Re: [Wikimedia-l] On toxic communities

[Katherine Casey]

I'd be happy to offer my admin/oversighter experience and knowledge to help
you develop the labeling and such, Aaron! I just commented on Andreas's
proposal on the Community Wishlist, but to summarize here: I see a lot of
potential pitfalls in trying to handle/generalize this with machine
learning, but I also see a lot of potential value, and I think it's
something we should be investigating.

-Fluffernutter

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Aaron Halfaker 
wrote:

> >
> > The League of Legends team collaborated with outside scientists to
> > analyse their dataset. I would love to see the Wikimedia Foundation
> engage
> > in a similar research project.
>
>
> Oh!  We are!  :) When we have time. :\ One of the projects that I'd like to
> see done, but I've struggled to find the time for is a common talk page
> parser[1] that could produce a dataset of talk page interactions.  I'd like
> this dataset to be easy to join to editor outcome measures.  E.g. there
> might be "aggressive" talk that we don't know is problematic until we see
> the kind of effect that it has on other conversation participants.
>
> Anyway, I want some powerful utilities and datasets out there to help
> academics look into this problem more easily.  For revscoring, I'd like to
> be able to take a set of talk page diffs, have them classified in Wiki
> labels[2] as "aggressive" and the build a model for ORES[3] to be used
> however people see fit.  You could then use ORES to do offline analysis of
> discussions for research.  You could use ORES to interrupt the a user
> before saving a change.  I'm sure there are other clever ideas that people
> have for what to do with such a model that I'm happy to enable it via the
> service.  The hard part is getting a good dataset labeled.
>
> If someone wants to invest some time and energy into this, I'm happy to
> work with you.  We'll need more than programming help.  We'll need a lot of
> help to figure out what dimensions we'll label talk page postings by and to
> do the actual labeling.
>
> 1. https://github.com/Ironholds/talk-parser
> 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_labels
> 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES
>
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 6:56 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 9:13 PM, Benjamin Lees 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > This article highlights the happier side of things, but it appears
> > > that Lin's approach also involved completely removing bad actors:
> > > "Some players have also asked why we've taken such an aggressive
> > > stance when we've been focused on reform; well, the key here is that
> > > for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a
> > > number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which
> > > forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely."[0]
> > >
> >
> >
> > Thanks for the added context, Benjamin. Of course, banning bad actors
> that
> > they consider unreformable is something Wikipedia admins have always done
> > as well.
> >
> > The League of Legends team began by building a dataset of interactions
> that
> > the community considered unacceptable, and then applied machine-learning
> to
> > that dataset.
> >
> > It occurs to me that the English Wikipedia has ready access to such a
> > dataset: it's the totality of revision-deleted and oversighted talk page
> > posts. The League of Legends team collaborated with outside scientists to
> > analyse their dataset. I would love to see the Wikimedia Foundation
> engage
> > in a similar research project.
> >
> > I've added this point to the community wishlist survey:
> >
> >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey#Machine-learning_tool_to_reduce_toxic_talk_page_interactions
> >
> >
> >
> > > P.S. As Rupert noted, over 90% of LoL players are male (how much over
> > > 90%?).[1] It would be interesting to know whether this percentage has
> > > changed along with the improvements described in the article.
> > >
> >
> >
> > Indeed.
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-- 
Karen Brown
user:Fluffernutter

*Unless otherwise specified, any email sent from this address is in my
volunteer capacity and does not represent the views or wishes of the
Wikimedia Foundation*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Recognition of WikiWomen's User Group

[Katherine Casey]

Awesome news, I'm always glad to see more efforts to be welcoming to women!
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Not all pixels are created equals: introducing brand new Wikimedia France's metrics

[Katherine Casey]

Everybody always tries to get rid of the content pixels because they beat
up the other pixels, but I tell you what, if you don't give those content
creator pixels what they want they're going to take their RGB and go home
and THEN where will your silly little projects be without any content
pixels, hmm?

