Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
Dear James, In general the idea sounds interesting, and Wikitravel is certainly one of the notable wiki community projects. But I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Kind regards Ziko 2012/4/9 James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com: The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in joining a WMF run Wiki Travel Guide. A proposal for creating such a project has been outlined here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide and would develop from the content currently at wikitravel.org *Wikitravel is currently in 20 languages and in English contains more than 25,000 articles. The content is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. Site readership statistics are not released by Internet Brands, but for travel information the site is consistently highly ranked. It is the largest and most popular freely-licensed, user-contributed travel guide collection. Alexa.com ranks it as the 2637 most popular site on the web with a global reach of 0.0602%. The interwiki links between Wikipedia and Wikitravel highlight the close historic cooperation between the editors of both sites, where users adding travelogue style content to Wikipedia have often been directed to add the content to Wikitravel. Benefits for the WMF: 1) Increase the scope of content offered by the WMF 2) Increase the number of Wikimedians 3) Increase the volume of content for fundraising 4) Provide a separate repository for important travel and tourism information, some of which currently is contained within Wikipedia articles. Benefits for travel content: 1) Reputation of the WMF would increase the editor base. 2) Remove the conflicts between the commercial decisions of the current hosting provider and the community. 3) Would increase the reliability of the site, which is currently running old MediaWiki versions, on poorly performing infrastructure. Benefits for both: 1) Would make it easier for the two sites to direct editors to the better site for the content in question, leading to better focus within articles. 2) Combining the image repositories at Wikimedia Commons would result in greater and easier image availability for both Wikipedia and the travel site, and an increase in both contributors and images.* -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- --- Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/ Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht --- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Hum... I thought this project was adequate for Wikimedia, but now I'm having some doubts. Could you please define 'educational content'? What's the nature of projects like Wikinews? Regards, -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
I think I would consider it educational. Travel itself is an educational experience, and a fuller travel experience enabled by the sharing of Wikimedia-style free knowledge all the more so :) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Patricio Molina patriciomol...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Hum... I thought this project was adequate for Wikimedia, but now I'm having some doubts. Could you please define 'educational content'? What's the nature of projects like Wikinews? Regards, -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
Hoi, Consider the number of links that are possible from a travel experience to an encyclopaedic experience .. !! Travelling has always been considered educational. Thanks, Gerard On 9 April 2012 18:39, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: I think I would consider it educational. Travel itself is an educational experience, and a fuller travel experience enabled by the sharing of Wikimedia-style free knowledge all the more so :) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Patricio Molina patriciomol...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Hum... I thought this project was adequate for Wikimedia, but now I'm having some doubts. Could you please define 'educational content'? What's the nature of projects like Wikinews? Regards, -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
One of the most useful articles on Wikitravel that I've found is an outline of different Bavarian beers, and which groups they are popular with in Bavaria. I refer back to it regularly. I can't say I see the not educational argument. Dan Rosenthal On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 7:46 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, Consider the number of links that are possible from a travel experience to an encyclopaedic experience .. !! Travelling has always been considered educational. Thanks, Gerard On 9 April 2012 18:39, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: I think I would consider it educational. Travel itself is an educational experience, and a fuller travel experience enabled by the sharing of Wikimedia-style free knowledge all the more so :) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Patricio Molina patriciomol...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Hum... I thought this project was adequate for Wikimedia, but now I'm having some doubts. Could you please define 'educational content'? What's the nature of projects like Wikinews? Regards, -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: One of the most useful articles on Wikitravel that I've found is an outline of different Bavarian beers, and which groups they are popular with in Bavaria. I refer back to it regularly. I can't say I see the not educational argument. It's a shame that things are not working out with Wikitravel's current situation. :( I survived visiting Japan a few years ago with just Wikitravel pages printed (no guide book!) out and appreciate the variety of educational and practical information. It would be great to have the Collection Extension there and other features. If WMF were to host a wiki travel guide, I think and hope it would do much better with tech support (same version of MediaWiki as Wikipedia, but would take a bit of work to migrate it). I don't know where it would be amongst WMF priorities though. Cheers, Katie Dan Rosenthal On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 7:46 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: Hoi, Consider the number of links that are possible from a travel experience to an encyclopaedic experience .. !! Travelling has always been considered educational. Thanks, Gerard On 9 April 2012 18:39, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: I think I would consider it educational. Travel itself is an educational experience, and a fuller travel experience enabled by the sharing of Wikimedia-style free knowledge all the more so :) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Patricio Molina patriciomol...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: I am not sure whether Wikitravel (or the content it provides) fit into the scope of Wikimedia. Is it really 'educational' content? Hum... I thought this project was adequate for Wikimedia, but now I'm having some doubts. Could you please define 'educational content'? What's the nature of projects like Wikinews? Regards, -- Patricio Molina http://twitter.com/patriciomolina ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Board member, Wikimedia District of Columbia http://wikimediadc.org @wikimediadc / @wikimania2012 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
Am 9. April 2012 06:50 schrieb James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com: The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in joining a WMF run Wiki Travel Guide. A proposal for creating such a project has been outlined here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide and would develop from the content currently at wikitravel.org As I've just written on the talk page there: Frankly speaking, I don't think we need another wiki on travelling as there already is Wikivoyage. Wikivoyage is a fork of Wikitravel that was created when Wikitravel went commercial. It is run under a free CC-by-sa licence, and it is ready to add new language projects. German editors of Wikivoyage most probably will not change to a WMF project. So the question is why the editors of English Wikitravel won't rather come over and join Wikivoyage? It would be a rather bad idea to split communities instead of joining them together. To my mind Wikivoyage is the place where to gather travel information. Regards, Jürgen (contributing to both Wikipedia and Wikivoyage). PS. I'll tell the German Wikvoyage community about this discussion. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Travel Guide
Hello, Possibly, what is educational in Wikitravel (-voyage) can go into Wikipedia, and what not, is not educational. One might get problems with policies such as NOR and NPOV. I suppose that they should be applied on Wiki Travel Guide, as on Wikipedia, Wikibooks and other Wikimedia sites. Kind regards Ziko 2012/4/9 Juergen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.com: Am 9. April 2012 06:50 schrieb James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com: The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in joining a WMF run Wiki Travel Guide. A proposal for creating such a project has been outlined here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide and would develop from the content currently at wikitravel.org As I've just written on the talk page there: Frankly speaking, I don't think we need another wiki on travelling as there already is Wikivoyage. Wikivoyage is a fork of Wikitravel that was created when Wikitravel went commercial. It is run under a free CC-by-sa licence, and it is ready to add new language projects. German editors of Wikivoyage most probably will not change to a WMF project. So the question is why the editors of English Wikitravel won't rather come over and join Wikivoyage? It would be a rather bad idea to split communities instead of joining them together. To my mind Wikivoyage is the place where to gather travel information. Regards, Jürgen (contributing to both Wikipedia and Wikivoyage). PS. I'll tell the German Wikvoyage community about this discussion. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- --- Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter http://wmnederland.nl/ Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht --- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Volunteers Wanted: Funds Dissemination Process Advisory Group
Can you explain why we need this proposed process? The decision has been made to form a committee to make recommendations to the WMF board about funds dissemination. The only decision still to be made, as far as I can see, is who should be on the committee. What questions do you want to answer with this long, time consuming and expensive process? On 9 April 2012 20:08, Barry Newstead bnewst...@wikimedia.org wrote: Dear all, Following up on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board resolution on Funds Dissemination[1], we are launching work on the design of the Funds Dissemination Committee[2] To help in the design and implementation work ahead, we are creating an Advisory Group which will begin work very soon. Information on the nomination process for the formation of the Advisory Group is available on meta [3] and we would encourage interested candidates who meet the criteria to consider applying. Please also pass this information on to people in the wider community. [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Funds_Dissemination_Committee [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_Advisory_Group/Formationhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/FDC_Advisory_Group Best, Barry -- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Personality rights
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 8:42 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 April 2012 13:39, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: I've sent you and Ryan an e-mail with a link to the deletion discussion. In a discussion like this, secret evidence is approximately worthless. Indeed. This is the link I received by mail: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/ObiWolf_Lesbian_Images Bencmq wrote: I believe the closing admins' arguments also include that by uploading those images to Flickr, those actress would have already given consent? Yes. Though the original uploader is rarely also the subject, and may not have such consent. If the uploader did not upload directly to Commons (but had their photos scraped from Flickr), and shows up later to say that they made a mistake in setting their Flickr prefs and that they or their subjects did not give consent for such distirbution, it is hard to gainsay them. In these cases I think we should accede to the photographer's request, unless we have a strong specific reason to keep the image, after reasonably verifying their identity. Ryan Kaldari writes: What was the justification for not following the Photographs of identifiable people guideline? Maarten Dammers writes: That probaby has to do with the fact that some people tried to (ab)use this rule to get images deleted they didn't like. Say I take http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_SOPA_Boiler_Room_Meeting.jpg If I would want to get rid of that picture I just say we don't have consent documented. Those people are identifiable and in a private place. If the photographer showed up and denied having consent, would we not promptly take that photo down? If one of the subjects showed up and denied giving consent and asked for the photo to be removed, we should see if the photographer had gotten consent. If not, again -- would we not take the photo down? If not, then I must be misunderstanding that Commons guideline. Sam. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
