Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal
On 27 April 2014 12:37, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: Hi Risker, On 27 Apr 2014, at 16:01, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: However, having accepted the validity of the proposal, the FDC does not have the authority to delegate its role. I think you're misunderstanding what has been delegated here. The FDC is asking WMDE to do the 'staff assessment' of the proposals, e.g. here's the one for WMDE from last round: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2013-2014_round1/Wikimedia_Deutschland_e.V./Staff_proposal_assessment This is normally done by the WMF/FDC staff, not by the FDC itself. It's a separate document from the recommendations that the FDC makes each round. None of the role of the FDC itself has been delegated here. Well, no, I'm not misunderstanding. If a staff assessment is needed, then it needs to be done by staff. The FDC doesn't have the authority to delegate that, either. particularly when there are obvious conflicts of interest involved. The lack of recognition of that conflict of interest on the part of the FDC is a very serious matter, and raises doubts about the impartiality of the FDC as a whole. In my personal opinion, WMDE has no more a COI here than the WMF/FDC staff has when they do the staff assessments of the other FDC applications. Remember that WMDE/WMF aren't in direct competition for money from the same pot here. There's no money involved in this proposal, in case you haven't noticed. Your job isn't programmatic review, and you should have rejected the request. If you can't do it right, don't do it at all, and tell the WMF to go to the community as a whole, or recommend to the Board that a completely independent party do the programmatic review. The amount of feedback that is coming in for WMF proposals under the FDC is significantly reduced from what happened when they went to the community. WMDE has stated it intends to review only two areas, one of which is an area where there is significant WMF/WMDE interface and historical friction. If they can't do the whole job, then the assessment will be of little value, as the staff assessments balance all aspects of proposals against each other. And really, it's unreasonable to expect another organization to take on a very time-consuming and technical process for which they have no experience and expect them to do so without payment - but the FDC doesn't have authority to spend money in that way. It's all well and good for your members to step out of the room while discussing certain applications, but with 4 of 9 FDC members being directly affiliated with supplicant groups, your standards for avoidance of conflict of interest need to be significantly stronger. There was good reason for concern that the FDC is becoming a self-dealing group without this delegation of responsibility. I think you're going off on a tangent here, and I don't think there's a big problem with how things are working at the moment with COI handling on the FDC, but I'd be interested to know how you'd strengthen this? I can accept that perhaps 2 seats be reserved for appointees from supplicant groups, and that all other members be unaffiliated to any group that meets the baseline requirements for requesting FDC funding *even if their affiliate does not request funds*. If supplicant groups are one seat short of a majority, it seriously affects the ability of the committee to consider big-picture issues from a non-affiliated perspective; remember that the overwhelming majority of people active in the Wikimedia movement are unaffiliated with anything outside of editing a few specific projects. With the Board's resolution restricting the total value of FDC grants in the coming two years, and the proposals being made by affiliates routinely seeking increases in funding that very significantly outstrips the limitations set by the Board, the FDC will very soon be in a position where they are not just assessing proposals on their own merits. In the near future, the FDC is going to have to say no to full funding of good proposals because the total cost of good projects is higher than the pool of funds the FDC has to dispense; the FDC will have to weigh proposals against each other, so that any member who has a conflict of interest for *one* proposal will have a conflict of interest for *all* proposals they are considering within a round (and possibly within a fiscal year). Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal
On 27 April 2014 14:35, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: Risker, 27/04/2014 19:49: Well, no, I'm not misunderstanding. If a staff assessment is needed, then it needs to be done by staff. Inappropriate metonymy here, staff doesn't equal WMF staff. Anyway, [citation needed]. Nemo, my position is that it shouldn't be being done at all because the request is outside of the FDC's scope, and that assessment is done, then community assessment will be more useful than a quasi-official, partial assessment by a conflicted group that isn't staff, has no experience using the analytical metrics, and doesn't have the wherewithal to do a complete the full assessment. The FDC does not have its own staff; it has WMF staff appointed to assist them by creating staff assessments, in accord with the FDC structure approved by the Board. The FDC doesn't get to pick who does the assessments. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal
On 27 April 2014 15:01, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: What is currently stopping a community assessment from being carried out? (If indeed the community has the actual desire to do it -- I assume the data is as public as it gets at the WMF's current level of transparency.) Best regards, Bence In the past, the WMF budget and programmatic proposals were separate from all others, and were widely advertised as the WMF proposal. Now they are buried in FDC proposal with no specific metion that there is a WMF proposal there. I've seen no banners. I got a personal talk page message because I'd been identified as a useful person to comment. In other words, there is much less transparency or effort to reach out to the broader community for the WMF proposal, which is radically different from all other proposals. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal
On 27 April 2014 17:23, Dariusz Jemielniak dar...@alk.edu.pl wrote: On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Nemo, my position is that it shouldn't be being done at all because the request is outside of the FDC's scope, and that assessment is done, then community assessment will be more useful than a quasi-official, partial assessment by a conflicted group that isn't staff, has no experience using the analytical metrics, and doesn't have the wherewithal to do a complete the full assessment. The FDC does not have its own staff; it has WMF staff appointed to assist them by creating staff assessments, in accord with the FDC structure approved by the Board. The FDC doesn't get to pick who does the assessments. Risker, I understand your view. However, we believe that there is value in having a spectrum of views, and also in not putting WMF staff in a position where they assess a project which includes their own department. WMDE staff has a lot of experience in using different metrics, and understands our movement. The FDC can request any the movement stakeholders specifically for comments, and so it did. best, dariusz pundit There is a huge difference between a request to any of the movement stakeholders specifically for comment and asking a specific stakeholder - one that has a lot to gain if the role of the WMF itself is diminished - to usurp the role of staff analysis. I'm really sad that you can't see that, Dariusz. You're better off having the staff do the analysis of everything except grantmaking - which you shouldn't be reviewing anyway as it is a complete conflict of interest for the FDC. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal
On 27 April 2014 22:04, Gergo Tisza gti...@gmail.com wrote: Risker risker.wp@... writes: There is a huge difference between a request to any of the movement stakeholders specifically for comment and asking a specific stakeholder - one that has a lot to gain if the role of the WMF itself is diminished - to usurp the role of staff analysis. I'm really sad that you can't see that, Dariusz. You're better off having the staff do the analysis of everything except grantmaking - which you shouldn't be reviewing anyway as it is a complete conflict of interest for the FDC. So apparently it is less of a conflict of interest for WMF departments to be evaluated for funding by their colleagues in the other side of the same room than by WMDE? This is really getting ridiculous. One can argue that the FDC asking movement entities to analyze the funding of other movement entities is a bad thing, but it has been the status quo ever since the FDC came into being, so asking WMDE to evaluate WMF is perfectly in line with past practice. I'm still taking the position that the FDC shouldn't be reviewing anything that does not include a direct funding request from an eligible entity. However, if we're going to be absurd, then at least we should be consistently absurd, and have the same people doing the staff assessment of a proposal that the FDC cannot approve. Any entity can comment on anyone else's proposal under their own auspices. Granting special authority and a higher degree of importance to any of the entities to review the WMF proposal sets that reviewing entity at a higher level than any other commenter, including other movement entities. Why is WMDE's opinion more relevant than, say, WMIT? or WMIN? or WMPL? or CIS? Or French Wikipedia's? Or Swahili Wikisource's? Indeed, I'd say that they'd be better off to ask the Board Audit Committee to do the assessment rather than having any individual entity do it. There might be legitimate reasons for preferring that the WMF keep all the funding-recommendation-making power, instead of trying to distribute that power within the movement, but if that's the case, you should think about what those are instead of making red herring arguments about conflicts of interest. (Also, if that's the case, what would be the point of having the FDC? It was created exactly to diminish the role of WMF, as you put it, and make the decision-making about funding a more collaborative process.) The WMF isn't keeping all the funding recommendation making power. WMF staff review the applications using a specific rubric agreed upon with the FDC, and post their results. The FDC reviews the analysis, asks additional questions, notes the responses to questions directed at the applicants, and makes their decision; the WMF does not have the opportunity to overrule them, only the Board of Trustees does. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia and Universities
On 6 May 2014 11:45, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 6 May 2014 15:28, Newyorkbrad newyorkb...@gmail.com wrote: Is there one place, perhaps on Meta, where a Wikipedian/Wikimedian could find a summary/briefing on the various different programs that exist? Newyorkbrad Hi Brad, Yes, this is the purpose of https://outreach.wikimedia.org. Admittedly it always needs updating, however Romaine's excellent work keeping the GLAM newsletter going should provide everything you would like to know about what is happening - https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter. Anyone can edit the outreach wiki, and people running education or GLAM projects should make a point of adding their projects to the site, it is our long term central repository of knowledge and should be the reference point for communications about our projects. I think Newyorbrad's point is that this is sectioned off into a distant project that few people know about - as I recall, it's not even part of the SUL so one has to log in separately there - and it seems not to be mentioned very often anywhere else. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 7 May 2014 16:17, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conducted into the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested in the medical content, but would also like to look over the others too. Cheers. Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole I've often thought about this myself, and I'm fairly certain the WMF has never done any serious assessment of article quality. Different projects have done so on their own, through content auditing processes and the development of Wikipedia 1.0, but that affects a minority of articles. There are some real challenges in coming up with workable metrics. For example - Is a stub article inaccurate, incomplete, or really contains all the information it's likely ever going to get? How does one assess the accuracy of articles where there are multiple sources that we'd consider reliable, but who provide contradictory information on a topic? That would include, for example, all the ongoing boundary issues involving multiple countries, the assessment of historical impact of certain events or persons, and certain scientific topics where new claims and reports happen fairly frequently and may or may not have been reproduced. There may also be geographic or cultural factors that affect the quality of an article, or the perceived notability of a subject, and challenges dealing with cross-language reference sources. Many of the metrics used for determining quality in audited articles on English Wikipedia have very little to do with the actual quality of the article. From the perspective of providing good information, a lot of Manual of Style practices are nice but not required. Certain accessibility standards (alt text for images, media positioning so as not to adversely affect screen-readers) are not quality metrics, strictly speaking; they're *accessibility* standards. There remains a huge running debate about whether or not infoboxes should be required, what information should be in them, how to deal with controversial or complex information in infoboxes, etc. So I suppose the first step would be in determining what metrics should be included in a quality assessment of a project. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 7 May 2014 18:14, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Anne, there are really well-established systems of scholarly peer review. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, or add distractions such as infoboxes and other bells and whistles. I find it extraordinary that, after 13 years, a project designed to make the sum of human knowledge available to humanity, with an annual budget of $50 million, has no clue how to measure the quality of the content it is providing, no apparent interest in doing so, and no apparent will to spend money on it. For what it's worth, there was a recent external study of Wikipedia's medical content that came to unflattering results: http://www.jaoa.org/content/114/5/368.full ---o0o--- Most Wikipedia articles for the 10 costliest conditions in the United States contain errors compared with standard peer-reviewed sources. Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care. Our findings reinforce the idea that physicians and medical students who currently use Wikipedia as a medical reference should be discouraged from doing so because of the potential for errors. Doesn't help very much in assessing the quality of the article on [[Liancourt Rocks]] - when depending on where in the world one is, the article can be reasonably accurate or completely inaccurate. This is one of the geographic issues of which I speak. There are also issues with the study you reference - it's quite biased toward American information and the articles only have two reviewers. It perhaps points out how easy it is to get junk science published in peer-reviewed journals if the topic is sexy enough - their own study wouldn't meet our standards for inclusion. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 7 May 2014 18:30, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: In a blinded process, we randomly selected 10 reviewers to examine 2 of the selected Wikipedia articles. Each reviewer was an internal medicine resident or rotating intern at the time of the assignment. This arrangement created redundancy, giving the study 2 independent reviewers for each article. Also, by using physicians as reviewers, we ensured a baseline competency in medical literature interpretation and research. The articles reviewed were coronary artery disease, lung cancer, major depressive disorder, osteoarthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, back pain, hyperlipidemia and concussion. Carry on. Ah, but the costliest conditions aren't actually comparable to the relevant Wikipedia articles. For example, the costly condition of cancer is compared to the article on lung cancer, despite the fact that we have an article on cancer. The costly condition of trauma-related disorders - a very broad topic that would include traumatic amputations, fractures, burns, and a multitude of other issues is compared to the article on concussion; the costly condition of mental disorders is compared to the article on major depressive disorder despite, again, haing an article on mental disorders. And each article is reviewed by only two people; when one looks at the results, we see that in most cases the two reviewers provided very different results. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 7 May 2014 20:56, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 1:30 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 8:24 PM, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: I'm a total newb here, and I know the grant system between WMF and the different chapters has been debated in the past. But I have a simple question: if WMF is funding these efforts through grants and the grant money is used to review and/or manage content, wouldn't it be indirectly getting involved with reviewing and managing content? ,Wil Depends on the nature of the grant. In any case I think affiliates are better placed to perform this kind of work anyway, since we'd want it to be done in more than one language and using diverse panels with members from more than just the U.S. But I do think it would be really cool research and the results would certainly be very interesting. It also makes sense as complementary to automated efforts, and then the results of the different methods could be compared to assess effectiveness of the review processes. I don't think this is an issue; as Erik has kindly pointed out in this thread, the Foundation has funded at least one such study in the past. (However, this study does not seem to have been based on a random sample – at least I cannot find any mention of the sample selection method in the study's write-up. The selection of a random sample is key to any such effort, and the method used to select the sample should be described in detail in any resulting report.) To me, funding work that results in content quality feedback to the community does not mean that the Foundation is getting involved in content management. The expert panel would obviously have to have complete academic freedom to publish whatever their findings are, without pre-publication review by the Foundation. I would not expect the experts involved to end up editing Wikipedia; if any of them did, this would be their private initiative as individuals, and not covered by any grant. I would consider such a research programme an important service to the community, just as the Board provides software, guidance through board resolutions, and so forth. It would be an equally vital service to the reading public that the Foundation's projects serve. In my view, any such programme of studies should begin with the English Wikipedia, as it is the most comprehensive and most widely accessed project, including by many non-native speakers looking for more detailed information than their own language version of Wikipedia provides. Medical content would be an excellent area to start with. I think perhaps there is a lack of research into the extent of research already being done by independent, qualified third parties. Several examples are provided in the references of the study you posted, Andreas. For example, this one in the Journal of Oncology Practice[1] compares specific Wikipedia articles for patient-oriented cancer information against the professionally edited PDQ database. It appears that the two were comparable in most areas, except for readability, where the PDQ database was considered significantly more readable. Now, again, this is a small study and it has not been reproduced; however, it took me minutes to find more information on the very subject you're interested in, created by completely independent bodies who have no pony in the race. There did seem to be a fair number of studies related to medical topics. Now if only we could learn from them - especially on the readability point, which I think really is a very serious issue. Wikipedia isn't really intended to educate physicians about medical topics, it's intended to be a general reference for non-specialists. Very few people are going to make life-and-death decisions based on our math or physics topic areas, but I'll lay odds that any study would find a significant readability issue with both of them, as well. Risker/Anne [1] http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/7/5/319.full ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
On 7 May 2014 22:24, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 2:41 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I think perhaps there is a lack of research into the extent of research already being done by independent, qualified third parties. Several examples are provided in the references of the study you posted, Andreas. For example, this one in the Journal of Oncology Practice[1] compares specific Wikipedia articles for patient-oriented cancer information against the professionally edited PDQ database. It appears that the two were comparable in most areas, except for readability, where the PDQ database was considered significantly more readable. Now, again, this is a small study and it has not been reproduced; however, it took me minutes to find more information on the very subject you're interested in, created by completely independent bodies who have no pony in the race. There did seem to be a fair number of studies related to medical topics. Now if only we could learn from them - especially on the readability point, which I think really is a very serious issue. Wikipedia isn't really intended to educate physicians about medical topics, it's intended to be a general reference for non-specialists. Very few people are going to make life-and-death decisions based on our math or physics topic areas, but I'll lay odds that any study would find a significant readability issue with both of them, as well. Risker/Anne [1] http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/7/5/319.full In the study you reference, Anne, reviewers spent all of 18 minutes on each article. The readability analysis was done by automation. Yes, of course readability analysis is done by automation. I've yet to find a consistent readability assessment that doesn't use automation. It's not an area where subjectivity is particularly useful. And that was an average of 18 minutes per article, i.e., 36 minutes: 18 minutes for the WP article and 18 minutes for the PDQ article. How long do you really think it should take? I read several of the articles in under 5 minutes on each site. Of course, the reviewers wouldn't need to look up the definitions of a lot of the terms that lay people would need to look at, because they were already professionally educated in the topic area, so that would significantly reduce the amount of time required to assess the article. Andreas, you seem to have pre-determined that Wikipedia's medical articles are all terrible and riddled with errors. Realistically, they're amongst the most likely to receive professional editing and review - Wikiproject Medicine does a much better job than people are willing to credit them. The biggest weakness to the articles - and I've heard this from many people who read them - is that they're written at too high a level to be really accessible to lay people. I thought the point that the study made about the benefit of linking to an English dictionary definition of complex terms rather than to another highly technical Wikipedia article was a very good one, for example. We could learn from these studies. Indeed, many science articles are mainly written by professionals in the field (I noted math and physics earlier, but chemistry and of course a large number of computer articles are also written by professionals). The biggest challenge for these subjects is to write them in an accessible way. Note, I said science - alternative medicine, history, geopolitical and soft science articles are much more problematic. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles
In answer to the question of the WMF funding research: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ Risker/Anne On 8 May 2014 01:13, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: Wow. Wil - you're going to love WikiData. Phoebe: I have seen that list of peer-reviewed articles related to Wikipedia medical content. I've extracted those related to quality and added more from a couple of database searches I did in January and the list of 42 (some are letters and there's a conference abstract, though) are collapsed on the WikiProject Medicine talk page now under the heading, This thread is notable. I've read most but not all of those and, as Andreas mentioned, most of those suffered from small sample size and poor or opaque sample selection criteria. Erik, thank you for pointing to the reviewer trial. I had read it before and I'm glad to have this opportunity to tell you how much I love it. There is a big hole in Wikipedia where expert reviewing belongs. I'm presently on the board of WikiProject Med Foundation, but will be stepping down after Wikimania. I mostly edit medical content. Anne is right, it is heavily curated. But stuff slips through the net of patrollers from time to time, and barely a day goes by without some howler of a long-term problem coming to light. I would like to know - know, rather than rely on my gut feeling - how accurate our medical content is. To know that, I think the first step would be to get an expert on scientific study design to review the 30-40 existing studies that address the quality of our medical content, and tell us what, if anything, we can take from that prior work - essentially what Anne recommends above, but rather than making my own incompetent and heavily biased assessment, get an expert to do it. My own, inexpert, belief is that those studies are (mostly) so hopelessly flawed that nothing can seriously be generalised from them. If I'm right, I'd then like us all to consider seriously doing a survey whose design is sufficiently rigorous to give us an answer. Thanks for your thoughts and attention everyone. Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 3:41 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, of course readability analysis is done by automation. I've yet to find a consistent readability assessment that doesn't use automation. It's not an area where subjectivity is particularly useful. And that was an average of 18 minutes per article, i.e., 36 minutes: 18 minutes for the WP article and 18 minutes for the PDQ article. How long do you really think it should take? I read several of the articles in under 5 minutes on each site. Of course, the reviewers wouldn't need to look up the definitions of a lot of the terms that lay people would need to look at, because they were already professionally educated in the topic area, so that would significantly reduce the amount of time required to assess the article. It took me more than 18 minutes to write the last e-mail in this thread. :) The lung cancer article, for example, which was among those reviewed, has well over 4,500 words of prose, and cites 141 references. That's a reviewing speed of 250 words per minute. I don't know if you have ever done an FA review ... Andreas, you seem to have pre-determined that Wikipedia's medical articles are all terrible and riddled with errors. And I think you are being needlessly defensive. I have an open mind as to what the results might be. What I am sure of is that neither you nor I nor the Foundation really know how reliable they are. Why not make an effort to find out? Realistically, they're amongst the most likely to receive professional editing and review - Wikiproject Medicine does a much better job than people are willing to credit them. Yes, and many editors there are sorely concerned about the quality of medical information Wikipedia provides to the public. Incidentally, there was a discussion of the JAOA study in The Atlantic today: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/can-wikipedia-ever-be-a-definitive-medical-text/361822/ A member of WikiProject Medicine is quoted in it, as is the study's author. —o0o— So both sides acknowledge: There are errors in Wikipedia’s health articles. And that’s a problem, because people use them. —o0o— The biggest weakness to the articles - and I've heard this from many people who read them - is that they're written at too high a level to be really accessible to lay people. I thought the point that the study made about the benefit of linking to an English dictionary definition of complex terms rather than to another highly technical Wikipedia article was a very good one
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Pete, you know the toothbrush image you talk about on your blog still shows up on a Commons search for electric toothbrush, right? It's in Category:Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrusheshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_or_partially_nude_people_with_electric_toothbrusheswhich is in turn a subcategory of Category:People with electric toothbrusheshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People_with_electric_toothbrushesso it shows up on any search of electric toothbrush. Seems the whole category thing really isn't as solved as well as people think. It still comes up as image #4 on a multimedia search of enwiki for electric toothbrush and about #45 for a multimedia search of toothbrush. Even though the title was changed, it remains in the category that gives high-ranking searches. Risker/Anne On 15 May 2014 18:20, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: Kevin, Andreas, et al: It took me a couple days, but I've assembled my list of files, exceeding the 10 I had committed to: http://wikistrategies.net/wikimedia-commons-is-far-from-ethically-broken/ I hope this annotated list of interesting deletion discussions on Commons is helpful to those who don't regularly participate; there is so much activity there that can be difficult to track. Of course, it's not close to exhaustive; I'd welcome suggestions of additional examples to highlight, and if anybody wants to copy this to a wiki page for further expansion that's fine by me. Andreas, in response to your last message -- I'm perfectly fine with the examples you provided! I just happen to think they do a better job supporting my position (Commons is healthy and productive) than they do yours (Commons is broken). I understand you disagree, and that's fine. A final detail, directed mainly to Wil (and anybody interested in the Board resolution that's been discussed): I don't think it's been mentioned that the directive to develop an image suppression feature was rescinded a year later: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Personal_image_hiding_feature Anyway -- I hope we can have a bit more discussion about the decision-making practices at Commons, informed by a wider variety of specific examples than we have had so far in this discussion thread. Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]] On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 2:05 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 9:53 PM, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: Admins and crats on commons have also historically made a large number of decisions that fly in the face of WMF board resolutions, often repeatedly. David Gerard's point is ringing very true here: you will not make this assertion more true merely by repeating it. Examples, please -- or else please drop it. Example 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/ObiWolf_Lesbian_Images_(6th_nomination) Clear violation (no evidence of model consent, photographer made clear the models wanted them off Commons). Took six attempts over several years to delete, despite a board member personally voting Delete in one or two prior nominations. Example 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Category:Sexual_penetrative_use_of_cucumbers Again, review the prior deletion discussions where these were kept. Models shown full-face, recognisable, no evidence whatsoever of model consent, geo-tagged to a precise street address. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
On 15 May 2014 22:22, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Pete, I am sure that I speak on behalf of all of the Commons community when I say that it is disheartening to continually hear the mantra commons is broken, when that could not be further from the truth. Your blog post, helps to present some of that reality, so I thank you, both on my behalf and on behalf of the Commons community. I will have some comments later on a couple of issues. Risker, Of course the image still shows up on search for electric toothbrush. If you read the closure on that DR, which I wrote in conjunction with 3 other admins, the issue is very clear. It's not a Commons problem, but a WMF problem. Cheers The solution to the problem is entirely within the control of Commons - recategorize the image to improvised vibrators instead of electric toothbrush and you're done. I wouldn't dare do it myself, it would be the kind of provocative activity from someone who doesn't really understand Commons that could result in my being blocked. I do understand that much about Commons and its culture. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
On 19 May 2014 18:59, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 3:08 AM, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Once new search is working, the first enhancement to the search should be a clustering feature.[3] Wouldn't such a feature pretty much solve the problem that we currently have with search, and which won't be solved by the out-of-the-box search that is being worked on now. John provided a link to Bugzilla[4] at which Chad has stated it would be a great feature, and it would be even more awesome to have the Assigned to change from Nobody - You can work on this! to WMF Platform Team. The WMF has the coin, it has the tech talent, now we as a community need that solution. Apart from everyone going to the Bugzilla report and adding their support for this feature (which they should do), how can we go about ensuring that such a feature is treated as a priority by the WMF? Cheers Russavia http://i.imgur.com/VdIqCkQ.png [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2014-May/000517.html [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nsfw [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming#Clustering_for_search_results_on_Commons [4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35701 I second this. Niabot's clustering idea was the most sensible proposal to come out of all the brainstorming effort that went on at the time. No tagging, no censorship concerns, yet elegantly solves the problem of isolated NSFW results appearing out of the blue. This would be a good thing to work on. ___ While all of these proposals for improving search are really good ideas, it still does not address the root cause of the masturbating with electric toothbrush image - which is improper categorization in the first place. This is entirely within the human realm, and no software is going to filter that image out of any search for electric toothbrush as long as it's categorized as an electric toothbrush image. Russavia's post directed to me earlier in this thread managed in one stroke to confirm just about everything that I said: that comments from those who aren't regular participants on Commons are to be belittled and ignored, that even a benign suggestion such as improving the categorization of an image will be met with cries of censorship, and that Commons does not have any desire or intention to change without the heavy hand of the WMF forcing it to do so. It's very sad. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
On 19 May 2014 19:08, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 00:05, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Russavia's post directed to me earlier in this thread managed in one stroke to confirm just about everything that I said: that comments from those who aren't regular participants on Commons are to be belittled and ignored, that even a benign suggestion such as improving the categorization of an image will be met with cries of censorship, and that Commons does not have any desire or intention to change without the heavy hand of the WMF forcing it to do so. It's very sad. What is your plan of action as an aspiring steward? Oh David, how sweet of you to remember! No intention to run again on my part, though. Been there, done that. I did give serious consideration to going and properly categorizing the image, but given the underlying threat from Russavia, and my disinclination to be blocked, I'll leave it to someone who finds the Commons experience less threatening. You perhaps, David? One would think you would see that improvised vibrators would be a much, much more likely search term for that image than electric toothbrush. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] COM:IDENT?