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Aleksey Bilogur aleksey.bilo...@gmail.com
wrote:

 I love today.
 On Apr 1, 2015 5:28 PM, quiddity pandiculat...@gmail.com wrote:

  On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org
  wrote:
   On 15-04-01 03:58 PM, Pierre-Selim wrote:
   This is only the beginning: next step is the measurement of cute
 pixels,
   encyclopedic pixels and amazing pixels.
  
   That metric is all wrong, because it presumes that all pixels are
   equally valuable.  Surely, you should be also assigning weights to
   pixels depending on how much information they carry - background pixels
   out of the FOV aren't worth as much!
  
 
  I assume you mean assigning *mass* to the pixels. Weight is so
  Earth-centric!
 
  I would like to join the kawaii-pixel WikiProject. Please let me know
  when we start debating the relative merits of various color models,
  and naming conventions, and kawaii-challenged accessibility tools.
  Thanks!
 
  -- quiddity
 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcing: The Wikipedia Prize!

[Katherine Casey]

Publicly identifying anonymous Wikimedians, especially with reference to
their editing histories, is not just an academic way to make a point; it's
messing with people's real lives, and it's not something I'm particularly
comfortable seeing suggested, especially for a reward, on a
wikimedia-hosted listserv. I mean, I see the point you're trying to make,
but making people whose privacy may already be imperfect into
explicitly-outed victims is rather like burning down the house to prove it
ought to have been fireproofed better: you've made your point, but now you
have no house. If you want to see if you can identify people using leaky
data, ask for volunteers from among those who are comfortable having their
identities researched this way and work on identifying them with their
consent.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Richard Symonds 
richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:

 I worry that encouraging people to do this to prove a political point could
 be inappropriate. It's one thing to point out a potential privacy flaw, but
 paying people to exploit it may be seen as a step too far.

 Richard Symonds
 Wikimedia UK
 0207 065 0992

 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and
 Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered
 Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT.
 United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia
 movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who
 operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

 *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control
 over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

 On 29 March 2015 at 23:25, Brian reflect...@gmail.com wrote:

  I'm sure many of you recall the Netflix Prize
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize. This is that, for
 Wikipedia!
 
  Although the initial goal of the Netflix Prize was to design a
  collaborative filtering algorithm, it became notorious when the data was
  used to de-anonymize Netflix users. Researchers proved that given just a
  user's movie ratings on one site, you can plug those ratings into another
  site, such as the IMDB. You can then take that information, and with some
  Google searches and optionally a bit of cash (for websites that sell user
  information, including, in some cases, their SSN) figure out who they
 are.
  You could even drive up to their house and take a selfie with them, or
  follow them to work and meet their boss and tell them about their views
 on
  the topics they were editing.
 
  Here, we'll cut straight to the privacy chase. Using just the full
 history
  dump of the English Wikipedia, excluding edits from any logged-in users,
  identify five people. You must confirm their identities with them, and
  privately prove to me that you've done this. I will then nominate you as
  the winner and send you one million Satoshis (the smallest unit of
 Bitcoin,
  times 1 million), in addition to updating this thread.
 
  I suspect this challenge will be very easy for anyone who is determined.
  Indeed, even if MediaWiki no longer displayed IP addresses, there would
  still be enough information to identify people. Completely getting rid of
  the edit history would largely solve the problem. In the mean time, this
  Prize will serve as a reminder that when Wikipedia says Your IP address
  will be publicly visible if you make any edits. what they mean is,
 People
  will probably be able to figure out where you live and embarrass you.
 
  An extra million Satoshis for each NSA employee that you identify. A full
  bitcoin if you take a selfie with them.
 
  Let the games begin!
 
  Brian Mingus
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month gender gap project-related decision

[Katherine Casey]

+1 to Keilana. The fact that people still believe that valuing women
somehow devalues men never fails to amaze me. It's not a zero-sum game.

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Keilana keilanaw...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hearing people whine “what about the men” because, God forbid, men might
 not get *every single* grant this time (as they did in the pilot round of
 IEGs), is incredibly tiresome.

