Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fuck the community, who cares
Ziko van Dijk wrote: I think that a single quote by a unnamed female Wikimedian, said in public or in private, is a very small basis for any substantiate criticism... I've said fuck the community a fair few times. And fuck the foundation and fuck chapter [name]. Generally, all of them under my breath and without being reported on in the Signpost. In fact, this whole thread is making me say things like “why the hell am I still subscribed to this increasingly pointless mailing list?” Storms in teacups, mountains out of molehills, wikidramas out of off-the-cuff remarks. Is there not an encyclopedia that needs editing? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ 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] Let's accept Bitcoin as a donation method
I demand that the Wikimedia Foundation start accepting the following: Litecoin Namecoin PPCoin Feathercoin Craftcoin Quarkcoin Freicoin Devcoin Terracoin BBQCoin Netcoin Actually, scrap that, I've got an even better Ponzi scheme - sorry, cryptocurrency: TomCoin. And, best of all, if you start taking TomCoins I'll be happy to give you a million of them. No, wait, how about a billion? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ 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] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] access to journals
If you've gone to university, it's well worth looking to see if your university provide alumni access. My university, the University of London, provide alumni access to the library for £220 a year, which includes an eight book borrowing limit, full JSTOR access (which doesn't have the limitation that JPASS has), Oxford DNB access and some other online resources. Some universities also charge the even better price of nothing. I've put up a page in project space on English Wikipedia so we can document which institutions provide access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:JSTOR/Alumni_access -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ On 24 September 2013 at 12:56:18, David Gerard (dger...@gmail.com) wrote: fyi -- Forwarded message -- From: Kathleen McCook klmcc...@gmail.com Date: 24 September 2013 12:25 Subject: [WikiEN-l] access to journals To: English Wikipedia wikie...@lists.wikimedia.org In an effort to enhance access options for people who aren’t affiliated with universities, colleges, or high schools, not-for-profit digital library JSTOR has launched JPASS, a new program offering individual users access to 1,500 journals from JSTOR’s archive collection. The move follows the March 2012 launch of JSTOR’s Register Readprogram, which allowed independent researchers to register for a free MyJSTOR account, and receive free, online-only access to three full-text articles every 14 days. That service has since attracted almost one million users including independent scholars, writers, business people, adjunct faculty, and others, and JSTOR plans to continue offering the service in its current form. However, in a recent survey, many of Register Read users expressed interest in an individual subscription model that would offer enhanced access, encouraging JSTOR to move ahead with JPASS. http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/ JSTOR Launches JPASS Access Accounts for Individual Researchers [Library Journal] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list wikie...@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ 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 ___ 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
[Wikimedia-l] OSM Funding Drive success, extension
Yesterday, the OpenStreetMap Foundation completed a funding drive of £40,000 ($60,000) to buy two new servers. Because of the success of the fundraising, they have decided to extend the campaign to raise another £32,500 ($50,000). See http://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/06/26/extending-funding-drive/ for details. If you've got some spare cash and want to support the technical development of the map anyone can edit, go to http://donate.openstreetmap.org/server2013/ You can also donate via Bitcoin. OSM is growing at a phenomenal rate. The success and ramping up of OSM Foundation fundraising shows that OpenStreetMap is perhaps experiencing the same kind of organisational growing up process as Wikimedia has... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ 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
[Wikimedia-l] State of the Map US, San Francisco June 7-10
Of possible interest to WMF staff and others in San Francisco, State of the Map US is happening in a few weeks. http://stateofthemap.us/ Schedule: http://stateofthemap.us/schedule.html They are discussing a wide variety of things which have crossover to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects including use of OSM in secondary and higher education, technical matters including building the new editor, vector maps, imports and operations, data analysis, community and social issues. Looks like fun. The main State of the Map conference this year is in Birmingham, England in September. http://2013.stateofthemap.org/ In terms of governance stuff, the OSM Foundation is going through a similar process of long-term strategy as Wikimedia did many years ago: trying to decide whether to stay small or expand, how to work with community members, businesses who use OSM data, developers and so on. In these discussions, frequent reference is made to Wikimedia as a big sister. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Exit Interview - Sue