I do not understand why anyone would assume that the woman has agreed to this, without her actually, personally, saying that she has agreed to this. Risker On 20 May 2014 15:22, Pierre-Selim pierre-se...@huard.info wrote: Hi all, As an oversight, I'd like to give an advice first. When encountering a privacy matter that you believe falls under the oversight policy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oversight_policy#Use you should probably contact directly oversight-comm...@lists.wikimedia.org rather than linking the information on a public forum (or even on a talk page), i.e. if there is a real breach of privacy more people will see it :(. That said, I fail to see what falls under the oversight policy as explained by Odder on his talk page. The only use case that come to mind is the first one *Removal of non-public personal information*, however by publishing the information the couple seems to agree, for now, to have this information published (as far as we know, they are not lying about their identity). I'd gladly suppress the personnal information if it is requested by the person concerned or if it was an obvious mistake. As an administrator, it remains, [[COM:IDENT]] which is a guildeline on how to proceed with photography of identifiable person, however I don't see any photo in this discussion. In the end I just think we are having this thread because of the topic being related to nudity (which is clearly a not consensual topic in our communities, probably because it is cultural) and not really because of any real breach of privacy. If I'm getting it wrong, I'm open to discussion. 2014-05-20 20:04 GMT+02:00 Pipo Le Clown plecl...@gmail.com: (...) Now, I'm not really at ease with Odder's decision, and I think we (as a community) need to discuss that, in a civilized manner. This could have (and will, I hope ) happened on the pages meant for that, on Commons, without any unnecessary drama. @ Pipo Le Clown Feel free to send an email to the oversight mailing list or start a discussion on Wikimedia Commons in order to explain your opinion. I believe the oversight team is open to community input. Pleclown Sincerely Pierre-Selim, On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Thyge ltl.pri...@gmail.com wrote: What a kind communication! It gives me the impression that you are afraid to discuss matters outside of Commons. The special role of Commons as a joint resource should occationally allow concerns to be raised outside the community of commonites. If concerns are not of a general nature, please at least deal with them in a friendly manner. Regards, Thyge 2014-05-20 17:51 GMT+02:00 Pipo Le Clown plecl...@gmail.com: You didn't get the answer you wanted, so you're forum shopping to get the right one ? How nice of you. Le 20 mai 2014 17:37, Jeevan Jose jkadav...@gmail.com a écrit : https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Odderoldid=124445321#Commons_talk:Nudity Is this the way Commons:Photographs of identifiable people works? Regards, Jee ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org ?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Pierre-Selim ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] COM:IDENT?
On 20 May 2014 15:43, Pierre-Selim pierre-se...@huard.info wrote: 2014-05-20 21:35 GMT+02:00 Pipo Le Clown plecl...@gmail.com: @Risker: I was thinking the same, hence my disagreement with Odder's decision. But I've visited the linked website (NSFW) and one can only assume that the person on the pictures is fully aware of the implication of said photos on the internet and willing to see them diffused. +1, I guess Odder (like me) also did his homework and did use this information to take his decision. Sorry, I've tried to give a complete answer, but it's never easy in a foreign language. I repeat my initial statement, why are you assuming that the woman has given authorization for publication of images on Wikimedia Commons? Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] COM:IDENT?
Who said that there were images uploaded to Commons? There is a link to images offered as a free sample. What I am disputing is one person's ability to claim authority to release photos of another person when the photos are taken in a non-public place. Given how common it is for women to find that their partners have been freely sharing nude images taken with the understanding that it was for the partner only, personal consent is important. There's also a big leap between you can put it on your website and you can make it freely available on Wikimedia Commons. Risker On 20 May 2014 16:04, Pierre-Selim pierre-se...@huard.info wrote: 2014-05-20 22:03 GMT+02:00 Risker risker...@gmail.com: On 20 May 2014 15:43, Pierre-Selim pierre-se...@huard.info wrote: 2014-05-20 21:35 GMT+02:00 Pipo Le Clown plecl...@gmail.com: @Risker: I was thinking the same, hence my disagreement with Odder's decision. But I've visited the linked website (NSFW) and one can only assume that the person on the pictures is fully aware of the implication of said photos on the internet and willing to see them diffused. +1, I guess Odder (like me) also did his homework and did use this information to take his decision. Sorry, I've tried to give a complete answer, but it's never easy in a foreign language. I repeat my initial statement, why are you assuming that the woman has given authorization for publication of images on Wikimedia Commons? Please link to the images you are talking about, because to my own knowledge none have been published on Wikimedia Commons. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Pierre-Selim ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Child Protection Policy
On 23 May 2014 13:05, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Is the following a full statement of Wikipedia's Child Protection Policy, reflecting all responsibilities that the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation have taken on to protect children in all of the projects they are involved with and/or sponsor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection Are there any other *published* policies of WP or the WMF pertaining to child protection that I might have missed? I know that this is a very politically charged issue in the WP community. I'd appreciate a high light:heat ratio if anyone has comments beyond links to current policy statements. Thanks! ,Wil English Wikipedia policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection The existence of a 'formalized' policy has been a topic of heated debate since its creation, although there is some truth that its original form more or less documented existing practice at the time. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Child Protection Policy
On 23 May 2014 13:09, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 May 2014 13:05, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Is the following a full statement of Wikipedia's Child Protection Policy, reflecting all responsibilities that the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation have taken on to protect children in all of the projects they are involved with and/or sponsor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection Are there any other *published* policies of WP or the WMF pertaining to child protection that I might have missed? I know that this is a very politically charged issue in the WP community. I'd appreciate a high light:heat ratio if anyone has comments beyond links to current policy statements. Thanks! ,Wil English Wikipedia policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Child_protection The existence of a 'formalized' policy has been a topic of heated debate since its creation, although there is some truth that its original form more or less documented existing practice at the time. Risker/Anne Just noting in addition that on the left side of the page there are language links to four similar policies on other Wikipedias: Catalan, Indonesian, Persian and Ukrainian. Since few other Wikipedias have active Arbitration Committees and each existing arbcom has a different scope, it's pretty clear that processes and policies would vary from project to project. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Participating on Wikipediocracy
Well, Wil, I caught your early posts there and was of the impression you joined to protect the privacy of a member of your family. And out of respect for that I declined to ask the question you seemed to be begging to be asked. You wouldn't be the first Wikimedian who felt that was a necessary action. Risker On 23 May 2014 21:36, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Doesn't it strike you as odd that the question came from an active wikipediocracy memeber? Honestly, I hadn't thought about it. I'm much more interested in the question that who asked it. You know where 4chan is I assume. No, actually. Can you tell me? What is it? Again you cite free speech. In effect you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your activity is that it's not literally illegal (XKCD 1357 alt text) I agree this is a bit confusing. I don't mean it in a legal sense- which one might well argue that's the only sense it has- but in a more social sense. I ask that if you don't like what I'm doing or saying, that you take it out on me by excising your own right to free speech by criticizing me, my actions, and my words- not on Lila through WP politics. Thats your opinion. Wikipedia is a fairly mature project at this point. We are where we are as the result of over a decade of refinement by thousands of people with each of those refinements destruction tested against whatever the internet can throw at them. Yeap. It's my opinion. And I also think that Wikipedia is an amazing achievement. Congrats and thanks to all of you! Given the size of the project and your fairly breath interaction with it what makes you think that you are in a position to make that judgement? Sorry, what do you mean by breath interaction? Not really. The issue had already been brought up on a thread on wikipediocracy that you were posting on. Makes your claim that I'm just asking what the current policies are. lack a certain credibility. Ah. Sorry. I was referring to the questions I asked on this list. After discussing it there, I wanted to figure out what the current policies were from the source. It was pretty hard to track down everything on WP and WM, so thanks everyone for all the links! Do you have the link to that thread? Maybe we should post it so that people can see what you're talking about. The relevant talk page has over 100 entries in its archives. Are you saying that I should discuss it there instead? I'm not aware of anyone planning to have you arrested. The US right to free speech involves governments something wikipedia is not. Sure wikipedia is pretty extreme on the spectrum on the degree of speech is will allow but that doesn't change the fact your right to free speech is between you and your government. Sure. I may not have used the right word. My apologies. I meant, please don't hold my words and actions against Lila in any way. Feel free to hold me to them, tho. :) This is a mailing list for dealing with cross project issues. It isn't for getting to know people. Ah. I guess I'll look for other places to get to know people. I'm really sorry to have bothered you here. Eh as long as you stick to the relevant venue which is not really this mailing list. This is for people who already have the knowledge base and are trying to move into genuinely new areas or have hit an issue that can't be dealt with through the usual project level channels. Yeah. It sounds like I really just barged in to the wrong place. Doh! So not an editor? Actually, I'm editing some. I'm about to publish an article about the modular sofa in the WMF office. It happens to be among my favorite furniture designs, and now I've got a great pic to use in the article. In addition, I plan to add some audio loops that I have made over the years doing electronic music to Commons. It would be really cool for people to have completely free loops to use in applications like Garage Band and FL Studio. Stay tuned! I guess I'll see y'all around somewhere else. ,Wil ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A personal note.
Wil, the deletion log of the page in question is publicly visible. There are no WMF employees who have deleted anything on that page, ever. This is information you can check for yourself instead of relying on the words of others. Risker On 28 May 2014 12:23, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Hi Fae, if you're referring to the discussion on this page, then I think I make it quite clear why I won't engage with WMF employees going forward: http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14t=4680start=150. To be sure, I'm not used to having anyone from Lila's team immediately emailing her through their official company addresses as soon as I ask a question in a public forum. In this case, the WMF has made it quite clear that the IRC channels aren't official and/or sponsored by the WMF, and I was asking about community affairs WRT to those channels. So my question about why a user was kicked from the channel didn't have anything to do with the WMF. I still don't understand why this employee felt it was necessary to bring Lila's attention to safety concerns through official WMF employee channels, although I'm sure he or she felt it was the right thing to do and I've given them the benefit of the doubt that it was. Of course, I can't form my own independent opinion, since a WMF employee revdeleted the rev in question in the ~10 minutes between when it was first posted and when I tried clicking on the link. In any case, it should be made clear that the WMF did not ask me to disengage with employees and has not yet asked me to stop posting to Wikipediocracy directly. So far, the organization itself has respected my individuality; I can only appeal to everyone in the WP community and all WMF employees to do the same in the future. I will be engaging with the broader WP community in whatever way I can, but I've made the hard decision to limit my engagement with WMF employees to public, logged forums from now on. ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 28/05/2014, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: ... independent individual able to speak with his own voice and ask his own questions. He does not take direction from me. He will not work for the WMF or engage with the WMF employees. Thanks for making these distinctions. It is sad to see that your time and energy is being used so early on in your introduction to the Wikimedia community, in creating a political distance between yourself and the public actions of your life partner, due to his casual curiosity about Wikimedia projects. A curiosity that only manifested itself shortly after the public announcement of your employment by the Foundation board. I do not really understand the point being made about not engaging with WMF employees, any active volunteer on Wikimedia projects should and must be free to engage with WMF employees. The statement does not appear to match actions over the last 24 hours, with Wil freely making public comments about his dissatisfaction after conversations (emails?) with some WMF employees. Thanks again for clarifying your position during this difficult start to your engagement. Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] A personal note.
Wil, if you want to use email lists for your discussions, you may find a better reception if you use one of the project- or task-specific lists. There is a page on English Wikipedia with links to mailing lists that most closely relate to that project[1] and a more extensive list at Meta that describes lists for many other projects and specific areas of interest.[2] One is more likely to get a positive response when the audience is more accurately targeted. You will probably find that a lot of practical questions you have asked could easily be answered at the English Wikipedia Teahouse page, where you have been invited. That would include questions about how to tell if something has been deleted from a page, how to read page histories, or even how to tell whether or not someone is WMF staff. Risker [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mailing_lists [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview On 28 May 2014 13:07, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Thanks, I wasn't aware I could do this. I'm assuming that it would be obvious who was an employee at Wikimedia in the log, too. I posted the following to Wikipediocracy a few minutes ago: I may have misread which page the rev was on, or I misunderstood the person who said s/he revdeleted it in thinking that it had been revdeleted in the previous few minutes. This is exactly why I prefer public recorded forums. Now no one can go back to clear up the confusion. For all I know, I might have to apologize for a misunderstanding, and it would really suck if I somehow misrepresented things and didn't have any opportunity to straighten things out. Of course, it is entirely on me. I knew that the IRC channels weren't logged, and that it was a bannable offense to log them (for those who aren't familiar with IRC, this essentially means that you aren't supposed to save conversations there; in most channels that's A-OK, but on all of the most used wikipedia channels it seems to be disallowed). Next time I have a concern, I will take it to wikimedia-l or one of the other mailing lists. As this example also shows, one can't be sure that the revs on a page within Wikimedia's wikis themselves won't be redacted after-the-fact. I'm not expressing an opinion about whether stuff should be redacted or on what grounds, but I am asserting that it is possible to do so. There is a discussion about this issue there, as well. It can be followed at the link I posted earlier. Here's the last page of the discussion that includes the comment above: http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14t=4680p=96600#p96600 ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Wil, the deletion log of the page in question is publicly visible. There are no WMF employees who have deleted anything on that page, ever. This is information you can check for yourself instead of relying on the words of others. Risker On 28 May 2014 12:23, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Hi Fae, if you're referring to the discussion on this page, then I think I make it quite clear why I won't engage with WMF employees going forward: http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14t=4680start=150. To be sure, I'm not used to having anyone from Lila's team immediately emailing her through their official company addresses as soon as I ask a question in a public forum. In this case, the WMF has made it quite clear that the IRC channels aren't official and/or sponsored by the WMF, and I was asking about community affairs WRT to those channels. So my question about why a user was kicked from the channel didn't have anything to do with the WMF. I still don't understand why this employee felt it was necessary to bring Lila's attention to safety concerns through official WMF employee channels, although I'm sure he or she felt it was the right thing to do and I've given them the benefit of the doubt that it was. Of course, I can't form my own independent opinion, since a WMF employee revdeleted the rev in question in the ~10 minutes between when it was first posted and when I tried clicking on the link. In any case, it should be made clear that the WMF did not ask me to disengage with employees and has not yet asked me to stop posting to Wikipediocracy directly. So far, the organization itself has respected my individuality; I can only appeal to everyone in the WP community and all WMF employees to do the same in the future. I will be engaging with the broader WP community in whatever way I can, but I've made the hard decision to limit my engagement with WMF employees to public, logged forums from now on. ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 28/05/2014, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: ... independent individual able to speak with his own voice and ask his own questions. He does not take direction from me
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The first three weeks.