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Peter Southwood 
 peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote:

  If you take it entirely at face value, I find it quite inoffensive.  As I
  have no experience with reviewing grant proposals, I can't comment on its
  accuracy, but I am quite happy to take Fred's word for it.
  Offence is often available if you search for it hard enough.
  Cheers,
  Peter
 
  -Original Message-
  From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
  wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Fæ
  Sent: 08 January 2015 06:17 PM
  To: Wikimedia Mailing List
  Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why WMF should reconsider the 3-month gender
  gap project-related decision
 
  On 8 Jan 2015 16:11, FRED BAUDER fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:
  ...
I've noticed that women are often quite motivated and good at writing
  grant proposals.
 
  Extending good faith I would presume this is irony. It does not transmit
  well by email. Please keep in mind how offensive this sort of thing
 appears.
 
  Fae
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  No virus found in this message.
  Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
  Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8890 - Release Date: 01/08/15
 
 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons copyright extremism

[Katherine Casey]

All sniping aside, it seems to me the problem (question?) here is whether
Commons's interpretation of package copyright is legally accurate, or
whether it is (like many of our projects' copyright policies) deliberately
a bit overbroad. If their packaging policy is Just How Copyright Works,
then there's not a lot we can do. Steven's points about feeling
unappreciated/bitten are something that could be worked on, but we can't
exactly change copyright law. If their packaging policy overreaches actual
copyright law, then it would be a matter of trying to adjust the Commons
policy to be more in line with real copyright law. Either way, neckbeards,
toxicity, and whining really have nothing to do with the point of this
conversation.

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Luis,

 I know all about that applause Jimmy received.

 http://i.imgur.com/SKX3P8J.gif

 Steven, is that you in the middle? :

 Russavia

 On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:55 AM, Luis Villa lvi...@wikimedia.org wrote:
  On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Russavia russavia.wikipe...@gmail.com
  wrote:
 
  Steven,
 
  Quite seriously, if you can't understand the concept of copyright and
  derivative works, then perhaps this is not the project for you.
 
 
  I understand the concept of copyright and derivative works, and I think
  Stephen has a lot of valid points (even if I don't agree with all of
 them).
  If you want to argue with the substance of what Stephen has to say,
 please
  do.
 
  In the meantime, your email is just an example of the kind of toxic
  behavior Jimmy spoke out against at Wikimania this year — and correctly
  received loud, sustained applause for.
 
  Luis
 
  --
  Luis Villa
  Deputy General Counsel
  Wikimedia Foundation
  415.839.6885 ext. 6810
 
  *This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have
  received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
  mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical
  reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for,
 community
  members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For
 more
  on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer.*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Offwiki

[Katherine Casey]

The standard of verification used in other offwiki venues (for instance,
the en.wp UTRS unblock system, IRC cloaks, etc) is generally having the
user make an edit using their wikimedia account, to their own userspace,
verifying that they are the holder of account [whatever] on offwiki site
[whatever]. I see no particular reason you couldn't do the same (either at
registration, or when asked by a wikipedian whose account has been
hijacked) if you're concerned about usernames being hijacked on
Offwiki.org, and any number of experienced Wikimedians could have told you
this if you'd asked. I find it a bit odd that your preferred solution is
instead to send an email to everyone that gives off a vaguely join my site
or someone else will do it for you vibe.


On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 9:48 PM, Wil Sinclair w...@wllm.com wrote:

 Hi all, I've started a new wiki called Offwiki: http://offwiki.org.
 Our community discusses potential changes to Wikipedia and its
 Wikimedia sister projects that aren't easily discussed in forums like
 this mailing list. We also try new ideas that we hope will be adopted
 on-wiki- both social and technical in nature.

 But that's not the primary reason I'm writing all of you. I've noticed
 that many prominent Wikipedians have created accounts to avoid
 impostors claiming their very public usernames for themselves. My
 apologies, but Wikimedia doesn't run an OpenID server, and there's
 really no other way for me to confirm identities before a user has
 created a username. The problem is technical, and AFAIK there is
 nothing I can do about it.

 So, if you're concerned about your username being phished out, then
 consider creating an account at http://offwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page.
 Maybe you'll even stick around for a few minutes to see what we've
 been up to. :)

 Thanks.
 ,Wil

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement Sarah Stierch

[Katherine Casey]

Add me to the list of people who are surprised the WMF has chosen to handle
this in so public and accusatory a manner. It is presumably their right to
sever business relationships with employees, of course, but they generally
don't do so by posting a public notice detailing the employee's alleged
misconduct.


On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 5:44 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote:

 * 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 not quite respecting her privacy.
 --
 Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
 Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Office hours for VisualEditor

[Katherine Casey]

You know, I didn't believe them when they said Wikimedians could fight
about *anything*...and then I read this thread.



On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Newyorkbrad newyorkb...@gmail.com wrote:

 Are you saying that our extensive discussion of the meaning of  counts
 for naught?

 Newyorkbrad


 On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com
 wrote:

  On 10/30/2013 8:39 AM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
 
  On 10/30/2013 11:20 AM, Risker wrote:
 
  Just to clarify, since  UTC is a confusing time for most of us
 
  {{cn}}
 
  I've heard that said very often (that 00:00 is somehow confusing to many
  people), but I've yet to actually see someone being actually confused by
  it.
 
  There is exactly one minute labeled 00:00 in every day, and that is
  unambiguously the first of the day.
 
  It ought to be straightforward, yes, since in numeric sequences 00:00
  clearly comes before other possible time values, and therefore is not
  nearly as confusing as, say, 12:00 (is noon AM and midnight PM, or is it
  the other way around?). However, it is definitely possible to overthink
  things, and as this conversation demonstrates, of all the faults of which
  our community is capable, overthinking things is one of the easiest for
 us
  to fall into.
 
  --Michael Snow
 
 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New access to non-public information policy, re-ID requirements and data retention

[Katherine Casey]

As far as  The physical handling is relatively easy to ensure is proper,
well... Considering that some of our less sane problematic users have, if
I'm remembering correctly, shown up at the WMF office itself and would have
loved to get their hands on the real-life documents of our
advanced-privilege users, I'm not all that confident that *any *storage on
the WMF premises, short of a vault, is adequate. When crazies go crazy
about Wikipedia, they go *very *crazy, and breaking a padlock in an office
isn't that outlandish for some of them.

-Fluff


On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 7:21 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote:

 Going back to the 2011 discussions on otrs lists, a flag was raised that
 challenged whether the WMF had sufficiently secure servers to host copies
 of ID documents that might be electronically submitted, including
 sufficient firewalling and/or airgapping, internal access controls, etc.

 My impression was that once that was raised as a detailed concern, the push
 died off rapidly, but I may be misremembering.

 Let me now ask - Can the WMF either publicly or privately (I live in the SF
 Bay Area and can come over and talk) provide enough detailed assurance as
 to the digital medium storage plan for these IDs?

 This is enough data for someone to do an identity theft with.  The physical
 handling is relatively easy to ensure is proper (locked cabinet or the like
 requires a physical office intrusion).  The electronic...



 On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Rschen7754 rschen7754.w...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  Speaking for myself, I have no problems with the overall idea, and I
 doubt
  that a lot of the others who have signed the petition do either.
 
  The problem is in the details of how it is implemented, and that
  appropriate safeguards are not written into place to protect the privacy
  and legal rights of those who (re)identify. I know some European users
 have
  raised concerns about how the overall policy does not work for them
 and/or
  would cause them to break the law. I don't believe that they should have
 to
  stand alone.
 
  Thanks,
 
  Rschen7754
  rschen7754.w...@gmail.com
 
 
 
  On Oct 23, 2013, at 4:07 PM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote:
 
   On 10/23/2013 07:01 PM, Newyorkbrad wrote:
   (I myself can
   think of one and only one, but am curious if there are others.)
  