FD seem to collect lots of crappy feedback... Why WMF promis always think a wiki interface will save the world? It definitely will not, because newbies will never touch this interface... and this is a BIG BIG problem nobody wants to acknowledge. We do need services that are easier to use than a wiki is... OMG can nobody understand this simple thing? And yes, it actually may be cheaper to develop such interfaces from scratch... than to try to bend MediaWiki over and over again. Teahouse is a good concept but in wrong software environment (wikitext and MediaWiki again). Why is LiquidThreads on hold? Who stopped it? Things are going to hell again then... This project was a light in the end of a tunnel... unfortunatelly the consesnus-based community probably blew it up... because there were few NO-sayers who sent this promising projet to the hell... 2012/4/7 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site like this? It seems like the ideal software for it. StackExchange and the open source OSQA equivalent are indeed powerful tools and worth experimenting with. Anyone wanting to set up a public instance of these or other tools to play with can do so through Wikimedia Labs and of course the toolserver. See https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Access for Labs access and policies. We've focused on creating a more integrated help experience with two projects, the feedback dashboard (FD) and the teahouse. The FD gives new editors an opportunity to ask a question or register a complaint. It pops into view the moment you first click edit, which is a more obvious affordance than a separate help site you have to find out about and visit. It's been active on en.wp and nl.wp for a few months, and was recently activated on French Wikisource as well. On en.wp, we register about 100 feedback submissions a day, and about 30-50 responses. FD includes a few features which elevate it above ordinary talk page responses: - an in-line response tool on the dashboard itself which shortcuts the path to the user's talk page - a mark as helpful feature which the recipient of a message can use to indicate that they were helped. - friendly email notifications (not the standard talk page notifiers) - a leaderboard of top responders, which has been helpful at incentivizing participation FD for English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard FD for Dutch Wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:DashboardTerugkoppeling FD for French Wikisource: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:FeedbackDashboard We're currently letting the project sit for a while to gather metrics about any impact it has on editors who are being helped. The teahouse is a less technical and more social initiative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse It is supported by some shiny templates and a nice little in-line response gadget. But it's primarily an effort to mobilize lots of people to engage in user-to-user help. As you can see, lots of folks have signed up as hosts (people who respond), and early metrics indicate that there's indeed a positive impact on retention. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Teahouse/Metrics IMO setting up a separate Q/A site would be in some ways a workaround for Wikimedia's poor internal discussion system, and would incur lots of disadvantages (detached from workflows, no easy login integration, no easy integration of wiki markup / templates, separate technical infrastructure with additional maintenance/scalability/security burden, need for additional policy development on copyright, terms of use, etc. ..). But it's worth experimenting with, for sure, if only to find out what UI/UX patterns are worth applying to our own solutions. LQT is on hold for now, because it's an overambitious and underresourced project. We're going to start work soon on this project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) This is a larger effort to improve Wikimedia's notifications infrastructure, and will lay the groundwork for messaging improvements, as well as other next generation features. We hope that we'll be able to improve user-to-user messaging features in this process, which would be a technical foundation for improved direct user support systems. For the tech side of things, our goals for next fiscal are still draft, but give a good idea what we're thinking about (pending approval of associated staffing/funding): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent There have also been a couple of other proposals on meta along these same lines, and perhaps something useful could be merged from the other ones as well: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_projects_-_QA Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Indeed, I would expect for the 'Sister Projects Committee' to have both the options of project fission and project fusion within its toolbag. Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Tarc Meridian t...@hotmail.com wrote: In some respects, that change would be quite good. My experience on Wikiquote has been unfavorable, to put it mildly, where the en.wiki concept of BLP is non-existent. Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 14:42:41 +1000 From: jay...@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process The policies of each project are different for a very good reason. e.g. If English Wikiquote was merged into English Wikipedia, the vast majority of the quote pages would be deleted very quickly, for good or ill. I know I would be the first to get out the sickle. :P On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Carlos Felipe Antonorsi -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving Wikipedia Information graphics
Can we please also have information on how to update them, and source files? It's good to have brilliant graphics, but also very important to be able to recreate them. I guess not all students followed the best practice (and more will next time): some of those images are SVG. That's a good first step, but beyond just saving them as SVG, which is important, it would be great to have instructions on how they were made: what software was used? How can one create a new, updated version when the data changes? For example, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_with_Gnuplot_source_code - these pictures can be recreated easily. Kind regards, -- David Richfield [[:en:User:Slashme]] +27718539985 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for POTY Helpers and Translators
Will you use the Translate extension for translations or will you just ask the translators to do it old-style? Please consider the extension - it's far more convenient for the translators and for the managers. It's already installed in Meta. 06.04.2012 6:42 пользователь Mono monom...@gmail.com написал: Hello Wikimedians, On behalf of the 2011 POTY committee, I'd like to invite you to join the Commons Picture of the Year (POTY) Committee. A volunteer-led contest, Picture of the Year is run by an organizing committee of Wikimedians. Since its inception in 2006, thousands of photos from people all over the world have been selected as Featured Pictures, and all of them are free for anyone in the world to reuse, remix and share. POTY is one of Wikimedia's most prominent events. The committee currently has several dedicated members, but we're looking for some more help. Last year, the committee counted 2,463 votes from Wikimedians! There are lots of ways to help out, including helping set up contest pages, posting messages in relevant locations, *translating interface messages,* assisting voters, and counting votes. We want to make POTY 2011 accessible to as many people as possible, so translating pages is a priority. We're looking for a handful of experienced and dedicated users. Together, we'll be able to run one of the most successful POTY contests ever. If you're interested in helping out, *please fill out this form http://pictureoftheyear.wufoo.com/forms/picture-of-the-year-2011-committee/ * and we'll get in touch with you. You can also keep up with the POTY 2011 contest on Twitter http://twitter.com/commonsPOTY, in the #poty2011 IRC channel on Freenode http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=poty2011uio=MTE9MTMz98, or by visiting the POTY page on the Wikimedia Commonshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:POTY/2011. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Thank you for your consideration, User:Mono Coordinator POTY 2011 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ for fundraising resolutions
Hi Phoebe, Thanks for posting this. I've asked a question (OK, three related questions) at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Board_FAQ#Why_just_the_four_chapters.3F Thanks, Mike On 5 Apr 2012, at 19:29, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 5 April 2012 19:14, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks, Tom. If you don't mind I'll put it on the talk page; this will likely require some discussion to answer. By all means. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
There have been some good suggestions in this thread! I've summarized some of them on meta here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sister_Projects_Committee Please help improve that page, and indicate if you would be interested in this work. SJ On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed, I would expect for the 'Sister Projects Committee' to have both the options of project fission and project fusion within its toolbag. Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Tarc Meridian t...@hotmail.com wrote: In some respects, that change would be quite good. My experience on Wikiquote has been unfavorable, to put it mildly, where the en.wiki concept of BLP is non-existent. Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 14:42:41 +1000 From: jay...@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process The policies of each project are different for a very good reason. e.g. If English Wikiquote was merged into English Wikipedia, the vast majority of the quote pages would be deleted very quickly, for good or ill. I know I would be the first to get out the sickle. :P On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Carlos Felipe Antonorsi -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for POTY Helpers and Translators
On 7 April 2012 22:00, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: Will you use the Translate extension for translations or will you just ask the translators to do it old-style? Please consider the extension - it's far more convenient for the translators and for the managers. It's already installed in Meta. I'm fairly experienced with the translate extension so I would be happy to use it, although I was skeptical at first when I was using it for the Steward Elections (which was mainly a copy/paste job from last year with a few dates changing), for all new translations that need to take place, I think the translation extension is going to be the most convenient for all (other than perhaps for Central Notice, where the current system still works relatively well). -- Thehelpfulone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone English Wikipedia Administrator ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
Looking a bit further into the best way to do this - since mailman doesn't have any sensible export/import features that retain list member settings, we'll probably need to make a full copy of the list on the server, and then remove the members of the old one. I'll ask Daniel to look into that next week and have held off for now. As for archives, Daniel says it shouldn't be a problem to keep the old archives under the old URL, but to also to copy them (with new URLs) into the new list. The only disadvantage I see that in the event we need to do any removals of old posts, we'll need to remember to do it in both places. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Yes we might be on the same page, but I think in general the employment policy of WFM is one big disaster. I would rather not make a research on productivity among the employees... which from a POV of an outsider seems to be a tragedy looking at the site usability and editing stats... I have no idea what all the administrative staff is doing... a non-profit like WMF should be employing only developers (+an accountant), while crowdsourcing assighments for them for free from the community. Now we loose great money on running programs that have little or no impact on the strategic goals defined recently. There simply have to be indicators of productivity and somebody really has to evaluate if current strategy is the right direction to the goals currently set... I not sure this is even about to happen soon. 2012/4/6 birgitte...@yahoo.com: Please don't assume I disagree with all objections that could possibly be made, just because I disagree that the one's which had been presented so far are very significant. I sincerely hope this program is more decentralized then any other program being run right now. It seems to be in rather early stages, to declare that it has failed to achieve this. But knowing SF, if the program were be half as well-distributed as needed for optimal performance (in a more perfect WMF); they will be white-knuckled, nauseous, and grasping for reasons to reel it in (figuratively speaking). So I hope the program isn't actually designed to be ideally decentralized. We don't operate in an ideal world. I hope it just one step further towards decentralization than SF has made thus far. Then it may serve to deliver two good outcomes, in it's stated purpose as well building confidence for decentralization in SF. Which is not to say I don't think your underlying objection is not the number one, most serious, concern I have with SF. If you asked me to explain what believed was the largest, most fundamental error SF is making. I would answer along your lines of thinking. If I could magically change one opinion regarding WMF, I would make everyone forget they had ever heard it was a good idea to have all the employees working face-to-face so they might more efficiently come to the wrong conclusions and more quickly be able to produce fait accompli [1] But one has to walk before they can run. Still if you are correct the end editor engagement program is meant to be entire run out of SF, they shouldn't bother wasting their time. There is a good reason politicians do not run their listening tours from within their capitol cities. It is impossible for them to really gauge how things are going in the communities when the folks at the cafeteria are so much more engaging! BirgitteSB [1] An accomplished fact; an action which is completed before those affected by it are in a position to query or reverse it. (I know English can difficult enough even when don't decide to rob other languages for concepts we are lacking. For all I know this might mean something slightly different in French!) On Apr 5, 2012, at 4:42 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead... 2012/3/28 birgitte...@yahoo.com: It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a Wikipedia class project without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status. I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach. It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: new projects suck, because there are (close to) none Well propose a non sucky one then? TBH I don't class a QA site really as a new project. Since that bug (if memory serves correctly) is just about setting one up for questions about using/editing WMF projects compared to a more general QA involving almost any topic questions. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