It is great to hear how you are working to learn about the vast Wikimedia community, its projects, its priorities and its challenges, Lila. I'm thinking there's something else that all of us should help you celebrate as well: after only a few weeks on the job, being named to the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women: http://www.forbes.com/profile/lila-tretikov/ That's a great start. Risker On 28 May 2014 08:58, Anna Torres a...@wikimedia.org.ar wrote: +1 Great to hearing your experience. As being a new ED too (3 months now) I can indentify myself with your experience: the first month is about listening and getting to know :) All the best for what is to come! Hope to meeting you asap! Hugs from Argentina. 2014-05-28 2:48 GMT-03:00 Nurunnaby Chowdhury n...@nhasive.com: +1 Thank you for this write-up. Happy to read..:) On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 7:24 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Lila Tretikov wrote: I wanted to give you an update on my first three weeks of Wikimedia immersion -- this will also go on the blog. As you probably noticed, my leadership approach is rooted in observation and focused discussions -- this means I watch and listen more than I talk. But I expect that you are probably curious about what I have observed and learned so far, and to know a little more about who I am. [...] Thank you for this write-up. It was nice to read. :-) Your recommendations on areas you see as priorities for development (while keeping in mind that not everything can be a priority at once!); [...] I think this continues to be a huge pain point. Developer resources are scarce and expensive and there's often a feeling that the latest Wikimedia Foundation initiatives trump all other worthwhile projects. I think we need to find a better way to more fairly allocate resources. As a concrete example, there continue to be dozens of Wikimedia Foundation developers and other staff specifically focused on the English Wikipedia and sometimes Wikimedia Commons, while the other sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikisource continue to receive almost no direct attention. (Over the past few years, even the term sister projects has become mildly insulting. These projects are more accurately the red-headed stepchild projects.) This won't happen quickly, but we must make it a goal to do better in this area. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- *Nurunnaby Chowdhury Hasive* Administrator | Bengali Wikipedia http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:nhasive Member | IEG Committee, Wikimedia Foundationhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/People Social Media Interaction Expert | The Daily Prothom-Alohttp://www.prothom-alo.com Bangladesh Ambassador | Open Knowledge Foundation Network http://www.okfn.org Treasurer | Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) http://www.bdosn.org Task Force Member | Mozilla Bangladesh http://www.mozillabd.org fb.com/nhasive | @nhasive http://www.twitter.com/nhasive | Skype: nhasive | www.nhasive.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Anna Torres Adell Directora Ejecutiva *A.C Wikimedia Argentina* *Imprime este correo solo si es realmente necesario* ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Child Protection and Harassment Policy
On 28 May 2014 21:37, Molly White gorillawarfarewikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Harassment: Has harassment been addressed in a comprehensive way on all sites, including all of the WP site? As an example, Wikipedia has had a problem with low and declining female participation for years, and the WMF has often stated that it would like to address it. Are women actively encouraged to participate on Wikipedia by the WMF or other organizations? If we're not doing everything to protect women and all other Wikipedians, is it morally or ethically correct to perform outreach to potentially vulnerable groups? I'd especially like to hear about this from a female perspective. A great start would be to hold this conversation in a safe space where people can discuss without fear of reprisal. I do not mean to say that wikimedia-l, nor any other public Wikimedia mailing list or page, is an inherently unsafe place to hold this discussion—that's not the case at all. But trying to hold this discussion after all the drama that you have been passing through this list in the past few days makes this a scary place for myself and others to post. You have ensured that this list has Wikipediocracy's rapt attention. Although I don't doubt the folks over there pay some attention to the regular goings-on of this list, the threads that you have been motivating and interacting with mean that every comment to this list is being scrutinized, and anyone they dislike is being torn apart. You have also shown that you have been interacting with and, at least to some degree, sympathizing with at least one person who, I feel, is dangerous. You have created a space where comments are being picked apart by a group of people eager to find or fabricate any flaw. My revision-deletion of an extremely violent and threatening edit was construed not as a standard admin action but as some sort of clean-up after someone whom they feel I am desperate to protect or cover up. You have drawn the attention of a dangerous user, who had not had contact with me for quite some time until now. You have the attention of at least one, likely more, of the people who created the racist, sexist, and threatening attack/doxxing pages mentioning me at EncyclopediaDramatica. So you'll have to excuse me when I'm somewhat unwilling to give my more in-depth female perspective here and now. Yours, Molly (GorillaWarfare) I'm going to second what Molly says here, Wil. I'm a woman who has held positions that have attracted abuse and harassment (directed both at me and my family) throughout the movement for years, and the first time I have ever felt unsafe on this mailing list was today. You knew that the subject you were raising here had already caused a Wikimedia staffer to take the (very unusual) step of advising his ED that s/he felt unsafe because of your actions, not to mention the post that was left on a talk page. Let me tell you, Wil, 85-90% of women would never edit Wikipedia again if that post had been left on their talk page. And yet, you could not leave it alone. It was all about you, and how you were done wrong by, and how you didn't like how someone who has a long history of making violently and sexually graphic abusive posts on English Wikipedia (and other places) was treated. (I'm pretty sure he didn't get around to telling you why he was banned, but you knew by the time you were drawn away from IRC.) So..you perpetuated the feeling of unsafeness for your own purposes rather than respect that your actions (whether intentionally or not) had created that unsafe setting. Several community members tried to draw you away from continuing in this vein, myself included, but you were not to be deterred. Your determination to continue to perpetuate this unsafeness, by actively participating in the ridiculing of Wikimedians, is precisely the kind of behaviour that makes Wikimedia projects so unpleasant for women. I've been trying very hard to keep an open mind about you, despite your unwillingness to modify your behaviour or even try to work with the Wikimedia community. But today, you went too far. Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Child Protection and Harassment Policy
No, Wil. I mean the repeated linking to a Wikipediocracy thread that actively denigrates many of the other correspondents on this list; that advocates that you use your personal influence to persuade the new ED to fire WMF staff; that implies that every WMF-related IRC channel (there are dozens, several of which are logged all the time) is littered with gratuitous insults and poor behaviour. Your own comments tar every Wikimedian and WMF staff member with the same brush. You appear to have accepted wholesale the information provided by people who have had a negative experience while discounting the comments of anyone who encourages you to try things out for yourself, no pressure. And you've worked very hard to try to force this community to discuss issues that are amongst the most highly contentious on any internet community at your convenience and with you framing the discussion, discounting any discussions that were had before, many of which you could have found for yourself with a rather basic google search. You knew all along that there was a security concern about the events relating to that IRC discussion, and yet you persisted. You would have earned some respect if you had walked away from that, but you chose not to. Now, I realise that you don't value the respect of Wikimedians very much. But on a day when Lila should be celebrating, she is instead trying to deal with the fallout of her life partner creating havoc amongst her staff and the volunteers who contribute to the projects for which she will be imminently responsible for. That's sad beyond words. Risker On 28 May 2014 23:54, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Ah. You mean the edit that I didn't write, I didn't post to IRC, and I've never actually seen. Got it. ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Molly White gorillawarfarewikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Wil Sinclair wllm@... writes: What??? What talk page are you talking about? How in the world am I making an unsafe environment? I believe Risker is referring to the post I revision-deleted. Those are some *very* serious charges. I'm really just stunned. *No wonder people are afraid to post here!* I've made my point, and I'm more or less done talking about this on-list, probably for similar reasons as NYB. Feel free to contact me off-list if you wish. Yours, Molly (GorillaWarfare) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Child Protection and Harassment Policy
Wil, the links? They're harassment. If you don't understand that, you're in no position to initiate a discussion about the subject. Risker On 29 May 2014 01:46, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Thanks, Risker. I think there are a few inaccuracies in there. * I link to threads on Wikipediocracy to demonstrate what I've actually said. In some cases, it has been characterized here without context. I'd prefer everyone just look at the original so that there are no misconceptions. What other people post there is their own business. I don't read the personal stuff, in any case, and I very actively discourage it there. * I believe I only talked about that one experience on the #wikipedia-en IRC channel and haven't said anything about any other channels. * I have told the people on Wikipediocracy countless times that I have no influence on Lila's profession decisions and that I refuse to get involved with the WMF at all for the time being. I've told everyone here, too, for that matter. I specifically said that I don't read the personal stuff on Wikipediocracy, and that I don't discuss WMF matters- staff or otherwise- with Lila. * Every experience that I've discussed here has been my own. * I don't know what security concerns you are talking about. Could you elaborate with links? * It's true. I value my self-respect far more than anyone else's, and I maintain it by being true to myself and to everyone I deal with. But I do value the respect of Wikimedians. In the end, I will either earn it or not by continuing to be true to myself and acting in good faith in all my dealings. * Again, Lila's career is her own. If others choose to bring my actions to her doorstep, it is their call. I've been very clear about my role with respect to the WMF; basically, there isn't one. And I would greatly appreciate it if everyone would stop bringing our private relationship in to this discussion. I've decided that I won't have anything to do with the WMF in any way. So our private lives are no longer the community's business. * I'm quite capable of thinking for myself. I am truly interested in protecting children and preventing harassment. And I'm particularly interested in the current state of the policies around these issues as the leadership of the WMF changes. Old discussions might contain outdated information. I could go on-wiki to see the current policies, but I keep having to reply to mails like these that somehow attribute a bunch of opinions to me that I've never expressed. I'm still trying to understand what I've done wrong here. I've basically asked some questions and replied to posts that either were directly addressed to me (as yours is here), or made extensive reference to me (as some of the mails calling for my blocking). Let me ask you a simple question that may help me understand where you are coming from: do you find the questions themselves personally upsetting? Thanks again! ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: No, Wil. I mean the repeated linking to a Wikipediocracy thread that actively denigrates many of the other correspondents on this list; that advocates that you use your personal influence to persuade the new ED to fire WMF staff; that implies that every WMF-related IRC channel (there are dozens, several of which are logged all the time) is littered with gratuitous insults and poor behaviour. Your own comments tar every Wikimedian and WMF staff member with the same brush. You appear to have accepted wholesale the information provided by people who have had a negative experience while discounting the comments of anyone who encourages you to try things out for yourself, no pressure. And you've worked very hard to try to force this community to discuss issues that are amongst the most highly contentious on any internet community at your convenience and with you framing the discussion, discounting any discussions that were had before, many of which you could have found for yourself with a rather basic google search. You knew all along that there was a security concern about the events relating to that IRC discussion, and yet you persisted. You would have earned some respect if you had walked away from that, but you chose not to. Now, I realise that you don't value the respect of Wikimedians very much. But on a day when Lila should be celebrating, she is instead trying to deal with the fallout of her life partner creating havoc amongst her staff and the volunteers who contribute to the projects for which she will be imminently responsible for. That's sad beyond words. Risker On 28 May 2014 23:54, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Ah. You mean the edit that I didn't write, I didn't post to IRC, and I've never actually seen. Got it. ,Wil On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Molly White gorillawarfarewikipe...@gmail.com wrote
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia movement affiliates liaisons
I'm still stuck on bylaws. Why is AffCom asking for bylaws? Risker ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]
On 1 June 2014 01:39, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote: ... ... selects strongly against women. Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding wikitext than men? (Probably drifting to Increase participation by women) As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax, given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article creation quite happily. There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual difficulty of namespaces which mean that some webpages behave differently to others. None is something that appears to select strongly against women, though the encyclopedia's way of defining notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend to be biased towards men. If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could provide a link? Fae, I don't know if wiki-syntax in and of itself is more of a barrier for women than men. What I do know is that wiki-syntax is a lot harder today than it was when I started editing 8 years ago, and that today I would consider it more akin to computer programming than content creation. That is where the barrier comes in. The statistics for percentage of women employed in computer-related technology is abysmal; we all know that. Even organizations that actively seek out qualified women (including Wikimedia, I'll point out) can't come close to filling all the slots they'd willingly open, because there simply aren't that many qualified women. They're not filling the seats in college and university programs, either. Eight years ago, only about a quarter of English Wikipedia articles had an infobox - that huge pile of wiki-syntax that is at the top of the overwhelming majority of articles today. There were not a lot of templates; certainly the monstrous templates at the bottom of most articles today didn't exist then. The syntax for creating references was essentially ref insert url /ref; today there is a plethora of complex referencing templates, some of which are so complex and non-intuitive that only a small minority of *wikipedians* can use them effectively. I know wiki-syntax, and I have found it increasingly more difficult to edit as time has gone on. I don't think it's because I'm a woman, I think it's because I'm not a programmer - and women who *are* programmers are only a small minority of all programmers, so it follows that women are less likely to have the skills that will help them sort through what they see when they click Edit. It's exactly why I've been following and keeping up with the development of VisualEditor - because I believe it will make it easier for those who aren't particularly technically inclined to contribute to the project. I believe it's the route to attracting a more diverse editing population, including but not limited to women. And I think that it's pretty close to being ready for hands-on use by those who are new to our projects, now that it can handle pretty well most of the essential editing tasks. It's not perfect, but it's getting there. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia
On 3 June 2014 03:02, ENWP Pine deyntest...@hotmail.com wrote: Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that is improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their knowledge, I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on English Wikipedia. I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up a framework which the community can use to decide which of several paths we would like to take. This is not my personal RfC, I just happen to think that with recent discussions trending positively about VE's improvement over the past several months and with the comments in this list about its possible value to acquiring new editors, I'm willing to put in some time to draft a framework for a discussion on-wiki. I am providing this note to let the community know that someone (me) is drafting a framework for on-wiki discussion. If someone else wants to start an RfC before I get around to starting one, that's completely ok. Cheers, Pine Without denigrating your considerable contributions to the project, Pine, I'd suggest that anyone setting up an RFC on this issue should have more recent experience with the product than you have, and I'd also suggest that an RFC is premature until there is an indication from the WMF that *they* feel the product might be ready for broader access. I don't think that a fair discussion can be had when it is happening without, for example, a clear understanding of what issues existed before and whether or not they have been resolved. I hope you will reconsider - or perhaps actually test the product for a couple of weeks before proceeding, so that the RFC can be based on factual information rather than well, some people think it should be enabled. There have always been some people who thought it should be enabled. There have always been some people who think it is a waste of engineering time and energy. But factual information about the current status of the tool, complete with intelligent assessment of its features, is what is really needed for the community to make a considered decision. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia
On 3 June 2014 09:05, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2014 03:02, ENWP Pine deyntest...@hotmail.com wrote: Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that is improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their knowledge, I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on English Wikipedia. I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up a framework which the community can use to decide which of several paths we would like to take. This is not my personal RfC, I just happen to think that with recent discussions trending positively about VE's improvement over the past several months and with the comments in this list about its possible value to acquiring new editors, I'm willing to put in some time to draft a framework for a discussion on-wiki. I am providing this note to let the community know that someone (me) is drafting a framework for on-wiki discussion. If someone else wants to start an RfC before I get around to starting one, that's completely ok. Cheers, Pine Without denigrating your considerable contributions to the project, Pine, I'd suggest that anyone setting up an RFC on this issue should have more recent experience with the product than you have, and I'd also suggest that an RFC is premature until there is an indication from the WMF that *they* feel the product might be ready for broader access. I don't think that a fair discussion can be had when it is happening without, for example, a clear understanding of what issues existed before and whether or not they have been resolved. I hope you will reconsider - or perhaps actually test the product for a couple of weeks before proceeding, so that the RFC can be based on factual information rather than well, some people think it should be enabled. There have always been some people who thought it should be enabled. There have always been some people who think it is a waste of engineering time and energy. But factual information about the current status of the tool, complete with intelligent assessment of its features, is what is really needed for the community to make a considered decision. Risker/Anne Okay, further to what I've said aboveI think that before having an RFC, we should seek community assistance to carry out a small-scale study so that there is some evidence on which people can base their decisions. This is what I would suggest. - Create a sample article that includes an infobox, an image or two, some references, a template or two, and at least three editable sections. Editors will be asked to copy/paste this page into a personal sandbox to carry out the experiment, so that their individual results can be observed through the page history, and problems can be more easily identified. - Identify about 15-20 *basic* editing tasks that an inexperienced editor would be likely to try. Some that come to mind: - Remove a word - Add a word - change spelling of a word - add a link to another article - remove a link to another article - move a sentence within a section - move a sentence across sections - add a [new] reference (multiple tests for website, newspaper, book references) - edit an existing reference - re-use an existing reference - edit existing information in the infobox - add a reference to the infobox - add a new parameter to the infobox - add an image - remove an image - add an image description - modify an image description - add a commonly used template (such as {{fact}}) - remove a template - add several symbols and accented characters that are not available on their standard keyboard (e.g., Euro and GBP symbols for US keyboards, accented characters commonly used in German or French) - Ask the testers to complete a chart outlining their results for each of the editing tasks being tested, and any comments they have about each of these editing features. If we can persuade even 25 people to work through these basic tasks, and the results are aggregated well, the community will have some useful data on which to base next-steps decisions. It will also provide the VisualEditor team with comparatively unbiased information about their progress. The key emphasis in the experiment is that it should focus on straightforward, elementary editing activities rather than complex tasks, and the purpose is to see whether or not these features work in an expected way or not. Thoughts? Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia
On 3 June 2014 12:25, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2014 16:37, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Okay, further to what I've said aboveI think that before having an RFC, we should seek community assistance to carry out a small-scale study so that there is some evidence on which people can base their decisions. This is what I would suggest. [snip a possible user test scenario] +1. Some sort of user testing like this would be fantastic. We might even be able to set it up so the Internet will do it for us, which will save WMF paying testers ... could do some serious A/B work too. There must be frameworks for this sort of thing ... VE team (cc James): so. How do you think this thing is now, getting to a year later? Performance? Robustness? Stability of code? - David, one of the most important features of this proposed test is that people who *know* what the results ought to look like are carrying out the testing. It is probably a good idea to have parallel testing with new or inexperienced users, but at the end of the day, it's experienced Wikipedians who are going to make the decision whether or not to open up availability of VisualEditor to an expanded user group, and they are the ones who have to believe that it is fit for purpose, at least for basic editing skills required by new users. I suspect that most Wikipedians will give much more regard to the documented experiences of editors whose reputations they know as compared to those who are brand new - and I include myself in that group. I've seen ringers sent in too often in different kinds of user tests (not necessarily Wikimedia-specific) to fully assume good faith. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia
Thanks Ed. The point I am trying to make is that the community can't make a good decision on this unless they understand the VisualEditor product as it exists today. I think pretty much everyone agrees it wasn't ready for default editing on 1 July 2013, but absent recent data most people would naturally base their opinions on their personal experiences from that very early period. Risker/Anne On 3 June 2014 12:15, Edward Saperia e...@wikimanialondon.org wrote: Sounds like your suggestion would be a perfect contribution to some kind of community discussion to try and decide a framework to decide if or when we might want to re-deploy visual editor, much like Pine was suggesting in the first place :-) *Edward Saperia* Chief Coordinator Wikimania London http://www.wikimanialondon.org On 3 June 2014 16:37, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2014 09:05, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2014 03:02, ENWP Pine deyntest...@hotmail.com wrote: Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that is improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their knowledge, I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on English Wikipedia. I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up a framework which the community can use to decide which of several paths we would like to take. Okay, further to what I've said aboveI think that before having an RFC, we should seek community assistance to carry out a small-scale study so that there is some evidence on which people can base their decisions. This is what I would suggest. - Create a sample article that includes an infobox, an image or two, some references, a template or two, and at least three editable sections. Editors will be asked to copy/paste this page into a personal sandbox to carry out the experiment, so that their individual results can be observed through the page history, and problems can be more easily identified. - Identify about 15-20 *basic* editing tasks that an inexperienced editor would be likely to try. Some that come to mind: - Remove a word - Add a word - change spelling of a word - add a link to another article - remove a link to another article - move a sentence within a section - move a sentence across sections - add a [new] reference (multiple tests for website, newspaper, book references) - edit an existing reference - re-use an existing reference - edit existing information in the infobox - add a reference to the infobox - add a new parameter to the infobox - add an image - remove an image - add an image description - modify an image description - add a commonly used template (such as {{fact}}) - remove a template - add several symbols and accented characters that are not available on their standard keyboard (e.g., Euro and GBP symbols for US keyboards, accented characters commonly used in German or French) - Ask the testers to complete a chart outlining their results for each of the editing tasks being tested, and any comments they have about each of these editing features. If we can persuade even 25 people to work through these basic tasks, and the results are aggregated well, the community will have some useful data on which to base next-steps decisions. It will also provide the VisualEditor team with comparatively unbiased information about their progress. The key emphasis in the experiment is that it should focus on straightforward, elementary editing activities rather than complex tasks, and the purpose is to see whether or not these features work in an expected way or not. Thoughts? Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikiconference USA in the media
Yep, I'm not happy with that particular quote. But you know what? It was a set-up. Any reporter worth her salt attending a conference like this knows how to spot the person in the room that will give them the story they want to tell, and this is what happened here. She came in looking for the geeky white guy whose talent at chatting up women was, um, not his strong suit, and then quoted him instead of talking to the women. Notice that? One would think that the people to talk to about the challenges of being a woman Wikipedian would be the Wikimedia women. And yet the reporter herself refuses to allow them their voice. I wasn't able to attend this conference, but I talked to several people who did, and I also looked at the photos. What struck me was how many women were there. Some of those who attended were struck by how engaged the women were, too; they were committed to being part of the gendergap solution. Russavia, give everyone a break here. I feel badly for the young woman, because she was put on the spot in a very awkward situation. I feel badly for Kevin, because I think he really does get the importance of expanding the perspectives on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, but he was put in a situation that was well outside his comfort level. Wikipedia, Wikimedia and the conference itself were inaccurately portrayed by a media outlet. We all know it happens all the time; it's why we look for multiple reliable sources in our articles. Risker On 7 June 2014 00:39, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: MZMcBride, et al On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 9:17 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I know for certain that there quite a few people who feel that you, Russavia, are actively damaging and degrading the wiki culture with your actions... perhaps the same would be said of me and others, though I hope not. I would appreciate it that if you are going to have a pot shot at me, that you expand on it, and explain exactly what actions you are talking about. However, this isn't about me, so feel free to start a new thread on that if you so wish. The article in question is obviously an issue, because gendergappers are already saying that the unnamed female is owed an apology for the comments which were directed towards her.[1][2] The comments from Kevin Rutherford were entirely inappropriate, and whilst others may not want to publicly say anything because they know the editor in question,[3] I am willing to go on the record and say that comments that come across as totally clueless have no place in a chapter-organised and WMF sponsored event. If Kevin Rutherford thinks that his comments were acceptable, then he is sorely mistaken and he has shown clear misjudgment through his comments at this public event, because they are not supported by the wider community (if they are, then shame on the community). I'm seriously not doubting that Frank Schulenberg is reported to have shaken his head at the comments, because I know others who have read the article have *facepalmed* and lolwut. Having this in the media is just another cost that communities have to face (it's not always about money), and unfortunately it seems to have overshadowed anything actually useful that might have come of the conference. Cheers, Russavia [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004310.html [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004311.html [3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/2014-June/004312.html ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikiconference USA in the media
On 7 June 2014 13:27, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 07/06/2014, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: ... This was an entirely volunteer-run conference. Thanks Pharos. My question was about proportions of attendees being women or employees, rather than who organized it. I should have avoided the subsequent comment, as that appears to have taken us on a tangent (by the way, I think paying someone to help project manage conferences is an excellent use of donated funds, it is the sort of thing that is likely to cause volunteer stress and burn-out). Aude's email (Sat Jun 7 16:12:35 UTC 2014) has confirmed that at least one attendee was an employee, so the answer to that question cannot be zero. Hold onso now you are saying that someone employed by a WMF chapter or the WMF itself will never be allowed to be considered anything other than an employee? Fae, if they're paying their own way, they are there as volunteers, not employees. If they have not been directed to attend by their employer, they are volunteers. Not everyone does everything for work-related purposes, and a very significant proportion of Wikimedians who work for a chapter or the WMF also make volunteer contributions in many ways to WMF projects. This is a good thing, and shouldn't result in them being slammed for attending Wikimedia-related events on their own time spending their own money, as the nature of the question implies. If they didn't register as employee of Chapter xx or employee of WMF, and their employer hasn't paid for their registration, there is absolutely no reason for them to be considered employees during their attendance. I do not believe that gender is a mandatory question on any registrations for any WMF projects, and I question whether or not it's an appropriate one unless there is some specific reason to ask (e.g., accommodation arrangements). Therefore, there is no accurate method to assess the number of women who attended. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why Wil's actions in multiple forums are a matter of significant concern
I'm sorry to say that my reading of your postings to this list in the past 24 hours is that you are making numerous personal attacks and insinuating yourself into the personal lives of individuals. I ask you to stop this line of discussion entirely; if you do not do so, I ask the moderators of this forum to start moderating your posts. Just stop, Pete. And everyone else, please stop responding and let these threads die. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Disclosure amendment to the Terms of Use
Not quite sure what you're shouting about, Gerard. The amendment clearly gives individual projects the right to have an alternative to this particular section of the terms of use, and that alternative can be either more strict or less strict. Seems Commons is considering an alternative that is very much less strict. If your point is that terms of use that are specifically intended for one or a small number of projects, and that are extremely unlikely to be enforced on most projects, should be addressed on a project-by-project basis, I tend to agree with you; however, it seems that since the primary target project couldn't come to consensus on a policy, everyone else gets stuck with one designed for enwiki. Risker On 16 June 2014 13:58, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, WOW, CAN SOMEONE WHO HAS THE AUTHORITY TO DO SO CLARIFY IF THIS WILL GET A HEARING? Either it is something that should apply to all projects and consequently it is a board issue or it is en.wp only. When it is en.wp only, the policy is either not carefully thought through or it should not be a board issue in the first place.\ The time to reconsider the application from a project level did come and has gone REALLY Thanks, GerardM On 16 June 2014 19:32, Tomasz W. Kozlowski twkozlow...@gmail.com wrote: Stephen LaPorte writes: We would like to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has approved an amendment to Section 4 of the Terms of Use to require disclosure of paid editing. There is a proposal on Wikimedia Commons that aims to opt-out that project from the amendment, given the huge differences between Commons and the English Wikipedia, at which the amendment was targeted. Feedback and comments are welcome at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/Alternative_ paid_contribution_disclosure_policy Tomasz ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Disclosure amendment to the Terms of Use
On 16 June 2014 20:48, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Not quite sure what you're shouting about, Gerard. The amendment clearly gives individual projects the right to have an alternative to this particular section of the terms of use, and that alternative can be either more strict or less strict. That's correct. Members of various projects asked for this kind of flexibility in the comment period, and the board agreed that we should add the ability for projects to craft alternatives on a per-project basis to this amendment. In the absence of a local policy, however, the ToU amendment applies to every project. While this issue is a concern of many on the English Wikipedia, the amendment was not crafted specifically for en:wp; this has been an issue across many language communities. The terms of use (amendments and all) apply to all of our projects. best, -- phoebe I'm so very disappointed in the Board and the WMF for this TOU amendment, which was obviously written to quell concerns about English Wikipedia, with extremely little consideration of any other project. Now projects *must* formally exempt practices that are perfectly acceptable to them: Commons in particular, where professionals (who link to their personal for-profit websites in their file descriptions) contribute a great deal of the highest quality work; MediaWiki and all its developer-related sites, where a large number of our best non-staff developers are financially supported by other organizations; Wikidata, which is pure data and no benefit can be derived; Wikisource, where no benefit can be derived; and a multitude of Wikipedias that have openly welcomed editors who receive financial support or are paid by various organizations without any issue whatsoever. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be enforced in the vast majority of WMF projects. And the end result is an amendment that can't effectively be enforced without violating the internal rules of the amendment. [1] It's virtually impossible to make a supportable allegation of undeclared paid editing without violating outing or harassment policies. Of course, we all know there will be plenty of unsupported allegations. It would have been far more beneficial if the WMF and the Board had had the courage to work directly with the English Wikipedia community to develop a policy there instead of imposing it on hundreds of projects that not only don't care, they will now have to create policies to counteract the effects of this TOU amendment. Simply put, Terms of Use should never include clauses whose enforcement is undesirable in a significant portion of the overall site. I'll be off now to help Mediawiki create their RFC to essentially void this decision. Risker/Anne [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/FAQ_on_paid_contributions_without_disclosure#How_does_community_enforcement_of_this_provision_work_with_existing_rules_about_privacy_and_behavior.3F ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Disclosure amendment to the Terms of Use
