% sure as we have some who still have to
> answer but so far so good.
>
> Thank you all for your kind words. It was a long night, will be a long
> week-end and hard time... for the second time in the year.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Take care of you and the people you love
>
> --
> Christophe
>
> On 14 November 2015 at 09:51, Giuliana Mancini <
> direttore-gener...@wikimedia.it> wrote:
>
> > Dear Nathalie,
> > I want to express our solidariety from Italy with all of you for the
> awful
> > things that happened yesterday.
> > If we can do anything, here we are.
> >
> > Giuliana
> >
> >
> >
> > Il 14/11/15 04:09, Sydney Poore ha scritto:
> >
> > Alex, thanks for sharing this information. My thoughts are with
> Wikimedians
> >> and their family and friends.
> >>
> >> Take care,
> >> Sydney
> >>
> >> Sydney Poore
> >> User:FloNight
> >> Wikipedian in Residence
> >> at Cochrane Collaboration
> >>
> >> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Alex Cella 
> wrote:
> >>
> >> All the staff is safe, I'm in touch with them.
> >>>
> >>> Thnaks for asking.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>>
> >>> *Alex Cella*
> >>> Finance Fellow
> >>> ace...@wikimedia.org
> >>> LinkedIn <http://fr.linkedin.com/in/alexcella>
> >>>
> >>> Wikimedia Foundation
> >>> 149 New Montgomery St., San Francisco, CA., 94105
> >>> www.wikimediafoundation.org
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Milos Rancic 
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> May WMFR coordinate efforts to inform us if all Wikimedians from Paris
> >>>>
> >>> are
> >>>
> >>>> live and well?
> >>>> ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Paris

[Milos Rancic]

May WMFR coordinate efforts to inform us if all Wikimedians from Paris are
live and well?
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wiktionary-l] Dictator

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Sam Klein  wrote:
> ...and the helper tool for naming new concepts is Benevocent?

Good addition! We are creating a Django-based web interface for
dictionaries, which we named "d'spot", which is shortened "despot" :)

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[Wikimedia-l] Dictator

[Milos Rancic]

No, it's not about Jimmy :P It's about the software for parsing
dictionaries. And we are presently inside of not so stable phase of
switching from the name "dictator" to "dicteator" (etymology is
"dictionary creator").

One of my strategic goals in relation to the movement itself is to
create methodology for parsing dictionaries and adding them into the
Wikimedia projects (first Wiktionary, but Wikidata and likely some
other projects in the future) and a pool of programmers to keep that
knowledge inside of the movement.

So, besides the software itself [1], one of the tasks of Milos
Trifunovic, programmer who is inserting data for the project
Wiktionary Meets Matica Srpska [2] was to create a white paper about
the process itself, which he did [3].

I know there were numerous previous additions of the dictionaries into
the Wiktionaries, but, as far as I know, no systematic effort was put
into dissemination of that knowledge.

We are at the beginning of the process. Up to the present, there are
~26k new entries on Serbian Wiktionary. The code is in the initial
useful phase. Up to the end of this part of the process I expect from
a few hundred thousand to a few million of new entries all over
Wiktionary editions (the most optimistic estimation is a few dozen
million entries; estimation varies that much because of many factors,
including future community involvement; one million is a reachable
target).

Keep in mind that there are three different stages of the software,
with various levels of usefulness and complexity:

1) Adding the content into Wiktionary. This depends on particular
Wiktionary customs, could be easily changed and didn't require too
much of sophistication, as it's dominantly about Pywikipediabot and
wiki syntax.

2) JSON intermediate storage. That's important as it's the most formal
way for representing dictionary data for future use, not depending of
destination platform. There is a space for further development of the
particular format and your participation will be appreciated.

3) Parsing particular dictionary. That's dictionary-specific, but a
number of methods could be shared for parsing other dictionaries. As
many dictionaries we have, as much we will have developed common
methods.

So, if you are interested into the matter, please go to the talk page
[4] and give your suggestions. Also, don't hesitate to reach me
directly.