In some respects, that change would be quite good. My experience on Wikiquote has been unfavorable, to put it mildly, where the en.wiki concept of BLP is non-existent. Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 14:42:41 +1000 From: jay...@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process The policies of each project are different for a very good reason. e.g. If English Wikiquote was merged into English Wikipedia, the vast majority of the quote pages would be deleted very quickly, for good or ill. I know I would be the first to get out the sickle. :P On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Carlos Felipe Antonorsi -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Yes and why the damn WMF does not throw their support behind such projects? Do they consider us all to be useless idiots when proposing such things? 2012/4/6 Mono monom...@gmail.com: Well, I don't think it could be successful unless the Foundation threw their support behind it. On Friday, April 6, 2012, K. Peachey wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: new projects suck, because there are (close to) none Well propose a non sucky one then? TBH I don't class a QA site really as a new project. Since that bug (if memory serves correctly) is just about setting one up for questions about using/editing WMF projects compared to a more general QA involving almost any topic questions. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving Wikipedia Information graphics
Very good stuff! Can we please also have information on how to update them, and source files? It's good to have brilliant graphics, but also very important to be able to recreate them. By the way, in the same breath, let me plug my basic, simple, parliament diagram creator (which writes svg files). I'd be very excited to hear from people who want to use and improve it, or even have a better free tool which supersedes it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Slashme#Parliament_diagram_tool ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
I will be happy to set such a site for the Foundation, as soon as someone gives me the power to do so... the only development task is to connect existing software (probably OSQA) to Global login system... Btw, Erik, I actually like acting rather than talking and I am terribly frustrated from the nothing (maybe except Wikidata, but that is not WMF again) that is currently happening in Wikimedia... then it happens that if I talk you may think I am ill... which again actually may partly be true temporarily. Anyways I do not feel like having to excuse myself for such behavior... Linking the old thread: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/242379 2012/4/6 Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Is there a more wiki like version of that platform available - or would development of such a platform be feasible and of interest to our volunteer developers? -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
WOW, you guys are bashing the WMF for not supporting a legal nightmare, and yet another clone of an existing service (answers.yahoo.com). The legalities and paperwork necessary to avoid the WMF from getting their asses sued off for bad answers is probably a multi-year endeavor, and a money sink. How would such a system function without degrading into a crap pit? And how would that further the goals of the WMF? On Friday, April 6, 2012, Mono wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
I believ you misinterpreted the use. This tool would only do users EDITing Wikipedia. On Friday, April 6, 2012, John wrote: WOW, you guys are bashing the WMF for not supporting a legal nightmare, and yet another clone of an existing service (answers.yahoo.com). The legalities and paperwork necessary to avoid the WMF from getting their asses sued off for bad answers is probably a multi-year endeavor, and a money sink. How would such a system function without degrading into a crap pit? And how would that further the goals of the WMF? On Friday, April 6, 2012, Mono wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:; javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Possibly, but maybe more trouble that it's worth. On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Is there a more wiki like version of that platform available - or would development of such a platform be feasible and of interest to our volunteer developers? -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
I'm unclear from a legal perspective how this presents a nightmare. In what ways do volunteers responding to QA's about Wikimedia projects and content present great challenges than existing efforts like enWP's Reference Desk and MW.org's Support desk? In regards to answers.yahoo.com - I think you may be misinterpreting the proposed initial scope. -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:43 PM, John phoenixoverr...@gmail.com wrote: WOW, you guys are bashing the WMF for not supporting a legal nightmare, and yet another clone of an existing service (answers.yahoo.com). The legalities and paperwork necessary to avoid the WMF from getting their asses sued off for bad answers is probably a multi-year endeavor, and a money sink. How would such a system function without degrading into a crap pit? And how would that further the goals of the WMF? On Friday, April 6, 2012, Mono wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Fair enough - I could also go around and around on the value or challenge of using wiki style editing to help folks running into problems using wiki edit tools.. -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:58 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote: Possibly, but maybe more trouble that it's worth. On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Is there a more wiki like version of that platform available - or would development of such a platform be feasible and of interest to our volunteer developers? -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
You might want to warn stackexchange ;-) Tom Morton On 6 Apr 2012, at 21:44, John phoenixoverr...@gmail.com wrote: WOW, you guys are bashing the WMF for not supporting a legal nightmare, and yet another clone of an existing service (answers.yahoo.com). The legalities and paperwork necessary to avoid the WMF from getting their asses sued off for bad answers is probably a multi-year endeavor, and a money sink. How would such a system function without degrading into a crap pit? And how would that further the goals of the WMF? On Friday, April 6, 2012, Mono wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site like this? It seems like the ideal software for it. Although IMO if MediaWiki discussions are too confusing for new users, we should be concentrating on fixing that (*cough* LiquidThreads *cough*) rather than going to a different platform. Peter [1] http://stackexchange.com/ On 6 April 2012 21:58, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote: Possibly, but maybe more trouble that it's worth. On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Is there a more wiki like version of that platform available - or would development of such a platform be feasible and of interest to our volunteer developers? -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
This site could be an interesting test ground for the developing visual editor and future LiquidThreads projects. I always feel a little weird when we develop new platforms rather than enhance the MediaWiki platform. -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 5:07 PM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site like this? It seems like the ideal software for it. Although IMO if MediaWiki discussions are too confusing for new users, we should be concentrating on fixing that (*cough* LiquidThreads *cough*) rather than going to a different platform. Peter [1] http://stackexchange.com/ On 6 April 2012 21:58, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote: Possibly, but maybe more trouble that it's worth. On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Is there a more wiki like version of that platform available - or would development of such a platform be feasible and of interest to our volunteer developers? -greg On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com javascript:; wrote: Take a look at toolserver.org/~mono/qua On Friday, April 6, 2012, Gregory Varnum wrote: Some modifications and requested info has been added to: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask.wikimedia.org_(Q%26A_site) -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:;javascript:; wrote: Great! Could you two please revise the current dormant proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAnswers And note that one of the active uses of the site would be a channel dedicated to QA about using the Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki? I think it is simpler and easier to say let's start a QA site, and focus on building a help channel there. As long as the site is up and maintained, you could answer other questions there as well. The WP:RefDesk has never been an ideal formal for answering questions or, more importantly, for aggregating and organizing answers over time so that it develops into a permanent reference resource. SJ On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com javascript:;javascript:; wrote: I would be interested in helping with this project from a third-party wiki and MediaWiki developer perspective. -greg aka varnent On Apr 6, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.comjavascript:; javascript:; wrote: Hi there, new projects suck, because there are (close to) none asked some time ago already with few positive replies bug was already filled at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29923 is there someone who can help move on? It looks like a good idea to me. Do you have any experience running one of those sites? As with any new project, a set of people signed up to help administer it / be initial contributors and editosr would be useful. So I think it's still valuable to create a page about it on meta as a 'new project' even though we haven't cleaned up the new project process there recently. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my iPad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving Wikipedia Information graphics
Steven Walling, 06/04/2012 00:39: These are fantastic. I don't see them on (EN) articles or Commons yet, though it's easy to miss... do the students need help uploading etc? All those images are hotlinked from Commons, or are we talking about different things? Some of them are in articles but could be made more prominent. David Richfield, 06/04/2012 20:23: Can we please also have information on how to update them, and source files? It's good to have brilliant graphics, but also very important to be able to recreate them. I guess not all students followed the best practice (and more will next time): some of those images are SVG. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site like this? It seems like the ideal software for it. StackExchange and the open source OSQA equivalent are indeed powerful tools and worth experimenting with. Anyone wanting to set up a public instance of these or other tools to play with can do so through Wikimedia Labs and of course the toolserver. See https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Access for Labs access and policies. We've focused on creating a more integrated help experience with two projects, the feedback dashboard (FD) and the teahouse. The FD gives new editors an opportunity to ask a question or register a complaint. It pops into view the moment you first click edit, which is a more obvious affordance than a separate help site you have to find out about and visit. It's been active on en.wp and nl.wp for a few months, and was recently activated on French Wikisource as well. On en.wp, we register about 100 feedback submissions a day, and about 30-50 responses. FD includes a few features which elevate it above ordinary talk page responses: - an in-line response tool on the dashboard itself which shortcuts the path to the user's talk page - a mark as helpful feature which the recipient of a message can use to indicate that they were helped. - friendly email notifications (not the standard talk page notifiers) - a leaderboard of top responders, which has been helpful at incentivizing participation FD for English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard FD for Dutch Wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:DashboardTerugkoppeling FD for French Wikisource: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:FeedbackDashboard We're currently letting the project sit for a while to gather metrics about any impact it has on editors who are being helped. The teahouse is a less technical and more social initiative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse It is supported by some shiny templates and a nice little in-line response gadget. But it's primarily an effort to mobilize lots of people to engage in user-to-user help. As you can see, lots of folks have signed up as hosts (people who respond), and early metrics indicate that there's indeed a positive impact on retention. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Teahouse/Metrics IMO setting up a separate Q/A site would be in some ways a workaround for Wikimedia's poor internal discussion system, and would incur lots of disadvantages (detached from workflows, no easy login integration, no easy integration of wiki markup / templates, separate technical infrastructure with additional maintenance/scalability/security burden, need for additional policy development on copyright, terms of use, etc. ..). But it's worth experimenting with, for sure, if only to find out what UI/UX patterns are worth applying to our own solutions. LQT is on hold for now, because it's an overambitious and underresourced project. We're going to start work soon on this project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) This is a larger effort to improve Wikimedia's notifications infrastructure, and will lay the groundwork for messaging improvements, as well as other next generation features. We hope that we'll be able to improve user-to-user messaging features in this process, which would be a technical foundation for improved direct user support systems. For the tech side of things, our goals for next fiscal are still draft, but give a good idea what we're thinking about (pending approval of associated staffing/funding): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: What about personal development? Do your managers play an active role in helping their reports develop with objectives, feedback, training, etc? Yes, of course. There's a standard $ allotment for each employee in the budget to support training, courses, coaching, etc. and managers/employees are encouraged to explore options together. In practice, some people take more advantage of this than others, of course -- and to be fair, some managers do a better job at it than others, which in my experience is more a function of management experience and personality than it is of number of reports. Gayle's office plays an important role in bringing fairness into the process, sharing info about development opportunities and options, setting standards about goal-setting and performance management, being available for deeper conversations, exploration of coaching options, etc. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Hoi, The WikiData project is at first very much technical. Software is developed and as the software gains a certain level of maturity, a community will start to grow. This community will slowly but surely become integrated with other Wikimedia projects. At this stage all eyes are on Wikipedia but Commons is another contender; the current data on the pages is highly structured and this makes it an obvious target. The quotes of Wikiquote can also be structured and made into structured data. The information in Wiktionary can also be structured, this has been realised to a really large extend in OmegaWiki. The most important notion as far as I am concerned is that WikiData will to a large extend compete with the WikiText and content will migrate to WikiData when it is appreciated what added value can be had as a result. When you consider new projects for the Wikimedia Foundation, when you even consider the existing projects, the key consideration is what is it that you want to achieve in that project and how this can be best realised. There are both technical, organisational and community issues. When you are willing to tackle these issues, when the Wikimedia Foundation is to tackle these issues it means that we will have to consider more than just business as usual. It means that tools that support existing practices like the recording of pronounced text can be either better documented maybe even integrated. This is to prevent the recurring development of new tools with the same purpose because older tools are unknown or not maintained. In a nutshell; because of Wikidata our standard practices will change. This will have an impact on new and old projects. Please consider the technical requirements of a project and do not consider new projects when they will not get the tools and the support they need. Thanks, Gerard On 3 April 2012 06:40, Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org wrote: With the launch of the WikiData effort, I am reminded that we should return to our early willingness to experiment with new project ideas. This means both starting new types of projects (like commons, like wikidata!) and closing / archiving / spinning off projects (like the sep11 wiki). Two things I would love to see in the near future: - a fixed new-project process, and at least one proposal evaluated through it. Starting to work through the backlog of new project ideas/requests that have existing active projects elsewhere - a global list of areas needing free knowledge, and how far we are as a society towards reaching that goal SJ -- Forwarded message -- From: Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 2:01 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org I would love to see the new project process on Meta come back online. (much of this email is posted to [[m:talk:new project proposals]]) I could use some help in making this happen - we need to start an incubator process for ideas with support, and a separate process for proposing existing projects that have been incubated elsewhere for support or hosting. The meta page for each proposed project should track its progress, whether offsite or on the incubator... a project infobox should be designed... an interested group (if less formal than langcom) should go through and review the backlog of proposals and suggest the necessary next step for each. On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: You can always make Wikinfo a sister project. A space to hold POV debates would be an interesting intermediate ground between no-restraint edit wars and topic bans, for those in heated argument. Is Wikinfo designed for this? I was thinking of something more like 'Wikireason'. There have been various proposals for an 'argument wiki' over the years, but I've never seen a working implementation. I have actually been independently trying to think of other wikis that should be sister projects. Some are really obvious and non-controversial-- SNPedia, for example, an encyclopedia of single nucleotide polymorphisms and related studies Yes. Link: http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia Genealogy: WeRelate and Rodovid. Both remarkable and lovely projects. Combinable, if all parties could be brought together. Both could use support; I've touched on the possibility of becoming WMF projects with each, and they are willing to discuss it. The result would be by far the largest free collection of genealogy information, with support from one of the major libraries studyig and archiving related data in the US Children's encyclopedia: WikiKids, Vikidia, Grundschulwiki, Wikimini. These projects could be coordinated better to share ideas and lessons, and could use more visibility. Some people active in these projects are already Wikimedians. Dictionaries: OmegaWiki
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Jürgen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.com wrote: Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu: I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. That is because there has been no serious attempt to promote/visibilize the other brands. I think all the sister projects should be displayed at the top of the site like the Google products in their new black bar. Also, the Wikimedia brand / logo should not be hidden at the bottom of the footer in every page! I made some suggestions about this some time ago: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063014.html If the sister projects were living in their own namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. Maybe... or maybe they will be namespaces that hardly anyone knows about because no one linked them in visible places. And the In the news section of the Main Page of Wikipedia should be a Wikinews one. -- Fajro ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Hi, Le 5 avril 2012 05:04, Jürgen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.com a écrit : Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu: Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have, say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and, hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell. I beg to disagree on all this. Yes, people do not know about the sister projects, but you can do a lot about that. First, start by promoting them, instead of only promoting Wikipedia. There are very good reasons why these projects are separate: different scopes, different rules, etc. Merging them at this point would be the worst idea: they would sink in the sea of controversy. No, the future does not lie in making one for binding them all in the darkness. ;o) The future lies in diversity. Five years of indifference do not prove anything. Regards, Jürgen. Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ for fundraising resolutions
Thanks for posting this, Phoebe. My question about what you intend to do over the next 3 years wasn't answered. There is no point waiting three years and then re-evaluating the situation if you haven't made sure you've been gathering all the right information during those 3 years and that you are clear on what the questions you are actually trying to answer are. As a movement, we have a very poor record of following through on our trials with proper evaluations and that is because we never actually plan them out at the start. It is really important that we don't make that mistake again here. On 5 April 2012 18:35, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, The Board has published a QA document around the recently published fundraising funds dissemination resolutions. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Board_FAQ It's quite long -- sorry! -- but hopefully informative. Note that we did this as everyone was traveling and, in the interests of time, didn't put it up for a final vote -- so not every trustee may agree with every word, and we reserve the right to edit :) The first section of the FAQ, overview, focuses on board process for coming to a decision and a summary of the decisions; the next two sections focus on specific questions about the resolutions' content regarding fundraising funds dissemination plans. Some of the questions we were asked this past weekend already, and some of them we are anticipating might be asked. If you've got more questions, please put them on the talk page; if you want to discuss the resolutions themselves, there's a talk page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Final_Board_resolutions all best, phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board of Trustees resolutions
On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 10:47 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Dear all, The Board of Trustees had a meeting this weekend in conjunction with the Wikimedia chapters conference held in Berlin. As an outcome of the meeting we discussed and passed nine resolutions, which are published here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions * Recognizing models of affiliation, and Affiliations committee are related to the movement roles project (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles) and are in response to that group's final recommendations. These resolutions recognize three new models for affiliated Wikimedia groups, and expand the mandate of Chapcom to cover these new models. * Organizational best practices and committee standards are general best-practices documents that also are related to recommendations from the movement roles group; these are documents that we asked the Board audit committee and the Board governance committee respectively to develop. * Board governance committee charter and Amendment to Chapter Committee Rules of Procedure both relate to creating or amending committee governing documents. The BGC is an internal board committee that deals with board appointments and evaluation; the chapter committee amendments update and clarify the procedure for appointing new chapters committee members. * Funds Dissemination Committee asks the WMF executive director to set up a community-led funds dissemination committee structure for making decisions on movement-wide project funds allocations. Fundraising 2012 is about chapter payment-processing, i.e. chapter handling of donations to the Wikimedia project sites, and asks that only the four chapters who are currently payment-processing be allowed to do so until 2016. These recommendations are the conclusion to our lengthy discussion this year and last about fundraising, and are in response to the ED's recommendations on the subject. * And, lastly, Board of Trustees Voting Transparency asks that the name of trustees be published with their votes in formal resolution votes. Please don't hesitate to ask me or us if you have questions about these. best, Phoebe (2011-12 WMF Board secretary) And one last resolution; there was a short delay in publishing while we talked to those affected. This resolution takes care of any outstanding open-ended provisional chapter approvals; there are currently only two such groups. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Revision_of_open-ended_Chapter_approvals best, -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ for fundraising resolutions
Thanks, Tom. If you don't mind I'll put it on the talk page; this will likely require some discussion to answer. -- phoebe On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for posting this, Phoebe. My question about what you intend to do over the next 3 years wasn't answered. There is no point waiting three years and then re-evaluating the situation if you haven't made sure you've been gathering all the right information during those 3 years and that you are clear on what the questions you are actually trying to answer are. As a movement, we have a very poor record of following through on our trials with proper evaluations and that is because we never actually plan them out at the start. It is really important that we don't make that mistake again here. On 5 April 2012 18:35, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, The Board has published a QA document around the recently published fundraising funds dissemination resolutions. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Board_FAQ It's quite long -- sorry! -- but hopefully informative. Note that we did this as everyone was traveling and, in the interests of time, didn't put it up for a final vote -- so not every trustee may agree with every word, and we reserve the right to edit :) The first section of the FAQ, overview, focuses on board process for coming to a decision and a summary of the decisions; the next two sections focus on specific questions about the resolutions' content regarding fundraising funds dissemination plans. Some of the questions we were asked this past weekend already, and some of them we are anticipating might be asked. If you've got more questions, please put them on the talk page; if you want to discuss the resolutions themselves, there's a talk page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_and_Funds_Dissemination/Final_Board_resolutions all best, phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ for fundraising resolutions