On 17 June 2014 12:56, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I'm so very disappointed in the Board and the WMF for this TOU amendment, which was obviously written to quell concerns about English Wikipedia, with extremely little consideration of any other project. Now projects *must* formally exempt practices that are perfectly acceptable to them: Commons in particular, where professionals (who link to their personal for-profit websites in their file descriptions) contribute a great deal of the highest quality work; MediaWiki and all its developer-related sites, where a large number of our best non-staff developers are financially supported by other organizations; Wikidata, which is pure data and no benefit can be derived; Wikisource, where no benefit can be derived; and a multitude of Wikipedias that have openly welcomed editors who receive financial support or are paid by various organizations without any issue whatsoever. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be enforced in the vast majority of WMF projects. I'm sorry you're disappointed. But I don't really follow your reasoning. I don't know of many people who get paid *specifically* to upload photos or contribute to Wikidata. Perhaps a few cultural professionals who are already, in general, following this best practice. And if someone is specifically getting paid to upload photos to Commons (or contribute to another wiki) it seems, in general, like a good idea to know about it. (If a professional photographer that's not doing work for hire chooses to donate some of their professional-quality photos to the project -- in their spare time, as it were -- I don't think the amendment applies, though I leave discussion of that nuance to the legal team and the commons community). The amendment has effect if someone decides to kick up a fuss about it; it may not result in a determination of paid contributions but will create a chill directed toward anyone contributing in a like manner. Substitute the word photos in the above with words; if someone linking to their personal site and contributing words from their published sources (available at a fee, click shop!) is not essentially a self-employed paid editor, then there is little point in this amendment. Anyway, I'm not sure why you are assuming that the amendment will automatically be abhorrent to every community that's not English Wikipedia. Of course projects do vary based on size and cultural norms and other factors; that's why we put in the local exemption clause however. Editors from several non-English Wikipedia projects stated that their projects are quite happy to have paid editors. Now in order for those editors not to violate the TOU, those projects have to go to the work of developing and approving an alternate policy, or they can just ignore it, and refuse to enforce the TOU; either way, it's not cost-neutral, and reduces the respect that the broad community has for the terms of use. I cannot think of another site anywhere that creates opt-out terms of use. Can you? Why does this need to be in the terms of use at all? It would have been far more beneficial if the WMF and the Board had had the courage to work directly with the English Wikipedia community to develop a policy there instead of imposing it on hundreds of projects that not only don't care, they will now have to create policies to counteract the effects of this TOU amendment. Simply put, Terms of Use should never include clauses whose enforcement is undesirable in a significant portion of the overall site. I'll be off now to help Mediawiki create their RFC to essentially void this decision. Of course you should feel free, though I'm not entirely sure how a provision that a person should disclose if they are getting paid specifically to edit that wiki (in mediawiki's case, it would likely be something along the lines of I work for the Foundation or I work for someone else who has an interest in developing mediawiki and also developing documentation on the wiki) is especially undesirable. I'm pretty sure most paid developers do this anyway. (If someone is editing in their spare time -- on any project -- and not specifically getting paid for that work, the amendment doesn't apply). At any rate, I leave that specific discussion to the mediawiki community, where I suspect it's basically a non-issue. There are actually a surprisingly large number of non-WMF employees who are indeed paid to develop mediawiki. As well, for the majority of the developer-related sites/software, they can't include the information on (non-existent) userpages or edit summaries which are either non-existent or specifically used for other purposes. If it's not important enough to be a mandatory requirement for every single user on every single project, then it really
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Okay, that's enough, Trilliium. You've now made a personal attack against an identifiable individual based on gossip and rumour. Stop. Risker On 29 June 2014 10:18, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: Pine, An analogous argument to the one you're making is: someone who intends to rob your home will be able to get in one way or other, so why bother locking the doors when you go out. This is not a good argument. You're calling into question the reliability of every identification document copy ever presented to the WMF by an advanced-rights-seeking administrator because a really sophisticated wrongdoer (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be associated?) could make a masterful forgery that beats the system. The fact is that 95% of them, I'd suppose, are going to be okay and the identification requirement is going to be an effective deterrent to at least the casual among the bad apples. And of course, once they've truly identified, the personal accountability aspects of it are going to keep in line once well-intentioned administrators that might be tempted to go bad for some reason. Forging identification documents is not impossible is another variation of the perfection is not attainable and no policy can be a magical solution arguments put forth previously on this mailing list by the WMF's deputy general counsel Luis Villa. I've attempted to answer those by explaining that you can have a pretty good and effective policy without having an infallible one. Trillium Corsage 29.06.2014, 07:32, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com: Trillium, I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people creating such documents. Pine On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: @Nathan You said so if you want to argue that such users should be positively identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom? What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary? It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical suggestions I've conspicuously avoided. I did at least suggest a secure filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise criteria by which an identification document is deemed good enough, I'd suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a do the best you can and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are insurmountable obstacles. The answer to this is hard is not well, let's just stop doing it. The answer is this is important, let's just do the best we can. I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a verification, but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule. Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan zings me with what are your specifics on the mailing list. What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment, and they will do whatever they want, because
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Interference in workshop for professors
What project(s) are you working on? Risker On 3 July 2014 18:12, Leigh Thelmadatter osama...@hotmail.com wrote: I am, at this moment, trying to give a workshop on Wikipedia to professors and they are having their own user pages being speedily deleted by Tarawa1943 and Taichi We have sent polite messages to them and bibliotecarios (admins) but the deletions continue. Suggestions ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community RfCs about MediaViewer
While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, Todd, there were 14,681 users on English Wikipedia alone who had enabled MediaViewer using the Beta Features preference before it became the default. That's a huge number of people who were all using it every time they clicked on an image in the weeks and months beforehand, and every one of them had to make a conscious decision to turn it on. The 64 users who want it disabled as default pale in comparison to the number of people who were actively using it beforehand. I've asked for some better statistical information because I don't think the Limn graphs that have been referred to in the discussion of the RFC are really accurate; it's my understanding that about 1600 registered accounts have opted out of MV in total (this should be a linear graph of the cumulative total, not a daily number of people who opted out graph which is what we seem to see now). As well, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 logged out users a day are disabling it - this needs to be a daily number, not a cumulative one, because logged-out disabling is linked to the individual browser session; those who aren't logged in don't have the chance to set preferences. There are between 4 and 5 *million* clicks on image thumbnails every day on enwiki, with only around 500 of those viewing the images disabling the MediaViewer (excluding logged-in users who have turned it off in their preferences). I suspect that at the end of the day, MediaViewer is going to be more like the switch to Vector skin: there will be plenty of people who choose to disable for reasons that work for them, but the overwhelming majority of users will be entirely fine with the default. It's having nowhere near the impact that VisualEditor had when first enabled as default; in the first 48 hours there were hundreds of how do you turn this off queries and complaints about functionality, not to mention pretty much automatic reverting of edits done by IPs because there were so many VE-related problems associated with them. We're not at that level at all here. I agree with John Vandenberg's comments that a clear roadmap and prioritized list of next steps is probably required for MediaViewer. Risker/Anne On 11 July 2014 00:56, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote: If you don't want to do small opt-in trials, release software in a fully production-ready and usable state. What's getting released here is barely ready for beta. It's buggy, it's full of unexpected UX issues, it's not ready to go live on one of the top 10 websites in the world. It's got to be in really good shape to get there. Until software is actually ready for widescale use, small and very limited beta tests are exactly the way to go, followed by maybe slightly larger UAT pools. Yeah, that takes longer and requires actual work to find willing testers. Quit taking shortcuts through your volunteers. On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:40 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hey guys, I use MediaViewer, I like it, and I am happy to trust the WMF product team to build stuff. I didn't know about the RFC, but even if I had I would've been unlikely to have participated, because I don't think small opt-in discussions are the best way to do product development -- certainly not at the scale of Wikipedia. I think we should aim on this list to be modest rather than overreaching in terms of what we claim to know, and who we imply we're representing. It's probably best to be clear --both in the mails we write and in our own heads privately-- that what's happening here is a handful of people talking on a mailing list. We can represent our own opinions, and like David Gerard we can talk anecdotally about what our friends tell us. But I don't like it when people here seem to claim to speak on behalf of editors, or users, or readers, or the community. It strikes me as hubristic. Thanks, Sue On 10 Jul 2014 16:13, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: In this case, we will keep the feature enabled by default (it's easy to turn off, both for readers and editors), but we'll continue to improve it based on community feedback (as has already happened in the last few weeks). Thanks for the reply. :-) If your feature development model seemingly requires forcing features on users, it's probably safe to say that it's broken. If you're building cool new features, they will ideally be uncontroversial and users will actively want to enable them and eventually have them enabled by default. Many new features (e.g., the improved search backend) are deployed fairly regularly without fanfare or objection. But I see a common thread among unsuccessful deployments of features such as ArticleFeedbackv5, VisualEditor, and MediaViewer. Some of it is the people involved, of course, but the larger pattern is a fault in the process, I think. I
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community RfCs about MediaViewer
There's a easy, clearly accessible, one-click option for disabling MediaViewer, Todd. Scroll to the bottom of the screen. Click disable. Done - it automatically changes your preference. Risker/Anne On 11 July 2014 02:44, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote: Risker, I'm actually not going to disagree with you in principle. I ultimately see Media Viewer being used by a good number of users, and said as much from the start. But I also warned that a bulldozer approach was going to cause massive blowback, especially after the previous debacles (VE and ACTRIAL come to mind for me). And well, here we are, with another repeat of the VE situation. That greatly eroded trust in WMF, especially its dev teams and PMs, and that's nowhere even close to rebuilt yet. Now that lack of trust is being confirmed and entrenched. WMF needs to step very lightly with deployments that will affect editors, and treat the volunteer community as an ally rather than adversary. If that doesn't happen, these showdowns will keep happening. Part of that is pure arrogance. A significant part of the reason the Vector switch worked is because there was an easy, clearly accessible, one-click option that said Do not want, disable this!. If that'd been the case here, I would have clicked that and forgotten about it. Instead, I had to dig for an hour to find how to disable the thing, after being surprised by a totally unexpected change. But now we hear things like We made Vector opt-out too easy! Media Viewer probably does have its place, once it is fully functional and free of major bugs. I might even turn it on at that point. But shoving it down people's throats will only serve to further place the WMF's flagship project and the WMF at odds. That is not, I can't imagine, a desirable situation by anyone's estimation. WMF needs a far better deployment strategy than YOU ARE GETTING IT, LIKE IT OR NOT, AND THAT IS FINAL! If the WMF's strategy for when the core community and dev team disagree is We're right, you're wrong, pipe down, these situations will increase in frequency and intensity. I want to stop that before it reaches a real boiling point, and it could've this time if someone had actually gotten desysopped. On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 12:21 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, Todd, there were 14,681 users on English Wikipedia alone who had enabled MediaViewer using the Beta Features preference before it became the default. That's a huge number of people who were all using it every time they clicked on an image in the weeks and months beforehand, and every one of them had to make a conscious decision to turn it on. The 64 users who want it disabled as default pale in comparison to the number of people who were actively using it beforehand. I've asked for some better statistical information because I don't think the Limn graphs that have been referred to in the discussion of the RFC are really accurate; it's my understanding that about 1600 registered accounts have opted out of MV in total (this should be a linear graph of the cumulative total, not a daily number of people who opted out graph which is what we seem to see now). As well, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 logged out users a day are disabling it - this needs to be a daily number, not a cumulative one, because logged-out disabling is linked to the individual browser session; those who aren't logged in don't have the chance to set preferences. There are between 4 and 5 *million* clicks on image thumbnails every day on enwiki, with only around 500 of those viewing the images disabling the MediaViewer (excluding logged-in users who have turned it off in their preferences). I suspect that at the end of the day, MediaViewer is going to be more like the switch to Vector skin: there will be plenty of people who choose to disable for reasons that work for them, but the overwhelming majority of users will be entirely fine with the default. It's having nowhere near the impact that VisualEditor had when first enabled as default; in the first 48 hours there were hundreds of how do you turn this off queries and complaints about functionality, not to mention pretty much automatic reverting of edits done by IPs because there were so many VE-related problems associated with them. We're not at that level at all here. I agree with John Vandenberg's comments that a clear roadmap and prioritized list of next steps is probably required for MediaViewer. Risker/Anne On 11 July 2014 00:56, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote: If you don't want to do small opt-in trials, release software in a fully production-ready and usable state. What's getting released here is barely ready for beta. It's buggy, it's full of unexpected UX issues, it's not ready to go live on one of the top
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal: List administration policy
Actually, Trillium Corsage, I'd say that's a reason for banning you again. It's a very serious allegation you're implying about a longstanding member of our community. Risker On 11 July 2014 14:24, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: Hi Fae, I was banned from the list by Austin Hair. I had contributed in my view a lot of good and polite stuff that was reasonably reasoned, but he banned me on the basis of a 17-word parenthetical phrase regarding arbitrator Timotheus Canens. I said that I had read it claimed that he was connected to Chinese military intelligence. Is that a reason to ban me? I emailed him, and then repeat emailed him to talk to me about it. I was met by silence. I wasn't going to get upset about it, and didn't. I figure Austin just another type who got moderator privilege on a mailing list. It's not even worth it to criticize him, but I guess I'll notice he banned me within minutes, and he hasn't posted to the list anything since, and I don't recall him ever contributing a email of substantive opinion since I joined the list. I logged on here today with the aim of unsubscribing to the list, but I'll keep reading long enough to see if your below email asking for transparency on the list goes anywhere. Good luck. Trillium Corsage 11.07.2014, 11:28, Fæ fae...@gmail.com: Hi, I would like to propose that this list have a published process for post moderation, banning and appeals. Perhaps a page on meta would be a good way to propose and discuss a policy? I would be happy to kick off a draft. This list has a defined scope at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l which explains who the 3 list admins are, but no more than that. There is no system of appeals, no expected time limits on bans or moderation, nor an explanation of the 30 posts per month behavioural norm that sometimes applies to this list. Neither is there any explanation of what is expected of list admins, such as whether there is an obligation to explain to someone who finds themselves subject to moderation or a ban, as to why this has happened and what they ought to do in order to become un-banned or un-moderated. I believe this would help list users better understand what is expected of them when they post here and it may give an opportunity to review the transparency of list administration, such as the option of publishing a list of active moderated accounts and possibly a list of indefinitely banned accounts where these were for behaviour on the list (as opposed to content-free spamming etc.) I see no down side to explaining policy as openly as possible. Thoughts? Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae (P.S. I am active on the English Wikipedia where I have a GA on the go, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fae. Sorry to disappoint, but reports of my retirement are premature.) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community RfCs about MediaViewer
On 14 July 2014 09:55, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: On 7/14/2014 4:43 AM, Andrew Gray wrote: I've been doing some thinking about this over the past year or so, bubbling away in the back of my mind, after a talk at last Wikimania - would there be any interest/usefulness if I sat down and tried to dump it into a how to run a large project RFC, and what doesn't work page somewhere? There certainly would be usefulness, so I hope there would be equivalent interest. I'd be interested in seeing it, at any rate. Me too, Andrew. I think we actually do need some sort of checklist or guidance document on how to deal with these sorts of issues. In this particular case, it had the added element of affecting readers possibly even more so than editors, so some thoughts on how to involve readers in discussions that affect their usage of the site would be good. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Effective censorship of Wikipedia by Google
I'm not sure you're correct about what is being disappeared, Fae. I believe that the Guardian is referring to an article of theirs that is now not seen in Google search results for certain terms. The article makes it pretty clear that The Guardian does not known which article is involved. Risker/Anne On 2 August 2014 23:27, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Re: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/02/wikipedia-page-google-link-hidden-right-to-be-forgotten If Google disappearing a Wikipedia article is a notable news event, wouldn't that meet the Wikipedia notability requirements to make an article about it? The information being disappeared is the 2009 Muslim conversion of Adam Osborne, brother of the chancellor, George Osborne. Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Effective censorship of Wikipedia by Google
Well, Fae, since the only place that Adam Osborne is mentioned in Wikipedia is as the son of his father, and it does not mention anything more than his name, I am pretty certain that you're mistaken. The exact quote from the Guardian is: Google has already begun to implement the ruling, with tens of thousands of links removed from its European search results to sites ranging from the BBC to the *Daily Express*. Among the data now hidden from Google is an article about the 2009 Muslim conversion of Adam Osborne, brother of the chancellor, George Osborne. Nothing in that quote says that it is a Wikipedia article that is hidden. Risker/Anne On 3 August 2014 00:12, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 August 2014 23:49, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure you're correct about what is being disappeared, Fae. I believe that the Guardian is referring to an article of theirs that is now not seen in Google search results for certain terms. The article makes it pretty clear that The Guardian does not known which article is involved. Risker/Anne The Guardian states in the first paragraph that: Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new right to be forgotten legislation to affect the 110m-page encyclopaedia. Wikipedia cannot be misread as the Guardian newspaper. Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering community team! (brainstorming)
On 5 August 2014 12:05, Gryllida gryll...@fastmail.fm wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, at 20:48, Fæ wrote: On 5 August 2014 11:33, Gryllida gryll...@fastmail.fm wrote: Hi all. WMF Engineering is currently composed of individual teams as documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering . These teams look after the software that faces us everyday, and often work together. Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated ‘community’ team) who could do these things: - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features they'd like, - run programming and documentation activities requested (or started) by community [there would be a lot of small projects, unlike the big ones the current Teams are working on], - encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location of, all community-developed programming work, - raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia projects, - actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets hackers in the Free Software philosophy? This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team (with just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC support). Open to brainstorming and suggestions. I would compile thoughts into a wiki page afterwards to continue thinking on the idea. The roles you describe seem to have a lot of overlap with what we might expect WMF volunteer coordinators / WMF community liaison employees to be busy with. Compare with: * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Volunteer_Development_Coordinator * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Community_Liaison Do you intend this to be an unpaid team of volunteers doing these tasks, or a end user group (in the Agile sense) that would be supported by employees and may themselves be paid for some activities? Fae Both please? [This is a question! This is a brainstorming thread.] Some part of such group of people could be paid (like the job openings you linked), and a very vast part could be volunteer and supported by the said employees (and documentation). You mean like the tech ambassadors? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors One thing to keep in mind is that English Wikipedia is only one of hundreds of projects. The technology and engineering groups generally work at a global level because they affect all projects; it's rare that they're doing something for one project only. There are lots of opportunities for community members to interact and to test software in advance (the beta preferences are but one of them) - but when discussing a global project or process or software, the best place to discuss is rarely going to be a single page on a single non-global project. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Superprotect user right, Coming to a wiki near you
Well, hold on here. On 17 August 2014 19:55, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: I think it is also a problem to look at this in terms of bugs. I don't think you can retrofit good design into something that has a variety of substantial problems, by merely squashing bugs. You might say that is the wiki way, but it is widely known that some tasks are better suited than others to ad hoc collaborative processes. Given the current use of bugzilla, which doesn't limit itself to bugs but also feature requests and enhancements over the base functionality, calling everything reported using bugzilla a bug is incorrect and inappropriate. In this case, we have a broad range of issues: * does it let the reader know they can help improve the page or upload another photo The Commons/File pages don't do that, why would you expect this software to do it? * does it reflect copyright holders' licenses accurately and effectively Agree this is important. Do you have any evidence that it is any less accurate than the Commons/File pages? * does it adequately respect the privacy of the subjects of photos The mere fact of the image being used on an article anywhere on a Wikimedia project suggests that this problem is in the actual usage, not in the software being used to display more information and detail in the image. If you believe that this is a serious issue, then it should be addressed where 100% of readers can see it, not in a subpage viewed only by the limited number of readers who click on the image. It's not a Media Viewer problem, it's an image usage problem. * does it reflect a look and feel that we feel OK about and is consistent with the rest of the software etc. etc. What problems are you seeing here? Spell it out, rather than making vague suggestions that there is an issue. Fixing one bug may well lead to other bugs, or negatively impact those already reported. What is needed, I believe, is a well-facilitated process to identify the problems and the best solutions. This is not easy to do and takes time. But I think the WMF has (not for lack of trying) managed to do a very bad job of that with this software product, and with many software products in the last few years. That does not mean it is impossible to do it that way, only that those specific efforts were insufficient. Why is this a Media Viewer issue? This is a problem for all types of software on all types of platforms, and is a challenge even for IT departments hundreds of times the size of the WMF. I cannot think of any software I have used in the last 20 years that has not had bugs or unsatisfactory UI elements or seems to miss a functionality I'd like to have. It is unreasonable to hold a comparatively very small organization to a standard that can't even be met by IT giants. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Superprotect user right, Coming to a wiki near you
On 17 August 2014 20:25, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: Well, hold on here. On 17 August 2014 19:55, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: I think it is also a problem to look at this in terms of bugs. I don't think you can retrofit good design into something that has a variety of substantial problems, by merely squashing bugs. You might say that is the wiki way, but it is widely known that some tasks are better suited than others to ad hoc collaborative processes. Given the current use of bugzilla, which doesn't limit itself to bugs but also feature requests and enhancements over the base functionality, calling everything reported using bugzilla a bug is incorrect and inappropriate. While this is true, I have yet to see bugzilla used as a platform for a design process for Media Viewer, and I don't think I would recommend it. It's *possible* to use it as a platform for more than mere bugs, and it has been done before; but I don't think tha'ts what's going on here, or should go on here. Perhaps you should get to know a bit more about bugzilla and its current usage; of the 104 current reports on Multimedia Viewer, 16 are enhancements and several others that are currently listed as bugs of varying importance/urgency are features that don't appear to exist in the standard format for viewing images or are so badly designed in the File pages that they're almost impossible to call acceptable in that format, either. Someone who is better able to describe the developer functions could better describe the planned changes from the use of Bugzilla to Phabricator, which is a more flexible platform that (I understand) is intended to consolidate several different design/development/improvement/bug reporting platforms currently in use. But right now, bugzilla is at least in some cases used as a platform for the design process of just about everything to do with MediaWiki, its extensions, and all the other platforms that are in use/developed by WMF. Every single type of software used on Wikimedia project sites, as well as software for other features provided by the WMF, has bugzilla reports. There are thousands for MediaWiki, the core software of the project. We haven't thrown in the towel on it just because it's got lots of bugzilla reports. In this case, we have a broad range of issues: * does it let the reader know they can help improve the page or upload another photo The Commons/File pages don't do that, why would you expect this software to do it? The Commons/File page DOES do that, to the extent that readers have some familiarity with MediaWiki software and how to find the Edit button. You may not believe that is significant, but I encounter people on an almost daily basis who are mystified by Wikipedia, but at least have a basic understanding what the edit button does, or could allow them to do. It may not be all readers or even a majority, but it is my very strong belief -- rooted, perhaps not in rigorous scientific analysis, but in my very active engagement with non-Wikipedias since 2006 -- that it's the pool of people who tend to replenish our declining editor pool. A great many of the 100+ students who signed up for the 4 rounds of my online course on editing Wikipedia, for instance, had accounts that were several years old, but only had a dozen or so edits. I'm sorry. How, exactly, do you envision a new editor or reader improving file pages? There's not very much that can be edited there that isn't going to cause more problems than it solves. Should they modify the author? Change the license? Add (potentially non-existent) categories? When the chances of reversion are nearly 100%, it's not necessarily a net positive to make a big deal about the existence of an edit button. Media pages are not really comparable to (written) content pages. I'd rank file pages as possibly the worst place to suggest that new editors just jump in, with the possible exception of templates. snip * does it adequately respect the privacy of the subjects of photos The mere fact of the image being used on an article anywhere on a Wikimedia project suggests that this problem is in the actual usage, not in the software being used to display more information and detail in the image. If you believe that this is a serious issue, then it should be addressed where 100% of readers can see it, not in a subpage viewed only by the limited number of readers who click on the image. It's not a Media Viewer problem, it's an image usage problem. This point has a lot of nuance in it, and I'm happy to discuss it, but not here and now. If you want to dig into it, I suggest this as a venue: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Consent -- if you leave a note there, please {{ping|Peteforsyth}} so I can find it. I am at a loss as to why
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Superprotect user right, Coming to a wiki near you
On 18 August 2014 03:53, Pete Forsyth petefors...@gmail.com wrote: Risker, some replies below: snip As I stated in my response, although the WMF failed to predict that this would be a hot issue, I predicted it clearly in February, and so did another longtime community member. (If anybody wants to see that other piece, let me know -- I now have permission to share it, actually an IRC log, not an email.) https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk: LilaTretikovdiff=9512960oldid=9512915 (and the reference link: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?diff=907392 ) Wow, Pete. You predict something will be rejected by the community, and identify a list of concerns. Several months later, you apply the code that applies a community rejection. This brings the term self-fulfilling prophecy to a whole new level. Just wow. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The reader, who doesn't exist
On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: 2014-08-21 9:30 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com: It would *seem* that every user converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki. That is an excellent point Frederico. In addition to the inherent difficulties of editing on small screen, especially large articles and the we know better approach discussed in detail in the last weeks, there is also the problem of navigating between articles - the mobile website arbitrarily skips some elements visible on desktop, such as navboxes and significantly alter some infoboxes because it doesn't look good. This makes it difficult to just browse the Wikipedia (thus finding mistakes that you might want to correct) and encourages searching for the information, which means going right on target Hopefully the future announced at Wikimania, no more mobile team, but mobile in every team will solve some of these problems. It's just a matter of when will this future be. Well, now. Here's a classic example of what is sometimes called a first world problem. I know that, even on desktops, the more infoboxes and navboxes and succession boxes on an article (regardless of article length), the longer it takes to load. On a slower desktop collection, some really large, complex articles sometimes time out. I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the desktop option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading; others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available to them. So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these navigation aids in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of meta data tab from articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The reader, who doesn't exist
On 21 August 2014 09:18, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: On 21.08.2014 14:26, Risker wrote: On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu strain...@gmail.com wrote: ... I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the desktop option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading; others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available to them. So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these navigation aids in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of meta data tab from articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though. Risker/Anne ___ For me the conclusion would be not that we should drop them altogether in the mobile version (most of them are useful navigation means after all) but that the mobile version should be improved to parse them and to present them as a piece of plain text, not as a template. Many of these templates have over 100 links in them; a surprisingly large number have subtemplates built into them. I'm having a hard time seeing how adding all those links at the bottom of an article is actually going to help that much. Unless we have some evidence to confirm this information is actually useful to readers -seriously, this is a community-designed feature targeted at readers as opposed to editors - it's probably time to rethink what indirectly related information on our article pages is made routinely available. We want people to use our information, not give up because it takes too long to load. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] New movement org?