[1] https://github.com/Interglider/dictator
[2] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_Matica_Srpska
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dicteator
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dicteator

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] 2014-15 Wikimedia Fundraising Report

[Milos Rancic]

Pavel, is everything alright with you? :P
On Oct 5, 2015 10:18 PM, "Pavel Richter"  wrote:

> aalalaaa)4915119645755lalaasalllAalXaalallalallaa@)larval c a fax
> a
> l a A ads alaLALAAALALALA
>
> Ala freundlichen Grüßen / Kind km A ha l laalaaAa) AXA a regards a l all l
> 4915119645755lalaasalllAaalalalaalalalaLaalalalaalaaalaAlaalall,
>
> Pavel Richter
> Mobil: +4915119645755 AfA L all l a A LA ALL A ALL LN LB AS A u a laval
> llaaLlallllaalAALLALALAAa
> Twitter: @pavel
> Blog: blog.pavelrichter.de
> Knall
> Von meinem Handy aus verschickt / send from my mobile phone
> Am 02.10.2015 19:03 schrieb "Balázs Viczián"  >:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > This job is pretty impressive, congratulations to the team :)
> >
> > Is there a per country breakdown available somewhere?
> >
> > Balázs
> >
> > 2015-10-02 18:56 GMT+02:00 Megan Hernandez :
> >
> > > Hi Rodrigo,
> > >
> > > Thank you for the question and for all your help with the latest Brazil
> > > campaign!  I've copied your question over to the talk page and replied
> > > there to keep track of the comments together in one spot.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising/2014-15_Report#Latin_America_Question
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Megan
> > >
> > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:38 PM, Rodrigo Padula <
> > rodrigopad...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Excellent report!
> > > >
> > > > I'm really impressed with the low level of donations from Latina
> > America.
> > > >
> > > > We need to do something to stimulate people to contribute a little
> bit
> > > more
> > > > to our mission.
> > > >
> > > > During the first two weeks of the campaign in Brasil, I received a
> lot
> > of
> > > > messages from friends requesting information about the Wikipedia
> > banners
> > > > asking for donations, a lot of people thought that it was spam,
> spyware
> > > or
> > > > something fake. So, I guess the low level of donations from Brasil
> > > > (specially) can be linked with that issue.
> > > >
> > > > In August I started a local effort talking to some journalists
> > regarding
> > > > the importance of the donations to our movement.
> > > >
> > > > I contacted some of our contacts to spread it, and many posts was
> > > published
> > > > here regarding the fund-raising campaign, with a really good impact.
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> http://bit.blog.br/wikipedia-pede-doacoes-para-ajudar-a-manter-site-no-ar/
> > > > ( interview replicated on twitter and facebook of
> > > > http://diariodepernambuco.com.br/ to more than 800.000 followers)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> http://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/vida-e-cidadania/wikipedia-comeca-nova-campanha-de-doacoes-para-manter-site-funcionando-cdlzioae60haolfoz3l6ohm1c
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> http://www.tecmundo.com.br/wikipedia/84931-wikipedia-volta-pedir-doacoes-leitores-manter-ar.htm
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/2015/08/1670681-wikipedia-comeca-nova-campanha-de-doacoes-para-manter-site-funcionando.shtml
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2015/08/wikipedia-pede-doacoes-para-se-manter-independente.html
> > > >
> > > > What we can do to help to improve the local level of donations? I'm
> > > really
> > > > interested to help with that problem here and our user group can
> spend
> > > some
> > > > time on it, for sure it is something that need some attention.
> > > >
> > > > How can I get more information about the donations from Brasil,
> mainly
> > to
> > > > identify if after the news published by the local media it
> improved(or
> > > not)
> > > > the level of donations?
> > > >
> > > > There are any way to track it?
> > > >
> > > > Best regards
> > > >
> > > > Rodrigo Padula
> > > > Project Manager / User Group Coordinator
> > > > Wikimedia Brazilian Community User Group of Education and Research
> > > > http://www.wikimedia.org.br
> > > >
> > > > 2015-09-30 22:36 GMT-03:00 Megan Hernandez  >:
> > > >
> > > > > Hi everyone,
> > > > >
> > > > > The fundraising team is happy to share the report on the 2014-15
> > fiscal
> > > > > year fundraising.  Please take a look at the report
> > > > >  >
> > > and
> > > > we
> > > > > look forward to your feedback on the report talk page
> > > > > .
> > > > >
> > > > > Thank you to Wikimedia volunteers, readers, donors, staff and
> > > fundraising
> > > > > team for making this the most successful year yet.
> > > > >
> > > > > Megan Hernandez
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > >
> > > > > Megan Hernandez
> > > > >
> > > > > Director of Online Fundraising
> > > > > Wikimedia Foundation
> > > > > ___
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> > > > > Unsubscribe:
> > htt