On 5 April 2012 19:14, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks, Tom. If you don't mind I'll put it on the talk page; this will likely require some discussion to answer. By all means. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead... 2012/3/28 birgitte...@yahoo.com: It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a Wikipedia class project without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status. I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach. It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into us and them. I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not us. Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups. Birgitte SB On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion. This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now. It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation. Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics. On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: I snipped previous emails because your summary is accurate and this ended up being massive. Fair warning. Let's say this doesn't happen. Things stay exactly as they are now. No increase in vandals nor PR agents nor anything other kind contributor for the rest of the year. Do you
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On 5 April 2012 22:42, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead... Well, I've been working remotely since I took this job 6 months ago, and plan to keep doing so :). Looking at the staff page, I see 18 other remote workers, and that's just the ones I know of! They're distributed throughout Europe, other bits of the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent. And we do have a grants programme: check out http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant :). -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Apr 5, 2012 2:42 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead... I think your understanding is outdated. The Foundation has quite a few remote workers. I can count 20-30 people not based in San Francisco just by scanning the staff and contractors page. 2012/3/28 birgitte...@yahoo.com: It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a Wikipedia class project without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status. I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach. It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into us and them. I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not us. Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups. Birgitte SB On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion. This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now. It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation. Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics. On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: I snipped previous emails
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving Wikipedia Information graphics
That's great stuff, thanks for letting the list know about it. Wikipedia may have squashed Encarta and put Britannica on its heels, but those encyclopedias had the edge with multimedia and professional infographics. This is a wonderful step forward and I hope we'll see more. -Andrew On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leino...@aalto.fiwrote: Hi, I have a nice little project to share. Our graphic design students have been improving some of the information graphics in the Wikipedia articles. The work was done as part of their Information Design class. The teachers of the class wrote about the class and its results in here: http://informaatiomuotoilu.fi/2012/03/student-works-from-our-course-part-i/ I think this is a good example of running Wikipedia Education Program / Wikipedia Academy kind of activities in art and design schools. Please copy! - Teemu -- Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Improving Wikipedia Information graphics
On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leino...@aalto.fiwrote: Hi, I have a nice little project to share. Our graphic design students have been improving some of the information graphics in the Wikipedia articles. The work was done as part of their Information Design class. The teachers of the class wrote about the class and its results in here: http://informaatiomuotoilu.fi/2012/03/student-works-from-our-course-part-i/ I think this is a good example of running Wikipedia Education Program / Wikipedia Academy kind of activities in art and design schools. Please copy! - Teemu These are fantastic. I don't see them on (EN) articles or Commons yet, though it's easy to miss... do the students need help uploading etc? Steven ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Please don't assume I disagree with all objections that could possibly be made, just because I disagree that the one's which had been presented so far are very significant. I sincerely hope this program is more decentralized then any other program being run right now. It seems to be in rather early stages, to declare that it has failed to achieve this. But knowing SF, if the program were be half as well-distributed as needed for optimal performance (in a more perfect WMF); they will be white-knuckled, nauseous, and grasping for reasons to reel it in (figuratively speaking). So I hope the program isn't actually designed to be ideally decentralized. We don't operate in an ideal world. I hope it just one step further towards decentralization than SF has made thus far. Then it may serve to deliver two good outcomes, in it's stated purpose as well building confidence for decentralization in SF. Which is not to say I don't think your underlying objection is not the number one, most serious, concern I have with SF. If you asked me to explain what believed was the largest, most fundamental error SF is making. I would answer along your lines of thinking. If I could magically change one opinion regarding WMF, I would make everyone forget they had ever heard it was a good idea to have all the employees working face-to-face so they might more efficiently come to the wrong conclusions and more quickly be able to produce fait accompli [1] But one has to walk before they can run. Still if you are correct the end editor engagement program is meant to be entire run out of SF, they shouldn't bother wasting their time. There is a good reason politicians do not run their listening tours from within their capitol cities. It is impossible for them to really gauge how things are going in the communities when the folks at the cafeteria are so much more engaging! BirgitteSB [1] An accomplished fact; an action which is completed before those affected by it are in a position to query or reverse it. (I know English can difficult enough even when don't decide to rob other languages for concepts we are lacking. For all I know this might mean something slightly different in French!) On Apr 5, 2012, at 4:42 PM, Jan Kučera kozuc...@gmail.com wrote: You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead... 2012/3/28 birgitte...@yahoo.com: It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a Wikipedia class project without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status. I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach. It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into us and them. I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not us. Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups. Birgitte SB On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
So, Erik is best suited to speak for Engineering's wider attitude on personal development: I can only talk about what I've seen, as an editor who slaves away for our evil and monolithic overlords in their goal to obliterate the commu-crud. wrong meeting. I've been not just impressed but humbled and kinda touched by the attitude I've seen from managers, or simply people with a day-to-day role directing other staffers, when it comes to personal development. Obviously, the software and the movement is the first priority, as well it should be, but they've always tried to make me feel at home and, more importantly, make sure I'm *learning*. It's a genuinely great environment to be in on that front :) On 5 April 2012 05:46, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 April 2012 02:05, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. What about personal development? Do your managers play an active role in helping their reports develop with objectives, feedback, training, etc? I imagine doing that for so many reports would be extremely time consuming. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
I don't know if this makes sense, so I beg your patience for my ignorance. But would it be an option to duplicate the archive? Then both the old and the new links will work. It would be a Great Pity if the new list would not contain the archive of the old list. Best, Lodewijk No dia 4 de Abril de 2012 01:43, Thehelpfulone thehelpfulonew...@gmail.comescreveu: One other thing to think about while you're making larger adjustments: it's possible to customize the listinfo page to not be so ghastly. For example, compare https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l with https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l. Perhaps one of the designers can work on making the new wikimedia-l listinfo page less ugly and off-putting? MZMcBride The designer could also use https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/accounts-enwiki-l for some inspiration, which is an improvement to the wikien-l mailing list (it has dynamic resizing for example). Source code is at https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist, https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist/blob/master/listinfo.html is the main page and https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist/blob/master/options.html is the page with all the subscription options once you've logged in. -- Thehelpfulone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone English Wikipedia Administrator ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
On 3 April 2012 07:04, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:37 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Will the archives be permanently split? Probably -- advanced mailman surgeries carry a high risk of fatal mistakes (e.g. we have a fancy pipermail URL alias, but the archive rebuild is causing URLs to change, or some such nonsense), so it's generally best to avoid them. But I'll ask Daniel Zahn, who's performed some trickier surgeries recently without fatalities (as far as I know). On 4 April 2012 10:15, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I don't know if this makes sense, so I beg your patience for my ignorance. But would it be an option to duplicate the archive? Then both the old and the new links will work. It would be a Great Pity if the new list would not contain the archive of the old list. Best, Lodewijk Hi Lodewijk, This is what Erik meant by advanced mailman surgeries - it's tricky business so it might not be possible, but I imagine they will still try! THO ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
I totally second SJ's poke for more new projects! Although our flagship project is highly successful, it would be good if we try to keep creating new communities. I have been sad for quite a while now that we don't create new projects any more. It would be great to see one new project every year :) Best, Lodewijk No dia 4 de Abril de 2012 05:53, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.comescreveu: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:38 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 April 2012 07:47, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free This is brilliant! I've been after something like this for a while. Thanks for the reminder, Nemo. I was looking for this on Meta, but forgot to check the stratwiki. Embarrassing, since apparently I started the page... :) Liam: another reason to consider merging meta wikis. Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. Liam (paraphrased): - project review : identify support each project expects from the WMF. - easy improvements with high value. Start with Wiktionary - rename Commons to WikiCommons? merge WikiSpecies w/ WikiData? - merge Outreach, Strategy and MetaWiki -- wikimedia.org - lower barriers b/t wikis: global userpages, talk, watchlists This whole class of brainstorming is important; making it less of a pain to travel between projects is good for all of them. Yaroslav: may be we could use the experience of langcom and appoint ten individuals who would recommend new proposals to the Board. That's not a bad idea. SJ Indeed, perhaps a 'Sister Projects Committee' could start looking into some of Liam's type of questions. (Of course, Wikipedia is a sister project too!) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] first Wikidata office hour on IRC
Hey :) just a quick reminder that the english one will be in about 23 hours. Cheers Lydia On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de wrote: Hi everyone! Next week the Wikidata team will be complete and start working at full speed. Finally! \o/ I will be holding the first round of Wikidata office hours next week. You're all invited to ask questions and discuss. If you can't attend there will be logs. * 4. April, German, in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode, 4:30pm UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikidata+Office+Houriso=20120404T1630 for different time zones) * 5. April, English, in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode, 4:30pm UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikidata+Office+Houriso=20120405T1630 for different time zones) I plan to offer these regularly. My (virtual) door is open outside these office hours as well of course ;-) Cheers Lydia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Eisenacher Straße 2 10777 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu: Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have, say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and, hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, as I mentioned in a response to Liam the other day, we've been working on having org charts generated in a more automatic, scalable form. ... Thank you for that. On a meta-question that raises - there are a lot of direct reports to the area directors. 18 people seems like a lot per director, not in total headcount, but in direct reports. I'm less familiar with org structure building at foundations than commercial or government or academia, but the others tend to subdivide more. Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is the SWIFT media storage migration). There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I totally second SJ's poke for more new projects! Although our flagship project is highly successful, it would be good if we try to keep creating new communities. I have been sad for quite a while now that we don't create new projects any more. It would be great to see one new project every year :) I had suggested earlier that we might even run this as an annual thing, with a Wikimania-style bidding process for the new sister projects. Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) No dia 4 de Abril de 2012 05:53, Pharos pharosofalexand...@gmail.comescreveu: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:38 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 April 2012 07:47, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free This is brilliant! I've been after something like this for a while. Thanks for the reminder, Nemo. I was looking for this on Meta, but forgot to check the stratwiki. Embarrassing, since apparently I started the page... :) Liam: another reason to consider merging meta wikis. Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. Liam (paraphrased): - project review : identify support each project expects from the WMF. - easy improvements with high value. Start with Wiktionary - rename Commons to WikiCommons? merge WikiSpecies w/ WikiData? - merge Outreach, Strategy and MetaWiki -- wikimedia.org - lower barriers b/t wikis: global userpages, talk, watchlists This whole class of brainstorming is important; making it less of a pain to travel between projects is good for all of them. Yaroslav: may be we could use the experience of langcom and appoint ten individuals who would recommend new proposals to the Board. That's not a bad idea. SJ Indeed, perhaps a 'Sister Projects Committee' could start looking into some of Liam's type of questions. (Of course, Wikipedia is a sister project too!) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process (James Heilman)
I would love to see two specific proposals taken up. One is The Wikipedia Journal as discussed here http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Journal_%28A_peer-review_journal_to_allow/encourage_academics_to_write_Wikipedia_articles%29 Currently working on corporate partners for this. And the other is a Wiki Travel Guide as per here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Travel_Guide A great deal of discussion is occurring off line. The question is would the Wikimedia Movement be interested in being involved with developing / hosting of this sort of content. Further details of potential collaborations should be coming out in the next few weeks. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is the SWIFT media storage migration). There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Sounds like a good thought out, informed answer. Thanks. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Hi everyone, I'm new on the list and this is my fist email, but I've been reading for a while(I'm from es.wiki). I support what Jürgen said, Most of the Wikimedia projects are not very popular (with the exception of Wikipedia and maybe commons). I talk about what I've read and listened to people totally ignorant about what the wiki is, If there could be a way we could incorporate other projects to wikipedia it would be perfect. You've never heard in the news things about Wikiquote or Wikiversity, it's always about Wikipedia. It would seem that the best thing we could do to help improve the participation on those projects would be to merge them in to the most popular project: Wikipedia On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Jürgen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.comwrote: Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu: Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have, say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and, hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -cfa Carlos Felipe Antonorsi G. 0416-6852535 @antonorsi ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
The policies of each project are different for a very good reason. e.g. If English Wikiquote was merged into English Wikipedia, the vast majority of the quote pages would be deleted very quickly, for good or ill. I know I would be the first to get out the sickle. :P On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Carlos Felipe Antonorsi carfel...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, I'm new on the list and this is my fist email, but I've been reading for a while(I'm from es.wiki). I support what Jürgen said, Most of the Wikimedia projects are not very popular (with the exception of Wikipedia and maybe commons). I talk about what I've read and listened to people totally ignorant about what the wiki is, If there could be a way we could incorporate other projects to wikipedia it would be perfect. You've never heard in the news things about Wikiquote or Wikiversity, it's always about Wikipedia. It would seem that the best thing we could do to help improve the participation on those projects would be to merge them in to the most popular project: Wikipedia On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Jürgen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.comwrote: Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu: Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have, say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and, hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- -cfa Carlos Felipe Antonorsi G. 0416-6852535 @antonorsi ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On 5 April 2012 02:05, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. What about personal development? Do your managers play an active role in helping their reports develop with objectives, feedback, training, etc? I imagine doing that for so many reports would be extremely time consuming. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Samuel Klein, 03/04/2012 06:40: - a global list of areas needing free knowledge, and how far we are as a society towards reaching that goal We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
Hello, Interesting. Please allow me to second that with the proposal to reconsider existing projects. For example, what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project, or at least cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages? Or invest money in promoting it? Kind regards Ziko 2012/4/3 Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org: With the launch of the WikiData effort, I am reminded that we should return to our early willingness to experiment with new project ideas. This means both starting new types of projects (like commons, like wikidata!) and closing / archiving / spinning off projects (like the sep11 wiki). Two things I would love to see in the near future: - a fixed new-project process, and at least one proposal evaluated through it. Starting to work through the backlog of new project ideas/requests that have existing active projects elsewhere - a global list of areas needing free knowledge, and how far we are as a society towards reaching that goal SJ -- Forwarded message -- From: Samuel Klein s...@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 2:01 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org I would love to see the new project process on Meta come back online. (much of this email is posted to [[m:talk:new project proposals]]) I could use some help in making this happen - we need to start an incubator process for ideas with support, and a separate process for proposing existing projects that have been incubated elsewhere for support or hosting. The meta page for each proposed project should track its progress, whether offsite or on the incubator... a project infobox should be designed... an interested group (if less formal than langcom) should go through and review the backlog of proposals and suggest the necessary next step for each. On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: You can always make Wikinfo a sister project. A space to hold POV debates would be an interesting intermediate ground between no-restraint edit wars and topic bans, for those in heated argument. Is Wikinfo designed for this? I was thinking of something more like 'Wikireason'. There have been various proposals for an 'argument wiki' over the years, but I've never seen a working implementation. I have actually been independently trying to think of other wikis that should be sister projects. Some are really obvious and non-controversial-- SNPedia, for example, an encyclopedia of single nucleotide polymorphisms and related studies Yes. Link: http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia Genealogy: WeRelate and Rodovid. Both remarkable and lovely projects. Combinable, if all parties could be brought together. Both could use support; I've touched on the possibility of becoming WMF projects with each, and they are willing to discuss it. The result would be by far the largest free collection of genealogy information, with support from one of the major libraries studyig and archiving related data in the US Children's encyclopedia: WikiKids, Vikidia, Grundschulwiki, Wikimini. These projects could be coordinated better to share ideas and lessons, and could use more visibility. Some people active in these projects are already Wikimedians. Dictionaries: OmegaWiki. This multilingual dictionary could help revamp our toolchain for Wiktionary, which remains a bit broken. Interface translation: TranslateWiki. iirc it does not want to be a WMF project per se, but could use more explicit support than we have given so far. Citations and bibliography: AcaWiki (and the budding WikiScholar). Wikified maps: Wikimapia. currently profitable and popular; probably fine on their own. However they use a non-free map stack and use an NC license; finding a way to help that project migrate to a free stack and license [now that there is a free orthorectified aerial map available http://blog.stevecoast.com/im-working-at-microsoft-and-were-donating-ima] would be of benefit to the whole world. Other projects for which there is a supply of raw materials available from content donors (which we cannot currently accept): * Annotated source materials and their translations: Part of Wikisource++ ? * Translation memory: Part of Translatewiki++ ? * Public datasets: Wikidata * Music scores: Wikimusic We're at the point where the lack of diversity of our English language project 'styles' may be a major factor dissuading new users from participation. It is certainly one of the factors. Sam. -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On 3 April 2012 07:47, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free This is brilliant! I've been after something like this for a while. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On 3 April 2012 06:50, Ziko van Dijk vand...@wmnederland.nl wrote: Hello, Interesting. Please allow me to second that with the proposal to reconsider existing projects. For example, what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project, or at least cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages? Or invest money in promoting it? Kind regards Ziko Interesting examples Ziko - and allow me to go a bit further... - I'd love to see some kind of project review to identify what the communities of all the different sister-projects and language editions believe to be the minimum standards of technical support that they expect from the WMF. We all often hear that everything-other-than-en.WP-is-ignored but if we had some published/agreed expectations that would make it much easier to see what was needed. - Similar to Erik Moeller's presentation at Wikimania 2010 (starting slide 17) I'd like to see some specific focus put on easy improvements with high value. In my mind Wiktionary seems to be the logical place where a little bit of attention could have massive impacts on the project. https://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Beyondencyclopediawikimania2010-100714133959-phpapp02.pdfpage=17 - I've often wondered if there has been any formal discussion about the name Wikimedia Commons and whether it should be renamed WikiCommons for consistency with the rest of the projects. This is especially so now that it is a public-facing project not merely the service project it was originally designed to be. - Perhaps WikiSpieces should be merged into WikiData (once it's built) since taxonomic information is most definitely a type of structured data. - Also, could we look at merging the OutreachWiki, the StrategyWiki and MetaWiki? Maybe they could all live at the (currently extremely under-utilised) domain of http://www.wikimedia.org/ - Finally, and more generally, could we make an assessment of the kind of software changes that could be made to make connecting between different wikis easier - both for readers and for editors. Now we have SingleUserLogin, global userpages and watchlists would seem an obvious step to making it easier for editors to work across projects. Just some very rough ideas! -Liam ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:47:45 +0200, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Samuel Klein, 03/04/2012 06:40: - a global list of areas needing free knowledge, and how far we are as a society towards reaching that goal We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Thanks, exactly what I mentioned in the previous message. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
Erik Moeller wrote: On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:37 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Are there any other consequences of a list rename? You will feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. :D A few pages at Meta-Wiki (and possibly wikimediafoundation.org) will need to be updated to reflect this change. Adding a hatnote to the foundation-l archives and listinfo pages would be nice, too. Anything to reduce the inevitable confusion that will accompany this change. One other thing to think about while you're making larger adjustments: it's possible to customize the listinfo page to not be so ghastly. For example, compare https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l with https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l. Perhaps one of the designers can work on making the new wikimedia-l listinfo page less ugly and off-putting? MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
One other thing to think about while you're making larger adjustments: it's possible to customize the listinfo page to not be so ghastly. For example, compare https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l with https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l. Perhaps one of the designers can work on making the new wikimedia-l listinfo page less ugly and off-putting? MZMcBride The designer could also use https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/accounts-enwiki-l for some inspiration, which is an improvement to the wikien-l mailing list (it has dynamic resizing for example). Source code is at https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist, https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist/blob/master/listinfo.html is the main page and https://github.com/enwikipedia-acc/mailinglist/blob/master/options.html is the page with all the subscription options once you've logged in. -- Thehelpfulone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone English Wikipedia Administrator ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:47 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: Samuel Klein, 03/04/2012 06:40: - a global list of areas needing free knowledge, and how far we are as a society towards reaching that goal We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free The several topical subcategories of 'Proposed projects' that I've played with also give a good idea of the variety of areas of free knowledge (list-focused, citation-focused, DIY-focused, etc) that have been proposed on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_projects Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New Project Process
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 4:22 PM, Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:38 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 April 2012 07:47, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: We had started a stub table about this: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free This is brilliant! I've been after something like this for a while. Thanks for the reminder, Nemo. I was looking for this on Meta, but forgot to check the stratwiki. Embarrassing, since apparently I started the page... :) Liam: another reason to consider merging meta wikis. Ziko: what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it? Good questions, subtle answers. Those are not the only options; we might help them merge with a similar project. For instance, wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis. Liam (paraphrased): - project review : identify support each project expects from the WMF. - easy improvements with high value. Start with Wiktionary - rename Commons to WikiCommons? merge WikiSpecies w/ WikiData? - merge Outreach, Strategy and MetaWiki -- wikimedia.org - lower barriers b/t wikis: global userpages, talk, watchlists This whole class of brainstorming is important; making it less of a pain to travel between projects is good for all of them. Yaroslav: may be we could use the experience of langcom and appoint ten individuals who would recommend new proposals to the Board. That's not a bad idea. SJ Indeed, perhaps a 'Sister Projects Committee' could start looking into some of Liam's type of questions. (Of course, Wikipedia is a sister project too!) Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiData and Football, WikiData and OpenGovernmentData, 2.9 Mio Eur from European tax payers
Hi Andreas, assuming the original data is in a license that can be used in Wikidata, and assuming the Wikidata community wants this data in Wikidata, yes :) The use cases are technically feasible for sure. Cheers, Denny 2012/4/1 Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de Hi Andreas On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 1:14 AM, andreas meier meier.a...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Through reports in the German Television I was made aware of the WikiData project. This sounds really interesting. I could also find the press Hah! Nice. Do you remember where you saw it? announcement online. There was a reference to the European Union Project, which seemed to be instrumental to kick this off: http://render-project.eu, and I was surprised that such diverse entities were behind this: Google in Ireland, Telefonica in Spain, KIT University in Germany, SIT University in Austria, JSI University in Slovenia, and Ontotext from Bulgaria. The budget of Render is 4.4 Mio Eur, and the contribution from European taxpayers is 2.9 Mio Eur. I also saw the first year presentation: http://render-project.eu/resources/presentations/project-review-year-1, and am wondering if and how the following use cases fit into the project. 1. Open Goverment Data There is a German Wikipedia article about this: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Data. And also a website explaining it a little more: http://opengovernmentdata.org/. Will there be any liason of WikiData with Open Goverment Data? Possibly. If and how is one of the things we have to decide in the community. 2. Sports Results When I tried to edit Wikipedia first, i wanted to update some sports results of my favoured football club F.C. Barcelona. Unfortunately I failed. I failed as well to copy from another language, the table syntax was too complicated and it somehow seems to differ from one languate version to the other. Will WikiData address current sports results, updating it and make it available for all language versions of Wikipedia? Yes that is one of the things Wikidata will help with. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Eisenacher Straße 2 10777 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: I think wikimedia-l would work fine and make sense. We probably don't need an additional list, a lot of the lists we have now are lightly used. Picking this up again .. I'll go ahead and make this change on Saturday 4/7, unless there are strong objections. Moving this list to wikimedia-l seems like the least disruptive change for now, acknowledging that its scope has long expanded beyond WMF matters. This is the only change -- all other list parameters would stay the same, so as to not surprise and annoy people by rolling up unrelated changes. In future we may - a) find that this is perfectly sufficient and leave it at that, b) create movement-l to discuss the wonderful bureaucracy that we're busily creating in more dedicated and extensive depth, c) create any other divisions that make sense, or not. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WikiData and Football, WikiData and OpenGovernmentData, 2.9 Mio Eur from European tax payers
Hi Andreas On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 1:14 AM, andreas meier meier.a...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Through reports in the German Television I was made aware of the WikiData project. This sounds really interesting. I could also find the press Hah! Nice. Do you remember where you saw it? announcement online. There was a reference to the European Union Project, which seemed to be instrumental to kick this off: http://render-project.eu, and I was surprised that such diverse entities were behind this: Google in Ireland, Telefonica in Spain, KIT University in Germany, SIT University in Austria, JSI University in Slovenia, and Ontotext from Bulgaria. The budget of Render is 4.4 Mio Eur, and the contribution from European taxpayers is 2.9 Mio Eur. I also saw the first year presentation: http://render-project.eu/resources/presentations/project-review-year-1, and am wondering if and how the following use cases fit into the project. 1. Open Goverment Data There is a German Wikipedia article about this: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Data. And also a website explaining it a little more: http://opengovernmentdata.org/. Will there be any liason of WikiData with Open Goverment Data? Possibly. If and how is one of the things we have to decide in the community. 2. Sports Results When I tried to edit Wikipedia first, i wanted to update some sports results of my favoured football club F.C. Barcelona. Unfortunately I failed. I failed as well to copy from another language, the table syntax was too complicated and it somehow seems to differ from one languate version to the other. Will WikiData address current sports results, updating it and make it available for all language versions of Wikipedia? Yes that is one of the things Wikidata will help with. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Eisenacher Straße 2 10777 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Conservapedia announce exciting new linked data project
On 1 April 2012 12:25, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: America’s most trusted encyclopedia, Conservapedia, have decided to launch a new wiki-based semantic data project named Conservadata. The new project will make right-wing soundbites available in machine readable form. http://blog.tommorris.org/post/20277406012/conservadata Great! Now even bullshit will be indexable! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 95
phoebe ayers, 01/04/2012 07:49: In the meantime, if there are any questions for us (as a board) or for individual trustees I encourage you simply to send those along, either to me (if you want them to go to the whole board, as I will pass them along) or privately. That would help make sure that we can address the questions people actually have, rather than speculating. It sounds like people are interested in individual trustee motives. I do think it's better if trustees individually write/talk about where they are coming from, rather than trying to put that information in an official document like the minutes, where everything is condensed and there is the possibility of misrepresentation. Misrepresentation is a risk also for majority views: minutes are always partial but they're supposed to explain or briefly highlight how the body came to some conclusion. Individual members should also be able to submit a few lines of explanation summarizing their view, if they want (again, I don't know if some of them actually wants, but they should definitely be allowed to). Nemo, thanks for sending around the notes -- that's quite helpful! I think we have some notes that Joslyn took too, I'll see if there is anything I can add from that (though etherpad still doesn't seem to work well in my browser - boo.) Don't use HTTPS! Unless the editing is still hectic (I doubt so), we could just immediately move those on Meta, which is their final destination anyway. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Conservapedia announce exciting new linked data project
happy april first On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 April 2012 12:25, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: America’s most trusted encyclopedia, Conservapedia, have decided to launch a new wiki-based semantic data project named Conservadata. The new project will make right-wing soundbites available in machine readable form. http://blog.tommorris.org/post/20277406012/conservadata Great! Now even bullshit will be indexable! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova http://flossk.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
My personal view on this John is that abstaining is appropriate in a couple cases: - you truly don't have an opinion and trust those who do have opinions to make the decision. in that case it's really a decision to support the majority view of the others who are voting. - you don't particularly like a decision but don't hate it enough to vote no. again, this ends up being a decision to support the majority view of others. In the end I think it comes down to personal choice. Some people see the world as more black and white and are comfortable with a simple yes or no (i tend to be in this camp). Others feel a yes/no vote can lack nuance and respect for the gray areas in between and prefer not to unnaturally push themselves to one extreme or the other. One note. I do view a recusal as something completely different. You should recuse yourself if you have some kind of personal conflict of interest with a decision. That's different than an abstention. On Mar 31, 2012, at 7:45 AM, John Vandenberg wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 March 2012 06:13, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: if you cant decide whether something is good or bad for the organisation, you are ill prepared for the vote (a procedural problem), or you are incompetent. Either that, or you're honest. Nobody knows everything (except me, of course!). There is no requirement to know everything. There is a requirement to make decisions in the best interests of the organisation, *as you see it*. If a trustee persistently abstains on the big decisions because they cant see *it* (no vision), or wish to avoid scrutiny, they are abusing their right to abstain and failing the organisation as a trustee. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
On 31 March 2012 06:45, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: There is no requirement to know everything. There is a requirement to make decisions in the best interests of the organisation, *as you see it*. If a trustee persistently abstains on the big decisions because they cant see *it* (no vision), or wish to avoid scrutiny, they are abusing their right to abstain and failing the organisation as a trustee. If they do it persistently, then sure. Is there a board member that is doing it persistently? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 March 2012 06:45, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: There is no requirement to know everything. There is a requirement to make decisions in the best interests of the organisation, *as you see it*. If a trustee persistently abstains on the big decisions because they cant see *it* (no vision), or wish to avoid scrutiny, they are abusing their right to abstain and failing the organisation as a trustee. If they do it persistently, then sure. Is there a board member that is doing it persistently? How could I know that as previously abstainers were not recorded as such. My hope, expressed in my original email to this list, is that looking forward abstentions will be well explained in the minutes or forcibly curtailed if abused. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
John Vandenberg, 31/03/2012 06:56: On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 March 2012 02:03, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: I expect that the minutes will explain the varied positions of the board. If not, then the board should put in place procedures to prevent abuse of abstains. Could you elaborate on what you mean by abuse of abstains? An abstention is a refusal to vote. By doing this, a trustee must have a good reason, such as conflict of interest, and it should be minuted why, or they are refusing the duties of their appointment and should be removed. The meaning of the abstention varies wildly among bodies, so I doubt you can say so. It's currently unclear what an abstention means in the WMF board, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_board_manual#Votes_vs._resolutions.2C_quorum_and_required_majority. The refusal to vote is always explicit and stated as such, often with implied reasons (e.g. voting on the appointment of yourself somewhere), and where not explicitly allowed can simply require the member to temporarily go out of the room during the (discussion and) vote. It's true that sometimes policies say that members can be requested to explain their abstention, given its controversial nature, but it's usually voluntary. Moreover, I think that in this case the reasons for abstentions are quite obvious, just knowing the persons or looking at the public discussion. On the contrary, it's quite hard to understand the votes in favour added to the bunch by the trustees who didn't engage in the discussion or seem to have a strong opinion. That's why a summary of the discussion in the minutes is useful, it explains why the decision has been taken. MZMcBride, 31/03/2012 06:12: I'm not sure I agree with encouraging Board members to explain their votes, though. I think the idea deserves further thought and consideration. Perhaps there would be more value to doing so than I anticipate. Personally, I think having Board members respond to direct follow-up questions regarding specific votes that community members are interested in (on the mailing list or on Meta-Wiki) would be more useful. The summary of the discussion is often more useful than the actual text of the resolution to understand what's been decided and why. There are many ways to do it and I'm sure the board would be able to find a suitable approach and stick to it. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:56 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 March 2012 02:03, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: I expect that the minutes will explain the varied positions of the board. If not, then the board should put in place procedures to prevent abuse of abstains. Could you elaborate on what you mean by abuse of abstains? An abstention is a refusal to vote. By doing this, a trustee must have a good reason, such as conflict of interest, and it should be minuted why, or they are refusing the duties of their appointment and should be removed. I have never heard of this idea before - where did you get it from? People with votes on all kinds of bodies abstain on things all the time, for all kinds of valid reasons. The most prominent recent example I can think of is that Sivlio Berlusconi's government in Italy was brought down by MPs he expected to support him abstaining instead. We don't know why Arne and Bishakka abstained, or why SJ voted against - it is only evident they did not feel able to support the motion as it stood. Regards, Chris ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
On 3/31/12 8:07 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote: On 31 March 2012 06:45, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: There is no requirement to know everything. There is a requirement to make decisions in the best interests of the organisation, *as you see it*. If a trustee persistently abstains on the big decisions because they cant see *it* (no vision), or wish to avoid scrutiny, they are abusing their right to abstain and failing the organisation as a trustee. If they do it persistently, then sure. Is there a board member that is doing it persistently? No. --Jimbo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 95
Craig Franklin, 31/03/2012 23:20: For the record, those who did not vote in favour of the resolutions, this morning explained their reasons for doing so. I'm sure someone more eloquent than I can summarise those reasons, but I think that they were valid. John Vandenberg is correct that if people are consistently abstaining to avoid making hard or unpopular decisions then that is a problem, but I do not think that this is presently the case with the BoT. There are some notes on http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/wmcon12-day2-board-chapters Nemo P.s.: It's a bit weird to focus so much on the reasons to oppose; why should opposing be justified /more/ than supporting? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 95
On 31 March 2012 22:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: P.s.: It's a bit weird to focus so much on the reasons to oppose; why should opposing be justified /more/ than supporting? There's supposed to be a QA coming that will explain the supports. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 95
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 11:40 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 March 2012 22:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: P.s.: It's a bit weird to focus so much on the reasons to oppose; why should opposing be justified /more/ than supporting? There's supposed to be a QA coming that will explain the supports. That's true! Soon -- in a couple of days (everyone is traveling today/tomorrow so it's hard to review quickly). I'll send a note when we get it done, of course. In the meantime, if there are any questions for us (as a board) or for individual trustees I encourage you simply to send those along, either to me (if you want them to go to the whole board, as I will pass them along) or privately. That would help make sure that we can address the questions people actually have, rather than speculating. It sounds like people are interested in individual trustee motives. I do think it's better if trustees individually write/talk about where they are coming from, rather than trying to put that information in an official document like the minutes, where everything is condensed and there is the possibility of misrepresentation. Nemo, thanks for sending around the notes -- that's quite helpful! I think we have some notes that Joslyn took too, I'll see if there is anything I can add from that (though etherpad still doesn't seem to work well in my browser - boo.) -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
phoebe ayers, 30/03/2012 14:03: During the Board of Trustees meeting today we passed a resolution on Trustee voting transparency: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency asking that in future resolutions we publish the names of trustees with their votes for each resolution. Very good! When the minutes get robust enough (if they're not already), it will also be useful to have a summary of the discussion with the differing positions. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
During the Board of Trustees meeting today we passed a resolution on Trustee voting transparency: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency asking that in future resolutions we publish the names of trustees with their votes for each resolution. best, Phoebe Thank you! A very helpful step forward, and I'm glad the Board felt able to take this step. Regards, Chris Wikimedia UK ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
Message: 2 Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:03:55 +0200 From: phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency Message-ID: CAAi3vqFXi9tPrkD9LUQPT6uqpe+d6MNhiOMv027SDX+QeykZ=q...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 During the Board of Trustees meeting today we passed a resolution on Trustee voting transparency: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency asking that in future resolutions we publish the names of trustees with their votes for each resolution. best, Phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * -- That's a very welcome move, and I hope it helps build bridges back to the community. From time to time we will have very divisive issues to discuss, and in such situations it is much easier for the losing side in the community if they can see that their voice was heard on the board, as opposed to the board appearing to make a monolithic decision. In the current arrangements it can sometimes seem that the community is divided and the board is on one side of that divide. It will be much healthier for the movement if the board takes a majority decision in scenarios where the community is divided. Sometimes it may even be worthwhile to record why the board minority dissented. Regards WereSpielChequers ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
On 30 March 2012 13:56, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: That's a very welcome move, and I hope it helps build bridges back to the community. From time to time we will have very divisive issues to discuss, and in such situations it is much easier for the losing side in the community if they can see that their voice was heard on the board, as opposed to the board appearing to make a monolithic decision. In the current arrangements it can sometimes seem that the community is divided and the board is on one side of that divide. It will be much healthier for the movement if the board takes a majority decision in scenarios where the community is divided. Sometimes it may even be worthwhile to record why the board minority dissented. Yes. This will also avoid, as recently, board members appearing to later disclaim actions (a vote) that they were in fact responsible for taking. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:19 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 30 March 2012 13:56, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: That's a very welcome move, and I hope it helps build bridges back to the community. From time to time we will have very divisive issues to discuss, and in such situations it is much easier for the losing side in the community if they can see that their voice was heard on the board, as opposed to the board appearing to make a monolithic decision. In the current arrangements it can sometimes seem that the community is divided and the board is on one side of that divide. It will be much healthier for the movement if the board takes a majority decision in scenarios where the community is divided. Sometimes it may even be worthwhile to record why the board minority dissented. Yes. This will also avoid, as recently, board members appearing to later disclaim actions (a vote) that they were in fact responsible for taking. It's worth recalling that for the majority of 2008-2009 the board did record all votes, and often noted who moved the motion, but the practise was dropped. Its great to see it is now mandatory. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] resolution on voting transparency
On 30 mrt. 2012, at 15:19, David Gerard wrote: Yes. This will also avoid, as recently, board members appearing to later disclaim actions (a vote) that they were in fact responsible for taking. - d. 1) Assume good faith, I cannot recall ANY incident in which a board member purposely lied about their vote within the board. 2) If this was a real problem, the resolution on transparency would not have passed unanimously. Jan-Bart ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
We ask the Executive Director not to allow any additional chapters to payment process, until the Board revisits the framework for fundraising and payment processing in late 2015 in advance of the November 2016 fundraising campaign. This is very disappointing. It's a real shame that chapters aside from WMDE, WMFR, WMUK and WMCH aren't being given any encouragement to develop their capabilities for handling donations. I have to say that I think this is a fundamental misstep for the Wikimedia movement, and one that we will come to regret in the future. On voting transparency: this is a great step forward. However, I would encourage the WMF to take a further step, and to explain why trustees voted approve/abstain/against. This could potentially be done by (for examples) adding notes next to votes explaining reservations or key supporting factors, or by making resolutions more focused (e.g. the fundraising decision could have been split into four: principles, chapter payment processing, four chapters, and additional chapters, which would have provided more insight here). Thanks, Mike Peel (Personal viewpoint) On 30 Mar 2012, at 22:42, Ting Chen wrote: Dear members of the community, After having discussed the final aspects of this today I would like to announce the following three resolutions 1) Board of Trustees Voting Transparency: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency 1) Fundraising 2012: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Fundraising_2012 2) Funds Dissemination Committee: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee For those of you who are currently in Berlin, we will have a 2 hour window tomorrow to discuss this together, we invite you to send questions for this session to Harel Cain (harel.c...@gmail.com mailto:harel.c...@gmail.com) He will be moderating tomorrow's session which will be similar to the QA session we had in Paris. We are currently working on a Question and Answer document which we will publish as soon as possible. Although the decision has now been made, we have a large number of challenges ahead of us and I hope that we as a movement will come together to make the Funds Dissemination Committee a success by working with us to come up with answers tot the questions that we still have and helping to make it work! -- Ting Chen Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. E-Mail: tc...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012
Michael Peel, 30/03/2012 23:52: On voting transparency: this is a great step forward. However, I would encourage the WMF to take a further step, and to explain why trustees voted approve/abstain/against. +1 (as on the other topic). I hope this will done, at least for this particular resolution, in the QA. This could potentially be done by (for examples) adding notes next to votes explaining reservations or key supporting factors, or by making resolutions more focused (e.g. the fundraising decision could have been split into four: principles, chapter payment processing, four chapters, and additional chapters, which would have provided more insight here). I hope that if a trustee wants to vote separately/differently for each item or to formally express disagreement over a part of the resolution he's allowed to do so! The board would look like a very dysfunctional and anti-democratic body otherwise (unless there's a clear policy and process to reject such requests). Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