On 21 August 2014 12:21, James Forrester jdforres...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 August 2014 09:13, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Richard, any links to where you found this information? The ever-excellent OpenCorporates has its entry: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_mi/71656Y … leading to the official US state of Michigan's entry: http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=71656Y No information about the officers, sadly, just a filing office. Incorporation documents here: http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/image.asp?FILE_TYPE=ELFFILE_NAME=D201408\2014224\E0091608.TIF President: Scott Perry Vice President: Ann Perry Secretary: Danielle Lewis Someone else can figure out how to copy/paste. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Specifying office action in edit summary?
I think the problem is that your question does not really relate to the subject line, Svetlana. Office actions are specifically directed at content (e.g., removal of specific content for copyvio reasons or court orders). Office actions are almost never undertaken by Engineering staff; it's usually Legal Community Advocacy staff, or rarely another administrative staff member. What you are talking about is something that has only been done very occasionally over the years by Engineering/Operations staff/sysadmins. There has been no designated manner in which those actions should be flagged. One must remember that until the last few years, the majority of individuals who could have taken (and in some cases, did take) such serious action were volunteer sysadmins, so labeling it a WMF action would not have been correct. We also have to remember that many of the systems that developers and engineers work with on a daily basis do not permit edit summaries, so adding what for many of us is an automatic and routine comment is for some of them a rare and unusual event. (Perhaps they should set their work account preferences to be reminded to include an edit summary?) Risker/Anne On 22 August 2014 11:50, svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au wrote: Hi all, I'm sorry to repeat, but I would like to hear some thoughts on this question. Also added a clarification for one of the lines. On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, at 22:26, svetlana wrote: Hi all. I understand the Engineering folks used superprotect instead of /undoing/ the edit and adding 'This is a WMF action.' in edit summary. Could I please be enlightened on the reasoning behind that? I suppose people could go and try editing other JS pages and cause havoc, but that's still possible where superprotect only affects a single page and not a namespace. Or can entire namespaces be protected and this new user right was intended to be able to prevent that easily? This is worded poorly, I mean - or can entire namespaces be protected and the new user right was intended as a means to easily revoke mediawiki:* access? Svetlana. svetlana ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The reader, who doesn't exist
Given the mission is sharing information, I'd suggest that if we have a 95% drop in readership, we're failing the mission. Donations are only a means to an end. Risker/Anne On 24 August 2014 22:57, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: First, let's make one thing clear: the reader doesn't exist; it's just a rhetorical trick, and a very dangerous one. For more: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader This essay looks fascinating. I hope to read it soon. Page views, however brute a concept, exist; and I think they're telling us we do have a readership problem. For it.wiki, in the last year I see a suspiciously similar decrease in desktop pageviews and editing activity (possibly around –20 %). It would *seem* that every user converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki. Long story: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/9380388 The page above is just a collection of pointers that I probably won't be able to pursue in the coming months, to study an unprecedented collapse of editing activity and active editors on it.wiki. However, there /are/ several things worth looking into and we do have a huge problem (or several). I don't know enough about the Italian Wikipedia to comment on it specifically. But generally I think it's important to re-emphasize that correlation and causation are distinct, as are readership and editorship rates. The two items of each set can be interrelated or connected sometimes, of course, but we need to make sure we're drawing accurate and appropriate conclusions. At https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62811#c10 Jared Zimmerman writes, We have a reader decline, its backed by hard numbers, any creative solution for bringing more readers and contributors into the project should be seriously discussed without being dismissed out of hand. There's substantial discussion in the subsequent comments. Let's temporarily accept the premise that pageviews suddenly drop from 20 billion per month to 1 billion per month. The easy argument is that we'd save a lot of money on hosting. But unlike most of the Internet, Wikipedia doesn't rely on advertising. Why does it matter how popular we are? Does it affect donation rates? Does it affect editorship rates? I'm not sure how much of this we know. It's increasingly clear that much of the rest of the Internet _is_ different: it doesn't require much thought of participants, it's user-focused, and it's built on the idea of selling (to) people. This difference in how we want to treat users, as collaborators and colleagues, rather than as clients or customers, will permeate the site design and user experience and that's okay. If the number of pageviews suddenly drops, for whatever reason, what happens next? The most likely worst case scenario seems to be a reduction in annual donations, which results in a smaller staff size (sometimes referred to as trimming the fat or optimizing). There's a lot of talk lately about the imperiled future, but we could end up with a smaller, more decentralized Wikimedia Foundation staff in what some would consider one of the least desirable outcomes. Eh. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments
Wasn't the creation of the DRAFT namespace at least in part a response to concerns raised at ACTRIAL, in particular new, poorly developed articles showing up in mainspace? Risker/Anne On 1 September 2014 19:08, Joe Decker joedec...@gmail.com wrote: This, to the best of my knowledge, represents the entirety of the WMF's response to ACTRIAL. To the extent that there was additional feedback given, it was not given at WP:ACTRIAL, nor any other venue I am aware of. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208 --Joe On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 3:44 PM, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote: That's the issue I cited above. You haven't heard more complaints, because the complaint was pointless the first time and took a massive effort to produce. The underlying issue isn't fixed. We're still drowning in crap and spam from people who never have the slightest intent of editing helpfully, and those who are newbies who genuinely want to help but need guidance get caught in the crossfire aimed at the vandals and spammers. It is relatively rare that when a genuinely new editor's first edit is a creation, it is the creation of an appropriate article on a workable subject, and that's normally more by dumb luck than them having actual knowledge that they should do it. So, consider that a complaint. The proposed fix didn't work, and most people at the time didn't figure it would work, but it was clearly the best we were going to get. On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Sep 1, 2014, at 8:45 AM, Todd Allen toddmal...@gmail.com wrote: That's contradicted by, among other things, ACTRIAL as mentioned above. The en.wp community came to a clear consensus for a major change, and the WMF shrugged and said Nah, rather not. That's... Not exactly what I remember happening there. What I remember was that a pretty good number (~500) of enwiki community members came together and agreed on a problem, and one plan for how to fix it and asked the WMF to implement it. The WMF evaluated it, and saw a threat to a basic project value. WMF then asked what's the problem you're actually trying to solve?, and proposed and built a set of tools to directly address that problem without compromising the core value of openness. And it seems to have worked out pretty well because I haven't heard a ton of complaints about that problem since. __ Philippe Beaudette Director, Community Advocacy ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Joe Decker www.joedecker.net ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] AffCom - Call for candidates 2015 [UPDATE]
A gmail address? I am sure if you ask nicely the committee can be granted a wikimedia.org email address through Mailman that will allow more than one person to handle applications. It could probably be done pretty quickly. Risker/Anne On 4 September 2014 14:35, Carlos M. Colina ma...@wikimedia.org.ve wrote: Dear all, Please note that, due a technical issue, direct your emails to salvador1...@gmail.com instead. Kindly apologize for the inconvenience. Regards, Carlos Sent from Samsung Mobile Original message From: Carlos M. Colina ma...@wikimedia.org.ve Date: 03/09/2014 19:58 (GMT+02:00) To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,Wikimedia Chapters general discussions chapt...@wikimedia.ch Subject: [Wikimedia-l] AffCom - Call for candidates 2015 (in the case you received it already, sorry for re-sending it, my Thunderbird crashed just as I clicked the send button :-( ) Dear all, The Affiliations Committee [1], the committee that is responsible for guiding volunteers in establishing Chapters, User Groups and Thematic Organizations and approving them when they are ready is looking for new members. The main focus of the AffCom is to guide groups of volunteers in forming affiliates. We make sure that the groups are large enough to be viable (and advise them on how to get bigger), review bylaws for compliance with the requirements and best practices, and advise the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation on issues connected to Chapters, Thematic Organizations and User Groups. This requires communication with volunteers all over the World, negotiating skills and cultural sensitivity and the ability to understand legal texts. We try to get a healthy mix of different skill sets in our members. The key skills/experience that we are looking for in candidate members, are typically the following: * Excitement by the challenge of helping to empower groups of volunteers worldwide * Willingness to process applications through a set, perhaps bureaucratic process * Readiness to participate in (movement roles) political discussions on the role and future of affiliates, models of affiliations, and similar questions * 5 hours per week availability [2], and the time to participate in a monthly ~2 hour voice/video meeting * International orientation * Very good communication skills in English * Ability to work and communicate with other languages and cultures * Strong understanding of the structure and work of affiliates and the WMF * Knowledge of different legal systems; experience in community building and organising is a plus * Effective communication skills in other languages are a major plus * Experience with or in an active affiliate is a major plus * Willingness to use full (real) name in committee activities (including reaching out to potential affiliates) when appropriate In 2012, new types of affiliations were introduced, and the role of the Committee has increased in guiding through volunteers towards affiliation models that empower them to further our mission, and making sure these models meet both the needs of the volunteers and the movement. We are looking for new people to help, who are not afraid of the workload and are motivated by helping other volunteers to get organized and form communities that further our mission around the world. Members are usually selected every twelve months for staggered two-year terms. The applications will be voted on by the current members not seeking re-election, taking into account comments put forward by the committee's members, advisers, WMF staff and board liaisons based on the above membership criteria. A final decision will be made by the end of the year, with new members expected to join on or around 1 January 2015. If you are interested, You can send your applications with your full name, contact data (e-mail address, wiki username), relevant experience and motivation letter to our treasurer Salvador Alcántar at salvador AT gmail.com by 30 September 2014. You will get a confirmation that your application came through. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email me and/or the committee as a whole. We are happy to chat or have a phone call with anyone about our work, if this helps them decide to apply. Please distribute this call among your networks, and do apply if you are interested. Best regards, Carlos Colina Chair, Affiliations Committee [1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee (please follow the links and familiarize yourself with our work) [2]: Our member standards of participation are at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Standard_of_participation_%E2%80%93_September_2012 -- *Jülüjain wane mmakat* ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain. Carlos M. Colina
Re: [Wikimedia-l] AffCom - Call for candidates 2015 [UPDATE]
Committees can have more than one mailing list, Bence. I suggest that Affcom rethink its approach: there's no good reason to assume that the order of candidacy has anything to do with selection, particularly if it goes to a second list, and your nominating subcommittee all has access. It is always a bad idea for only one person to manage anything that results in formal appointments. Accountability is important here. I don't think it will harm your process whatsoever to get a mailing list set up by the weekend, since self-nominations do not close until September 30. Indeed, I'm not entirely clear why this isn't happening onwiki, but I suppose there may be a reason for that which doesn't come through in the original email. Risker/Anne On 4 September 2014 15:34, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for the suggestion, Anne! As some background, the reason the private e-mail address is used instead of the AffCom mailing list is that it allows the incoming applications to be looked at all at the same time - thus not giving anyone an advantage or disadvantage based on the time they apply especially if there are any outgoing AffCom members who are reapplying for another term (which may not be relevant this time around, I am not sure, but we tend to rely on existing processes and improve on them iteratively where we can based on suggestions like yours). Having a @wikimedia.org address would be cool, but they are not allocated to individual volunteers - we did ask a while ago. AffCom itself does have a mailing list on a wikimedia server, which we are not using for this purpose.Setting up a separate mailing list for the purpose might be something to consider next year. Hope this helps. Best regards, Bence (A member of AffCom, with some experience on how this process runs, but this is my personal view) On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: A gmail address? I am sure if you ask nicely the committee can be granted a wikimedia.org email address through Mailman that will allow more than one person to handle applications. It could probably be done pretty quickly. Risker/Anne On 4 September 2014 14:35, Carlos M. Colina ma...@wikimedia.org.ve wrote: Dear all, Please note that, due a technical issue, direct your emails to salvador1...@gmail.com instead. Kindly apologize for the inconvenience. Regards, Carlos Sent from Samsung Mobile Original message From: Carlos M. Colina ma...@wikimedia.org.ve Date: 03/09/2014 19:58 (GMT+02:00) To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,Wikimedia Chapters general discussions chapt...@wikimedia.ch Subject: [Wikimedia-l] AffCom - Call for candidates 2015 (in the case you received it already, sorry for re-sending it, my Thunderbird crashed just as I clicked the send button :-( ) Dear all, The Affiliations Committee [1], the committee that is responsible for guiding volunteers in establishing Chapters, User Groups and Thematic Organizations and approving them when they are ready is looking for new members. The main focus of the AffCom is to guide groups of volunteers in forming affiliates. We make sure that the groups are large enough to be viable (and advise them on how to get bigger), review bylaws for compliance with the requirements and best practices, and advise the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation on issues connected to Chapters, Thematic Organizations and User Groups. This requires communication with volunteers all over the World, negotiating skills and cultural sensitivity and the ability to understand legal texts. We try to get a healthy mix of different skill sets in our members. The key skills/experience that we are looking for in candidate members, are typically the following: * Excitement by the challenge of helping to empower groups of volunteers worldwide * Willingness to process applications through a set, perhaps bureaucratic process * Readiness to participate in (movement roles) political discussions on the role and future of affiliates, models of affiliations, and similar questions * 5 hours per week availability [2], and the time to participate in a monthly ~2 hour voice/video meeting * International orientation * Very good communication skills in English * Ability to work and communicate with other languages and cultures * Strong understanding of the structure and work of affiliates and the WMF * Knowledge of different legal systems; experience in community building and organising is a plus * Effective communication skills in other languages are a major plus * Experience with or in an active affiliate is a major plus * Willingness to use full (real) name in committee activities (including reaching out
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments
I think there have been some pretty strong indications over the years that the current talk page system needs to be improved. However, there's been little discussion at all about whether Flow is that improvement. I have been following the development for quite a while, and it really looks like the system was developed backwards: essential functions for effective discussion that already exist and are used on a daily basis were not included in the initial designs, while the design incorporated plenty of bells and whistles that were considered desirable (although the reasons for desirability weren't necessarily universally held or particularly clear). This has resulted in a huge amount of re-engineering to incorporate (some of the) needed functions , and a lot of downplaying of the feedback given because the feedback has conflicted with the bells and whistles of the original design. There is also the fact that it would add another completely different user interface to the editing process, which increases barriers for existing users but even more so for new users. In other words, the issues with Flow are so deeply rooted in its core design and philosophy that it may not be possible to come up with a product that is actually useful on the projects we have to replace the discussion system we have. It seems that the Flow team has assembled the ingredients to make a chocolate cake with the hope that it will be a suitable replacement for vegetable stew. Risker/Anne On 5 September 2014 13:29, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: This somewhat circuitously brings us back to the subject. We have a chance to rollout Flow the right way. There are some questions that come to mind that might tell us if we're headed for a big win or a bigger debacle: 1) Is the WMF working with the community as closely and substantially as possible to make sure Flow is ready for primetime? 2) Is the community preparing itself for a major change, not only in interface, but to some degree in wiki-philosophy about how discussions are conducted- not to mention the notion that, while wiki software can do almost anything involving asynchronous online communication, it can't do everything as well as other interfaces? I think Flow will be particularly challenging. I deployed Liquid Threads on another site. I liked the threaded interface, as did others. But overall it was roundly rejected because it was harder to search (I only found out you have to add the namespace to the searchable namespace in LocalSettings.php later), and it invasively took over all discussion pages, among other headache. Problems like these could easily be addressed before a rollout, but they should be addressed as early as possible. It is notable, however, that the more our users used it, the more they seemed to like it. What can we do to make the Flow rollout as smooth as starting '''now'''? ,Wil On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 09/05/2014 11:12 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: On 25.08.2014 06:07, Marc A. Pelletier wrote: FLOW? Last I checked, Flow isn't deployed except as experiments in a handful of places, and is still in active deployment. But you're correct that this would constitute a replacement rather than a new method alongside the old. A long, long overdue and desperately needed replacement -- but a replacement nonetheless. That also explains the very deliberate development and feedback loop. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments
Wil, the tl;dr here is Philosophical beliefs aren't an effective underpinning for good software design. Start over. It's taken me a while to piece together much from the early discussions about Flow and figure out how we got to where we are now. It's my opinion that the root of the problem is that, much as the WMF wants to move toward being a software or tech organization, it really doesn't have very much history or experience in the kind of ground-up software design and deployment that is conducive to successful implementation. Tech organizations seeking to redevelop a core function normally start by gathering extensive data on the current system, identifying key functions that must be incorporated into the new system, understanding how the current system is used, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and ensuring that even early iterations will at least include the key functions and strengths from the soon-to-be-deprecated system. This baseline background research was never really done before investing in the development of Flow. Instead, Flow very much comes across as software being designed according to philosophical principles rather than function. The major deficiencies that have long been identified in the current discussion system (and that can be addressed by technology) are all able to be addressed in MediaWiki software or by extensions. Automatic signatures have been done by bots for years; indenting could be added to the editing function gadget and moved to an extension; much work has already been done on graceful resolution of edit conflicts. The ability to watchlist an individual thread or section of a page is more challenging but, I have been told, still possible. Several of the features identified as must-do have turned out not to quite work out. Automatic signature (something that is currently functional on Flow, but is not customizable) turns out to be more of a challenge when users are widely known by a signature line that doesn't match their username, and there is no method by which users can add an explanatory note to their signature such as formerly known as User:Whatever. The more efficient indenting has reduced possible indents to three levels, without exception; even in simple discussions, it's pretty clear that hasn't really worked out as it's often difficult to figure out who is responding to which post. Rigid predictable technical restrictions on who can edit what has resulted in inability to remove posts that are obviously unsuitable (there's no undo or revert function), replaced with a hide function that can only be applied by certain users that's practically a red flag for people to look-see what the problem edit is. With broader early discussion, some of these would probably have been fleshed out before getting this far. At the core is whether or not there is value in developing a discussion system that is radically divorced from any other interface used by the system. This is a philosophical question, and doesn't actually have that much to do with technology - and this conversation has never really taken place anywhere but by a bunch of guys who are into making cool software and, often as not, have little interest in the kinds of discussions that normally occur on Wikimedia projects. There has certainly never really been a discussion with the broader community about what would better serve in discussions. More importantly, some of the core assumptions and goals upon which Flow has been built[1] have very little to do with technology at all - plenty of research indicates that new users are driven away by the nature of discussions rather than the technological challenges of participation - and the lack of active broad community consultation means that the development team really doesn't know what's working well, what's problematic, and what kind of efficiencies experienced users are looking for. There's absolutely no basis to believe that Flow is in any way likely to encourage [more] *meaningful conversations* that support collaboration. (I'd love to see what kind of metrics would be used to assess the meaningfulness of conversations!) And the other key issue is a complete lack of recognition that the more UIs a new user needs to learn to develop competency, the lower the likelihood that they'll actually be able to develop the necessary skills to become fully functioning members of the editing community. The Wikimedia family has largely bought in to the necessity to introduce a WYSIWYG editing interface (that would be VisualEditor), and to recognize that wikitext editing needs to remain in existence as well. Adding a third one whose primary purpose will be to talk about the content being created using the other two is counterintuitive at best. Risker/Anne [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow On 5 September 2014 21:53, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote: Risker, what do you think might get us all back on track for Flow? Should the WMF
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF-community disputes about deployments