[Wikimedia-l] California draught and WMF

[Milos Rancic]

For the last few years I am thinking about this issue, and as I didn't see
anybody talking about that, I think we should start a kind of low level
discussion, as it doesn't require immediate action.

From what I read, Bay Area is not particularly endangered (although it
could be in the future). Even so, I am sure all WMF employees have enough
money to buy bottled water. I know, of course, they are not in the same
position as Google or Facebook employees, but I think the whole story is
not about water safety of our headquarters.

It's about responsibility. WMF shouldn't spend resources unreasonably if it
doesn't have to. And it's not just about possible "fund for water", which
could become a standard for every Bay Area employer, but also about the
environmental harm of the attitude of keeping yourself in hostile place if
not necessary.

United States don't have the same climate everywhere. There are many places
not that endangered because of the climate change. And I am sure you could
find a good place for the office somewhere else. (OK, Florida is the second
worst option because of floods, but there are many better places.)

I know it doesn't sound solidary. We have a number of friends in Bay Area,
not working for WMF and not willing to move. However, WMF's responsibility
is far beyond local patriotism.

Keep in mind that it's better to move in a year or two and be able to
choose the place, than to do it in five years, when Google decides to move
it's own headquarters.

And we should start talking about this. We need to analyze the risks and
then WMF should make the best possible decision at the best possible time.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Cebuano and Waray-waray Wikipedias among Top 10

[Milos Rancic]

I would consider this discussion as a sensible one if you are editors of
Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias, oppose the idea of creating
bot-generated articles and have better plan how to increase quality and
quantity of those projects. Optionally, you are always free to offer your
help to those projects and start working.

Without such actions, I see opposition to that work as vanity expression:
It's not fair that they have bigger than ours.

Article count is a valid measurement and it says exactly how many articles
exist in Wikipedia in particular language. I hope this tautology is clear
enough.

Conclusions based on article count may vary, but, don't worry, they are not
about the greatness of your Wikipedia community or your ethnolinguistic
group.

What makes sense -- and thus I am replying to Amir's message -- is to build
repository of common knowledge and best practices related to bot generated
articles.
 On Jul 6, 2015 12:15, "Amir Ladsgroup"  wrote:

> I'm a bot operator in Persian Wikipedia (~500K articles) and I'm directly
> or indirectly responsible for creating more than half of the articles in
> that Wiki using automated or semi-automated tools that I built. If our
> language used Latin alphabet, we definitely would be one of the five
> biggest wikis.
>
> I'm telling this to emphasize I'm not against bot-creating articles in
> general but I agree this is not the way we build Wikipedia.
>
> We create articles of Wikipedia for people to read. Even if your articles
> has a very low quality eventually someone will improve it [1] but articles
> that have reader. How many of these articles will be read by people?
> Honestly I think 100K out of the 1M was enough.
>
> That's why we created articles by bot in broad topics in Persian Wikipedia
> (minor planets 16K, villages of Iran 70K, national heritages of Iran 20K,
> cities of the world ~20K, chemical compounds 10-20K) because 20K articles
> in same topic attracts less then half of reader comparing to combination of
> 10K in one topic and 10K in another topic.
>
> [1]: IPs can't create article, we enabled it once, disaster. but they can
> edit articles (low-quality-bot-created articles) and it attracts to add
> something and after a while they become a regular editor. That's why
> Persian Wikipedia has one of the highest growth rate in number of users and
> active users. So bot-created articles can be useful but not this way.
> Best
>
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Gerard Meijssen  >
> wrote:
>
> > Hoi,
> > I would not say that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is NOT an
> encyclopaedia.
> >
> > The objective of Wikipedia is EXACTLY that it is read. Not that it is
> > edited.
> >
> > You can argue all you like against bot generated articles but in the
> final
> > analysis it is doing a much better job than not providing information.
> > Arguably it is not needed to save them as articles because it is possible
> > to generate them on the fly based on information from Wikidata and cache
> > the results but that is EXACTLY the kind of technology that would bring
> > missing information to any Wikipedia without distorting the number of
> > articles for people who only care about editors and editing. It is
> EXACTLY
> > the kind of technology I would welcome the WMF to explore.
> > Thanks,
> >   GerardM
> >
> > On 6 July 2015 at 11:09, Ilario Valdelli  wrote:
> >
> > > https://war.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinaurog:ActiveUsers
> > > https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:ActiveUsers
> > >
> > > An encyclopedia in the first 10 places without a community is it an
> > > encyclopedia?
> > >
> > > Is the community important to say that wikipedia is wikipedia? In this
> > case
> > > these projects are demonstrating that Wikipedia can renounce to one of
> > its
> > > pilaster.
> > >
> > > In my opinion the impact of Waray Waray or of Cebuan is a demonstration
> > > that any "strange" language can have a big traffic if it is placed in
> the
> > > first places of the ranking because it will be best ranked in search
> > > engines.
> > >
> > > But an impact is something that produces "effects" and
> "dissemination". I
> > > don't see impact because the bot has increased only one measure (page
> > view)
> > > and nothing else.
> > >
> > > If the impact must be produced with SEO, the parameters of evaluations
> > must
> > > change.
> > >
> > > It is different when a bot is running in an encyclopedia supported by a
> > > "mature" community, because the articles will be improved in quality
> and
> > > will generate more and more effects.
> > >
> > > Regards
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
> > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > > How do you know that there is no impact ?
> > > >
> > > > https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
> > shows
> > > > clearly how much Cebuano has grown considerably in page views. The
> same
> > > is
> > > > true for Waray Waray. Compare it to language

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Languages] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> One more lame mistake: It's not about countries, but about languages.
> Thus: немачки, njemački, њемачки, njemački,

Khm... немачки, nemački, њемачки, njemački,
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Languages] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> Just a short note here... The complexity of the task, which I think I
> comprehend, is so significant, that I made the lamest mistake from my
> own perspective. Please note that the page Names of Wikimedia
> languages [1] assumes that there is only one variant of Serbian
> (although some languages have full four written varieties in Serbian:
> Немачка / Nemačka / Њемачка / Njemačka).

One more lame mistake: It's not about countries, but about languages.
Thus: немачки, njemački, њемачки, njemački,

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Languages] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
> And either I missed it, or nobody mentioned it yet, but ahem ahem ahem
> ContentTranslation. It is already helping Wikipedias in minorized languages
> to create a lot of meaningful articles more easily, and with future features
> like task lists and suggestions, it will be possible to use it for tracking
> success conveniently.

Just a short note here... The complexity of the task, which I think I
comprehend, is so significant, that I made the lamest mistake from my
own perspective. Please note that the page Names of Wikimedia
languages [1] assumes that there is only one variant of Serbian
(although some languages have full four written varieties in Serbian:
Немачка / Nemačka / Њемачка / Njemačka).

So, yes, ContentTranslation. (To be honest, one of my priorities
should be to actually see how it works...) Besides the tools (and I
think there are some other tools, as well), there is a lot of
documentation, which should be gathered inside of one user friendly
howto.

Creating correlations between Wikimedia projects data and data about
languages is not a simple task. In relation to the languages, we know
which information we need, but we often don't have enough of data; in
relation to Wikimedia, we have data, but we often don't know what to
do with it. And the most important danger of dealing with such sets is
not to have enough data and don't know what to do with it.

While the lack of reliable data about languages could be fixed through
necessary approximations, while searching for more relevant data, the
part which says that we should know what we should do with data could
be easily fixed by sharing the ideas here. That's the main reason why
I am sharing here work in progress.

