Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Kourosh Karimkhany, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships

* Josh Lim wrote: >In the absence of any meaningful alternative, what should we do then? >Close down Wikipedia Zero and let the developing world languish in the >dark? Technically it would be entirely possible for service providers to offer access to Wikipedia "for free" even if the Wikimedia F

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason

* Siko Bouterse wrote: >We've heard from a number of chapters/groups so far that are excited about >the campaign and are wondering how to help. We've heard from only a few >people so far about specific time-sensitive requests of concern, and we're >really quite open to continue working with anyone

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason

* Sydney Poore wrote: >It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the >problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. > >The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests >for funds to address the gender gap even though it

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason

* Sydney Poore wrote: >It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing >community members through regular channels is not creating content free of >systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as >someone who has read all types of WMF funding pro

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason

* Liam Wyatt wrote: >I understand from the explanations that the reason for not accepting >any non-gender-gap focused grants for several months is because of the >expected workload on the staff in reviewing applications and >supporting the projects that do get funded. > >However, what I don't under

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WaPo Wikipedia's 'complicated; relationship with net neutrality

* Kim Bruning wrote: >Found another article calling out Wikipedia. Are there also >articles praising us? :-) > > > https://medium.com/backchannel/less-than-zero-199bcb05a868 Quoting, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Wikipedia become “the Internet” for the users of mobile data supported

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason

* Siko Bouterse wrote: >Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing >gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged >organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG >and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to di

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Spam] Re: Fwd: Our final email

* Andrew Gray wrote: >(In all seriousness: I generally agree with Liam's concerns, but I'd >also like to note that the banners running on mobile are much more >discreet, though are just as eye-catching. Well done to whoever >thought of those.) When I encountered one of those I had to scroll four s

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Our final email

* Peter Southwood wrote: >OK, I was just wondering if acceptance of this form of marketing was an >American thing or more generally an English language thing. Obviously >not universally acceptable to English speakers, even in USA and England, >but possibly more offensive to people with other cu

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Google Groups: You've been added to Gender Gap

* Russavia wrote: >I mentioned on the Gender Gap mailing list the other day that this was not >me, but now it would appear that email addresses on this mailing list are >being scraped. Whoever controls that list added the address in my From and my signature which pretty clearly suggests use of som

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising banners (again)

* Martijn Hoekstra wrote: >Dear fundraising team. Thank you for your efforts to make the fundraiser as >quick as possible. I understand that effective banners allow us to keep the >yearly donation drive as short as possible. Considering the rate at which the Foundation and its Chapters increase an

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraising banners (again)

* geni wrote: >On 2 December 2014 at 06:53, Lila Tretikov 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 I got something like that on my mobile phone yesterday, only it di

Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

* Andrew Lih wrote: >Read the details and you'll see that free (as in beer) Internet Broadcast >video doesn't need a license. > >SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS: >http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf > >"In the case of Internet Broadcast AVC Video (AVC Video tha

Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

* Andrew Lih wrote: >BTW, Luis from WMF has put a very lengthy and detailed analysis of the >legal issues that does help quite a bit, at the end of the RFC: > >https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video#Commercial_use_and_h264 I note that the Wikimedia Foundation doe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

* Tim Starling wrote: >On 17/01/14 01:14, Todd Allen wrote: >> This proposal asks to move to a "free as in beer" model, where content will >> be free to view, but not necessarily to reuse (and with the opaque license, >> it may not even be possible to tell). > >I don't really understand this argum

Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

* Fabrice Florin wrote: >The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team (1) seeks your guidance on a >proposal to support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital >video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch >videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home vid

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement Sarah Stierch

* Frank Schulenburg wrote: >And so I ask you to respect Sarah's privacy at what is surely a >difficult time for her, ... An extremely visible public announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation has fired her within two days of an allegation of misconduct -- that is how you are making it sound -- is

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

* Nathan wrote: >We should thank them for editing using a major banner, a la the fundraiser. >I don't know why we do huge fundraising drives but seem to neglect editing >drives, even though editing is really the core way for people to donate to >Wikimedia. That would make many editors very annoyed

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Public Domain Day

* Michael Maggs wrote: >On 3 Jan 2014, at 14:22, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: >> I find it a bit worrying that Commons makes little effort to distinguish >> between "copyright on this sculpture" and "copyright on this photograph >> of a sculpture". It would s

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Public Domain Day

* Romaine Wiki wrote: >January 1st was Public Domain Day [1] and after xx years of copyright, >it expires on the first of January of the year after. As result hundreds >of images were restored on Commons on the 1-1-2014, but many of them did >not get a place in articles on Wikipedia and her sist

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Dells are backdored

* James Salsman wrote: >Can we please stop paying the Microsoft and NSA taxes and start buying >datacenter equipment which costs a lot less? Cubieboard/Cubietrucks for >instance? Related: . -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · h

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Office hours for VisualEditor

* Risker wrote: >Just to clarify, since UTC is a confusing time for most of us...is >that the minute after 2359 UTC on November 2 (i.e., 7 hours after the first >session), or is it the minute after 2359 UTC on November 3? > >I've seen it used both ways so I just want to be clear. Could you el

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Communication plans for community engagement

* Nathan wrote: >I think your anti-Americanism is misplaced. Let's look at some of the >key people involved in the VisualEditor project. Erik is German, James >F is British, Roan Kattouw is Dutch, Timo Tijhof is Dutch. If you were >to skim the list of the engineering staff, they are extremely diver

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

* Tomasz W. Kozlowski wrote: >it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has >been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people >by default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube > element. >I am told that there are technical lim

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] PRISM, government surveillance, and Wikimedia: Request for community feedback

* Geoff Brigham wrote: >https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/ You are not making a good case there as to what to do and why and how this community is affected and needs to act. An immediate question seems to be whether the Wikimedia Foundation should become signatory

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

* Andrea Zanni wrote: >At the moment, Wikisource could be a interesting corpora and laboratory for >improving and enhancing OCR, >as the OCR generated text is always proofread and corrected by humans. >As part of our project ( >http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource_vision_development), Micru was >l

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

* Erik Moeller wrote: >Are there open source MT efforts that are close enough to merit >scrutiny? In order to be able to provide high quality result, you >would need not only a motivated, well-intentioned group of people, but >some of the smartest people in the field working on it. I doubt we >cou

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage launch: why no blog post or pressrelease?

* Jay Walsh wrote: >I'm amused that this thread commenced with a reflection about the need to >distribute press releases at the appropriate global time window and has >rolled into this. I've been at this for five years and this is the first >time I've seen so much attention paid to the manner we co

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention (was Re: "Big data" benefits and limitations (relevance: WMF editor engagement, fundraising, and HR practices))

* Andreas Kolbe wrote: >I am mostly looking at the column for editors making more than 100 edits a >month, as that is where the decline in the English Wikipedia has been most >pronounced, from 4804 in March 2007 to 3137 in November 2012. It's when >core editors leave in droves that you start to wor

Re: [Wikimedia-l] TVTropes deletes all pages with "Rape" in title under advertising pressure.

* Andreas Kolbe wrote: >On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 4:10 PM, David Gerard wrote: >> This is pretty much completely wrong, as you'd know if you'd read the >> links at the beginning. The pages were already marked "don't put ads >> here". Google objected to their presence on the site at all. The pages >>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] TVTropes deletes all pages with "Rape" in title under advertising pressure.

* Nathan wrote: >It's simple. The WMF didn't do anything. The English Wikipedia did. That >project effectively changed the content of the entire encyclopedia for >political reasons. That is the condicio sine qua non for abandoning >neutrality. You might say it was done for great reasons, and that i

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

* Tobias Oelgarte wrote: >Am 17.06.2012 01:21, schrieb Anthony: >>> I have never seen a "censorware" that works >>> flawlessly (not even china can do this right). Either it allows to much >>> (incomplete blacklist) or it is unnecessary limited (incomplete whitelist >>> producing angry mob). Additio

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

* Michael Peel wrote: >My understanding of this line of argument was that images would be >displayed where you would expect them to be displayed (e.g. the article >on penis or vagina would naturally include a picture of a penis or >vagina), but wouldn't be immediately displayed where you wouldn't e

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

* David Gerard wrote: >So, is the time ripe yet for us to start pushing for a 14-year term, >or do we wait a bit? I suggest we start contemplating it, however. You don't say who "we" are, but in case some people think the Wikimedia Foundation should position itself on "copyright" matters much beyo