I'm not going to reply in-line here, because I think there's been an undoubtedly unintentional missing of the point here. Instead I will tell a story about a friend of mine. Some years ago, when her children were 3 and 4, their family had a lovely traditional Christmas Day, but something felt like it was missing. She told her husband about a tradition in her own family, where she and her siblings had (since they were very young children) always bought their mother a Terry's Chocolate Orange for Christmas - no matter what else her mom got, that was considered the one essential Christmas gift under the tree. Mom would glow with joy when she unwrapped it, and her most heartfelt thanks was for this specific present. Some time later in the day, she'd smack it open and everyone would get a piece. My friend thought it would be wonderful to start a similar tradition in her own young family. Her husband remembered this story in the weeks leading up to the next Christmas. He plotted with the children, now 4 and 5; he researched the best types of similar treats; and ultimately he helped the children obtain a chocolate orange made of the finest Swiss chocolate, filled with Grand Marnier liqueur, presented in an elegant marquetry box. Everyone was surprised when she burst into tears instead of smiles, and spent the whole day snapping at people and generally being a grouch. Finally her husband confronted her and insisted she explain her behaviour. What happened, of course, was that despite his best efforts, he'd missed the real purpose of the chocolate orange. He thought it was symbolic of the esteem in which the matriarch was held. Really, it was about the familial sharing of a special treat; the joy that the sharing brought to both the recipient and the presenters. But she couldn't share liqueur-filled chocolate with her children, and could barely bring herself to smack open the beautifully designed and presented chocolate. In other words, even though the gift looked brilliant on paper, it missed the point. I think the design of Flow is much like the liqueur-filled chocolates. It's missed the point of a discussion space on Wikimedia projects. All the use cases in the world, no matter how carefully researched and accounted for, will help you build a discussion system to effectively replace a discussion system if you don't understand that the one overriding, incontrovertible feature of the current system is that it is a page that acts just like all the other wiki pages, with all the same functions, and anyone who can work on one wiki-page can work on any of them. In other words, you're building something that is explicitly different from wiki-pages - but the expectation of the majority of the people who will use these pages is that they work exactly like any other wiki-page. This is what I mean when I say that you've not really understood how wiki-discussion functions, and you've created the bells and whistles without demonstrating an understanding of what the real, core functions of these pages are. The priority in design should focus on being able to produce identical results for basic wiki-editing and page management: we move pages, we protect them, we undo and revert edits, we fix typos and correct URLS and links in each other's posts, we quote each other and copy/paste, we modify each other's words when collaborating on the wording of a complex section of an article, we get rid of trolling, we delete and sometimes suppress personal attacks, we hat and archive individual discussions. Whether or not a post gets auto-signed is a frill compared to those basic functions, and it is inevitable that the deprioritization of the basics will result in people not really caring much about the frills (no matter how well they are executed) and focusing instead on what the new system doesn't do. This is the real parallel between Flow and Visual Editor - focusing on the difference between the new product and that it was intended to replace, instead of ensuring that things that had to be similar or identical were considered the first step of design. Risker/Anne On 6 September 2014 02:13, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 10:42 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: The major deficiencies that have long been identified in the current discussion system (and that can be addressed by technology) are all able to be addressed in MediaWiki software or by extensions. Automatic signatures have been done by bots for years; indenting could be added to the editing function gadget and moved to an extension; much work has already been done on graceful resolution of edit conflicts. The ability to watchlist an individual thread or section of a page is more challenging but, I have been told, still possible. Let's just acknowledge that the limitations of what can reasonably be layered onto wikitext-based representation of comments have not been fully explored, rather
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
On 7 September 2014 23:54, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 09/07/2014 01:57 AM, Diego Moya wrote: a major property of a document-centric architecture that is lost in a structured one is that it's open-ended, which means that end users can build new features and flows on top of it, without the need to request the platform developers to build support for them (sometimes even without writing new software at all; new workflows can be designed and maintained purely through social convention). And yet, after over a decade of open-ended design through social convention, the end result is... our current talk pages. Perhaps another decade or two will be needed before that document-centric architecture gives us a half-decent discussion system? Sorry if that sound snarky, but I have difficulty buying an argument that the current system has the potential to suffice when it has demonstrably already failed. It does no good to have the hypothetical capacity for a good system if, in practice, it's unusable. -- Marc I suppose the question really is, has it failed? On what basis are we saying that our current discussion system is unusable? Simply put, I'd suggest that the problem isn't the system, it's the discussion process itself that has points of failure. The replacement of actual discussion with templates is a point of failure, and that will not be improved by a change in the platform if all that happens is we use basically the same templates to have the same non-discussions. Nothing in the technology, either document-based or open-ended, will change the nature of the discourse itself; rude people will still be rude, erudite people will still be erudite, and none of will change the snark on Jimbo Wales's talk page. A significant percentage of Wikimedians rarely use talk pages at all (and a goodly number of those identify as exopedians), but no evidence that the percentage of Wikimedians who eschew social interaction has changed significantly, or that those with a low level of contribution to discussion space are doing so because they find the *technology* unappealing. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
On 8 September 2014 00:46, John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: snip . e.g. once it is beta quality, I am sure Jimmy Wales will want it enabled on his user talk page, which would increase exposure to, and acceptance of, Flow. ...or possibly far less complaining on his page. :-) Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
That's not a reasonable task, Marc. Newbies have an equally hard time editing content, too, and even when they succeed, on many projects they're very likely to be reverted and deluged with templated messages in response to a good faith attempt. There is no evidentiary basis to demonstrate that new users have a harder time participating in discussion than they do in content contribution. Independent studies seem to identify the nature of the discussions as being significantly more problematic than the technical means of participating. Nobody is saying that it is easy for newbies to participate on many of the larger Wikimedia projects. There are lots of ways that we can make it easier. The most obvious one is automatic signing of comments, and it is something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot didn't come into existence in a vacuum. Risker/Anne On 8 September 2014 09:58, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 09/08/2014 12:46 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote: While it may not be everybody's dream system, talk pages are quite usable, as demonstrated by a lot of people using them every single day. That's... not a demonstration of usability. Like many people, I found myself using some random blunt object not designed for purpose to hammer in a nail at least once; that speaks to the importance of getting the nail in, not the lack of need for a proper hammer. :-) Let's be honest here; I'm /highly/ computer-literate, and I've been using Mediawiki for some 11 years and I *still* find talk pages an annoyance at the best of times and they can be downright painful if there's anything like a large discussion in progress you are attempting to track/participate in. Between edit conflicts, increasingly confusing indentation, signatures that may or may not make separation between commenters clear... It's no surprise that newbies are scared away. Editing articles is already hard enough, anything that provides an extra barrier to participation hurts - especially when that barrier lies in the way of getting /help/. Talk pages, as a mechanism, are lacking every affordance that users expect of a communication medium. And no, that X thousand people have gotten used to their failings does not make them any better for the Y billion people that have not. But don't take my word for it! Find random newbies, and ask them to try the simple task of commenting on a discussion in progress without giving them guidance. They they flail around, or simply give up, remember that it's not /them/ who have failed -- I'm pretty sure they've participated in plenty of other online discussions before. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
Well, I think that the article editing project (i.e., VE) has a huge potential for also resolving a lot of discussion space issues. I don't see tacking on yet another UI as being a positive for new editor introduction or retention, and cannot think of another significant site that has two such wildly divergent interfaces (one very flexible and the other very rigid in structure), except perhaps in the mobile vs. desktop situation. I dunno, Marc. There are different expectations about signature, depending on the target group. We still have people being freaked out that article histories contain their username or IP (a form of automatic signature), so I'm not convinced that there's an expectation on the part of new users that anything they write anywhere will automatically be signed. Risker/Anne On 8 September 2014 10:24, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 09/08/2014 10:18 AM, Risker wrote: The most obvious one is automatic signing of comments, and it is something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot didn't come into existence in a vacuum. I suppose that's a philosophical divergence between us then - that sinebot even needs to exist to me is demonstration that the system is broken. You say that discussion isn't all that much harder than editing content. Even if I agreed with that (and I do not, edit conflicts in articles are much rarer than on talk pages - and usually easier to sort out), that's not a *good* thing! Participating in discussion should be much, *much* easier than editing articles: encouraging newbies to seek help and participate in the community *before* diving in anything but trivial article edits would be an immensely powerful retention tool! (Which isn't to say that editing articles doesn't *also* need a lot of help - but that's a different project). -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
Facebook? So tell me, how do you explain to new Facebook users about the different levels of privacy? Seems to me that I'm constantly hearing about people having a lot of problems with that, especially since it's supposed to be a key site feature. I'm with you about indenting, it's always been something strange. But signing posts is very natural for a lot of people, and many, many online sites encourage the development of canned signature lines - just as we do with preferences, although we put more constraints on them generally. Indeed, the majority of people in this thread have signed their posts. Indeed, Jon Davies' +1 in response to this post had a 588-character signature line, presumably added to his mail client preferences. Risker/Anne On 8 September 2014 11:43, Ziko van Dijk zvand...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, a) This discussion actually belongs to a talk page on Meta or Mediawiki.org, for example :-) b) All my experience in teaching Wikipedia tells me that the talk page system is absolutely outdated and inappropriate. It is, sorry to use this word, *ridiculous* that you have to teach people how to communicate technically in Wikipedia. I never had to explain to someone how to do that on Facebook... As other people have pointed it out already, if you are already accustomed to the Wikipedia user interface for a longer time, you might find it difficult to fully understand what is the problem for newbies. And how big this is a problem, and how important it is to solve this problem. Kind regards Ziko Am Montag, 8. September 2014 schrieb Risker : Well, I think that the article editing project (i.e., VE) has a huge potential for also resolving a lot of discussion space issues. I don't see tacking on yet another UI as being a positive for new editor introduction or retention, and cannot think of another significant site that has two such wildly divergent interfaces (one very flexible and the other very rigid in structure), except perhaps in the mobile vs. desktop situation. I dunno, Marc. There are different expectations about signature, depending on the target group. We still have people being freaked out that article histories contain their username or IP (a form of automatic signature), so I'm not convinced that there's an expectation on the part of new users that anything they write anywhere will automatically be signed. Risker/Anne On 8 September 2014 10:24, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org javascript:; wrote: On 09/08/2014 10:18 AM, Risker wrote: The most obvious one is automatic signing of comments, and it is something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot didn't come into existence in a vacuum. I suppose that's a philosophical divergence between us then - that sinebot even needs to exist to me is demonstration that the system is broken. You say that discussion isn't all that much harder than editing content. Even if I agreed with that (and I do not, edit conflicts in articles are much rarer than on talk pages - and usually easier to sort out), that's not a *good* thing! Participating in discussion should be much, *much* easier than editing articles: encouraging newbies to seek help and participate in the community *before* diving in anything but trivial article edits would be an immensely powerful retention tool! (Which isn't to say that editing articles doesn't *also* need a lot of help - but that's a different project). -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; ?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; ?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow
On 10 September 2014 07:54, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 8 September 2014 08:22, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: snip * potential to work with Notifications (tell me when anyone replies to this discussion) without needing individual pings or relying on spotting one talkpage edit in a busy watchlist - especially since on some pages a comment may come two years later. You know, Andrew, this was always something that I thought would be one of the real features of Flow, one of the things that could pull people over to supporting the transition. Until it got turned it on. I have 'watch-listed' the Flow-specific pages on Mediawikiwiki (MWW) and English Wikipedia for a very long time. When they turned on notifications at MWW about a week ago, my mailbox and notifications were flooded - I'm not talking just a little bit, I mean I got so many notifications that I couldn't sort out the ones that weren't related to that one specific Flow page - and that was with a single Flow stream being watched. I suppose I expected it to be like the email notices we get when a watched page gets edited on non-Wikipedia projects (e.g., Meta, MWW) - that is, the first change would generate an email/notification and nothing more until I went to the page itself. From what I've been told, this isn't something that Echo/notifications does or was meant to do. I know the Flow team is scrambling to try to reduce the overwhelming nature of the notifications. But it occurs to me that there was a reason why email notification was never turned on for Wikipedia projects - the sheer volume of messages that would be generated for users with hundreds or thousands of pages on their watchlists - and that's going to be just as much an issue for Flow as it would be if we just turned on those email messages today. Looks brilliant on paper, but reality is a different thing. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015
I'm with James and Isarra here. Only a small minority of Wikimedians are part of chapters and affiliated groups; being a member of an organized group has nothing to do with being a Wikimedian, or even directly with Wikimedia itself. This is an exclusionary conference - not only do you have to be a member of one of these groups (or otherwise receive an invitation based on role within the WMF structure or as a speaker) to attend, but the conference isn't even open to all members of those groups. Please do not call it the Wikimedia conference. It may be many things, but it's not that. Wikimedia Affiliates Conference will do fine. Risker/Anne On 11 September 2014 15:12, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote: On 11.09.2014 20:48, Isarra Yos wrote: I'm part of the Wikimedia movement, but there are no chapters nearby, nor are there any user groups that I know of relevant to my interests as yet. Thus there is nobody to represent me but myself. If this is Wikimedia, why can't I go to a Wikimedia conference? -I ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe You may create your own user group and participate. I suppose that all people participating in Wikimedia conference don't represent their own (personal) interests (or they should not). If you participate in a project it's not so hard to create an user group. All projects are based on collaboration of individuals, so it should be not hard to find other members sharing the same interests. Wikisource created its own, for instance, and they don't need a single chapter to represent their position. Regards -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015
On 11 September 2014 19:19, Charles Gregory wmau.li...@chuq.net wrote: On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Isarra Yos zhoris...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/09/14 22:06, Pete Forsyth wrote: Personally, I have no problem with the existence of the conference, but I find its name alienating. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, but clearly some others in this thread do. What Pete said. We could go into issues with the exclusionary nature itself, such as that it would exclude representatives of groups who ran into trouble becoming official - despite such a conference likely being one of the best venues for them to bring up and discuss with relevant others how to actually address or resolve that trouble that excluded them in the first place... ...but that sort of thing is much harder to resolve/address. The name, at least, is simple, and should also make a lot of the other problems less glaring in the process. Assuming the issue of the name is the sticking point ... What about the Wikimedia Meta-Conference? Or Meta-Wikimedia Conference? Or MetaWiki Conference? It's more about the organisations in the background than keep the movement going. It doesn't seem (from my second-hand knowledge of the event) that a regular editor would get a lot out of it? Regards, This is the same problem. It's usurping the Wikimedia name, and this proposal also usurps the Meta (all communities communication forum) name. It is neither for Wikimedia (as a whole) nor for Meta. It's for designated members of affiliates/chapters. It's okay for it to be what it is. But let's call it what it is. It's not about the colour of the bikeshed. It's about calling a bikeshed a community centre. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015
We do have a community centre. It's called Meta. It may not be a very elegant one, and there are definitely parts that can be improved, but it's our virtual community centre. Risker/Anne On 11 September 2014 19:54, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: But we don't even have a bikeshed or a community centre yet :-P On 12 Sep 2014 00:52, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 11 September 2014 19:19, Charles Gregory wmau.li...@chuq.net wrote: On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Isarra Yos zhoris...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/09/14 22:06, Pete Forsyth wrote: Personally, I have no problem with the existence of the conference, but I find its name alienating. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, but clearly some others in this thread do. What Pete said. We could go into issues with the exclusionary nature itself, such as that it would exclude representatives of groups who ran into trouble becoming official - despite such a conference likely being one of the best venues for them to bring up and discuss with relevant others how to actually address or resolve that trouble that excluded them in the first place... ...but that sort of thing is much harder to resolve/address. The name, at least, is simple, and should also make a lot of the other problems less glaring in the process. Assuming the issue of the name is the sticking point ... What about the Wikimedia Meta-Conference? Or Meta-Wikimedia Conference? Or MetaWiki Conference? It's more about the organisations in the background than keep the movement going. It doesn't seem (from my second-hand knowledge of the event) that a regular editor would get a lot out of it? Regards, This is the same problem. It's usurping the Wikimedia name, and this proposal also usurps the Meta (all communities communication forum) name. It is neither for Wikimedia (as a whole) nor for Meta. It's for designated members of affiliates/chapters. It's okay for it to be what it is. But let's call it what it is. It's not about the colour of the bikeshed. It's about calling a bikeshed a community centre. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Conference 2015
On 11 September 2014 22:07, Charles Gregory wmau.li...@chuq.net wrote: ... but the conference has been running for a few years, and has gradually evolved over that time, from primarily chapters, to other affiliate organisations, AffCom itself, FDC in recent years, etc. I don't think anyone is suggesting any revolutionary changes for the next one? Just a change in name to suit the current audience. What's the problem with the name Wikimedia being used? It is, after all, a conference involving Wikimedians. It appears the main complaint is the over-generic title Wikimedia Conference. Charles (User:Chuq) You are correct, Chuq. Wikimedia by itself is the entire movement. It's not a subgroup of the movement, which is what the chapters and affiliated organizations are as a group. We don't call the hackathons Wikimedia Conference, nor do we call the diversity conferences Wikimedia Conference, yet arguably they are even more representative of Wikimedia (the movement) than this particular conference is; while attendees are largely self-selected, they are open to anyone who has the means and will to attend. What's been known in the past as the Wikimedia Conference is essentially a by-invitation conference that is not representative of the movement. It's a big movement with lots of parts. A better argument could be made for renaming Wikimania the Wikimedia Conference than using that term for a conference restricted to one small branch of the movement. Many Wikimedians over the years, particularly those who are highly active in core movement activities but not chapter/affiliate activities, have felt disenfranchised and marginalized by having the name of the movement to which they make their contributions used for a conference at which they will never be welcome. And the other reason for changing the name to be more representative of what the conference is that it sets the tone for the agenda. The focus of the conference is, at least in theory, chapters and affiliated groups: what they can learn from each other, sharing of tools and ideas, making connections within and external to the Wikimedia movement, etc. It's not Wikimedia as a whole; it's far too exclusive (and exclusionary) for the movement as a whole to be the focus of the conference. From a different perspective, let's compare ourselves to other conferences that succeed because of their focus: A conference for gastroenterologists isn't going to call itself the medical conference, nor would a conference for neurosurgeons. They're going to wave the flag that they're focusing on a specific aspect of medicine. It's what we do with the diversity conference, and with the hackathons, too. You're not losing anything by changing the name: you're recognizing the specialty focus of the conference. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow: on featured article discussions
English Wikipedia rarely has more than 10-15 people participating in featured content candidate discussions/reviews. I'm hugely impressed that Hebrew Wikipedia has this level of participation in similar discussions. I suspect this is a higher level of participation than is seen on most projects, and wonder why editors at your project think that the current level of participation is too low. I also don't understand why you find your watchlist flooded using the current discussion process, but this may be a difference in preferences or in the setup of your specific project. Risker/Anne On 15 September 2014 05:12, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: My 2 agorot in the Flow or not Flow discussion: A prominent Hebrew Wikipedia user started a discussion about his impression that too few people participate in the discussions about nominating featured articles.[1] This Wikipedia has about 700 active and 150 very active editors[2]; the number of participants in these discussions is usually much less than twenty, often less than ten. Now I don't know what are other people's reasons not to participate in them; maybe a lot of them are just not interested in discussing featured articles. I know what my reasons are, though. I am quite interested in such discussions, and I would participate in them, but I don't, because in the few times I tried, it filled my watchlist with unnecessary notifications about other people's opinions. These opinions are relevant, but the way they are presented in the watchlist is unhelpful and I feel that it wastes my time. More structure in such discussions would encourage me to participate. The current version of Flow doesn't solve this problem: Its notifications are far from being well-adapted even for simple talk pages, and it doesn't even attempt to be adapted to a more structured decision-making discussion like Featured Article nomination. But I do believe that Flow is in the direction of resolving these problems. Flow will have to be carefully tweaked for each discussion scenario, but the general idea of having adaptable structured discussion is a good start. The frequent argument for remaining with the current talk pages and not moving to Flow is that the current talk pages work. Well, at least in this case they don't, and Flow could be a solution to that. [1] Roughly corresponding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TFAR [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaHE.htm -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Damon Sicore joins WMF as Vice President of Engineering