(Now back to linking languages: 208th Wikipedia edition by size,
Karachay-Balkar...)

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Wikimedia_languages

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

Read the rest :P
On Jun 13, 2015 02:43, "Asaf Bartov"  wrote:

> (adding Analytics, as a relevant group for this discussion.)
>
> I think this is next to meaningless, because the differing bot policies and
> practices on different wikis skew the data into incoherence.
>
> The (already existing) metric of active-editors-per-million-speakers is, it
> seems to me, a far more robust metric.  Erik Z.'s stats.wikimedia.org is
> offering that metric.
>
>    A.
>
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
> > When you get data, at some point of time you start thinking about
> > quite fringe comparisons. But that could actually give some useful
> > conclusions, like this time it did [1].
> >
> > We did the next:
> > * Used the number of primary speakers from Ethnologue. (Erik Zachte is
> > using approximate number of primary + secondary speakers; that could
> > be good for correction of this data.)
> > * Categorized languages according to the logarithmic number of
> > speakers: >=10k, >=100k, >=1M, >=10M, >=100M.
> > * Took the number of articles of Wikipedia in particular language and
> > created ration (number of articles / number of speakers).
> > * This list is consisted just of languages with Ethnologue status 1
> > (national), 2 (provincial) or 3 (wider communication). In fact, we
> > have a lot of projects (more than 100) with worse language status; a
> > number of them are actually threatened or even on the edge of
> > extinction.
> >
> > Those are the preliminary results and I will definitely have to pass
> > through all the numbers. I fixed manually some serious errors, like
> > not having English Wikipedia itself inside of data :D
> >
> > Putting the languages into the logarithmic categories proved to be
> > useful, as we are now able to compare the Wikipedias according to
> > their gross capacity (numbers of speakers). I suppose somebody well
> > introduced into statistics could even create the function which could
> > be used to check how good one project stays, no matter of those strict
> > categories.
> >
> > It's obvious that as more speakers one language has, it's harder to
> > the community to follow the ratio.
> >
> > So, the winners per category are:
> > 1) >= 1k: Hawaiian, ratio 0.96900
> > 2) >= 10k: Mirandese, ratio 0.18073
> > 3) >= 100k: Basque, ratio 0.38061
> > 4) >= 1M: Swedish, ratio 0.21381
> > 5) >= 10M: Dutch, ratio 0.08305
> > 6) >= 100M: English, ratio 0.01447
> >
> > However, keep in mind that we removed languages not inside categories
> > 1, 2 or 3. That affected >=10k languages, as, for example, Upper
> > Sorbian stays much better than Mirandese (0.67). (Will fix it while
> > creating the full report. Obviously, in this case logarithmic
> > categories of numbers of speakers are much more important than what's
> > the state of the language.)
> >
> > It's obvious that we could draw the line between 1:1 for 1-10k
> > speakers to 10:1 for >=100M speakers. But, again, I would like to get
> > input of somebody more competent.
> >
> > One very important category is missing here and it's about the level
> > of development of the speakers. That could be added: GDP/PPP per
> > capita for spoken country or countries would be useful as measurement.
> > And I suppose somebody with statistical knowledge would be able to
> > give us the number which would have meaning "ability to create
> > Wikipedia article".
> >
> > Completed in such way, we'd be able to measure the success of
> > particular Wikimedia groups and organizations. OK. Articles per
> > speaker are not the only way to do so, but we could use other
> > parameters, as well: number of new/active/very active editors etc. And
> > we could put it into time scale.
> >
> > I'll make some other results. And to remind: I'd like to have the
> > formula to count "ability to create Wikipedia article" and then to
> > produce "level of particular community success in creating Wikipedia
> > articles". And, of course, to implement it for editors.
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TYyhETevEJ5MhfRheRn-aGc4cs_6k45Gwk_ic14TXY4/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

Read the rest :P
On Jun 13, 2015 02:43, "Asaf Bartov"  wrote:

> (adding Analytics, as a relevant group for this discussion.)
>
> I think this is next to meaningless, because the differing bot policies and
> practices on different wikis skew the data into incoherence.
>
> The (already existing) metric of active-editors-per-million-speakers is, it
> seems to me, a far more robust metric.  Erik Z.'s stats.wikimedia.org is
> offering that metric.
>
>    A.
>
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
> > When you get data, at some point of time you start thinking about
> > quite fringe comparisons. But that could actually give some useful
> > conclusions, like this time it did [1].
> >
> > We did the next:
> > * Used the number of primary speakers from Ethnologue. (Erik Zachte is
> > using approximate number of primary + secondary speakers; that could
> > be good for correction of this data.)
> > * Categorized languages according to the logarithmic number of
> > speakers: >=10k, >=100k, >=1M, >=10M, >=100M.
> > * Took the number of articles of Wikipedia in particular language and
> > created ration (number of articles / number of speakers).
> > * This list is consisted just of languages with Ethnologue status 1
> > (national), 2 (provincial) or 3 (wider communication). In fact, we
> > have a lot of projects (more than 100) with worse language status; a
> > number of them are actually threatened or even on the edge of
> > extinction.
> >
> > Those are the preliminary results and I will definitely have to pass
> > through all the numbers. I fixed manually some serious errors, like
> > not having English Wikipedia itself inside of data :D
> >
> > Putting the languages into the logarithmic categories proved to be
> > useful, as we are now able to compare the Wikipedias according to
> > their gross capacity (numbers of speakers). I suppose somebody well
> > introduced into statistics could even create the function which could
> > be used to check how good one project stays, no matter of those strict
> > categories.
> >
> > It's obvious that as more speakers one language has, it's harder to
> > the community to follow the ratio.
> >
> > So, the winners per category are:
> > 1) >= 1k: Hawaiian, ratio 0.96900
> > 2) >= 10k: Mirandese, ratio 0.18073
> > 3) >= 100k: Basque, ratio 0.38061
> > 4) >= 1M: Swedish, ratio 0.21381
> > 5) >= 10M: Dutch, ratio 0.08305
> > 6) >= 100M: English, ratio 0.01447
> >
> > However, keep in mind that we removed languages not inside categories
> > 1, 2 or 3. That affected >=10k languages, as, for example, Upper
> > Sorbian stays much better than Mirandese (0.67). (Will fix it while
> > creating the full report. Obviously, in this case logarithmic
> > categories of numbers of speakers are much more important than what's
> > the state of the language.)
> >
> > It's obvious that we could draw the line between 1:1 for 1-10k
> > speakers to 10:1 for >=100M speakers. But, again, I would like to get
> > input of somebody more competent.
> >
> > One very important category is missing here and it's about the level
> > of development of the speakers. That could be added: GDP/PPP per
> > capita for spoken country or countries would be useful as measurement.
> > And I suppose somebody with statistical knowledge would be able to
> > give us the number which would have meaning "ability to create
> > Wikipedia article".
> >
> > Completed in such way, we'd be able to measure the success of
> > particular Wikimedia groups and organizations. OK. Articles per
> > speaker are not the only way to do so, but we could use other
> > parameters, as well: number of new/active/very active editors etc. And
> > we could put it into time scale.
> >
> > I'll make some other results. And to remind: I'd like to have the
> > formula to count "ability to create Wikipedia article" and then to
> > produce "level of particular community success in creating Wikipedia
> > articles". And, of course, to implement it for editors.
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TYyhETevEJ5MhfRheRn-aGc4cs_6k45Gwk_ic14TXY4/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> > ___
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> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinf

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Languages] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

Illario, Latin doesn't have L1 speakers. And data about languages are such
a mess, that I would stick with Ethnologue's data for L1 speakers, although
they are not reliable. Ethnologue counts "there are 100,000 speakers of
language X in country A and 34 in country B, thus there are 100,034
speakers in total" (although likely error margin for the first number is
150 times larger than the second number), as well as it has numerous other
flaws, like fringe "macrolanguage" category is. However, besides counting
the same way, English Wikipedia has much worse failures when we leave ~50
major languages safety, if not based on Ethnologue's data. (It's mostly
about wishful thinking of ethnic nationalists and chronic lack of manpower
to fix that bullshit promptly.)

Nemo, yes I was thinking about various data instead of article count and
GDP/PPP per capita, so here are the thoughts, including those two
parameters:

* Article count per speaker gives one one nice pseudo-hyperbolic curve.
Basically, you can see a hyperbolic curve by drawing the line over the
highest points: Hawaiian-Upper Sorbian-Basque-Swedish-Dutch-English. By
normalizing the numbers, we could get targets per language.

* However, edit count seems like better idea. I think, but it has to be
proved, that such numbers won't have to be adjusted for the number of
speakers themselves.

* We could count various numbers related to users. For example, it seems
that as smaller ratio between the number of active and very active users
is, as healthier community is. Also, number of editors per million of
speaker per GDP or HDI could be useful parameter.

* I was thinking yesterday about HDI. But then I've realized that it would
be good to create all of possibly relevant charts and see what they bring
as information. I am interested in comparison of Wikipedia stats with Gini
coefficient, for example.

And I will do that. After I finish with the most frustrating part of the
job: draw the line between Wikipedia editions, Ethnologue data and actual
languages. Good news is that I am on ~150th of ~280 Wikipedia editions and
it's likely I will finish it during the next week. (After almost eight
years of dealing with this matter, whenever someone says that there are two
hundred eighty something Wikipedia languages or that there are 7000
languages in the world, I reach for my revolver.)
 On Jun 12, 2015 20:51, "Federico Leva (Nemo)"  wrote:

> Milos Rancic, 08/06/2015 00:23:
>
>> And I suppose somebody with statistical knowledge would be able to
>> give us the number which would have meaning "ability to create
>> Wikipedia article".
>>
>
> Why not use the human development index (HDI) as factor? Also, instead of
> the number of articles I'd rather use database size or number of words.
>
> Nemo
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Global North/South

[Milos Rancic]

On Jun 11, 2015 10:06 PM, "Yaroslav M. Blanter"  wrote:
>
> On 2015-06-11 22:03, Milos Rancic wrote:
>>
>> I think the reason is more than obvious: Belarus is south of Moldova and
>> Ukraine is in between, so it went south. As Russia is basically on the
east
>> of all of three countries, it's logical to put it among the northern
>> countries.
>
>
> Not that I object the general reasoning, but Belarus is north of Moldova
(Ukraine is either way).

Besides it's not nice to write spoilers on the public list, I would remind
you that according to the 6th century naming rules, every White Sea has to
be south of every Black Sea. As Moldova is closer to the Black Sea than
Belarus, Belarus is closer to the White Sea, it's logical that Belarus is
on the south of Moldova.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Global North/South

[Milos Rancic]

I think the reason is more than obvious: Belarus is south of Moldova and
Ukraine is in between, so it went south. As Russia is basically on the east
of all of three countries, it's logical to put it among the northern
countries.
 On Jun 11, 2015 9:59 PM, "Yaroslav M. Blanter"  wrote:

> Does anybody happen to know why Russia and Moldova are classified as
> Global North whereas Ukraine and Belarus are classified as Global South,
> from the WMF point of view? There is some discussion (specifically about
> Belarus) at the talk page, but it is too heated and I was not able to get
> the point.
>
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Countries_by_Regional_Classification
>
> I notice this in the Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013. I am
> wondering whether this has more serious implications like finance
> distribution etc.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia article per speaker

[Milos Rancic]

When you get data, at some point of time you start thinking about
quite fringe comparisons. But that could actually give some useful
conclusions, like this time it did [1].

We did the next:
* Used the number of primary speakers from Ethnologue. (Erik Zachte is
using approximate number of primary + secondary speakers; that could
be good for correction of this data.)
* Categorized languages according to the logarithmic number of
speakers: >=10k, >=100k, >=1M, >=10M, >=100M.
* Took the number of articles of Wikipedia in particular language and
created ration (number of articles / number of speakers).
* This list is consisted just of languages with Ethnologue status 1
(national), 2 (provincial) or 3 (wider communication). In fact, we
have a lot of projects (more than 100) with worse language status; a
number of them are actually threatened or even on the edge of
extinction.

Those are the preliminary results and I will definitely have to pass
through all the numbers. I fixed manually some serious errors, like
not having English Wikipedia itself inside of data :D

Putting the languages into the logarithmic categories proved to be
useful, as we are now able to compare the Wikipedias according to
their gross capacity (numbers of speakers). I suppose somebody well
introduced into statistics could even create the function which could
be used to check how good one project stays, no matter of those strict
categories.

It's obvious that as more speakers one language has, it's harder to
the community to follow the ratio.

So, the winners per category are:
1) >= 1k: Hawaiian, ratio 0.96900
2) >= 10k: Mirandese, ratio 0.18073
3) >= 100k: Basque, ratio 0.38061
4) >= 1M: Swedish, ratio 0.21381
5) >= 10M: Dutch, ratio 0.08305
6) >= 100M: English, ratio 0.01447

However, keep in mind that we removed languages not inside categories
1, 2 or 3. That affected >=10k languages, as, for example, Upper
Sorbian stays much better than Mirandese (0.67). (Will fix it while
creating the full report. Obviously, in this case logarithmic
categories of numbers of speakers are much more important than what's
the state of the language.)

It's obvious that we could draw the line between 1:1 for 1-10k
speakers to 10:1 for >=100M speakers. But, again, I would like to get
input of somebody more competent.

One very important category is missing here and it's about the level
of development of the speakers. That could be added: GDP/PPP per
capita for spoken country or countries would be useful as measurement.
And I suppose somebody with statistical knowledge would be able to
give us the number which would have meaning "ability to create
Wikipedia article".

Completed in such way, we'd be able to measure the success of
particular Wikimedia groups and organizations. OK. Articles per
speaker are not the only way to do so, but we could use other
parameters, as well: number of new/active/very active editors etc. And
we could put it into time scale.

I'll make some other results. And to remind: I'd like to have the
formula to count "ability to create Wikipedia article" and then to
produce "level of particular community success in creating Wikipedia
articles". And, of course, to implement it for editors.

[1] 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TYyhETevEJ5MhfRheRn-aGc4cs_6k45Gwk_ic14TXY4/edit?usp=sharing

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

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 9:02 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> # We use S/N/O for many other kinds of votes, including FDC, steward,
> Arbitration Committee, and featured content votes. I have not heard
> disagreement with it until now, which suggests that generally there is
> consensus for this system.
> ...
> # One of the best features of S/N/O is that it works to favor candidates
> who have consensus for them, i.e. have both a good quantity of supporters
> and have few people who oppose their election. If someone has many support
> votes and many oppose votes, this suggests that the person is relatively
> controversial, which probably makes them a less optimal choice for roles
> like FDC, Steward, Arbitration Committee, and WMF Board roles.

From my perspective, and I don't think it's unique, those elections
are quite different:

* FDC: Realistically, just people from chapters and thematic
organizations are interested in this. And if I am a Board member of a
chapter, my rational approach would be to approach other chapters and
make a deal with them who should be elected. Basically, that
population decides anyway. Besides the fact that a lot of us don't
feel comfortable to make political decision for expert seats, while we
don't have precise clue what we should require from the candidates.
It's not the duty of *every* member of the community to be an expert
in hiring grantmaking staff.

* English Wikipedia ArbCom: At some point of time I was very active on
en.wp, but I was never interested in en.wp governance (not even to
become an admin). I think that the majority of non-native English
speakers have such approach to en.wp. On the other side, I would note
that being a member of en.wp's ArbCom is highly stressful position and
I don't think that there are many of long-term ArbCom members (in
comparison to, let's say, WMF Board). I am sure that one of the most
important reasons are negative votes, exactly. You can't do good job
if you want to be reelected.

* Stewards are the third category and this system is actually perfect
for their elections: both public and requiring 80% of support.
Stewards are not going to reelections. Other stewards review their
work, while openness of the group is guarantied by constant elections.

* Negative votes tend to make the whole atmosphere much more tense,
stressful for both the community and Board members. Besides the
reasons I (and others) have given into the previous emails.

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