   I can also think of exactly one off the cuff (and it is almost
 certainly
   the same); but I can think of a couple of scenarios where the
 dissuasive
   effect alone might have made a difference.
  
   But my understanding is that this is prompted by a more serious focus
 on
   accountability than over any particular incident.
  
   -- Marc
  
  
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Communication plans for community engagement

[Katherine Casey]

I think the Foundation is trying to make steps toward increased
communication with its constituent communities with its blitz of hiring
Community Liaisons. And that's a good idea, and liaisons can do a lot of
good. But I don't think that program is running at 100% effectiveness yet,
and back-end developers and staffers are depending entirely on liaisons to
do their communicating, with the result that liaisons are stretched thin
(one person covering multiple language wikis, another person covering every
single issue on a gigantic wiki, a bunch of language wikis having no active
liaison at all, etc) and overly stressed. Combine that with liaisons being
sourced from the community a lot of the time, and we end up with overly
stressed users who are used to speaking their minds being put in a position
where they feel responsible for not only making sure entire communities,
every single person, understand that software is coming, but also for
explaining every tiny feature of that software and convincing entire
communities to accept those things even if the things are objectively
flawed or even just plain ol' bad, and for taking every ounce of abuse the
community wants to heap upon the devs who aren't doing the talking, and
doing all those things in a way that doesn't offend the community members
they're supposed to be communicating with. It would be a difficult job for
a team full of professional tech-writer communicators, and it's pretty much
an impossible one for one or two part-time workers who mostly aren't
professional technical writers or mediators. The result is communities are
up in arms, liaisons are fighting onwiki battles instead of communicating
neutrally, and no one trusts anyone to actually communicate anything.

A more full-featured engagement strategy, actively involving a) more
staffers than just liaisons and b) more liaisons, might go farther toward
bringing project communities on board with the WMF's goals. Every project
team at the WMF should have a liaison, and every liaison should work as
part of a team so they're not expected to be on 24/7 until they burn out.
Every liaison should be trained in communicating effectively and in
handling and directing criticism. A liaison who is not communicating
effectively with the community they're assigned to is worse than no liaison
at all, because the community assumes the failure of communication is
deliberate on the WMF's part. At the same time, every dev or manager who
expects a liaison to do the talking for them should be making sure that
they're listening to their liaison and being responsive to concerns the
liaisons raise that are coming from the community. Devs and managers should
understand that liaisons are only as effective as the responses they get
from devs and community, and that it's this person's job to listen to you
and nod and then tell you how it's going to be is not a substitute for we
are actually adapting our approach/software in response to your concerns.
There is *no substitute at all* for hearing from someone who's actually
driving the software changes when it comes to answering specific questions
about the software or where it's going, because the more intermediaries the
message goes through, the higher the chances that it will become
unintentionally garbled or muted.

*Or, to tl;dr this whole thing*: Liaisons could be SO MUCH MORE USEFUL than
they are right now, and that would go a long way toward improving these PR
disasters. But that would require the cooperation of every aspect of the
Foundation's staff.

-Fluffernutter


On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Craig Franklin
 cfrank...@halonetwork.net wrote:

 
  As is usually the case, I'm not saying this to have a go at the
 developers
  or anyone else involved (who are obviously doing their best), but I think
  that some of the communication on this topic has been a bit clumsy and
 has
  caused a lot of unnecessary angst that could probably have been avoided
 if
  it had been planned for in advance.  Does the Foundation have formal
  communication plans for things like this that focus on gaining community
  buy-in?  If not, then you probably should.  Obviously more testing and
  specifically more user acceptance testing would have been helpful in this
  case, although I understand the political pressures in getting the
 product
  shipped on time.
 
  Cheers,
  Craig Franklin


 I alluded to this same issue in my earlier reply and thought this
 deserved its own thread. We all know that it has happened many times -
 a change, policy or other initiative emanates from the Foundation or a
 member of its staff, and various community groups respond negatively.
 The response is ignored or not properly addressed in a timely manner,
 and it snowballs into something much larger.

 The WMF staff often seem to be caught flat-footed when this happens,
 and only after an unnecessary degree of escalation within the
 community 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[Katherine Casey]

Having read through this entire thread, I have to ask: would there have
been any value in, instead of desysopping non-staff (because there appears
to be a possibly-valid argument that non-staff did most of the
administrative work on the wmf wiki), instead making it clear that unlike
on all other wikis, +staff users had the final say in any
administrative/editing dispute on the wmf wiki? That is, since Sue says a
large part of the problem was non-staff making staff justify themselves and
their decisions endlessly, why not just short-circuit that particular weak
spot and otherwise let work carry on? I guess the operative questions here
would be something like:

   1. Was there actual misuse of admin tools being done by non-staff?
   2. Were there other, non-misuse issues that arose from non-staff having
   +admin (i.e. we already know about too many challenges to staff, but was
   there anything else that made non-staff admins suboptimal? this would
   include even things like it looks weird to outsiders to have non-staff
   changing 'corporate' content)
   3. If there weren't other issues, could the issue of non-staff
   challenging staff decisions have been corrected with a less-drastic
   solution (such as clarifying who had final say in things)
   4. Is it true that non-staff admins do significant portions of the work
   on that wiki, such that their loss will now cause the wiki to go un- or
   more-poorly-maintained?
   5. If 4 is true, what solutions can we/the WMF put in place to pick up
   that slack so the wiki doesn't become worse?

None of these questions are intended to apportion blame or determine who
was right, but they may help us figure out why actions are being done,
how we could have routed around this huge blow-up, and where to go from
here.

-Fluffernutter


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:

  My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
  small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic
 editing
  rights.

 Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it
 allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because
 the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a
 dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the
 MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that
 regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the
 reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our
 other wikis. There are 600 registered users on the WMF wiki.

 While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted,
 volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with
 extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that
 configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked
 Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would
 continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue
 says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki
 clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no
 disrespect was intended.

 The original text on
 https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in
 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving
 all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day
 operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while
 the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that
 delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very
 beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the
 community governance practices established in other wikis because it
 serves a distinct purpose.

 Erik
 --
 Erik Möller
 VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info: Election for WCA Chairperson

[Katherine Casey]

Seconding Béria here - by common sense, a group called the Wikimedia
Chapters Association would represent the Wikimedia chapters. If it only
exists to represent Wikimedia chapters that sign on to ideas X and Y, and
pledge Z, and attend meeting Q, then the name ought to be more
representative of that - Biggest Wikimedia Chapters Association, or
Wikimedia Europe, or Wikimedia Chapter Politics Interest Group...

-Fluffernutter

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote:

 Well, since the WCA don't plan to represent all the chapters, it would be
 good it changed the name to a more suitable representation of the truth
 (that would be something like European Chapters Association based on the
 people present in the last
 meeting
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Meetings/2013-07
 )
 to avoid confusion.
 _
 *Béria Lima*

 *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
 livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a
 construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos*


 On 25 February 2013 12:21, Dariusz Jemielniak dar...@alk.edu.pl wrote:

  On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 
   The model of voting delegates the casting of votes to members of the
council; which are individuals, chosen by chapters. Purely from a
   practical perspective, it may not be possible for chapters to get
   council members in order by the deadline for this vote if they are not
   already members. Additionally, it's important to distinguish in voting
   between chapters abstaining and chapters simply not participating.
   Choosing to be a member, while not exercising a vote, is effectively
   assent to the outcome. This is not the case for those chapters which
   have chosen not to join the WCA.
  
 
  while I agree that in principle WCA should serve the large Wikimedia
  community and its impact should definitely not be limited to members
 only,
  I believe it is quite dangerous from the point of view of governance to
  separate membership from voting rights. Although  it could make perfect
  sense to accept non-member chapter functionaries as candidates for the
  board/chair/etc., the very right to vote should be reserved to those who
  opt-in. Otherwise the chain of responsibility gets fuzzy, plus what
 Nathan
  wrote.
 
  best,
 
  dariusz
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