On 29 September 2014 16:32, Cristian Consonni kikkocrist...@gmail.com wrote: 2014-09-29 20:41 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com: Lila Tretikov, 29/09/2014 19:38: We are excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation now has a Vice President of Engineering. Damon Sicore will be filling this vital role. Nice to see this long story reach an end. Welcome, Damon. It will be interesting to see the experience from previous friend orgs merge into ours. +1 (for the lazy ones: «[Damon] spent six years at the Mozilla Corporation, where he grew a small team of 27 people to a team of more than 600 open source software engineers, technical leads, managers, and directors in developing Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla open source platform, Firefox for Android, and Firefox OS. Most recently Damon served as VP of Engineering at Edmodo, Inc., an educational content network, and was responsible for all web, platform, and mobile engineering, security, IT operations, support, and QA efforts.») Welcome Damon! I am admittedly amongst the lazy, so thanks, Cristian. Welcome, Damon. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] First Wikipedia Article has been Formally Peer Reviewed and Published
Umm, no, they aren't - at least not in the way the term is used in scientific subjects. Many articles are never reviewed in any systematic manner; in fact, that is the overwhelming majority of our articles. Those that are formally reviewed are reviewed in the context of meeting *Wikipedia* standards: formatting, manual of style, reliable sources as references (as opposed to, say, blogs). It doesn't contain most of the elements of peer review seen for scientific papers. Risker/Anne On 3 October 2014 15:56, Erlend Bjørtvedt erl...@wikimedia.no wrote: But remember: all Wikipedia articles are peer reviewed.. Erlend Bjørtvedt Den fredag 3. oktober 2014 skrev Vishnu visdav...@gmail.com følgende: Congratulations! A great model that could be emulated by many of us across other disciplines too. Cheers, Vishnu On Friday 03 October 2014 04:54 AM, James Heilman wrote: Article published by the journal Open Medicine http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewFile/562/564 Will soon be pubmed indexed. Editorial regarding the efforts are here http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/652/565 Hope these sorts of efforts will improve the reputation of Wikipedia and the number of contributors. I guess we will see. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- *Erlend Bjørtvedt* Nestleder, Wikimedia Norge Vice chairman, Wikimedia Norway Mob: +47 - 9225 9227 http://no.wikimedia.org http://no.wikimedia.org/wiki/About_us ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board of Trustee elections
On 5 October 2014 13:35, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: On 05.10.2014 14:24, John Mark Vandenberg wrote: On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Itzik - Wikimedia Israel it...@wikimedia.org.il wrote: Pine, IMO the minimum thresholds should be set at levels such that any staff member who has employed for a reasonable period of time is likely to be eligible, if they are engaging with the community on public projects, which is how a person becomes part of 'the community', and would be a suitable voter for community seats on the board. e.g. Danny Horn joined in April 2014, and now has 284 edits globally, albeit spread across seven projects. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/DannyH_(WMF) I think most of the staff (not sure specifically about Danny) have normal (not WMF) accounts which are eligible to vote, and they should not be voting from two accounts anyway. Cheers Yaroslav Speaking as one of the election monitors for the last election, we specifically checked for those types of duplicate votes, and would have de-activated the earliest vote(s) keeping only the last one. As it happens, nobody did that; the only votes we needed to strike were test votes.[1] Risker/Anne [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/Results ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quarterly review for Grantmaking
I do not think it is a good idea to have community members directly involved in these meetings. First off, any community member who participates is in no way representative of the broad international community as a whole, so granting individuals access gives them a radically disproportionate influence on the outcome of these meetings. Secondly, this is the team's ONE chance per quarter to have the undivided attention of the Executive Director, and they need to be able to communicate directly with her for the purpose of evaluation of their work. They have one hour, and they have to be able to ensure that they cover the essential points of their message. Even a few off-point questions can have a significantly adverse effect on their ability to update the ED on their progress on the responsibilities within their portfolio. This is part of the evaluation of the performance of the teams and its individual members, which is directly a responsibility of the ED and the executives, and is absolutely not a responsibility of the community. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask community members to put their questions on the talk pages of the minutes, and for the community to expect that questions relevant to the responsibility of the team will receive a response. Risker/Anne On 5 October 2014 14:13, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Tilman, Thanks for redirecting the thanks to Anna and Maria. Erik mentioned quarterly reviews accounting for community feedback: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/471142. Involving community members directly in meetings could be interesting if done carefully, and/or there could also be ways of amplifying the weight given to community feedback already received about projects like Flow when conducting quarterly reviews. I believe that Communications already wants to find someone who will perform sentiment analysis, and perhaps summarizing community sentiment for quarterly reviews could be part of their job. Let me quote the end of the notes from this quarterly review of Grantmaking: Anasuya: As we are. If we are moving to a much more proactive structure, we are going to need much more tech support internally. There needs to be a larger long term strategy around that. Lila: it should show success and then Product can invest. We need to integrate these projects in the communities. Let's say the library is a good one, someone in product needs to look at it and see what is the threshold of success and how much staffing do we need so that we can match it. And it seems like Growth may be the place to evaluate these things. Erik: We also need to look at your team's short term needs. Like I did on Friday with Frank Schulenburg and Floor with regard to the education program's needs. Lila: I think the next steps is to group about this and determine next steps. To me it sounds like there is further significant business to be discussed that is effectively a part of this quarterly review but time expired for this particular meeting, so I am hoping that there will be notes from the discussion that follows. In order for me to comment usefully, it would be good to know if that follow up discussion has already happened and if so what was decided in that discussion, or if that discussion is planned for the near future. Thanks, Pine On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 8:27 AM, Tilman Bayer tba...@wikimedia.org wrote: (For other readers: Pine appears to refer to the publication of the minutes from the quarterly review meeting for the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking team, announced in a separate thread at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-October/074824.html ) On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Tilman, thanks for those notes. As mentioned at the top of the page, these minutes were actually taken by Anna Koval and Maria Cruz. (I had been unable to attend this particular review due to a conflicting meeting.) So the thanks should go to them ;) There was discussion awhile ago about involving the community in quarterly reviews, I don't recall that discussion, do you have a link? and I have some questions and comments about this review, mostly for Lila. Sure! Feel free to leave them on the talk page - as community members have already been doing with other reviews this week. However, I would like to see the notes from the group mentioned at the end of the quarterly review before I make comments, or if there is an opportunity for community participation in the group, I would like to participate in a community capacity, if that is ok. (: Well, again, I wasn't at the meeting myself, but my interpretation of that sentence is that to group about this simply was a somewhat colloquial expression meaning to have a smaller followup meeting between staff from the Product team and from the Grantmaking team
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board of Trustee elections
On 5 October 2014 20:51, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 10/05/2014 08:24 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote: I checked a few of the WMF admin staff who have been employed more than a year, and many dont look likely to reach the 300 threshold, even with wikitech and foundation wikis included. An interesting question, I think, is /whether/ anyone from the Foundation ever voted that would not otherwise have had sufferage from the edits requirement? Pretty sure they have, Marc. It's difficult to tell for certain, because some of the applicable wikis where people might be posting are not included in the SUL grouping (for example, FDC wiki or other non-public wikis, Foundation wiki, etc). Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board of Trustee elections
John, please explain what your point is here. I mean really, picking on individual people who voted in the election? That's crossing the line, especially as they met the voting eligibility criteria for the election involved, which happened 16 months ago. I expect better from you. If you would like to propose different voting eligibility criteria for future elections, including the one that will take place some time around June 2015, please do so - perhaps consider offering to chair the election committee for next year. But insinuating that some people didn't deserve to vote, or shouldn't have been allowed to vote using a staff account, when that was in the eligibility criteria for many previous elections (not just the 2013 one) is just rude. As best I can tell, there were no concerns expressed in the lead-up the 2013 election about WMF staff having franchise. Risker/Anne On 6 October 2014 22:26, John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 October 2014 20:51, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote: On 10/05/2014 08:24 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote: I checked a few of the WMF admin staff who have been employed more than a year, and many dont look likely to reach the 300 threshold, even with wikitech and foundation wikis included. An interesting question, I think, is /whether/ anyone from the Foundation ever voted that would not otherwise have had sufferage from the edits requirement? Pretty sure they have, Marc. It's difficult to tell for certain, because some of the applicable wikis where people might be posting are not included in the SUL grouping (for example, FDC wiki or other non-public wikis, Foundation wiki, etc). It should be 'quite easy' to confirm wrt staff by looking for '(WMF)' and 'office.wikimedia.org' in the raw data, and filtering out any developers with merged changesets. https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/list/290?limit=2000 This is not easy for volunteers because some of the staff usernames are not SUL accounts, dont have links to personal accounts, and userpages dont include names, so sorry for any mistakes made in the following. MRay (WMF) - no SUL account, or account by that name on meta or wmfwiki - 'ray' doesnt appear on wmf:Staff GGrossmeier_(WMF) - no SUL account, but an account by that name does exist on wmfiwki, and belongs to dev Greg Grossmeier, but didnt have merged gerrit patches for that period AFAICS. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:%22Greg+Grossmeier+%253Cgreg%2540wikimedia.org%253E%22,n,z Ldavis (WMF) - SUL account, easily meets community voting criteria LVilla (WMF) - SUL account with a link to personal account 'user:LuisVilla', which from a quick count (I didnt use the eligibility checker tool) to have met either criteria of the 200 total edits or 20 recent edits. Jorm (WMF) - didnt check; quite certain they were eligible one way or another. Sbouterse (WMF), now Siko (WMF), and Seeeko - SUL accounts, achieved the community voting criteria with both staff and personal account. woot! JMathewson (WMF) - SUL account, easily meets community voting criteria KLove (WMF) - SUL account, may have amassed 200 edits across all projects with a few months of employment (I didnt use the eligibility checker tool to confirm this). borderline case; but had she known that she needed a few more edits to be eligible, my guess is she would have done the necessary edits with ease in order to qualify. Gyoung - not a SUL account, but does have SUL accounts GYoung_(WMF) and GayleKaren, but between them doesnt appear to have met the criteria for the 2013 election, but will easily meet the criteria for the 2015 election. Lcarr - not a SUL account, but lots of merged patches. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:%22Lcarr+%253Cgeekgirl%2540gmail.com%253E%22,n,0024c1aff0b9 The other exception is for WMF board members; the easiest way to check those is by username. While scanning the list I saw a few chapter people who voted from [country].wikimedia.org , so it would also be worth checking those to see if they were also eligible on content wikis. If chapterwikis are included in the eligibility counts, then foundationwiki and wikitech (and other WMF public wikis) should also be counted. -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Board of Trustee elections
On 7 October 2014 00:57, John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: snip IMO the election must be run by a third party, as happened prior to 2013, by SPI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_in_the_Public_Interest Adequate staff support from WMF is also needed. The elections have never, even once, been run by a third party. For two board elections, the voting was hosted off-site, although vote verification was still carrried out by internal volunteers (the election committee); on the last board election, to avoid the problems that arose with off-site hosting, the election key (which acts as a kill-switch for the election) was held by a third party. All the rest of the activities were done on-site by volunteers with some help from staff. All of the organization except for the hosting of votes has always been done internally. In my own post-mortem after the last election, I too suggested that the elections be hosted off-site; however, my reasoning was that it would be difficult to justify the expense of redeveloping SecurePoll sufficiently to make it straightforward enough to use given that it's only used once or twice a year. However, work has been happening on SecurePoll pretty much since the last election, so there's no benefit to hosting elsewhere, especially given the difficulties that were encountered in the past. External election hosting is a fairly big ticket item if it is being done well (and it would probably involve non-free software and as much if not more work on the part of WMF staff), although I do understand that there are certain advantages to going outside or more precisely not hosting on our own servers. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Vandalism on photographs of living people
Thanks very much for developing this Fae, it's a great idea. Risker/Anne On 17 October 2014 03:37, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Due to recent vandalism a new report on Commons for page patrollers has been started at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:F%C3%A6/BLP_overwrites. This page shows images actively used on English Wikipedia biography articles, where a new upload has overwritten the original by a newbie* account. The report should be automatically refreshed within 15 minutes of a new image upload/overwrite of this type. Instances of deliberate image vandalism of this type are rare, but important to handle promptly. If you have suggestions for improvement of this report, I would be happy to do my best to accommodate them. Notes: * For convenience newbie accounts have been arbitrarily taken as accounts with fewer than 200 edits on the English Wikipedia or fewer than 100 edits on Wikimedia Commons. * The report is maintained by Faebot and should be considered in a draft state as it may be moved to a more 'official' location or be taken on by more skilled bot operators. Cheers, Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikidata-l] Wikidata wins the ODI Open Data Award
Very exciting news. Risker/Anne On 5 November 2014 14:19, Pierre-Selim ps.hu...@gmail.com wrote: Kudos \o/ and keep on the good work! Pierre-Selim Message d'origine De: Lydia Pintscher Envoyé: mercredi 5 novembre 2014 19:09 À: Wikimedia Mailing List Répondre à: Wikimedia Mailing List Objet: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikidata-l] Wikidata wins the ODI Open Data Award Hey everyone :) I forgot to send this to wikimedia-l this morning as well... I'm incredibly happy to share the news with you that Wikidata has won the Open Data Award of the Open Data Institute in the category publisher. The world is starting to notice that we have something big with Wikidata. http://opendatainstitute.org/news/first-odi-open-data-awards-presented-by-sir-tim-berners-lee-and-sir-nigel-shadbolt Cheers Lydia -- Forwarded message -- From: Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de Date: Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 10:53 AM Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Wikidata wins the ODI Open Data Award To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. wikidat...@lists.wikimedia.org Hey everyone, Wow! We won! \o/ This is incredible. I am so happy to see this recognition of all the work we've put into Wikidata together. Magnus and I had a blast at the award ceremony yesterday night. Here's a picture of us on stage with Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee: https://twitter.com/opencorporates/status/529721444549550080 Here's Wikidata written in huge letters above the heads of the audience: https://twitter.com/marin_dim/status/529721419580854272 And here is Magnus and me with the price: https://twitter.com/wikidata/status/529723778558083074 I am delighted that they especially recognized the breath of topics Wikidata covers and that it has been developed in the open since the beginning. This award is for everyone in this community. We should be proud! This is a perfect start into year 3 of Wikidata :) 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 27/681/51985. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wiki Project Med
Actually, as I recall, email alerts for changes in articles has never been activated on English Wikipedia. Risker/Anne On 12 November 2014 22:53, Anthony Cole ahcole...@gmail.com wrote: Agree with all that, Svetlana - though we don't have a button at the top of articles making it easy for readers to enable email alerts. 99.999% of readers wouldn't know it was available. (This is something BLP subjects would appreciate too, I'm sure.) Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 7:17 PM, svetlana svetl...@fastmail.com.au wrote: Thanks Anthony for sharing your ideas! Anthony Cole wrote: Svetlana, presently we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Lists_of_pages/Articles which reports all changes to articles tagged on their talk page as of interest to WikiProjedt Medicine (about 33,000 so far). This is a grand tool. Though 1) it doesn't filter for new page creations (would it be nice to have a new page tag?), and 2) is not as grained as subcats would be (where people would be able to pick a more narrow topic to watch). Anthony Cole wrote: I'd like all our medical articles to have a button at the top saying email me when this article changes, so interested experts could easily adopt a few articles. Yes, this is a watchlist thing, it's already there (interested people can enable email delivery). ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising banners (again)
These banners are problematic in that they are likely to trigger automatic filtering of Wikimedia sites by certain types/brands of net nanny/anti-spam/security software - including software used by many employers, schools and libraries. And once the sites are filtered/blocked, it will be difficult if not impossible for many users (particularly if they don't have administrator permissions for the site) to lift the filter/block. Getting donations is not more important than keeping the sites accessible. Please reconsider. Risker/Anne On 26 November 2014 at 15:33, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Banni%C3%A8rePopUpWikipedia2014.png Gah. Yes, I understand that more obnoxious banners means more money faster and presumably a shorter overall campaign. I also understand that we're only punishing certain large wikis with these banners and that these banners typically set a cookie so that they'll only appear once for most users. Still, there's an element of basic human decency that must be incorporated into our banner designs. Obscuring the page content is not cool. Pop-ups (even ones that stay in the same window) are not cool. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] FDC funds allocation recommendation is up
Gerard, we hear you. On the other hand, we have the example of Wikimedia France, which has recently told us about a highly innovative event that features community outreach, content creation, editing workshop, and sufficient fundraising to pay for itself. We know that, despite the issues of payment processing, several European chapters have been receiving their national equivalent of Gift Aid for direct donations, and it is worthwhile for others to look into this and see if there are opportunities there. (There might not be, because this is location-specific.) Some countries have government-supported opportunities with relatively lightweight application processes to improve digital content in certain fields, whether photography, literature, or targeted groups. Wikidata would not have come to be without external funding, even though a significant portion of its initial and continued funding is supported by grants directly from the WMF or as part of the FDC recommendations. At the same time, although I believe that chapters (especially those with budgets in the FDC range) should at least be able to demonstrate that they've investigated opportunities, I also am aware that in many regions the opportunities might be very limited, or could require completion of highly complex documentation with only a small chance of success. (Anyone thinking that the FDC asks for a lot of documentation has never completed the paperwork for a typical research grant.) But chapters are the organizations best placed to research and analyse their own local fundraising opportunities, and to figure out which ones are worth pursuing from both a financial and programmatic point of view. Fundraising can, indeed, be expensive. We do have to keep in mind that this is a big, global movement, the available financial resources are *not* unlimited (contrary to popular belief), and that there has to be some sort of evidence that the money being distributed in large grants is generating demonstrated results within the movement. The nature of those results will vary from grantee to grantee. Risker/Anne On 26 November 2014 at 15:06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Lodewijk when the funding process stifles innovation and, it does by design. The process is suboptimal. When the argument is made that the chapters are second class citizens BECAUSE they are foced into a yearly straight jacket and BECAUSE they forcibly lost their involvement in fund raising. Arguably it makes sense to look for alternative funding. However, the chapters are for their projects dependent on WMF projects where they do not have any control either. All GLAM projects rely on LABS and it is NOT considered a production environment.This is best expressed that with the move of Yuvi Panda to the USA, the availability of LABS personnel will consequently become worse. The quality of the up time of services is not good. My observation that chapters are second class citizens is very much based on their involvement in critical processes. When the German chapter is denied its funding, Wikidata was cherry picked for full funding. This denies the ownership of the German chapter of this project. Several chapters are independent of WMF funding. They do not answer to the community that wants to own them and determine for them. When the Toolserver was ended in favour of Labs, it lost its involvement in hardware and services. This point is NOT about the quality of Labs but about the involvement of chapters. It was removed.and nothing remains that empowers chapters in this. In discussion we hear about the community about committees but there is no sense at all of the chapters as an equal partner.This is imho not healthy for us as a movement. Thanks, GerardM On 26 November 2014 at 19:45, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I don't quite agree. Raising funds from institutions can sometimes even help improve your impact - it forces you to think beyond the usual lines of thought. It makes you think about further partnerships, which might also help your mission. In the longer run, it makes you less dependent of a single party, which helps with answering the constantly changing requirements for reporting to the Wikimedia Foundation (which are often with good intentions, but the constant changes also cost time). But yes, there are instances where getting a grant costs more effort than you would like. At the same time, it helps you to be more flexible: the annual grants process is quite inflexible, as it limits the funds for a whole year - for the basis this is great, but for innovative projects sometimes external funding is more effective. Lets not reject the idea of external funding out of hand. There are positive sides and of course also negative sides. Lets first aim for grants where the positive sides outweigh the negative sides, also locally, and when the balance goes
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why is bank transfer no longer possible?