On Friday, 17 May 2013 at 06:54, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Dan Rosenthal, 17/05/2013 07:32: Is there any thought or discussion as to whether Sue could (or would want to) additionally do an actual Reddit IAmA, as Jorm did? Don't get me wrong, I understand why it is on Meta and I think the Meta interview is a great idea, but there is also something to be said for presenting to an audience of people beyond our immediate community of users who even know about meta, which Reddit's IAmA subreddit is. Especially since Sue has done some very important work on things like gender issues and her departing thoughts on broader internet governance issues that would benefit from a wider audience. Note however that Reddit is an all-male environment, as noted on some other list linking this: https://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_chicks_rule.png. (Still not as bad as Wikimedia!) Reddit is like the rest of the Internet: there are bits which are misogynist and horrible, and there are bits which are more progressive and inclusive on gender issues. r/mensrights or r/seduction are a hell of a lot creepier than, say, r/feminisms or r/lgbt or, indeed, some technical topic like r/python. If Sue were to do an IAmA (and that's kind of up to her), there'd probably be some sexist assholery and some people who want to rant about the perceived injustice of wanting to encourage women to edit Wikipedia (I know, pass the smelling salts, what a radical idea), but there's a solution for that: report it to the mods and move on. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] OSM iD Editor: how a nice editing interface could engage users
Yesterday, OpenStreetMap launched iD, an in-browser editor so that you can edit the map. You no longer need to download JOSM, the desktop application, or use Potlatch, a Flash-based application. When you start using iD, it gives you an introductory guide on how to edit. The app is designed to let newbies start editing very quickly and easily, without having to go and read documentation or a load of other cruft. It's an amazing bit of open source work and has the potential for making it dramatically easier for new users to jump in and make their first edit, and then get utterly addicted. There's a site about it here: http://ideditor.com/ Blog post about it from the official OSM blog: http://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/05/07/openstreetmap-launches-all-new-easy-map-editor-and-announces-funding-appeal/ My off-the-cuff reactions: http://tommorris.org/posts/8264 ;) Now the Foundation just need to do the same for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects with VisualEditor, right...? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Tweet this page from some or all sites???
On Thursday, 18 April 2013 at 04:05, Sarah Stierch wrote: On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 8:00 PM, James Alexander jalexan...@wikimedia.org (mailto:jalexan...@wikimedia.org)wrote: I tend to think that they can be incredibly useful and reader friendly. I've always found it a bit disappointing we don't have it as they are probably the bigger reader request I've ever seen. That said I know that enWiki has had multiple discussions about it ending in failure. The issues mostly seem to stem from the we're not MySpace crowd which I think misses the point that we both are a social network and that we're an educational site (and should encourage sharing that information) but sigh. I agree. Readers ask a lot about it, and so do new editors. I think it's so lame. Then again, people said the same about the Teahouse (NOTFACEBOOK). I wonder if we did a test for it what people would think. Talk abou reach - we'd be getting more people to read articles and content, which means potentially more people editing. But, I'm also a regular Twitter user and I see boosts in viewership for anything I post on my Twitter and Facebook. So sick of anti-social media Wikipedia. People love to deny we are a social network, when most of us involved in the community know that isn't true. A lot of my friends and so forth come from the Wikipedia world. If that isn't social media, then I don't know what is. The problem I have is that we lose some independence by doing this. Five years ago, we'd be all about putting MySpace links all over Wikipedia. Today, it'd be Twitter and FB. The services we include will be something we'll constantly be debating. Some hip new startup gets going and we'll have to have a long debate as to whether to add them. Then if we decided to include, say, Google Plus but not include some other service, we get accused of favouring Google because we're supposedly in cahoots with them in destroying copyright, stabbing babies, bringing on the infoapocalypse and all that. Or we choose services that are only used by Westerners. Or we include every damn service and we end up with those horrible palettes of 2000 different social services. We implicitly waste the time of people who don't use social sharing services or who, say, are trying to undermine the social services by building their own. [1] Browsers already come with a social media sharing service: it's called copy'n'paste. It doesn't infringe your privacy, it supports all services, allows easy reformatting, [1] http://indiewebcamp.com/ Come join in and free yourself from the social media silos! ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How gay friendly is Wikimedia and where do LGBT Wikimedians hang out?
On Monday, 15 April 2013 at 08:31, Fae wrote: The answer is we have real idea how gay friendly the projects are, but LGBT Wikimedians have been doing a lot more outreach recently and we think this is great evidence for our increasing diversity. From a few chats over tea at the GLAMwiki conference last weekend, I realised that most folks with an interest in LGBT matters were either unaware that anything had changed in the last year, or just had not got around to finding out where to go for more information (apart from asking me). So, here are 4 new global resources created in the last 12 months for you to investigate, share with friends or bookmark for later: Thanks for posting this, Fæ. I'm hoping that the mailing list can be used for a variety of purposes, both as a safe space for discussing how to handle issues faced by LGBT Wikimedians, and for discussion of what people are working on, developing LGBT content on Wikimedia and so on. It'd be great if list members could post stubs they've been working on at Wikipedia, Wikinews articles, collections of photos they've uploaded to Commons and so on. As for IRC, while it may not be a dating service, there is occasional campy, flirty silliness. :-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] fiction: WMF policy of paying less than market
On Thursday, 7 March 2013 at 18:43, Leslie Carr wrote: Talking about my salary isn't disparaging the company -- as referenced later, in the US employers can't prevent folks from talking about their salaries. Though I do feel that the WMF salary is discriminating against my right to fly first class everywhere. My champagne glass won't refill itself, you know! Next time someone balks at my day rate, I'm just going to say I need a new Ferrari and twenty new Hugo Boss suits a year or you'll feel the force of a discrimination case at the employment tribunal. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Strange, surprising, bold and unnecessary - reply to the WMF board statement
I think the failure of the WCA process thus far has shown an enormous lack of connection between chapter bureaucracy and what editors actually care about. Wikimedians have a rightful distaste for off-wiki bureaucracy. The distinct lack of formal bureaucracy and organisation (we, of course, create our own bureaucracy - see http://enwp.org/WP:WTF ) is one of the chief things about Wikimedia projects that a lot of us like. I've sat on far too many committees in my life. I have kept a small eye on the WCA discussions and have yet to see compelling reasons to think that it would do anything to actually directly help the projects. I'm sure if I pulled 10 random admins from English Wikipedia and asked them what the WCA is, they wouldn't be able to tell me, or they'd give me a cynical answer like it's an empire-building project for political players in chapters. Whether that's right or wrong, the WCA hasn't made a case to the people who actually matter: the people who hit 'edit' every day on the projects. The same will be true for other thematic organizations and so on. These organisations will exist in political limbo - supported by chapter bureaucrats and the Foundation - until their importance and worth is actually sold to editors. Sell us, the editors, on why these things are necessary, and the process of getting approval from the WMF Board will be easy because the political winds will shift in your favour. What exactly are Chapters trying to do now that they are failing at that necessitates the creation of the WCA? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] [PRESS RELEASE] Wikimedia Foundation named Knight News Challenge winner
Does this mean Wikinews might get an app for Android and iOS? ;-) On Jan 17, 2013 4:41 PM, Matthew Roth mr...@wikimedia.org wrote: (This press release is also available online at: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_Knight_News_Challenge_winner ) Wikimedia Foundation named winner of Knight News Challenge $600,000 in Knight Foundation funding supports innovation across Wikimedia mobile initiatives SAN FRANCISCO, CA - January 17, 2013 - The Wikimedia Foundation was named a winner in the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge for its efforts to expand and improve Wikimedia's mobile projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is enhancing the Wikipedia mobile experience and making it easier to access Wikipedia, particularly for readers in developing countries. As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, the Wikimedia Foundation is working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. The News Challenge grant will be utilized in four areas: *Improving the way that users experience our mobile platform on feature phones; *Expanding Wikipedia Zero, which gives mobile users free access to Wikipedia on their phones; *Developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is, including new ways to access Wikipedia via texting; *Increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile. The Wikimedia Foundation is one of eight mobile projects to receive a total of $2.4 million today through the Knight News Challenge, which accelerates projects with funding and advice from Knight's network of media innovators. A full list is at knightfoundation.org. Knight Foundation's funding will support us making the mobile version of Wikipedia easier to use, as well as enabling us to expand Wikipedia Zero, our project with mobile operators that lets their customers access Wikipedia for free, said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm very happy Knight has chosen to support us; it's an important affirmation of our mobile work. Knight Foundation, the nation’s leading funder of journalism and media innovation, is committed to promoting democracy by supporting informed and engaged communities. Founded by newsmen John S. and James L. Knight, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge in 2007 to find the next generation of innovations that help communities get the information they need. Wikipedia has helped define the way that people collaboratively create content. Making the site available to more people across the world will help foster and spread that culture, said John Bracken, director for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation. The $600,000 News Challenge grant is for two years and follows a general support grant of $250,000 that Knight Foundation awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2012. The Wikimedia Foundation and the other winners of the challenge will present their projects via live Web stream at 12:30 p.m. ET/ 10:30 a.m. MT Friday, January 18 at knightfoundation.org/live, from a gathering on the future of mobile at Arizona State University. (Follow #newschallenge on Twitter.) About the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org http://blog.wikimedia.org The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 483 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, November 2012). Available in 285 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 24 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. Press contact Jay Walsh Senior Director, Communications Wikimedia Foundation Tel. +1 415-860-8166 jwa...@wikimedia.org About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org or newschallenge.org Press contact Andrew Sherry VP for Communications, Knight Foundation Tel. 305-908-2677 she...@knightfoundation.org (To unsubscribe from Wikimedia Foundation press releases, reply with unsubscribe in the subject line.) ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage launch: why no blog post or pressrelease?
I'd say it's simpler than any of that. Wikimedia Foundation need to synchronise the formal launch of projects with press announcements and availability of press contacts. I don't care whether that's done on GMT, EST, PST, BST, CET, MMA, BDSM, MI5 or any other timezone. What's important is we don't formally launch a new project with a big stonking banner on Wikipedia (hint: people do see those) and not have any press release or blog post up… journalists will be confused, bloggers will be confused, ordinary citizens of the Internet will be confused. In fact, pretty much the only people who won't be confused will be people who have spent time keeping track of Wikimedia policy and governance stuff. Which is a pretty small group. And they won't even be able to say to the confused friends, bloggers, journalists etc. Oh, here's a blog post from the Foundation which explains it because there isn't a blog post or press release to point them to. Not having press releases or blog posts out when a project is formally launched is about as big a failure of basic public relations/press handling as you can get. If a PR professional working for a commercial organisation failed to make material available for the press upon launch of a new product, that'd be grounds to rapidly dropkick them from the building. (I mean, it's not like the Foundation are formally launching new sister projects every other week like in the old days…) Any plans to make sure things like this don't happen in the future? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 05:52, Peter Southwood wrote: There are two immediately obvious possibilities for this. 1 GMT/Universal time, which would be relatively unsurprising to most, as it is traditionally the zero offset timezone. 2 +12 so that New Zealand and other extreme east timezone users would see something when the time arrives. A more complex option would be to link to the user's timezone and release when that reaches the relevant time. This may not be feasible or even particularly useful. Linking to a time zone which is tomorrow for half the world would be counterproductive, better early than late. I would recommend GMT as least surprise option. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage launch: why no blog post or press release?
Some friends asked me today about the Wikivoyage launch, and the reasoning behind it. I hopped over to https://blog.wikimedia.org/ and found... nothing. Then I went to https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room and also found... nothing. Any reason why the Foundation hasn't published anything about the official launch of Wikivoyage? It'd be quite useful to be able to point my enquiring friends to oh, this is what the Foundation are saying about it, but apparently the Foundation aren't saying anything about it. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage images being imported to Commons
I haven't really been paying much attention to the Wikivoyage stuff recently. But it looks like Wikivoyage images are being imported to Wikimedia Commons… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_moved_from_shared.oldwikivoyage_to_Commons_requiring_review There are 8,345 images that need review and categorisation. If you've got some spare time, perhaps you could welcome our new friends from Wikivoyage by going through, checking copyright status, adding categories, improving descriptions and marking them as checked when you are done. Dealing with over eight thousand images seems a lot, but many hands makes light work... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Alpha version of the VisualEditor now available on the English Wikipedia
On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 20:29, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Terry with respect, an alpha release that is not even ready to be used in the scripts and languages of Wikipedia is not worthy of the designation alpha. It has pointed out for more than a year that the internationalisation of the visual editor needs serious attention. The notion that internationalisation is an architecture is very much accepted wisdom. The VisualEditor has yet to serve me tea and croissants, mix me a cocktail or arrange a threesome. Here I was, with disgusting visions in my head involving whipped cream and Olympic gymnasts, and all I get to do is play with a visual editor. Oh well, I suppose it is just an alpha. Perhaps the engineering team are a bit too busy trying to fix complicated parser bugs to meet either your ludicrously high expectations or my even higher and more ludicrous expectations. If you are trying to write a parser, whether the textual components of the parse tree that results are in Somali, Hindi, Japanese or English doesn't matter a great deal qua being a good parser. Making sure that the right bits of syntax result in the right parse tree is what matters. Rolling out a primitive visual editor on a single Wikipedia language is fine because the intention isn't to fine-tune the interface but allow the community to help find parser bugs. Would it be impolite for me to point out that having a properly specced, properly implemented, bidirectional parser implementation rather than an unspecified bundle of regex and pain is likely to actually make dealing with complex internationalization (and international text input) issues easier? Congrats to James and his team for all their hard work. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copy and paste
On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 6:26 AM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote:
We really need a plagiarism detection tool so that we can make sure our
sources are not simply copy and pastes of older versions of Wikipedia.
Today I was happily improving our article on pneumonia as I have a day off.
I came across a recommendation that baby's should be suction at birth to
decrease their risk of pneumonia with a {{cn}} tag. So I went to Google
books and up came a book that supported it perfectly. And than I noticed
that this book supported the previous and next few sentences as well. It
also supported a number of other sections we had in the article but was
missing our references. The book was selling for $340 a copy. Our articles
have improved a great deal since 2007 and yet school are buying copy edited
version of Wikipedia from 5 years ago. The bit about suctioning babies at
birth is was wrong and I have corrected it. I think we need to get this
news out. Support Wikipedia and use the latest version online!
It's sort of unrelated, but there's a project called Common Crawl:
http://commoncrawl.org/
It is trying to produce an open crawl of the web (much as Google,
Bing etc. have for their search engines).
Now that the copyvio bot is down, I'm wondering if someone would be
interested in building something that used the Common Crawl database,
or whether that'd be practical.
--
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] O'Dwyer
On Wednesday, 27 June 2012 at 17:56, Nathan wrote: Jimmy is not Wikipedia. What about that is hard to understand? The whole point about deliberate obfuscation is that it's supposed to blur that line. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] O'Dwyer
On Wednesday, 27 June 2012 at 18:05, Andreas Kolbe wrote: I would have agreed with you half a year ago. But Jimbo decided there would be a SOPA blackout, and a SOPA blackout was had. And every press article that mentions his campaign for O'Dwyer has the obligatory Wikipedia founder label. Whether you like it or not, Wikipedia is now associated with that effort in the public's eye, for better or worse. Yes, you can argue it's his right to act as an individual, it's not his fault that the press describe him as the Wikipedia founder, etc. It's almost as if what the press say and what the facts are in reality are two different things that have only a very tenuous relationship. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked principle of least surprise for the image filter?
On Monday, 18 June 2012 at 02:44, Tobias Oelgarte wrote:
Every stupid bot could do this. There is no running out of the box
solution at the moment, but the effort to set up something like this
would be minimal compared to anything else.
I would say that Citizendium failed because they did no automatic
updating. What i have in mind is delayed mirror with update control. It
is not meant to be edited by hand. It is a subset of the current content
selected by the host (one or many users) of the page himself. It is
essentially a whitelist for Wikipedia that only contains
selected/checked content. That way a childrens Wiki could easily be
created, by not including any unwanted content, while the effort stays
minimal. (Not more effort then to create your own book from a list of
already written articles)
{{sofixit}}
If all the people in favour of filters had spent their time building them
rather than arguing about them, we would have had a wide array of different
solutions, without any politics or drama.
That said, if people want to filter Wikipedia, a client-side solution rather
than a filtered mirror is preferable. If a filtered mirror were to come into
existence and become popular, this would mean that people would just filter all
of main Wikipedia, which would prevent people from editing Wikipedia. A
client-side solution means they are still looking at wikipedia.org just without
naughty pics and doesn't interfere with editing. It also reduces the need for
any servers.
--
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked principle of least surprise for the image filter?
On Saturday, 16 June 2012 at 20:21, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: That means they already found a solution to their problem that includes the whole web at once. As you might have noticed it isn't perfect. I guess that it could be easily improved over time. But the image filter had an different goal. It wouldn't help the schools, since the content is still accessible. But why we discuss about schools and children all the time and speak about it as a net nanny? Don't you get it? An image filter you can trivially opt-out of by clicking the big button labelled show image is a perfect way of preventing children from getting to naughty pictures… Seriously though, I'm slightly surprised that commercial censorware providers haven't bothered to add the nudey stuff from Commons. Pay a few bored minimum wage people to go through and find all the categories with the naughty stuff and stick all those images in their filter. It'd only take a few hours, given the extensive work already done by the Commons community neatly sorting things into categories with names like Nude works including Muppets and Suggestive use of feathers etc. It's almost as if the censorware manufacturers are selling products to people who don't know any better that are ineffective and serve to give piece-of-mind placebo to people in place of effective access control. Oh, wait, that would be the inner cynic speaking. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked principle of least surprise for the image filter?
On Saturday, 16 June 2012 at 23:51, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: Am 16.06.2012 23:36, schrieb Tom Morris: On Saturday, 16 June 2012 at 20:21, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: That means they already found a solution to their problem that includes the whole web at once. As you might have noticed it isn't perfect. I guess that it could be easily improved over time. But the image filter had an different goal. It wouldn't help the schools, since the content is still accessible. But why we discuss about schools and children all the time and speak about it as a net nanny? Don't you get it? An image filter you can trivially opt-out of by clicking the big button labelled show image is a perfect way of preventing children from getting to naughty pictures… Is this irony? My comment included some irony as well. ;-) I should probably get a .uk domain name for my emails to remove any doubt as to whether I'm being ironic and/or dryly sarcastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked principle of least surprise for the image filter?
On Friday, 15 June 2012 at 13:21, David Gerard wrote: I don't recall seeing any, but did anyone actually explain why the market had not provided a filtering solution for Wikipedia, if there's actually a demand for one? Market failures do sometimes exist. Also, because as far as I can tell, the proposed filter isn't a NetNanny type thing, it's a I don't want to see pictures of boobies AdBlock type thing. Which is a different thing entirely. Of course, there's some confusion here. Larry Sanger, for instance, is very very angry about how Wikipedia hasn't implemented a filter, even though he seems slightly confused as to the difference between an AdBlock type filter and a NetNanny type filter. Preventing people who don't want to see pictures of naked people from seeing pictures of naked people is a lot easier a task than preventing people who DO want to see pictures of naked people from doing so. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
[Wikimedia-l] donate.wikimedia.org.uk has an SSL error
If you go to http://donate.wikimedia.org.uk/ you can donate… insecurely. If you go to https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk/ you can donate… but you get an SSL certificate error. This seems like a problem. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] donate.wikimedia.org.uk has an SSL error
I do apologise. I meant to send this to Wikimediauk-l rather than Wikimedia-l. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who invoked principle of least surprise for the image filter?
On 13 June 2012 22:02, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 13 June 2012 21:56, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Earliest I have it on a Wikimedia list is from WikiEn-L on 2/11/08 from Ian Woollard (written as principle of least surprise), in the context of a Muhammad images thread started by Jimbo -- but my logs only go back to the summer of 07. Bingo - and he specifically invoked it to minimise offence. Sure, but it also applies to getting back what you expect. A male heterosexual friend of mine typed in the word Boobs into Commons search engine a while back and came back with the page Boobs on Bikes. It's not a matter of minimising offence, it's simply that if you type in one thing and get something else and rather surprising, that's a problem. That a subset of that surprise happens to be involve people getting offended doesn't mean that avoiding unnecessary surprise isn't a laudable goal. There's surprise in the reading a book and learning something new sense, then there is surprise in the being told that the book is on this shelf, but instead it's on a different shelf sense. The two are rather different, and I fear some conflation is going on. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] TomTom does a Britannica
The more you play with OpenStreetMap, the more magical ways you start discovering that you can use the data. Two that I've recently found... 1. Water fountains. Here in London, we used to have lots of water fountains. Then modern capitalism found a much better way of delivering water to people: put it in plastic bottles, drive it half way around the country (or world) and sell it to people and a massive profit, who then drink it and throw the plastic bottle away. There are a few water fountains in London though, and they are listed on OpenStreetMap. Any movement to campaign for change requires actual data to start with. 2. Stopped clocks. There are hundreds of beautiful, historical clocks on public buildings across the country. It's possible to mark clocks on OSM, and I've just been discussing on the wiki how we can mark disused clocks. Having the data lets us campaign to have these clocks restarted. I'm also finding that in the process of doing OpenStreetMapping, I take a lot of photos which are also usable on Commons. Quite a lot of them aren't (for copyright reasons or scope reasons or just because they are pretty crappy photographs), but a lot of the time you can find uses for them on Commons. (Just need to go through and write descriptions, categorise and upload.) I heartily recommend any Wikimedians grab themselves the relevant tools for OSMing (which don't necessarily mean a standalone GPS device: things like iPhones and Android smartphones can be used, and you can even go low-tech and print out walking maps), go out and do it. If there's an OSM community in your area, go hang out with them. The systemic bias issues that Wikipedia face also exist on OSM: here in London, the city is richly documented and the OSMers are mostly just tweaking, fixing and maintaining (most of my edits in London are just metadata improvement rather than actually adding any new shape information). But if you go and look at many non-Western countries, you'll find whole towns which just aren't covered at all. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] TomTom does a Britannica
On 29 May 2012 13:08, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: The difference is that Wikipedia is usable in the real world, whereas OSM, for the most part, is not. Yes, TomTom is dying. But it's because of Google, not because of OSM. I'd say OSM is beginning to be pretty usable in the real world. It's usable for a lot of things where there's not so much commercial interest in the map data... Wheelchair accessible maps: the work done by wheelmap.org that takes OSM and lets you tag which businesses are wheelchair accessible. Footpaths and cycle paths. There is a market for pedestrian and cycle navigation tools, but it's a small fraction compared to the motorist market. If you go out into rural Britain and want to know where the footpaths, bridleways or cycle paths are, Google won't tell you. You either have to pay Ordnance Survey for a map, or rely on OSM. Even in cities, OSM is very, very useful for pedestrians. Here is Old Street roundabout on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.525611lon=-0.086892zoom=18layers=M https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Old+Street,+Londonhl=enll=51.525724,-0.08722spn=0.001799,0.005284sll=51.022157,0.280645sspn=0.003638,0.014656oq=Old+Street,+hnear=Old+St,+London,+United+Kingdomt=mz=18 Note how OSM shows the location of underpasses, traffic lights, ATMs, petrol station and bike storage... that's what you get when you are creating maps with a bit of love, care and attention. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] TomTom does a Britannica
On 29 May 2012 13:38, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Tom: Is there a way to find out where OSM isn't very accurate/complete? Well, there's OSM bugs. Basically, there is a way you can file a bug on the map, sort of like how you might leave a note on a talk page (only there is some actual bug semantics) or whack a big warning template on the top of an article. If you are editing in Potlatch, it'll show the bugs as little red ladybugs! ;-) Of course, the only way to really know is to compare OpenStreetMap to reality or to another map or to a data source. Comparing to reality is time-consuming, and is basically what OSMers do every time they go out and trace new paths. Comparing to another map is hard because of copyright issues and getting the data from that map in a usable form. Comparing to a data source is a very limited way of measuring completeness. One way that would be fairly good for the United Kingdom, for instance, would be to get hold of some dataset from the government of every institution of a similar type (hospitals and doctor's surgery information is available from the NHS, for instance, and I believe school data might be available also) and then write a script to see if there is something with a very similar name in the vicinity on OSM. Personally, I find that whenever I look something up about somewhere I know, work or live, OSM is pretty good. There are issues: occasionally I'll find a street name that's wrong. But when using Google Maps, I find all sorts of inaccuracies, mostly derived from SEOers spamming Google Maps. I saw an SEO consultant who managed to get their business listing bang in the centre of the Houses of Parliament once. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright
On 28 May 2012 22:37, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: I'd love to see -NC and -ND dropped from the CC catalog, but I doubt its going to happen. It would be nice if -NC and -ND had a time limit on them, after which the work becomes CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Although NC and ND cause pain for Wikipedians and Commonists and so on, I'd actually not be a big fan of getting rid of them. NC and ND give people a chance to dip their toe into free culture licensing. Then upon finding that their leg hasn't been bitten off by ravenous sharks and that actually mostly everything is fine, we can come along and nudge them into upgrading. See, for instance, the UK government: many government departments published images under NC/ND. And then when nobody got fired for it, they pass the Open Government License, which is a free content license very much like CC BY.* The question is: does NC/ND give people an excuse not to go for a freer license, or does it give them a stepping stone towards freer license from no licensing? It'd be nice if we could have some evidence on this rather than anecdote trading. ;-) NC and ND do have some uses. For instance, the very common use case of publishing an academic paper. Yes, CC BY would be better. But BY-ND is still pretty useful for the most common use case for a lot of academic papers, namely photocopying a paper for a whole class of students... (Plus getting rid of NC and ND won't mean that people won't stop licensing works under NC/ND. There's a huge load of NC/ND work out there already.) * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OGL -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia sites not easy to archive (Was Re: Knol is closing tomorrow )
On Thursday, 17 May 2012 at 13:34, Anthony wrote: On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org (mailto:t...@tommorris.org) wrote: We could also consider the possibility of allowing users to use OpenID or OAuth or whatever the web identity mechanism du jour is to allow loose affiliation of usernames between MediaWiki installs. That way you can establish the link between identities across wikis (of course, if you don't want to, you don't have to). Also, there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_committed_identity But most people don't seem to care about these things. Sure, the use cases of Committed Identities are slightly different. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Announcement] James Forrester joins WMF as Technical Product Analyst
On 17 May 2012 17:52, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Everyone, It’s my pleasure to announce that James Forrester is joining our San Francisco office as a Technical Product Analyst, supporting the Visual Editor team. James started his work as a remote contractor yesterday and will be joining us in San Francisco later this year as a staff member. James will help prioritize the short term and long term work log on the Visual Editor, conduct user research, and incorporate community feedback into the development process. As many of you know, James is a long-time Wikimedian. He started contributing to English Wikipedia in October 2002, and was a founding member of their Arbitration Committee. He was also the movement’s volunteer Chief Research Officer, helping shepherd the predecessor of what is today the Research Committee, has for years been the “gopher-in-chief” at the Wikimania community conferences, and helped found Wikimedia UK in 2005. You forgot one biggie: he has run the London Wikipedia meetup which first started in June 2004 has now met 57 times. Hong Kong has met more often, but London is, I believe, the Original and Best (in all 57 varieties).* * The Heinz joke blatantly stolen from Jon Davies at Wikimedia UK. Anyway, James F. knows more about Wikipedia than most people on the planet. Good hire. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] No internet censorship in Hong Kong
On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 22:49, Nathan wrote: This is a similar argument to those made against Egypt or Israel etc. It's a facile and false notion that holding Wikimania in a particular city is an implicit political endorsement for the national government of the host city. You could just as easily interpret it in the opposite manner - holding a Wikimania event in Egypt, Israel, China, the U.S. or elsewhere supports knowledge liberalism and draws attention to the mission of the WMF in the areas where it may be most poignant. More likely, the decision of where to hold the event is made independent of political concerns and the WMF, as well as the host Wikimedians, take no political positions implicit or otherwise. As one of the people who worked on and supported the London bid, I agree. I would hope that if London had got it, people wouldn't have inferred support for the UK's planned internet censorship regime (or, indeed, the Digital Economy Act, the enormous and growing gap between the rich and poor, the presence of unelected clerics in our legislature—a trait we share only with Iran, our government's horrible mistreatment of disabled people, the lack of full civil equality for LGBT citizens, indoctrination in religious schools, our terrible libel laws, or seventeen other issues I can and do get angry about very frequently). Spending a week or so in a country for a conference is not the same as living there, becoming a citizen, pledging allegiance to the flag or the Queen or the Party or whatever. In the bidding process, there rightly are some minimum standards, specifically with regards to freedom of speech laws and whether or not the cities in question are welcoming to religious and LGBT minorities. If we wish to include anti-censorship as one of those requirements, it'd be worth knowing that up-front so Wikimedians who wish to bid in the future can take that into account rather than have it brought up after the bidding process is complete. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Office hours reminder
On the IRC front, I note that Sue last had an IRC office hours session on 13 March and there doesn't seem to be any scheduled sessions with Sue in May. Might it be an idea to have another office hours session with Sue soon? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