Ummm. We have all kinds of ways for people to donate, and the process for transferring is pretty clear. Having been in a situation where I had to make bank transfers, I felt honestly like I was handing over the keys to the kingdom just for the right to pay someone money: far more personal information was required than is needed for any other means of payment that I've ever used. Banks in Canada regularly call their customers for transactions under $5 because fraud is so common - and that is with chip cards and PINs. Risker On 1 December 2014 at 00:08, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, IMHO we need to advertise how people can transfer money to us. It requires an account number. Now if the USA is not able to accommodate this, FINE, let us do it in Europe at least.. WHAT AM I MISSING HERE ? Thanks, GerardM On 1 December 2014 at 03:38, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: On 11/30/2014 1:14 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, An IBAN number is NOT a credit card ... You need a ping number in combination with some smart card functionality in order to make it work.. The combination generates a number that is always different.. You seem to have misunderstood the scenario I laid out. I'm not talking about people using the IBAN to steal money out of a Wikimedia account, I depend on the bank to have security robust enough to prevent that. The scenario I'm discussing involves people using the IBAN to fraudulently pay money to Wikimedia from someone else's account, such as a credit card. That account does not necessarily have an IBAN or chip-and-pin security, and at any rate whatever security it has was already breached. The payment would just be a method for the fraudsters to verify the success of the breach. The result would be added costs to Wikimedia and to the financial institutions involved, in order to identify and reverse the fraudulent transactions. To respond to some of the other questions raised about my scenario: This was a risk scenario I presented to answer the question, How can posting a bank account number lead to fraud? It may or may not have been a factor in the decision to not publicly post the IBAN, I don't know. I'm also not suggesting that this scenario is unique to IBAN, it could affect any type of account number that accepts payments (for example, accounts you might have for various utility services, such as water, electricity, telephone, or internet). It's also possible thru PayPal, of course, and that's the reason for having a $1 minimum donation requirement, among other protections. I don't know if there are difficulties with establishing comparable security around the IBAN, or if it's more a matter of a cost-benefit analysis indicating that it's worth the resources to deal with this for donations via Wikimedia's online payment form, but not for donations directly to Wikimedia's bank account. Also, I'm no expert on EU regulations, but I do observe that according to the European Payments Council, it seems payees receiving SEPA credit transfers are advised to communicate the IBAN only where necessary: http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/index.cfm/sepa-credit- transfer/iban-and-bic/ (and likewise for payers making direct debit payments). It may simply be that the fundraising team has been advised that this is more consistent with providing the IBAN upon request, rather than posting it on the website. Not to disparage what may be common practice at other organizations, but that does seem like a natural conclusion to draw from that guidance. --Michael Snow ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising banners (again)
On 2 December 2014 at 20:27, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 2 December 2014 at 06:53, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: All -- we will not have a pop-up banner. And how exactly would you describe this then? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oversized_donation_notice.png Pop-ups are generally considered to obscure content and prevent the user/reader from proceeding until some sort of action is taken. I don't know about you, but for me none of the content was obscured (it was just pushed down further on the page, but it was all readable), and I did not need to do anything to see the content or use other functions like edit or search. So no, I don't think this is a pop-up. It's big, and I still think the message could be improved in a way that doesn't sound as though the funds go to feeding the caffeine addictions of WMF staffers, but this is a lot better than the version we saw just under a week ago. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising in the UK
On 5 December 2014 at 13:25, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Michael On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Michael Maggs mich...@maggs.name wrote: Over the last few years the Foundation has decisively moved away from allowing local chapters to take part in the on-screen fundraiser, preferring to centralise the work in spite of the loss of the available local tax reliefs (such as Gift Aid in the UK). Many chapters, including the UK, would have liked to have been part of the fundraiser, but the previous ED, Sue Gardner, determined that that would not be permitted. WMUK regretted that decision, and we responded to it here: https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Open_letter_to_Sue_Gardner. The question was raised by Nick over at the WMF Board noticeboard.[1] There Sj states: The [UK Fund for Charities channels gifts to validated non-UK based charities. We were able to use their service this year for large Wikimania-related donations. They charge 1% for large gifts, making this an effective way to receive gift aid. However this is not a great solution for individual donors: for gifts under £100, they charge up to 20%, consuming most of the gift aid. $500,000 is quite a lot of coin to be missing out on; and the WMF is obviously looking at ways to get this gift aid (whilst bypassing WMUK), just without registering themselves in the UK, which would see it having to comply with European directives on numerous issues. There's more to this story me thinks ;) Russavia Before getting all excited about losing $500,000first we need to consider some facts. Fact #1 - in every country that I'm aware of (and I've been asking around a bit recently), donors have the *option* of adding Gift Aid or whatever local equivalent is available, but it is not an automatic option. Therefore, there might be the *potential* to raise significant dollars through this process, but it is not a guaranteed amount of money or a guaranteed percentage. Offsetting this is the cost of actually collecting the donations. This is a very significant factor, and for many chapters the cost of operating the fundraiser locally with a remittance to the WMF is prohibitively expensive. They have to worry about hosting costs, staffing, banking, lawyers, accountants, issuance of receipts, auditors, legislated requirements as to how the donations are usedand that's just what I'm aware of off the top of my head. Unless there is excellent evidence that the additional donation outweighs the cost of collecting it *for the movement as a whole, not just the chapter* - and there was significant work done on this when the opportunity for chapters to do this before was withdrawn - then it is not in the best interests of the movement to operate this way. We also have to keep in mind that there are many chapters that simply have no opportunity to participate in this kind of fundraising (e.g., those in countries with no similar government scheme) and there is absolutely no opportunity for thematic organizations or user groups to participate in this type of fundraising. So yes, it is worth investigating, and Lisa Gruwell has already answered some locally-specific issues. But there were a lot of reasons why this option was heavily restricted in the past, and it wasn't just because certain chapters were having governance issues. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons copyright extremism
Fae, Steven hasn't been a WMFstaffer for some months. Luis is, but he appears to be speaking in his staff role. Risker/Anne On 11 December 2014 at 13:14, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Making defamatory comments about Commons volunteers on this list is not terribly productive, nor a very nice thing to do when anyone is free to express their point of view in the deletion request so that a closing admin can consider all rationales put forward, or raise it on the user's talk page. I commented in two chocolate 'packaging' related deletion requests today, before this thread started, my opinion being to keep. Why don't you join me in keeping these images in time for Christmas by making positive comments and interpreting Commons policies in a non-hostile environment? * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Belgian_pralines_boxes.jpg * http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_in_Category:Tim_Tam Alternatively, you can work to improve policies and guidelines on commons. One key benefit is that if photographs you uploaded were deleted under old policies but could be kept under new policies, they can all be considered for undeletion. I suggest a good starting point is better guidelines to interpret what significant doubt means in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Precautionary_principle P.S. Stephen, you are young and handsome, in fact rather dishy to my ageing eyes. Good for you. Keep in mind that your fellow volunteers might not have been born so lucky, and that being young and pretty all too soon passes into memory, sigh. P.P.S. It might be politic for WMF employees to avoid using their staff accounts to join in with whatever the latest witch-hunt happens to be. I find it disturbing to see official accounts being used to inflame arguments, when in other circumstances the same accounts are used to give official positions that affect the whole Wikimedia community. Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Most obnoxious banner yet
On 31 December 2014 at 11:33, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Really. Who thought it was a good idea to MAKE THE BANNER FOLLOW YOU DOWN THE PAGE? There must be an identifiable person who actually said yes, this is a good decision, I shall make this decision. - d. It's not doing that for me (Canada, using an old IE browser). However, it IS ignoring my previously set don't show me this again cookie. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Most obnoxious banner yet
On 31 December 2014 at 18:43, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Megan Hernandez mhernan...@wikimedia.org wrote: The blue banners at the top of the page do show up more than one time. If you close these banners, you won't see anymore banners. That's not my experience here. I've clicked the blue banner away at least three or four times this month. It keeps coming back. I've had the same experience as Andreas - I have had to inactivate the banners multiple times on every computer I use. In fact, I've had banners almost 90% of the time when I go to Wikipedia without logging in, cookies or no cookies. Frankly, I am increasingly of the belief that Fundraising has sounded a klaxon alarm without any concern whatsoever about *next year*. The fact that the editorial community doesn't see the banners on a regular basis anymore is the only thing that has kept the voices of the community quiet; we tend not to complain too much about things we don't see. Frankly, I'd rather the fundraiser fell short of its goals (recognizing that there would be other impacts within the organization) than continue the current trajectory; I've had complaints from just about everyone who knows I edit Wikipedia about the banners, including a handful who said they were former donors who decided not to give this year because of how obnoxious the banners were. There's little doubt in my mind that more and more people are blocking those banners already - the more annoying they get, the more people block them, and the smaller the potential contribution pool. We're starting to chase our own tails here. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who are the nicest people on our projects ?
On 5 February 2015 at 10:47, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, After reading an interesting related discussion on GenderGap, I have queried the top 10 users of the thanks feature last month, on both the English Wikipedia and Commons. Snapshot image attached and report link below. Perhaps someone might think of a suitable barnstar and award these folks for being nice? :-) Link: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:F%C3%A6/sandboxoldid=149050523 P.S. This is a long query to run, taking 20 to 30 minutes due to the nature of the logging tables. However if someone wanted to make a monthly summary on-wiki somewhere, part of an active be nice campaign, I would be happy to set up an automated monthly report (if someone discovers this is already reported somewhere, that's cool we can use that). Fae This is interesting stuff, Fae - thanks for sharing, and for doing all the legwork to produce the report. It's a much more interesting metric than a lot of others that get collected! Perhaps colleagues on other projects might want to borrow the script and see the results there. I'll admit to sharing Rich's curiosity about who was most thanked. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Most obnoxious banner yet
We now have at least a partial understanding of the reason the fundraising campaign was extended, which is found in the minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting of November 2014.[1] Board members asked Lila and Lisa to consider and evaluate ways to raise additional revenue to increase the reserve for future needs of the organization and movement, including the possibility of adjustments in fundraising methods as appropriate. Risker/Anne [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2014-11-21#Executive_Update_from_Fundraising ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: A new structure for WMF Community Engagement
Thank you very much for sharing this, Lila. A special thank you to Anasuya for all of her work in the grantmaking area. She has been a driving force, and her contributions will be missed. Congratulations to Luis, Siko and Asaf in their new roles. I will look forward to working with all of them in their new capacities. Out of curiosity, and bearing in mind that the WMF has put itself forward as having its major focuses on techology and grantmaking, is there a reason that the person leading the third-largest group of staff, in one of these priority areas, is a Senior Director when smaller departments have Chiefs and the other focus departments have VPs?The organizational chart is getting a bit tricky to follow. :-) Risker/Anne On 19 February 2015 at 17:15, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: Dear Wikimedians, Among the WMF’s top priorities for 2015 is strengthening our engagement with Wikimedia editors and volunteers. Today we are taking the first step by bringing together the people who know our communities best and asking them to break barriers and improve engagement. Everyone at the WMF who carries responsibilities directly related to the communities will join a new Community Engagement department. I have asked Luis Villa to lead the Community Engagement organization as the Senior Director of Community Engagement, reporting to me. Promoting from within the WMF for this critical role will allow us to leverage the knowledge and experience with our communities and reinforce the strengths of our people. Luis’s experience with communities is lengthy and deep. He has been involved in open communities since the late 1990s, from communities as small as the Lego Mindstorms hackers to those as large as Mozilla. He worked in open communities as a lawyer, a programmer, a bugmaster, an engineering lead, a community leader, and a board member. Luis has performed exceptionally within the Foundation and supported some of our most fruitful community engagements. The Grantmaking, LE, Education, Community Advocacy and Community Liaisons teams will join the new Community Engagement department [2] under his leadership. Unfortunately, Anasuya Sengupta -- our beloved leader of grantmaking -- will be leaving us due to personal health concerns at the end of March. We will invite you soon to celebrate her time with us, her work at the WMF and the deep insight she brought to the Foundation. We are saddened to see her go. The team she has nurtured will provide an important foundation for our upcoming work. Siko Bouterse will move up to lead the day-to-day work of the Grantmaking team as Director of Community Resources, supervising all department Grant programs and the Global South strategy. Siko has been instrumental in innovating programs at the WMF, including initiatives like the Teahouse[1] and the IdeaLab[2] combining vision with strong support for volunteer community, tough decision making, and great project management skills. These changes are an opportunity to improve the coordination of our work supporting the communities. To accelerate this, I have asked Luis to lead an internal “tiger” team to better understand the needs, concerns and priorities of our volunteers, and to develop recommendations for future programs. This work will be shared with all of you as it becomes available. Please join me in congratulating Luis and Siko and in supporting our teams. The Wikimedia communities are what makes the projects strong, unique, and irreplaceable. This is the next step forward in our support to them, and in service of our mission. Lila [1] As Director of Community Resources, Siko will oversee the IdeaLab, Annual Plan Grants, Project and Event Grants, and Travel and Participation Support. Her team will include Katy Love, Winifred Olliff, Alex Wang, Janice Tud, Jonathan Morgan, and Asaf Bartov. Asaf will also take on a new title as Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities. [2] Rachel DiCerbo, Philippe Beaudette, Siko, and Anasuya’s other direct reports, and their respective teams (CL, CA, and Grantmaking/GLEE) will report to Luis. The Engineering Community team will be part of the tiger team but will continue to report to Engineering. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
BumpingI do not see any response on this mailing list from the Grantmaking team, and I can't actually find very much about this entire plan on the Grants portal at Meta (which may say more about the grants portal than about the dissemination of the plant). However, since this is something that has the potential to affect a lot of Wikimedians (individuals, chapters, and other affiliated groups)...as well as women (apparently)... it would be really nice to see what is going on. Some people have mentioned that they received an email. Perhaps it could be forwarded to this mailing list? Risker/Anne On 3 January 2015 at 13:35, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: For everyone here: I've asked our Grantmaking team to comment and clarify the details of this plan. On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Answering to Teemu and Chris: I do think that the for Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Art it is safe to claim that if we organize it the way we would always do, it would still tip the gender balance in our community a little more to the female side. However, I disagree that this should be a main consideration, because I think that would be true for so many outreach projects. Focusing on that would be a pity and a distraction imho. Also, for most participants we don't know the gender, and we don't want to know the gender (because asking for it alone can scare people away) - except for a sample of them, who happen to answer the survey afterwards. All data on that is quite shaky. If necessary, I could easily make a case why WLM is a wonderful gendergap project - the point is that I don't want volunteers to waste their time on making such cases, but rather let them be innovative, come up with new ideas instead of rebranding existing ideas on something like the gendergap. My problems are more fundamental than 'I can't get money for my specific project'. So Chris: yes, these people do a lot for reducing the gender gap in our projects. Also, Wikimedia organizers tend to hop between projects - their next might be more focused on a topic that is popular with women, if their current idea isn't yet. Drawing them into a topic in a positive way (what we do is cool! Join us!) tends to be more successful than telling them they are not allowed to do other stuff (we won't fund you at all unless you do this specific theme). Prioritisation sounds great, but that only works that way if you have one clearly defined pool of resources, that you can actually control. What do you think is the major bottle neck in organizing activities in the Wikimedia movement? In my experience, that is not money, or even WMF staff capacity (even though it is a limiting factor sometimes), but the primary bottle neck is volunteer organizers (or editors). And volunteer time is not a resource you can easily 'control'. If you want to influence it, the most effective way is by persuading the volunteers why another angle is more interesting, more fun, more effective. Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:11 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com wrote: Like Bence, I would be interested to see how this kind of experiment in WMF grantmaking works out. And also like him I would be a little surprised if something like this is implemented with no notice period. A couple of responses to Lodewijk's post; with people confirming my fear that this will likely undermine the community support (or at least support by the 'organizing community') for gendergap-related projects in general - be it out of frustration, compensation or jealousy. Out of interest, were any of these people doing anything at all to support the reduction of the gender gap in the first place? ;) I called it a 'negative campaign' in my emails because the focus is not about actively boosting one type of requests (which is the claim), but rather about making it harder to do something unrelated to it in the hope that people instead will choose for the easy way, and organize a gendergap related event. Equally, if you have limited resources, prioritising one thing means reducing attention to something else. So saying we shouldn't work on the gender gap if anything else gets less atention as a result is logically equivalent to saying We shouldn't work on the gender gap. Regards, Chris ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Most obnoxious banner yet
On 12 January 2015 at 15:59, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 Jan 2015, at 11:25 pm, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: Now that the 2014 Fundraising campaign has finished and which, according to a WMF blogpost from a week ago, surpassed our goal of $20 million According to the data provided at https://frdata.wikimedia.org/ the Foundation seems to have taken $30.6 million over the period from December 2 2014 to December 31 2014. This is $10.6 million more than the $20 million fundraising goal indicated in the blog post. (At any rate, that's the sum I get; I'd welcome anyone double-checking my math.) There is no scenario I can come up with where this is actually a good result. Sure, an extra $10.6 million might be nice in the bank, but it massively exceeds budget. The fundraiser met its goal, with plenty to spare, on December 17. And yet we put our readers and our users through another two weeks of fundraising. Given that we were already really pushing the goodwill of the broad Wikimedia community (that includes the users of our products)well, as I say, this is not a good result. People were putting Wikipedia on Adblock because of those banners, and they were doing it long after the goal had been reached. I'd say I was speechless, but actually I am working extremely hard to hold my tongue here, awaiting an explanation for this. And yes, I think the Wikimedia community deserves to know why this happened. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month gender gap project-related decision
I have one simple question: if the Grants program was to focus on some other key area rather than the gender gap, would we be having this discussion about how horrible it is to waste time this way? Would we see throwing up of hands in this way if the focus was, say, requests from the Global South? A focus on getting great bots built and working across wikis? A focus on events and processes for media collection? (Incidentally the latter more or less happens anyway with several groups applying for funding for WLM within a narrow period...) Frankly, there's not a single thing I've read, or a single objection I've seen raised, that wasn't about how unnecessary it is to focus on women. I don't think we've ever heard that about the global south, or non-European languages, or a lot of other areas where there are acknowledged biases. Risker/Anne On 8 January 2015 at 02:07, mcc99 mc...@hotmail.com wrote: Dear fellow Wikipedia devotees, While I'm new to this list, I've been an avid fan and proponent of Wikipedia and all the great service it gives people since it launched. People can learn not just all the basics of nearly any topic imaginable, but for a large number, readers can with diligence become expert on more than a few and save themselves the cost of tuition/training. All this, in addition to satisfying their curiosity about millions of subjects. That said, it doesn't matter who writes the content on Wikipedia so long as it's relevant and factual. Unlike the published, single-authority edited encyclopediae of the past, Wikipedia allows anyone with relevant information to contribute to it. Their additions or other edits are checked by volunteers to make sure the edit isn't a defacement, irrelevant, patently unfactual, or unverifiable. They are typically left as written or maybe edited only for grammar/spelling. Wikipedia is a rare success story in democracy of knowledge. If one feels moved to contribute, they do. If not, they don't. It's like voting in a sense, though it's true people in democracies should perhaps take the opportunity to do so more often. But it's up to them. Like voting or anything else, to single out a particular group of people based on their indelible characteristics as being desirable as contributors to any field implicitly devalues the contributions not just of those currently contributing who don't fall into that category, but also says to any other group of a particular identity that you care more about the group you're trying to get more involvement from than them. Identity politics is unfortunately a fact of our current political climate and I hope one day we can, as MLK Jr. hoped, judge one another not by skin color (and I'd add gender, sexuality, and a few others), but by content of character. In the context of Wikipedia, this would translate to the veracity and applicability of contributions made to the vast Wikipedia knowledge-base -- not who in particular is doing the contributing, nor their indelible characteristics of person. Because identity politics is today part of general electoral politics doesn't mean it need be for anything else, and especially given how such things as a person's ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., say nothing about what they know about or can do, I don't see how it's relevant to the veracity and applicability of Wikipedia's knowledge base. I don't care that, for example, a black person (Charles Drew, MD) came up with the process of creating blood plasma, an innovation that has saved millions of lives. He was tragically and mortally injured in a car accident, however, and so his potential future achievements were lost to humanity. (He was not refused treatment for his injuries at the hospital he was taken to because of his ethnicity, as is widely but falsely believed; he was just so badly injured that he died. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Drew#Death ). I also don't care that Adm Grace Hopper (USN) wad female, only that she wrote the first computer language compiler so programmers of lesser brain power than her (such as myself) could go on to program computers without struggling with binary switches and punch cards. Her contributions were what was important, not her gender, skin color, or anything else as far as her professional achievements go. If you ask any RN the names of the greatest contributors to the nursing profession, you'll get a stream of women's names. To suggest that nursing needs more men or else it won't be able to achieve its greatest potential would be a crass and inaccurate insult to the many thousands of women who have made modern nursing what it is. Of course there have been and will be male nurses who stand out as contributors, but only a very small percentage, probably in keeping with the ratio of men to women in nursing. And yet, despite the high salaries RNs command, are there any gov't-sponsored initiatives to get men
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF Finance Fellows to develop first-ever movement-wide financial report and metrics
So I read the page that is linked. It says that their *DRAFT* report will be completed February 28. It does not say that it will be publishing its draft report. Presumably the draft will be reviewed by selected partners (particularly the WMF) before the final report is completed. That is due March 19. You have no reason to believe that the draft report hasn't been completed. Perhaps you could hold your concerns about deadlines being missed until the final report is due. Risker/Anne On 1 March 2015 at 21:06, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Keegan, May I point out that the term on the timeline is deadline, as in commitment, not as in estimate. I view commitments as serious business. I believe that in IEGCom we met our deadlines every single time when I was on that committee, the Signpost is published weekly with rare exceptions, and there were a number of nights as a WMF intern when I got less than 6 hours of sleep in my semi-successful efforts to keep my commitments to WMF and to my other employer. ( I do thank WMF for that internship, it was a good experience overall). Of course there may be variances from schedules on occasion (people do get sick, have their cars break down, etc), but I believe that Lila made a point in the All Hands that projects are to be completed on time, and I think it's reasonable that commitments should be kept whenever possible. I try to do this myself and I hope that WMF takes its commitments seriously too. The report of the Finance Fellows will inform some of my thinking about Cascadia's budget and it would be helpful to have the draft published early this week. Thank you, Pine On Mar 1, 2015 5:38 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Finance Fellows, The timeline for your work says that your draft report should be finished. May we look at it? I am very curious about your findings. Thanks (: Pine I'd like to point out that the timeline estimates completion by February 28. This is (hemispherically) March 1. And a Sunday. I suggest some patience :) -- ~Keegan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan This is my personal email address. Everything sent from this email address is in a personal capacity. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] New Wikimedia Foundation report on activities in 2014
Actually, it appears it is also published here: https://meta.wikimedia. org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation (Heather Walls sent me the link). This is good - but the document on Commons points to a serious usability issue; the combination of faint print and small font made it unreadable for me, a person with fairly normal vision. The Commons page should probably also have a link to the Meta page. Risker/Anne On 2 April 2015 at 16:35, Jan Ainali jan.ain...@wikimedia.se wrote: Risker: For your convenience: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ainali/sandbox *Med vänliga hälsningar,Jan Ainali* Verksamhetschef, Wikimedia Sverige http://wikimedia.se 0729 - 67 29 48 *Tänk dig en värld där varje människa har fri tillgång till mänsklighetens samlade kunskap. Det är det vi gör.* Bli medlem. http://blimedlem.wikimedia.se 2015-04-02 22:22 GMT+02:00 Risker risker...@gmail.com: On 2 April 2015 at 15:31, Katherine Maher kma...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi all, Today the Wikimedia Foundation published a report on its activities in calendar year 2014. This State of the Wikimedia Foundation https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.pdf report provides a snapshot view of the Foundation’s major initiatives and considerations during that period. It also offers a baseline assessment of key efforts made by internal Foundation departments, with an emphasis on data-based results, project impact, challenges, and how our work supports our mission. Last December, the Wikimedia Foundation entered into the beginning of a strategy planning exercise. As we progressed, we found people had differing familiarities with the work, needs, and concerns of other departments -- the proverbial Blind Men and an Elephant.[1] In response, we began pulling together information as a baseline reference so we would better understand each others’ work. This report is the outcome of that research.[2] Although the information in the report was originally gathered in response to an internal Foundation need, we planned to make it public as a report from the very beginning. It is intended to be relatively candid, sharing insight into where teams feel they have strengths and where they feel there are development areas. The report also offers the first look at the Foundation’s internal Call to Action for 2015 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation#2015_Call_to_Action . The Call to Action is a set of actions for the 2015 calendar year to focus the staff of the Foundation on our core functions. These include improving the processes by which we do our work, building stronger community relationships, and exploring new ways to expand free knowledge. Terry, our new COO https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/03/20/wmf-welcomes-coo/, will manage its implementation over the coming year. Finally, a note: the report is a standalone product designed to aide the strategy development process, and does not substitute for the Quarterly Reports, Annual Report, or Annual Plan process. It is scoped only against the Foundation’s existing workflows in 2014, and not against the work of the Wikimedia movement overall. We have not committed to making it an annual exercise. The full State of the Wikimedia Foundation report is available as a wiki here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation and as a PDF on Wikimedia Commons here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.pdf . You can also find more information in our blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/02/new-wikimedia-foundation-report/ . We hope you find it interesting, and welcome your feedback. Thanks, Katherine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant [2] Thanks to everyone at the Foundation who contributed so much great information to their various teams sections. And a special thanks to Juliet Barbara and Heather Walls who wrote and produced the whole thing! -- Katherine Maher Chief Communications Officer Wikimedia Foundation 149 New Montgomery Street San Francisco, CA 94105 +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kma...@wikimedia.org Thank you very much for telling us about this, Katherine. I am unable to read the file on Commons (the print is far too faint, and also quite small), and I really don't want to download it. Is there an alternative? I am looking forward to reading this. Risker/Anne ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe