Re: [Foundation-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[Samuel Klein]

DGG, I appreciate your points.  Would we be so motivated by this
thread if it weren't a complex problem?

The fact that all of this is quite new, and that there are so many
unknowns and gray areas, actually makes me consider it more likely
that a body of wikimedians, experienced with their own form of
large-scale authority file coordination, are in a position to say
something meaningful about how to achieve something similar for tens
of millions of metadata records.

> OL rather than Wikimedia has the advantage that more of the people
> there understand the problems.

In some areas that is certainly so.  In others, Wikimedia communities
have useful recent experience.  I hope that those who understand these
problems  on both sides recognize the importance of sharing what they
know openly -- and  showing others how to understand them as well.  We
will not succeed as a global community if we say that this class of
problems can only be solved by the limited group of people with an MLS
and a few years of focused training.  (how would you name the sort of
training you mean here, btw?)

SJ


On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:57 AM, David Goodman wrote:
> Yann & Sam
>
> The problem is extraordinarily   complex. A database of all "books"
> (and other media) ever published is beyond the joint  capabilities of
> everyone interested. There are intermediate entities between "books"
> and "works", and important subordinate entities, such as "article" ,
> "chapter" , and those like "poem" which could be at any of several
> levels.  This is not a job for amateurs, unless they are prepared to
> first learn the actual standards of bibliographic description for
> different types of material, and to at least recognize the
> inter-relationships, and the many undefined areas. At research
> libraries, one allows a few years of training for a newcomer with just
> a MLS degree to work with a small subset of this. I have thirty years
> of experience in related areas of librarianship, and I know only
> enough to be aware of the problems.
> For an introduction to the current state of this, see
> http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/Phase1Chp17_11_2_08.pdf.
>
> The difficulty of merging the many thousands of partial correct and
> incorrect sources of available data typically requires the manual
> resolution of each of the tens of millions of instances.
>
> OL rather than Wikimedia has the advantage that more of the people
> there understand the problems.
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:15 PM, c wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> This discussion is very interesting. I would like to make a summary, so
>> that we can go further.
>>
>> 1. A database of all books ever published is one of the thing still missing.
>> 2. This needs massive collaboration by thousands of volunteers, so a
>> wiki might be appropriate, however...
>> 3. The data needs a structured web site, not a plain wiki like Mediawiki.
>> 4. A big part of this data is already available, but scattered on
>> various databases, in various languages, with various protocols, etc. So
>> a big part of work needs as much database management knowledge as
>> librarian knowledge.
>> 5. What most missing in these existing databases (IMO) is information
>> about translations: nowhere there are a general database of translated
>> works, at least not in English and French. It is very difficult to find
>> if a translation exists for a given work. Wikisource has some of this
>> information with interwiki links between work and author pages, but for
>> a (very) small number of works and authors.
>> 6. It would be best not to duplicate work on several places.
>>
>> Personally I don't find OL very practical. May be I am too much used too
>> Mediawiki. ;oD
>>
>> We still need to create something, attractive to contributors and
>> readers alike.
>>
>> Yann
>>
>> Samuel Klein wrote:
 This thread started out with a discussion of why it is so hard to
 start new projects within the Wikimedia Foundation.  My stance is
 that projects like OpenStreetMap.org and OpenLibrary.org are doing
 fine as they are, and there is no need to duplicate their effort
 within the WMF.  The example you gave was this:
>>>
>>> I agree that there's no point in duplicating existing functionality.
>>> The best solution is probably for OL to include this explicitly in
>>> their scope and add the necessary functionality.   I suggested this on
>>> the OL mailing list in March.
>>>    http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-discuss/2009-March/000391.html
>>>
> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published
> work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion
> about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with
> OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas)
 To me, that sounds exactly as what OpenLibrary already does (or
 could be doing in the near time), so why even set up a new project
>>

[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: May 2009

[Sue Gardner]

Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Covering:   May 2009
Prepared by:Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for:   Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

PRIORITIES FOR JUNE

1. Finalize 2009-10 Annual Plan for WMF Board of Trustees Approval
2. Begin hiring the Strategy Development team
3. Conduct end of year staff performance evaluations and finalize
individual staff goals

REACH

In May, the Wikimedia Foundation sites held steady as the number four
most-popular sites in the world with 317,255,000 global unique
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.

2009-10 ANNUAL PLAN

During May, the main focus for the Wikimedia Foundation was the
development of the 2009-10 Annual Plan, with departments developing
their funding requests for 2009-10.  In addition to normal
departmental funding requests, three proposals for non-recurring
programmatic activities were developed:

* Sue Gardner developed a proposal for the Wikimedia Collaborative
Strategy Development project, in which the Wikimedia Board, staff,
chapters and individual volunteers will work with each other and
external experts and advisors, supported by non-profit strategy
development firm Bridgespan, in order to collaboratively develop a
five-year strategic road-map for the Wikimedia movement.  This project
began being discussed at the Board level six months earlier, and was
first discussed publicly at the Chapters Meeting in Berlin in April.

* Frank Schulenburg developed a proposal for the Public Outreach
Bookshelf Project, designed to create a core set of
awareness/engagement/training public outreach materials, in English,
to later be translated, localized and used by volunteers and partner
organizations such as schools.

* Jay Walsh developed a proposal for a communications campaign,
designed to increase public understanding of Wikipedia as a serious
educational endeavor, and of the Wikimedia Foundation as a charitable
organization.

The 2009-10 Annual Plan will continue to be developed throughout June,
while simultaneously staff develop their individual performance goals
for 2009-10.  The Plan will be delivered to the Board of Trustees for
approval in mid-June.

LICENSE MIGRATION

On May 21, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a
resolution bringing about significant changes to the licensing of the
content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. This resolution follows
a vote among the international Wikimedia community, during which 88%
of all voters who expressed an opinion supported the change.  It will
result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects moving from the
GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content
license.  This change means that all Wikimedia project content will be
more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content, and therefore
easier to re-use in multiple ways for multiple purposes. The Wikimedia
Foundation staff will now begin taking steps to ensure that correct,
updated licensing is in place for all Wikimedia project content.

A press release about this important change can be found here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Dual_license_vote_May_2009

TECHNOLOGY - DEVELOPMENT

The official Wikipedia iPhone client was beta-tested by a small set of users.

Erik Zachte submitted a new version of proof-of-concept Monthly Report
Card statistics with enhanced views and has been generally moving
forward on improvements to statistics generation. As the template
matures and the generation of these statistics is regularized, we will
develop a public version to accompany the Report to the Board.

Tim Starling continued preparing MediaWiki for a 1.15 quarterly
release, which is expected to be complete in June. Tim also completed
ongoing code reviews for the release and code updates on the live
site.

The Collection (PDF book) extension was tweaked in response to issues
with UI and save permissions, but continues to run.

TECHNOLOGY - CORE OPERATIONS AND OFFICE IT

Database dumps other than the English Wikipedia full-history dump were
all generated correctly and consistently, feeding Erik Zachte's
statistics jobs and other uses. Tomasz Finc continues to experiment
with Hadoop as infrastructure for the more scalable next-generation
dump system.

Brion Vibber, Ariel Glenn, and Daniel Phelps reviewed candidates and
conducted interviews for the newly created Head of Office IT Support
position. After  interviewing a variety of candidates, Steven Kent was
hired to fill the position.  Steve Kent comes to Wikimedia with more
than 20 years of IT systems management experience. He has been in
similar roles with several organization including; RR Donnelley,
Charrette LLC, Communicomp and CMP Media. Steve was most recently the
Director of Information Technology for Sandbox Studios located in San
Francisco. Steve will start in mid-June.

Search servers were upgraded with 

Re: [Foundation-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[David Goodman]

Yann & Sam

The problem is extraordinarily   complex. A database of all "books"
(and other media) ever published is beyond the joint  capabilities of
everyone interested. There are intermediate entities between "books"
and "works", and important subordinate entities, such as "article" ,
"chapter" , and those like "poem" which could be at any of several
levels.  This is not a job for amateurs, unless they are prepared to
first learn the actual standards of bibliographic description for
different types of material, and to at least recognize the
inter-relationships, and the many undefined areas. At research
libraries, one allows a few years of training for a newcomer with just
a MLS degree to work with a small subset of this. I have thirty years
of experience in related areas of librarianship, and I know only
enough to be aware of the problems.
For an introduction to the current state of this, see
http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/Phase1Chp17_11_2_08.pdf.

The difficulty of merging the many thousands of partial correct and
incorrect sources of available data typically requires the manual
resolution of each of the tens of millions of instances.

OL rather than Wikimedia has the advantage that more of the people
there understand the problems.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:15 PM, c wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This discussion is very interesting. I would like to make a summary, so
> that we can go further.
>
> 1. A database of all books ever published is one of the thing still missing.
> 2. This needs massive collaboration by thousands of volunteers, so a
> wiki might be appropriate, however...
> 3. The data needs a structured web site, not a plain wiki like Mediawiki.
> 4. A big part of this data is already available, but scattered on
> various databases, in various languages, with various protocols, etc. So
> a big part of work needs as much database management knowledge as
> librarian knowledge.
> 5. What most missing in these existing databases (IMO) is information
> about translations: nowhere there are a general database of translated
> works, at least not in English and French. It is very difficult to find
> if a translation exists for a given work. Wikisource has some of this
> information with interwiki links between work and author pages, but for
> a (very) small number of works and authors.
> 6. It would be best not to duplicate work on several places.
>
> Personally I don't find OL very practical. May be I am too much used too
> Mediawiki. ;oD
>
> We still need to create something, attractive to contributors and
> readers alike.
>
> Yann
>
> Samuel Klein wrote:
>>> This thread started out with a discussion of why it is so hard to
>>> start new projects within the Wikimedia Foundation.  My stance is
>>> that projects like OpenStreetMap.org and OpenLibrary.org are doing
>>> fine as they are, and there is no need to duplicate their effort
>>> within the WMF.  The example you gave was this:
>>
>> I agree that there's no point in duplicating existing functionality.
>> The best solution is probably for OL to include this explicitly in
>> their scope and add the necessary functionality.   I suggested this on
>> the OL mailing list in March.
>>    http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-discuss/2009-March/000391.html
>>
 *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published
 work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion
 about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with
 OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas)
>>> To me, that sounds exactly as what OpenLibrary already does (or
>>> could be doing in the near time), so why even set up a new project
>>> that would collaborate with it?  Later you added:
>>
>> However, this is not what OL or its wiki do now.  And OL is not run by
>> its community, the community helps support the work of a centrally
>> directed group.  So there is only so much I feel I can contribute to
>> the project by making suggestions.  The wiki built into the fiber of
>> OL is intentionally not used for general discussion.
>>
>>> I was talking about the metadata for all books ever published,
>>> including the Swedish translations of Mark Twain's works, which
>>> are part of Mark Twain's bibliography, of the translator's
>>> bibliography, of American literature, and of Swedish language
>>> literature.  In OpenLibrary all of these are contained in one
>>> project.  In Wikisource, they are split in one section for English
>>> and another section for Swedish.  That division makes sense for
>>> the contents of the book, but not for the book metadata.
>>
>> This is a problem that Wikisource needs to address, regardless of
>> where the OpenLibrary metadata goes.  It is similar to the Wiktionary
>> problem of wanting some content - the array of translations of a
>> single definition - to exist in one place and be transcluded in each
>> language.
>>
>>> Now you write:
>>>

Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Ray Saintonge]

Brion Vibber wrote:
> On 8/12/09 12:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
>   
>> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
>> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
>> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
>> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
>> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
>> unfriendly to new participants.
>> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
>> 
> On the contrary, getting the old guard more active is essential in 
> resolving such community issues -- Wikipedia was much more 
> newbie-friendly in its first couple of years than it is today, and we 
> need to recover that spirit.
>   

I concur.  As you described in another thread about dividing your job in 
two, one can too easily get caught up in administrative tasks and forget 
what got us involved in the first place.  We hang on because we still 
believe in the vision, and that vision comes with a deeply felt ethic.  
The old guard may even be more committed to democratic principles than 
the young Turks who profess to be. The dilemma therein for the old guard 
lies in the fact that the solution may lie in bold actions that conflict 
with our democratic ethic.

Ec

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Liam Wyatt]

On 8/13/09, Andrew Turvey  wrote:
>
>
> - "Mathias Schindler"  wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Tim Starling
> wrote:
> >
>
> > > There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more
> > > readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to
> > > upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but
> > > found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large
> > > scale.
> >
> > There is an upcoming tool from the usual suspects at Wikimedia that
> > might be of interest to you and the GLAM people.
> >
>
>
> Look forward to this? Do you know what the expected time line is and where
> we can get more information?
>
> Thanks


All of the reporting on the event that has been done so far is being
collated at the event page:
http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM
There is a list of all of the press reports, subsequent blog posts, and an
export of the #GLAM-WIKI hashtag feed from twitter. Very soon all of the
videos from the presentations will be uploaded too. Our hosts, the
Australian War Memorial, were kind enough to also professionally film all
the presentations :-)

These all indicate a large range of issues that were raised and, even if
they cannot be acted upon directly (like the hotlinking idea) they are now
'floating around'. I encourage you to read the aforementioned blog posts and
keep an eye out for some of the videos. The presentation slides are slowly
being added too.

Moreover, I believe the most immediate benefit of this event is the fact
that something like the UK-NPG controversy would not happen in Australia.
Even though the two communities don't necessarily agree on how to 'move
forward together' this event has 'taken the heat' out of the debate and
moved it to a position of collaboration rather than antagonism. And, as
Mathias said, the Australian Copyright Council presentation was fantastic -
he did more in 5 minutes to undermine his own pro-restriction position than
we could have done in 6 months. Comments in the twitter stream (page 41 of
the 
feed)
from the GLAM sector themselves (!) were scathing. There will be a
video
of this soon enough.

In the medium-longer term there are many specific ideas/tools/methods that
were raised to make the GLAM and Wiki communities more easily work together.
This report "the recommendations list" is currently being compiled and will
be released in a week. It lists some specific recommendations that each
community could act upon and is divided up into the four streams of the
conference - Technology, Law, Education and Business  - and is in two
columns - from GLAM to Wiki and from Wiki to GLAM. This is a two-way
conversation after all, not simply us just preaching to them. I will be
presenting these recommendations in my timeslot at Wikimania in a couple of
weeks too.

I personally hope that we can demonstrate our goodwill towards the cultural
sector (not just in Australia, but globally - they have equivalent needs all
over the world) by attempting to achieve some of their requests. In return
this would give our requests to the GLAM sector greater weight because we
had proved our bona fides. Just as one example, the GLAM sector would like
to be able to easily access statistics on how their collections are being
used in Wikimedia projects (otherwise they can't report to their management
with strong numbers about the benefit of collaboration). Did you know
(apparently) there is a 2 year waiting list for cultural institutions to
join the Flickr Commons project ?? If we are able to provide the services
that Flickr offers - e.g. easy mass uploading and good data reporting on
usage - then they will be approaching us!

I do know there are a couple of institutions that attended GLAM-WIKI are now
having super-secret internal debates about making some sort of announcement
of collaboration with Wikimedia (and open-access principles more generally)
but this is not an easy process for them. The 170 attendees at GLAM-WIKI
were, as Tim said, self selected (list of institutions
here).
Now we need to assist those people in their talks with their colleagues -
and there are moves afoot to do just that. I'll report more on these talks
when I can...

All in all, a very successful event IMHO if for no other reason than it
demonstrated that the Wikimedia community *cares* about their POV and
expertise - and now they are telling their colleagues worldwide that "those
Wiki people are people too" :-) I encourage other chapters and organised
communities to start talking with their local/national cultural sector - but
don't expect it to be a quick or easy process. It is not one that can be
measured in number-of-photographs-released-per-day. Ultimately, it is about
how we can share resources/expertise to fulfill the common parts of our
mission statements and that can manifest itself in man

Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Pedro Sanchez]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:

> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community
> becoming
> unfriendly to new participants.
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
>
>
> Steven Walling
>
>
Yes, you're becoming too nervous.
We're doing fine, we're doing right, we had and election and we have decided
who's going to be on board.

Whatever the "media outlets" want to think is not somethign we should lose
sleep over to.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Kwan Ting Chan]

Congratz indeed to the (re)elected, and thank you Domas for all your 
work, both within and outwith the Board.


Andrew Turvey wrote:
My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political pro/con reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the anti-incumbency factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be successful if they're well known, and that will give an advantage to more established editors. 

However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out to sj. 



I'll have to agree, and also point out that it's a bit silly classing 
Ting as "old guard". Yes, he's a returning member of the board, but 
considering he was only elected last year, it's not so surprising he did 
well again this year.


KTC

--
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine


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Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board April 2009

[Veronique Kessler]

Hi Thomas and others following this thread,

I am following up with a more detailed response.  Since the Board report 
was for the month of April, but our fiscal year ended June 30, I'd like 
to re-cap the fiscal year's results for the operating budget.
 
The plan for 2008-09 called for $7.3 million of revenue and $5.9 million 
in expenses which would have resulted in a reserve of $1.4 million. Our 
current estimate (we are still closing up the books) are that we will 
have revenue of $7.7 million and expenses of $5.2 million which will 
result in a reserve of $2.5 million.
This is good news, but at the beginning of the last online fundraiser, 
back in October and November 2008, it looked like we might not make our 
target for community gifts which was $3 million for the entire year 
(much of it concentrated from October through January).Thanks to a 
few different factors and the personal appeal from Jimmy,  the situation 
turned around and we found not only that community gifts would well 
exceed the $3 million,  they would be the largest source of revenue for 
the 2008-09 fiscal year and would help make up for shortfalls in other 
revenue areas.

Meanwhile, our expenses were lower than plan because we slowed spending 
and stopped some spending altogether from October to January.  This was 
in response to both the global economic crisis and concerns that 
donations might be impacted significantly by the crisis.

Instead, we had a strong year and now have the task of making the best 
decisions regarding reserve amounts.  As Sue said, we can't and do not 
want to continually grow reserves as donors like to see their money 
going towards productive work.  At the same time, we want to have a 
certain level of security that when unforeseen events occur, we can be 
confident that we can keep the servers running, keep the lights on and 
all will be well with Wikimedia's projects.

Feel free to email with other questions,

Veronique

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/8/12 Veronique Kessler :
>   
>> Your comment is very timely.  We are, and have been, thinking about the
>> best solution regarding extra money.  First, we want to consider an
>> appropriate "reserve" amount, i.e. this can range from 3 months of
>> expenses for some organizations to 2 years for others.  So, we are
>> discussing this; there are lots of theories of the perfect amount.
>> Beyond that, we are considering things like investment strategy, the
>> creation of an endowment, etc.-things that can help towards ongoing
>> financial sustainability.
>> 
>
> Thank you both for your replies. I drafted a Reserve Policy for
> Wikimedia UK so I have some idea of the challenge facing you there!
> I'm really glad you are giving the subject of an endowment serious
> thought, I think it would be really good to have that kind of
> sustainability in the future.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Luna]

Congrats to the winners, and thanks to all those who had the courage to
stand up and offer themselves as candidates.

-Luna
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Brian]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Philippe Beaudette <
pbeaude...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> candidates ranked as follows:
>
>  Final ranking
>
> 1   Ting Chen (Wing)
> 2   Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
> 3   Samuel Klein (Sj)
>


Congrats to Tin, Kat & especially SJ!
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
>> I don't think so. "Your English is better than my 
>> language." is a honest response.
>
> Thank you, Milos, I appreciate your input.
>
> I meant another... aspect - like
>
>> Rough eligibility can be derived from edit histories. This is a bit
>> harder to calculate, though anyone with a toolserver account could do
>> this.
>
> ... meaning that:
> * I do believe that election comity should (if not have to / must)
> share statistic data which is in their possession
> as well as
> * I don't have (and never had) toolserver account
> etc.
>
> So
>
> {{Sofixit}}
>
> looks like more the "friendliness to newcomers" issue (for this
> mailing list and beyond) which is so popular in _discussions_ here
> last time.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Pavlo Shevelo 
>> wrote:
>>> {{You're laughing on me }}
>>>
>>> :(
>>
>> I don't think so. "Your English is better than my 
>> language." is a honest response.
>>
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>
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Well, the raw data is certainly available, but more involved
statistics will take someone with time and a computer to
do the number crunching. That was Greg's original point,
that anyone can use the data if they'd like, for whatever
statistical analysis suits your needs.

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Pavlo Shevelo]

> I don't think so. "Your English is better than my 
> language." is a honest response.

Thank you, Milos, I appreciate your input.

I meant another... aspect - like

> Rough eligibility can be derived from edit histories. This is a bit
> harder to calculate, though anyone with a toolserver account could do
> this.

... meaning that:
* I do believe that election comity should (if not have to / must)
share statistic data which is in their possession
as well as
* I don't have (and never had) toolserver account
etc.

So

{{Sofixit}}

looks like more the "friendliness to newcomers" issue (for this
mailing list and beyond) which is so popular in _discussions_ here
last time.


On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Pavlo Shevelo 
> wrote:
>> {{You're laughing on me }}
>>
>> :(
>
> I don't think so. "Your English is better than my 
> language." is a honest response.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:47 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>>> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
>>> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
>>> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
>>> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
>>> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
>>> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
>>> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
>>> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
>>> organizational knowledge.
>>
>> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
>> increasing the ops staff this last year.
>
>
> One addition that popped up in my head overnight.
>
> You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry
> standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role.
>
> CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the
> sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards.
>
> CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and
> outwards facing environments.  Large websites sometimes have CTO for
> outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs
> development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense.
>
> I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a
> typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different
> at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference
> in who you can find and how they approach the role.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herb...@gmail.com
>
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This is a very true point. To people not in the industry, there seems to be
little distinction between the two titles. And a lot of companies only have
a CIO or CTO, further leading people to believe there is no difference.

There is certainly more "tech" involved in a CTO. Clever of them to put
the word in there :)

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Milos Rancic]

BTW, congratulations from me, too.

I expect that:
* Kate will stay as a hardline defender of the community interests;
* Ting will continue to promote interests of the worldwide Wikimedians;
* Samuel will bring fresh ideas about which he talked publicly, as
well as privately with many of us.

I also hope that the Board will find a way how to engage Gerard and
Domas more into the WMF issues.

(And, articles in English are still mystery for me :])

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
> {{You're laughing on me }}
>
> :(

I don't think so. "Your English is better than my 
language." is a honest response.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Brion Vibber]

On 8/12/09 1:48 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> Let me clarify: I'm not actually arguing that anything is wrong with the
> election system, the results, or having old hands on the Board. On the
> contrary. I'm just wondering if this election (even if it's not unusual)
> might be conflated with the PARC stats on the community that have gotten so
> much attention from the media lately. That's all.

a) I doubt it
and
b) I gave an example response of why that's not a bad thing

-- brion

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Brion Vibber]

On 8/12/09 6:18 AM, Chad wrote:
> Just thinking aloud here, but as to methods for accessing the content:
>
> A) Extends FileRepo to work with their data, however they happen to give
> us access to it
> B) Provide something similar to Special:Import, that will go retrieve their
> data and import it to a format MediaWiki can handle
>
> Both are certainly feasible with the current code base; it's not going to
> require some massive re-write of anything.

We've already got the latter in the pipeline with Michael Dale's work on 
the add media wizard:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Add_Media_Wizard

This includes the ability to search remote media repositories and import 
particular resources from them into the wiki. In testing this is 
implemented for for instance pulling videos from the Internet Archive's 
video collections (kindly pre-transcoded into Ogg Theora -- thanks IA 
guys and gals!)

As this matures some more and the backend support gets merged into our 
live deployment, this'll be rolled into the advanced editing tools the 
Usability crew is working on.

-- brion

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Steven Walling]

Let me clarify: I'm not actually arguing that anything is wrong with the
election system, the results, or having old hands on the Board. On the
contrary. I'm just wondering if this election (even if it's not unusual)
might be conflated with the PARC stats on the community that have gotten so
much attention from the media lately. That's all.
Steven Walling

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:

> On 8/12/09 12:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> > While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> > election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> > With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state
> of
> > the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard"
> Wikimedians
> > as our Board representation will support claims about the community
> becoming
> > unfriendly to new participants.
> > Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
>
> On the contrary, getting the old guard more active is essential in
> resolving such community issues -- Wikipedia was much more
> newbie-friendly in its first couple of years than it is today, and we
> need to recover that spirit.
>
> -- brion
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On 8/7/09 5:43 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> I suspect you're going to have to be prepared to do a lot of internal
>> discovery and discovery with potential hires to show them the web ops
>> side - it's not well documented now (I keep meaning to find out more
>> about the ops team and finding I have no time to join the IRC channel
>> 24x7 ;-P ).  The team seems to function well - servers seem decently
>> stable - but it's not clear to me if the process and documentation is
>> up to industry standards for large website operations.  At some point
>> tribal knowledge has to yield to documentation and process and
>> organizational knowledge.
>
> Oh yes, this is already very much an ongoing process as we've been
> increasing the ops staff this last year.


One addition that popped up in my head overnight.

You've been describing the role as CTO, but I think in US IT industry
standard naming schemes it's really more of a CIO role.

CTO tends to be associated with development (hardware/software), the
sort of role I understand Brion will be still handling going forwards.

CIO is more of the IT operations manager, both for inwards and
outwards facing environments.  Large websites sometimes have CTO for
outwards facing IT environments, but with a breakdown of IT vs
development I think the standard industry naming may make more sense.

I understood what you had in mind from the first email, but I think a
typical IT candidate seeing CTO would think something very different
at first, and the label and first impression can make a big difference
in who you can find and how they approach the role.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Brion Vibber]

On 8/12/09 12:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
> unfriendly to new participants.
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?

On the contrary, getting the old guard more active is essential in 
resolving such community issues -- Wikipedia was much more 
newbie-friendly in its first couple of years than it is today, and we 
need to recover that spirit.

-- brion

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Sean Whitton]

Hi,

Congratulations Ting, Kat and Samuel. Thanks for everything so far and
more to come, domas :)

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 20:07, Steven Walling wrote:
> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
> unfriendly to new participants.
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?

Since the board of the Wikimedia Foundation is our ultimate authority
(where necessary), surely it should be made up of old hands and
experienced veterans who, by being around and demonstrating their
sanity repeatedly, are most likely to be successful in the role? We
should encourage new contributors in more accessible jobs, where they
can make an equally valuable contribution, while putting those who (we
would like to think) have proved themselves to be committed and
knowledgeable in the ultimate positions of responsibility and power.

S

-- 
Sean Whitton / 
OpenPGP KeyID: 0x25F4EAB7

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Pavlo Shevelo]

{{You're laughing on me }}

:(

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
>> Maybe my English is not good enough but I don't get it:
>
> Your English is far better than my Ukrainian.  I apologise for not
> being more clear.
>
>> Either you suggest that it will be possible or you're quite sure about that?
>> ... and what about data correction due to dramatic error being discussed.
>> ... and where are those public data anyhow?
>> (you may call me dummy, but I have no clue about that)
>
> The list of voters and projects is available at
>
> https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/index.php?limit=5000&title=Special%3ASecurePoll%2Flist%2F17
>
> Rough eligibility can be derived from edit histories. This is a bit
> harder to calculate, though anyone with a toolserver account could do
> this.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
> Maybe my English is not good enough but I don't get it:

Your English is far better than my Ukrainian.  I apologise for not
being more clear.

> Either you suggest that it will be possible or you're quite sure about that?
> ... and what about data correction due to dramatic error being discussed.
> ... and where are those public data anyhow?
> (you may call me dummy, but I have no clue about that)

The list of voters and projects is available at

https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/index.php?limit=5000&title=Special%3ASecurePoll%2Flist%2F17

Rough eligibility can be derived from edit histories. This is a bit
harder to calculate, though anyone with a toolserver account could do
this.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Pavlo Shevelo]

> The things you are asking for should be possible with already
> available public data.  These things would be good, but they are
> things that *you* can do. :)

Maybe my English is not good enough but I don't get it:
Either you suggest that it will be possible or you're quite sure about that?

... and what about data correction due to dramatic error being discussed.

... and where are those public data anyhow?
(you may call me dummy, but I have no clue about that)


On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:09 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
>>> A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
>>
>> Would you please add detailed statistic summary (number of people
>> voted, %% of eligible wikipedians, dice and slice of those to projects
>> groups etc.) ?
>> ... I mean as detailed as possible - more is better
>
> {{Sofixit}}
>
> The things you are asking for should be possible with already
> available public data.  These things would be good, but they are
> things that *you* can do. :)
>
> Please save the election committees' cycles for dealing with whatever
> non-public stuff remains. :)
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Marco Chiesa]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Andrew
Turvey wrote:
> My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When 
> you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political 
> pro/con reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the 
> anti-incumbency factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be 
> successful if they're well known, and that will give an advantage to more 
> established editors.
>
> However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring 
> candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out 
> to sj.

Congratulations to Ting, Kat and Sj for being elected, and to
committee for handling such a complex vote so smoothly. I think the
community has chosen really well, and seeing that also the runners-up
are well-known people, it's clear that the voiting system works well.
Cruccone

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Pavlo Shevelo wrote:
>> A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
>
> Would you please add detailed statistic summary (number of people
> voted, %% of eligible wikipedians, dice and slice of those to projects
> groups etc.) ?
> ... I mean as detailed as possible - more is better

{{Sofixit}}

The things you are asking for should be possible with already
available public data.  These things would be good, but they are
things that *you* can do. :)

Please save the election committees' cycles for dealing with whatever
non-public stuff remains. :)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Pavlo Shevelo]

> A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.

Would you please add detailed statistic summary (number of people
voted, %% of eligible wikipedians, dice and slice of those to projects
groups etc.) ?
... I mean as detailed as possible - more is better


On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Philippe
Beaudette wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> candidates ranked as follows:
>
>  Final ranking
>
> 1       Ting Chen (Wing)
> 2       Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
> 3       Samuel Klein (Sj)
> 4       Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
> 5       Domas Mituzas (Midom)
> 6       Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
> 7       Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
> 8       Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
> 9       Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
> 10      José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
> 11      Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
> 12      Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
> 13      Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
> 14      Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
> 15      Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
> 16      Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
> 17      Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
> 18      Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
>
> A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
>
> These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
> moved to seat the top three candidates.
>
> The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
> candidates.  It was a broad and diverse field this year.  We also wish
> to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process.  The
> committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
>
>
> For the committee,
> Philippe
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Erik Moeller]

Let me add my congratulations to our newly elected or re-elected Board
members. :-)

Domas - thank you for all your contributions as a Board member. I'm
still amazed that you managed to serve on the Board while continuing
your technical volunteer work!
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Foundation-l] PARC Was: Election Results

[Erik Moeller]

2009/8/12 Gregory Maxwell :
> Speaking of PARC, does anyone have any contacts with them?

We've been in touch with Ed Chi for the strategy planning process.
I'll make a direct intro.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Mathias Schindler]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Kat Walsh wrote:

> Congrats to Ting and SJ -- and a thank you to Domas, who is not only a
> good big scary sysadmin but also a good big scary board member.

Congrats to the three (re-)elected board members and all the best for
the upcoming term. The voting system seems to do a great job in
expressing what a majority actually prefers :)

Re Domas, I hope the board is going to rely on his advise and expertise.

Mathias

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Andrew Turvey]

My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When 
you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political pro/con 
reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the anti-incumbency 
factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be successful if they're 
well known, and that will give an advantage to more established editors. 

However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring 
candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out to 
sj. 

- "Steven Walling"  wrote: 
> From: "Steven Walling"  
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"  
> Sent: Wednesday, 12 August, 2009 20:07:00 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, 
> Portugal 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results 
> 
> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the 
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia. 
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of 
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians 
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming 
> unfriendly to new participants. 
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too? 
> 
> If I'm not alone, perhaps any official announcement about the elections 
> (i.e. on the Wikimedia blog and in press releases) should address this, even 
> if only tacitly. 
> 
> Steven Walling 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Chad  wrote: 
> 
> > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe 
> > Beaudette wrote: 
> > > The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the 
> > > board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the 
> > > candidates ranked as follows: 
> > > 
> > > Final ranking 
> > > 
> > > 1 Ting Chen (Wing) 
> > > 2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage) 
> > > 3 Samuel Klein (Sj) 
> > > 4 Gerard Meijssen (GerardM) 
> > > 5 Domas Mituzas (Midom) 
> > > 6 Thomas Braun (Redlinux) 
> > > 7 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro) 
> > > 8 Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist) 
> > > 9 Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester) 
> > > 10 José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora) 
> > > 11 Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd) 
> > > 12 Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse) 
> > > 13 Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone) 
> > > 14 Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice) 
> > > 15 Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering) 
> > > 16 Gregory Kohs (Thekohser) 
> > > 17 Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe) 
> > > 18 Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman) 
> > > 
> > > A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly. 
> > > 
> > > These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has 
> > > moved to seat the top three candidates. 
> > > 
> > > The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as 
> > > candidates. It was a broad and diverse field this year. We also wish 
> > > to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process. The 
> > > committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > For the committee, 
> > > Philippe 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > ___ 
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> > > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org 
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l 
> > > 
> > 
> > Congrats to the winners! 
> > 
> > -Chad 
> > 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Thomas Dalton]

Congratulations to the victors and thank you to all the candidates and
thank you to the departing Domas!

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Kat Walsh]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe
Beaudette wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> candidates ranked as follows:

Wikimedia is an amazing thing to be part of and I'm honored to be
chosen again, and I will at least try to make *different* mistakes
this time after hopefully learning from the old ones!

Congrats to Ting and SJ -- and a thank you to Domas, who is not only a
good big scary sysadmin but also a good big scary board member.

Cheers,
Kat


-- 
Your donations keep Wikipedia online: http://donate.wikimedia.org/en
Wikimedia, Press: k...@wikimedia.org * Personal: k...@mindspillage.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage * (G)AIM:Mindspillage
mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net * email for phone

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[Foundation-l] PARC Was: Election Results

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
[snip]
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?

I didn't.

Speaking of PARC, does anyone have any contacts with them?

I wrote asking about how they removed vandalism from their revert and
have not had a reply (and my comment on their blog was either deleted
or never published).  In particular I'm curious because their revert
concentration over time appears to show the same seasonal trend in
vandalism that you get from charting the proportion of vandalism over
time. (Its much easier to identify a subset of vandalism and track its
behaviour than it is to remove all vandalism).

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
> unfriendly to new participants.
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
>
> If I'm not alone, perhaps any official announcement about the elections
> (i.e. on the Wikimedia blog and in press releases) should address this, even
> if only tacitly.
>
> Steven Walling
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Chad  wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe
>> Beaudette wrote:
>> > The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
>> > board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
>> > candidates ranked as follows:
>> >
>> >  Final ranking
>> >
>> > 1       Ting Chen (Wing)
>> > 2       Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
>> > 3       Samuel Klein (Sj)
>> > 4       Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
>> > 5       Domas Mituzas (Midom)
>> > 6       Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
>> > 7       Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
>> > 8       Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
>> > 9       Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
>> > 10      José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
>> > 11      Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
>> > 12      Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
>> > 13      Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
>> > 14      Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
>> > 15      Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
>> > 16      Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
>> > 17      Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
>> > 18      Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
>> >
>> > A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
>> >
>> > These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
>> > moved to seat the top three candidates.
>> >
>> > The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
>> > candidates.  It was a broad and diverse field this year.  We also wish
>> > to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process.  The
>> > committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
>> >
>> >
>> > For the committee,
>> > Philippe
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > ___
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>> > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>> >
>>
>> Congrats to the winners!
>>
>> -Chad
>>
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Similar to how we have Senators in office for 20+ years...because they
continue to run and people continue to elect them. We certainly had
a wide cross-section of Wikimedians this year. But nobody voted
for them.

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Steven Walling]

While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
unfriendly to new participants.
Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?

If I'm not alone, perhaps any official announcement about the elections
(i.e. on the Wikimedia blog and in press releases) should address this, even
if only tacitly.

Steven Walling

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Chad  wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe
> Beaudette wrote:
> > The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> > board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> > candidates ranked as follows:
> >
> >  Final ranking
> >
> > 1   Ting Chen (Wing)
> > 2   Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
> > 3   Samuel Klein (Sj)
> > 4   Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
> > 5   Domas Mituzas (Midom)
> > 6   Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
> > 7   Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
> > 8   Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
> > 9   Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
> > 10  José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
> > 11  Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
> > 12  Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
> > 13  Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
> > 14  Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
> > 15  Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
> > 16  Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
> > 17  Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
> > 18  Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
> >
> > A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
> >
> > These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
> > moved to seat the top three candidates.
> >
> > The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
> > candidates.  It was a broad and diverse field this year.  We also wish
> > to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process.  The
> > committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
> >
> >
> > For the committee,
> > Philippe
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___
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> > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
> Congrats to the winners!
>
> -Chad
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe
Beaudette wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> candidates ranked as follows:
>
>  Final ranking
>
> 1       Ting Chen (Wing)
> 2       Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
> 3       Samuel Klein (Sj)
> 4       Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
> 5       Domas Mituzas (Midom)
> 6       Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
> 7       Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
> 8       Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
> 9       Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
> 10      José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
> 11      Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
> 12      Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
> 13      Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
> 14      Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
> 15      Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
> 16      Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
> 17      Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
> 18      Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
>
> A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
>
> These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
> moved to seat the top three candidates.
>
> The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
> candidates.  It was a broad and diverse field this year.  We also wish
> to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process.  The
> committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
>
>
> For the committee,
> Philippe
>
>
>
>
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Congrats to the winners!

-Chad

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[Foundation-l] Election Results

[Philippe Beaudette]

The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the  
board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the  
candidates ranked as follows:

  Final ranking

1   Ting Chen (Wing)
2   Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
3   Samuel Klein (Sj)
4   Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
5   Domas Mituzas (Midom)
6   Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
7   Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
8   Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
9   Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
10  José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
11  Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
12  Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
13  Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
14  Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
15  Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
16  Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
17  Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
18  Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)

A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.

These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has  
moved to seat the top three candidates.

The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as  
candidates.  It was a broad and diverse field this year.  We also wish  
to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process.  The  
committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them


For the committee,
Philippe




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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
>>
>>> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>>
 I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is
 the key to avoidance in the future!)

>>> It was my fault, and it was pretty much identical to the error I made
>>> in 2007, where certain kinds of edits were double-counted and so the
>>> effective edit count threshold was lower than it should have been.
>>>
>> Thanks Tim.  It sounded like what happened in the past.  I apologize
>> for not doing my part and catching it this time. :(
>>
>> To err is human... nice to know that at least some of us aren't bots.
>> ;) May all future errors be as correctable!
>>
>>
> It's also refreshing to see people who accept their share of
> responsibility when something has gone.  Kudos to both of you for such
> rare kind of behaviour.
>
>
> Ec
>
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Maybe we need to clone Tim too? :p

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes

[Ray Saintonge]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
>   
>> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm interested in knowing the nature of the error (understanding is
>>> the key to avoidance in the future!)
>>>   
>> It was my fault, and it was pretty much identical to the error I made
>> in 2007, where certain kinds of edits were double-counted and so the
>> effective edit count threshold was lower than it should have been.
>> 
> Thanks Tim.  It sounded like what happened in the past.  I apologize
> for not doing my part and catching it this time. :(
>
> To err is human... nice to know that at least some of us aren't bots.
> ;) May all future errors be as correctable!
>
>   
It's also refreshing to see people who accept their share of 
responsibility when something has gone.  Kudos to both of you for such 
rare kind of behaviour.


Ec

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[Foundation-l] Hotlinked images Was: GLAM-WIKI report

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
[snip]
> Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
> Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries.

So there have been a number of statements against doing something like
this, but (unsurprisingly) I don't think they have been strong enough
stated or hit all the arguments that I think are important.  So please
humour me for a moment.

I think hotlinking images is something we ought not to do for several
independent reasons.

(1)  There is no reason to do so.

The so far cited reasons for GLAM interest in this are Branding and Statistics.

Hotlinking or caching would do nothing to improve branding— Most of
the time a hot linked image looks just like a local one to users.
Whatever branding we'd find acceptable could be accomplished as well
or better locally.

Statistics gathering is something that is interesting to many of our
contributors, we cand should have good statistics for everything (and
caching would be useless for statistics), so hotlinking should create
no improvement.

GLAMS have spent money building their own databases, yes. But ours are
an additional copy, our problem, and not a significant cost.

The only other reason I can see for hotlinking would be collecting
resellable marketing data on Wikipedia viewers, and I do not believe
that this would be a use we'd wish to support. (I'm not making a value
judgement here— If that is indeed someone's goal thats fine— only that
it's not one WMF would intentionally support). See below for more…

(2)  Hotlinking has enormous privacy problems

When the rubber hits the road NDAs are ineffective: People make
mistakes. Governments and ISPs snoop. Privacy polices are often bad
and allow things which would horrify people. Hotlinking would greatly
increase readers exposure to information leaks.

Some random museum has no business knowing that I loaded the pederasty
article just because some art was placed in it.

Wikimedia's handling of reader privacy ought to be leading-edge
trend-setting stuff. That would be an nearly impossible goal if media
were inlined from many third party sites.

(3) It significantly reduces the atomicity of the Wikimedia projects.

Today are *things*, objects you can obtain (± temporary problems with
the dump system), archive, data-mine, etc.  I have complete (though
not current right now) copies of Wikipedia in all languages along with
all images and other media, as well as the core software.  Not just
partial bits and pieces, but the whole thing.

External links are a clear boundary between what is in Wikipedia and
what isn't. ... and the stuff *in* wikipedia is all freely licensed
and available for download.   They are now all tracked with a common
revision control system, have common (if bad…) metadata.

External dependency would lower reliability and make the generally
less tractable. It would become more difficult to retain backups and
historical records.

Perhaps some day Wikipedia will be too big to maintain any singular
copy of for purely technical reasons, but we are a long long way away
from that now!


So basically I think there are a bunch of practical and principled
problems with hotlinking, but that hot-linking isn't actually needed.
Really good upload systems that preserve metadata and provide good
links to external resources?  Statistics collection?  These are good
an uncontroversial things. They don't require hotlinking.


Cheers—

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[Foundation-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

This discussion is very interesting. I would like to make a summary, so
that we can go further.

1. A database of all books ever published is one of the thing still missing.
2. This needs massive collaboration by thousands of volunteers, so a
wiki might be appropriate, however...
3. The data needs a structured web site, not a plain wiki like Mediawiki.
4. A big part of this data is already available, but scattered on
various databases, in various languages, with various protocols, etc. So
a big part of work needs as much database management knowledge as
librarian knowledge.
5. What most missing in these existing databases (IMO) is information
about translations: nowhere there are a general database of translated
works, at least not in English and French. It is very difficult to find
if a translation exists for a given work. Wikisource has some of this
information with interwiki links between work and author pages, but for
a (very) small number of works and authors.
6. It would be best not to duplicate work on several places.

Personally I don't find OL very practical. May be I am too much used too
Mediawiki. ;oD

We still need to create something, attractive to contributors and
readers alike.

Yann

Samuel Klein wrote:
>> This thread started out with a discussion of why it is so hard to
>> start new projects within the Wikimedia Foundation.  My stance is
>> that projects like OpenStreetMap.org and OpenLibrary.org are doing
>> fine as they are, and there is no need to duplicate their effort
>> within the WMF.  The example you gave was this:
> 
> I agree that there's no point in duplicating existing functionality.
> The best solution is probably for OL to include this explicitly in
> their scope and add the necessary functionality.   I suggested this on
> the OL mailing list in March.
>http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-discuss/2009-March/000391.html
> 
>>> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published
>>> work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion
>>> about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with
>>> OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas)
>> To me, that sounds exactly as what OpenLibrary already does (or
>> could be doing in the near time), so why even set up a new project
>> that would collaborate with it?  Later you added:
> 
> However, this is not what OL or its wiki do now.  And OL is not run by
> its community, the community helps support the work of a centrally
> directed group.  So there is only so much I feel I can contribute to
> the project by making suggestions.  The wiki built into the fiber of
> OL is intentionally not used for general discussion.
> 
>> I was talking about the metadata for all books ever published,
>> including the Swedish translations of Mark Twain's works, which
>> are part of Mark Twain's bibliography, of the translator's
>> bibliography, of American literature, and of Swedish language
>> literature.  In OpenLibrary all of these are contained in one
>> project.  In Wikisource, they are split in one section for English
>> and another section for Swedish.  That division makes sense for
>> the contents of the book, but not for the book metadata.
> 
> This is a problem that Wikisource needs to address, regardless of
> where the OpenLibrary metadata goes.  It is similar to the Wiktionary
> problem of wanting some content - the array of translations of a
> single definition - to exist in one place and be transcluded in each
> language.
> 
>> Now you write:
>>
>>> However, the project I have in mind for OCR cleaning and
>>> translation needs to
>> That is a change of subject. That sounds just like what Wikisource
>> (or PGDP.net) is about.  OCR cleaning is one thing, but it is an
>> entirely different thing to set up "a wiki for book metadata, with
>> an entry for every published work".  So which of these two project
>> ideas are we talking about?
> 
> They are closely related.
> 
> There needs to be a global authority file for works -- a [set of]
> universal identifier[s] for a given work in order for wikisource (as
> it currently stands) to link the German translation of the English
> transcription of OCR of the 1998 photos of the 1572 Rotterdam Codex...
> to its metadata entry [or entries].
> 
> I would prefer for this authority file to be wiki-like, as the
> Wikipedia authority file is, so that it supports renames, merges, and
> splits with version history and minimal overhead; hence I wish to see
> a wiki for this sort of metadata.
> 
> Currently OL does not quite provide this authority file, but it could.
>  I do not know how easily.
> 
>> Every book ever published means more than 10 million records.
>> (It probably means more than 100 million records.) OCR cleaning
>> attracts hundreds or a few thousand volunteers, which is
>> sufficient to take on thousands of books, but not millions.
> 
> Focusing efforts on notable works with verifiable OCR, and using the
> sorts of helper tools that Greg's paper descr

Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Andrew Turvey]

- "Mathias Schindler"  wrote: 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Tim Starling wrote: 
> 
> > There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more 
> > readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to 
> > upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but 
> > found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large 
> > scale. 
> 
> There is an upcoming tool from the usual suspects at Wikimedia that 
> might be of interest to you and the GLAM people. 
> 

Look forward to this? Do you know what the expected time line is and where we 
can get more information? 

Thanks 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:02 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Brian wrote:
>> This comment makes my skin crawl. Everyone is entitled to have a voice and
>> it is only the Board's impoverished vision of the community and limited
...
>
> Brian, I like many things you say while ranting, for instance I think
> we need to think about suffrage as something essential to our identity
> as a community, not a quick hack that balances commitment and
> flood-proofing against openness of process. However, a prickly tone
> tends to discourage people from responding to you.
>
> Can you provide some positive examples of what you would like to see
> instead?  Would you prefer to have no requirements for editing or
> contribution, only a requirement that a voter prove they are a real
> and unique snowflak^B^B^B^Bperson?
>
> SJ

FYI to all: There's an on-wiki discussion of what suffrage
requirements should be here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2009/en#Post_mortem

-- phoebe

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Chad wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Brianna
> Laugher wrote:
>> Re GLAM repositories as a MediaWiki repo, I don't know enough on the
>> tech side to know if it is even a remotely feasible idea. But on the
>> 'social' side it did make me think about our insistence (currently
>> technically necessary) that everything is in MediaWiki format,
>> essentially under the Wikimedia branding somewhere, before we will
>> effectively work with it. We want the GLAMs to let up some control,
>> but essentially so material can come under our control. A different
>> kind of control, certainly, but definitely control. Let's not kid
>> ourselves - not a neutral ground. Maybe it is not a bad idea for us to
>> think about how we can embrace collaboration or resource sharing that
>> might wear someone else's badging.
>>
>> cheers
>> Brianna
>>
>> --
>> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
>> http://modernthings.org/
>>
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>
> Just thinking aloud here, but as to methods for accessing the content:
>
> A) Extends FileRepo to work with their data, however they happen to give
> us access to it
> B) Provide something similar to Special:Import, that will go retrieve their
> data and import it to a format MediaWiki can handle
>
> Both are certainly feasible with the current code base; it's not going to
> require some massive re-write of anything.
>
> -Chad
>

(Sorry for the followup, I pressed send too soon)

Both methods also allow the GLAMs to keep their control over what they
do and do not let us use, but allow us access to the material in a way that
works with what we do. Best of all, it doesn't require a full mirror
of everything
they have...one time imports of individual items are much more trivial,
comparitavely speaking.

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Chad]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Brianna
Laugher wrote:
> Re GLAM repositories as a MediaWiki repo, I don't know enough on the
> tech side to know if it is even a remotely feasible idea. But on the
> 'social' side it did make me think about our insistence (currently
> technically necessary) that everything is in MediaWiki format,
> essentially under the Wikimedia branding somewhere, before we will
> effectively work with it. We want the GLAMs to let up some control,
> but essentially so material can come under our control. A different
> kind of control, certainly, but definitely control. Let's not kid
> ourselves - not a neutral ground. Maybe it is not a bad idea for us to
> think about how we can embrace collaboration or resource sharing that
> might wear someone else's badging.
>
> cheers
> Brianna
>
> --
> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
> http://modernthings.org/
>
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Just thinking aloud here, but as to methods for accessing the content:

A) Extends FileRepo to work with their data, however they happen to give
us access to it
B) Provide something similar to Special:Import, that will go retrieve their
data and import it to a format MediaWiki can handle

Both are certainly feasible with the current code base; it's not going to
require some massive re-write of anything.

-Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Anthony]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Anthony  wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>>
>> If someone else does the actual work, fine! It doesn't actually have
>> to be WMF doing it.
>
>
> Sure, as a volunteer, you'll say that.  Godwin is a paid employee though,
> not a volunteer.
>

I'm going to apologize for that comment, as it was a terrible assumption of
bad faith.

Many volunteers actually enjoy their work, after all.
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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Tim Starling]

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> The suggestion was also made that Wikimedia should revisit its
> restriction on NC material, and it was written down too, although I
> think I was thinking the same thing as every other Wikimedian in the
> room...

For Wikimedia I think the lack of non-commercial material is
relatively arbitrary.

For open source software development, developers have it in their
interests to allow commercial use since they usually end up getting
paid by the companies that use their free software. And for the GLAM
sector, a non-commercial restriction makes sense because they want to
encourage dissemination in the cultural sphere, while recovering some
costs from the commercial sphere, which is more able to afford it and
has a sense of reciprocity or corporate social responsibility.

Wikimedia's justifications seem weaker to me. We say that commercial
dissemination will aid our mission, but so far, such commercial use
has been underdeveloped. The only kind of commercial reuse that is
fully developed is the thousands of out-of-date mirrors run by SEO
professionals, who make little contribution to our wider goals.

But I think there is a value in consistency. Now that we have this
vast encyclopedia illustrated with images that are free for commercial
use, it would be a pity to destroy that potential benefit by adding a
handful of images that are non-commercial only, with commercial use to
be negotiated directly with the institution. That would create a
landmine for commercial reusers and would discourage them
disproportionately.

So I think we should continue to negotiate with our content sources to
have them release their content without a non-commercial restriction.
And I think we should try to be more effective at encouraging
commercial use which supports their goals and ours, so that we have a
better answer to the question when it inevitably comes up.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Anthony]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>
> If someone else does the actual work, fine! It doesn't actually have
> to be WMF doing it.


Sure, as a volunteer, you'll say that.  Godwin is a paid employee though,
not a volunteer.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Anthony]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Mike Godwin  wrote:

> In short, it was difficult for Knol to build
> on the work of other collaborative freely licensed projects without, as a
> practical matter, violating those licenses. (We saw countless examples of
> people attempting to import Wikipedia content into Knol, for example, and
> played a bit of whack-a-mole with those folks.)


Huh?  Whack-a-mole?  I imported Wikipedia content into Knol, under the GFDL,
and never was even asked to take it down.

The problem isn't the licensing.  The problem is duplicate content.  Unless
*maybe* if you're one of the top experts in the world for the topic, people
don't want to read your 95% Wikipedia and 5% original contribution.  Even if
you are one of the top experts in the world for the topic, you're better off
presenting your 5% contribution as a standalone article, criticizing the
Wikipedia article and referencing Wikipedia by link.

But to me the takeaway from this error of Knol's licensing design is not
> that Knol can't work -- it's that it actually could work, if properly
> thought through.  So my view right now is the Wikimedia community can't be
> complacent about Knol's apparent failure -- properly adjusted and
> redesigned, it could have quite an impact on us.


Better internal linking is the most needed adjustment/redesign.  An
"encyclopedia that anyone can add an article to", with maybe an allowance
for minor edit suggestions and collaborations of small well-knit teams, is
an interesting twist that could help provide useful information that
Wikipedia doesn't and in fact can't provide.

Anthony
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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Tim Starling]

Kat Walsh wrote:
> Thanks for the recap; sounds like the conference went pretty well.
> 
> I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I
> can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't
> want to let the point slip by. A few:
> 
> 1. What about our mirrors and forks and reusers; do they get the same
> rights? How about users who want to download media dumps?
> 
> 2. What about when they decide to change around their naming
> schemes/take works offline/otherwise restructure their websites, and
> us with millions of links? Any change of theirs would cause serious
> disruption.
> 
> I don't think it is a waste for us to mirror those images unless you
> want to call all redundancy a waste--but if it's really a concern,
> from my perspective I'd far rather have them hotlink from us! I think
> it is fine to provide links to the institutions' own sites where the
> highest-resolution images are available for purchase, but I think we
> must host the other images ourselves. I do want to see Wikimedia
> collaborate and reach understanding with cultural institutions. But I
> think it needs to be on the level of how we share their mission of
> preserving and disseminating cultural knowledge, and showing them how
> much more can happen when we are able to use that material
> independently on the Wikimedia projects.

I would add further reasons against hotlinking or caching:
* The difficulty of providing good performance and high availability
24/7: the institutions usually run their own server rooms
* The low cost to us of mirroring a collection, up to a scale of
hundreds of gigabytes
* The bandwidth cost to them could potentially be high
* The software development cost

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Re GLAM repositories as a MediaWiki repo, I don't know enough on the
> tech side to know if it is even a remotely feasible idea. But on the
> 'social' side it did make me think about our insistence (currently
> technically necessary) that everything is in MediaWiki format,
> essentially under the Wikimedia branding somewhere, before we will
> effectively work with it. We want the GLAMs to let up some control,
> but essentially so material can come under our control. A different
> kind of control, certainly, but definitely control. Let's not kid
> ourselves - not a neutral ground. Maybe it is not a bad idea for us to
> think about how we can embrace collaboration or resource sharing that
> might wear someone else's badging.

Well, if it's about branding, then maybe we can think of ways to do
repositories that are mirrored in our data centres but look more like
a separate branded collection as presented in MediaWiki. But the
Wikimedia community might have trouble with that.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: [Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[James Forrester]

2009/8/12 Samuel Klein :
> Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn
> on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal
> statistics about my own site usage.  Currently there's nothing other
> than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver
> tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no
> beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.

The UserStats extension[0] does some pretty graphs, but I'm not sure
I've seen such a detailed and advanced tool. Would be interesting, if
intrusive, to see my results. :-)

[0] - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Usage_Statistics

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
jdforres...@wikimedia.org | jdforres...@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Not necessarily. One acronym I learned was KPI, when a GLAM has as a key
performance indicator the number of times a picture is actually accessed, it
may affect the amount of subsidy they get. There is no reason why an image
cannot be made available to the people who want that image on their hard
drive.

So I mean really there may be more to it.
Thanks,
  GerardM

2009/8/12 David Gerard 

> 2009/8/12 Kat Walsh :
>
> > I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I
> > can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't
> > want to let the point slip by. A few:
>
>
> The ones who want hotlinking want it as a way of making the images not
> free. l mean, really.
>
>
> - d.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[David Gerard]

2009/8/12 Kat Walsh :

> I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I
> can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't
> want to let the point slip by. A few:


The ones who want hotlinking want it as a way of making the images not
free. l mean, really.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[Dennis During]

I would so much like it if we had aggregate statistics about our users and
their behavior while retaining our exemplary privacy culture.

At Wiktionary it seems to me that the absence of statistics about users,
especially anons, seems to lead us to a culture of serving ourselves rather
than users, not in the largest matters, but in countless small matters of
entry layout, subsidiary entries, help etc.  This is not to evil motives. It
is mostly due to the active editors defaulting to using themselves as models
of the typical user.  The ability of experienced users to customize makes
the practice quite ridiculous.  Our efforts to solicit feedback give us a
view of users the bias of which is uncalibrated.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:

> On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking.  Other
> > people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
> > of user-invisible behavior.
>
> Yay!
>
> Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
> in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
>
> We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
> could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
> session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
> seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
> databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
> privacy.
>
> Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
> cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
> things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
> statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
> permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
> from users.
>
> -- brion
>
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-- 
Dennis C. During

Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity
with the deities of other faiths. - Ambrose Bierce

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cynolatry
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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Brianna Laugher]

Thanks for your report Tim.

A minor correction,

2009/8/12 Gerard Meijssen :
> Liam has a point when he suggests that we typically do not need the highest
> resolutions to illustrate our Wikipedias . But I
> really like the idea of Brianna where we hotlink and cache pictures from the
> GLAMs themselves. I can appreciate why Tim did not get into that... It is a
> lot of work, complicated work as well. Questions like what to do when the
> GLAM is off line are only part of it.

This was not my idea! It was suggested by GLAM people (a couple of
times) and like a good facilitator I made sure it was recorded. The
aim was to brainstorm, not debate the merits of every suggestion at
the time it was suggested.

The suggestion was also made that Wikimedia should revisit its
restriction on NC material, and it was written down too, although I
think I was thinking the same thing as every other Wikimedian in the
room...

Re GLAM repositories as a MediaWiki repo, I don't know enough on the
tech side to know if it is even a remotely feasible idea. But on the
'social' side it did make me think about our insistence (currently
technically necessary) that everything is in MediaWiki format,
essentially under the Wikimedia branding somewhere, before we will
effectively work with it. We want the GLAMs to let up some control,
but essentially so material can come under our control. A different
kind of control, certainly, but definitely control. Let's not kid
ourselves - not a neutral ground. Maybe it is not a bad idea for us to
think about how we can embrace collaboration or resource sharing that
might wear someone else's badging.

cheers
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Kat Walsh]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tim Starling wrote:

> I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would
> need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large
> amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of
> terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of
> this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of
> pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if
> we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise
> with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width
> and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems
> like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a
> significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage.
>
> A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be
> reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a
> large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would
> seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
> Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet,
> the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed.

Thanks for the recap; sounds like the conference went pretty well.

I'm not sure what the technical challenges you had in mind are, but I
can think of plenty of reasons to argue against hotlinking and I don't
want to let the point slip by. A few:

1. What about our mirrors and forks and reusers; do they get the same
rights? How about users who want to download media dumps?

2. What about when they decide to change around their naming
schemes/take works offline/otherwise restructure their websites, and
us with millions of links? Any change of theirs would cause serious
disruption.

I don't think it is a waste for us to mirror those images unless you
want to call all redundancy a waste--but if it's really a concern,
from my perspective I'd far rather have them hotlink from us! I think
it is fine to provide links to the institutions' own sites where the
highest-resolution images are available for purchase, but I think we
must host the other images ourselves. I do want to see Wikimedia
collaborate and reach understanding with cultural institutions. But I
think it needs to be on the level of how we share their mission of
preserving and disseminating cultural knowledge, and showing them how
much more can happen when we are able to use that material
independently on the Wikimedia projects.

-Kat

-- 
Your donations keep Wikipedia online: http://donate.wikimedia.org/en
Wikimedia, Press: k...@wikimedia.org * Personal: k...@mindspillage.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage * (G)AIM:Mindspillage
mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net * email for phone

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Re: [Foundation-l] Knol, a year later

[Kwan Ting Chan]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-from-a-wikipedia-killer-to-a-craigslist-wannabe/

--
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine


PGP.sig
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Re: [Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[Samuel Klein]

Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn
on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal
statistics about my own site usage.  Currently there's nothing other
than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver
tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no
beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.

SJ

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking.  Other
>> people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
>> of user-invisible behavior.
>
> Yay!
>
> Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
> in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
>
> We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
> could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
> session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
> seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
> databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
> privacy.
>
> Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
> cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
> things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
> statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
> permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
> from users.
>
> -- brion
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Election vote strikes

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Brian wrote:
>> This is important:  NO ONE WAS DISENFRANCHISED BY THE ERROR. People
>> were given suffrage who weren't entitled.
>>
>>
> This comment makes my skin crawl. Everyone is entitled to have a voice and
> it is only the Board's impoverished vision of the community and limited
> sense of what technology can accomplish that has led them to create
> arbitrary rules about how to best stifle the voices of the vast majority of
> the actual community. Not only that, but the Board has forgotten the WMF's
> original vision where all editors were highly valued members of the
> community. Because the Board does not have to sit face to face with these
> people they feel free to treat our community members as if they were not, in
> fact, people, with highly valued and varied life experiences whose votes do
> in fact contain useful information - in the information theoretic sense.

Brian, I like many things you say while ranting, for instance I think
we need to think about suffrage as something essential to our identity
as a community, not a quick hack that balances commitment and
flood-proofing against openness of process. However, a prickly tone
tends to discourage people from responding to you.

Can you provide some positive examples of what you would like to see
instead?  Would you prefer to have no requirements for editing or
contribution, only a requirement that a voter prove they are a real
and unique snowflak^B^B^B^Bperson?

SJ

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Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Thank you Tim I find I am sad for not having been there. I blogged in reply
but here is its text as well.
Thanks,
 Gerard
**
Tim Starling  wrote a nice
reporton
last weeks GLAM Wiki conference. He touched briefly on two issues, the
storage of GLAM material and the collation of meta data from all libraries
in Australia.

*The storage of GLAM material*
Much of the material digitised is in the tiff format. They represent the
original material best because with tiff you do not lose information due to
compression. The WMF does not support tiff files in Wikipedia; at the moment
it allows only for the storage of these files. There are however important
reasons why we want access to tiff files; high resolution loss less files
are the base material for our digital
restorations
.

Liam has a point when he suggests that we typically do not need the highest
resolutions to illustrate our Wikipedias . But I
really like the idea of Brianna where we hotlink and cache pictures from the
GLAMs themselves. I can appreciate why Tim did not get into that... It is a
lot of work, complicated work as well. Questions like what to do when the
GLAM is off line are only part of it.

What I would suggest is that we could get the high resolution tiff on
request if we aim to restore a particular image.

*The annotations of GLAM material*
Annotations are what makes the material we may use worthwhile. Without
annotations, provenance a picture is hardly worthwhile as an illustration.
The annotations in illustrations are as important as the sources for text.



In the last paragraph, there is one little gem; it says that "there is an
ongoing project to collate metadata from the libraries of Australia". A
similar project exists in the Netherlands for musea.

The question is very much how does the Wikimedia community fit in. To what
extend does it make sense to update the data in Commons and not have this
information available as part of the metadata of the GLAM. If the question
of hotlinking is a hot patatoe, then this is much more complex.

Consider this scenario, the Tropenmuseum  makes
available 100.000 images about Indonesia. The Indonesian WMF chapter finds
people willing to translate the Dutch annotations in Bahasa Indonesia and
the Indonesian community starts to improve on these annotations. How will
that affect the original annotations and what about the English translation
that is also very much desired ??

There are no obvious answers, they will come as we work together and make
our attempts to come up with workable solutions. Solutions that are bound to
change and improve in time.
Thanks,
GerardM

2009/8/12 Tim Starling 

> I thought I'd better write up a report about the conference I went to
> last week, to justify the time I spent there. I'll give some general
> observations followed by some technical ones.
>
> GLAM-WIKI was a two-day conference billed as a meeting between
> Australia's GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and
> Wikimedians. GLAM representatives outnumbered Wikimedians, but we had
> enough people there to make sure our point of view was heard both inside
> and outside of the formal program. Many of the talks were from people in
> the GLAM sector who were already converted to our way of thinking, and
> who endeavoured to convert the rest of the GLAM audience by speaking in
> their language.
>
> The GLAM representatives were generally very receptive. When dissenting
> questions came up, they were often answered in our favour by another
> GLAM representative. I asked one of the delegates about this favourable
> mood, and he said that the delegates were generally self-selected people
> who had a favourable opinion of Wikimedia and free content, and that the
> skeptics did not attend. However, the discussions had at the conference
> would provide valuable ammunition against those skeptics back in the
> office.
>
> As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary
> opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian
> MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council. He said, in essence, that
> institutions need to prevent reuse or modification of the content they
> hold in order to preserve its purity, which risks sullied by the
> cumulative distortions of the general public. This was passionately
> countered by Jessica Coates during question time, with some success
> judging by nearby whisperings. MacDonald also warned the audience about
> evil Wikimedians like the one who "hacked into" the NPG (UK) website and
> stole a million pounds worth of images. The factual errors in this
> statement were briefly 

Re: [Foundation-l] [ol-discuss] [Wikisource-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:

>> Let's take a practical example.  A classics professor I know
>> (Greg Crane, copied here) has scans of primary source materials,
>> some with approximate or hand-polished OCR, waiting to be
>> uploaded and converted into a useful online resource for
>> editors, translators, and classicists around the world.
>>
>> Where should he and his students post that material?
>
> On Wikisource.  What's stopping them?

Greg: does Wikisource seem like the right place to post and revise OCR
to you?  If not, where?  If so, what's stopping you?



> I'm not so sure we agree.  I think we're talking about two
> different things.
>
> This thread started out with a discussion of why it is so hard to
> start new projects within the Wikimedia Foundation.  My stance is
> that projects like OpenStreetMap.org and OpenLibrary.org are doing
> fine as they are, and there is no need to duplicate their effort
> within the WMF.  The example you gave was this:

I agree that there's no point in duplicating existing functionality.
The best solution is probably for OL to include this explicitly in
their scope and add the necessary functionality.   I suggested this on
the OL mailing list in March.
   http://mail.archive.org/pipermail/ol-discuss/2009-March/000391.html

>> >> >> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published
>> >> >> work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion
>> >> >> about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with
>> >> >> OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas)
>
> To me, that sounds exactly as what OpenLibrary already does (or
> could be doing in the near time), so why even set up a new project
> that would collaborate with it?  Later you added:

However, this is not what OL or its wiki do now.  And OL is not run by
its community, the community helps support the work of a centrally
directed group.  So there is only so much I feel I can contribute to
the project by making suggestions.  The wiki built into the fiber of
OL is intentionally not used for general discussion.



> I was talking about the metadata for all books ever published,
> including the Swedish translations of Mark Twain's works, which
> are part of Mark Twain's bibliography, of the translator's
> bibliography, of American literature, and of Swedish language
> literature.  In OpenLibrary all of these are contained in one
> project.  In Wikisource, they are split in one section for English
> and another section for Swedish.  That division makes sense for
> the contents of the book, but not for the book metadata.

This is a problem that Wikisource needs to address, regardless of
where the OpenLibrary metadata goes.  It is similar to the Wiktionary
problem of wanting some content - the array of translations of a
single definition - to exist in one place and be transcluded in each
language.


> Now you write:
>
>> However, the project I have in mind for OCR cleaning and
>> translation needs to
>
> That is a change of subject. That sounds just like what Wikisource
> (or PGDP.net) is about.  OCR cleaning is one thing, but it is an
> entirely different thing to set up "a wiki for book metadata, with
> an entry for every published work".  So which of these two project
> ideas are we talking about?

They are closely related.

There needs to be a global authority file for works -- a [set of]
universal identifier[s] for a given work in order for wikisource (as
it currently stands) to link the German translation of the English
transcription of OCR of the 1998 photos of the 1572 Rotterdam Codex...
to its metadata entry [or entries].

I would prefer for this authority file to be wiki-like, as the
Wikipedia authority file is, so that it supports renames, merges, and
splits with version history and minimal overhead; hence I wish to see
a wiki for this sort of metadata.

Currently OL does not quite provide this authority file, but it could.
 I do not know how easily.


> Every book ever published means more than 10 million records.
> (It probably means more than 100 million records.) OCR cleaning
> attracts hundreds or a few thousand volunteers, which is
> sufficient to take on thousands of books, but not millions.

Focusing efforts on notable works with verifiable OCR, and using the
sorts of helper tools that Greg's paper describes, I do not doubt that
we could effectively clean and publish OCR for all primary sources
that are actively used and referenced in scholarship today (and more
besides).  Though 'we' here is the world - certainly more than a few
thousand volunteers have at least one book they would like to polish.
Most of them are not currently Wikimedia contributors, that much is
certain -- we don't provide any tools to make this work convenient or
rewarding.


> Google scanned millions of books already, but I haven't heard of
> any plans for cleaning all that OCR text.

Well, Google does not believe in distributed human effort.  (This came
up in a recent Knol thread as we

Re: [Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Mathias Schindler]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Tim Starling wrote:

> As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary
> opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian
> MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council.

He started his opening statement with his intention to act as a "party
pooper" (spelling?). He basically systematically ridiculed his own
position by the way he made his statement and made it hard for anyone
to subscribe to any particular position he stated. We should consider
booking him on another occation.

> There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more
> readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to
> upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but
> found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large
> scale.

There is an upcoming tool from the usual suspects at Wikimedia that
might be of interest to you and the GLAM people.

> Special:BookSources came up a couple of times. The libraries would love
> to see software improvements, such as geolocation giving the ability to
> present the nearest few libraries at the top of the page, without the
> user having to click on the world map. Liam mentioned the geolocation
> projects based on detecting nearby 802.11 access points. I think
> MaxMind's GeoIP City would be a better as a software development
> starting point.

Anyone interested in the capabilies of the W3C geolocation feature
(currently supported by Firefox 3.5) can look it up at
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/#geo-demo (link: give
it a try). This feature requires a consent from the user, whereas hte
GeoIP feature alone can be run on the server side without prior
consent. It should be reasonably precise to find nearby libraries.

> Delegates from the National Library of Australia reported that they have
> an ongoing project to collate collection metadata from all libraries in
> Australia. It may be possible to replicate this data to Wikimedia
> servers, or otherwise make it available. This would enable a feature
> whereby the user is told which libraries have the book being searched
> for, in the requested edition or a different edition. It may even be
> possible to report whether the book is on the shelf or not.

The theoretical construct behind this is FRBR
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records).
It would help to identify the relationship of the english paperback
4th edition of a text book to the french hardcover edition of the 3rd
edition and to the german e-book of the same work.

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[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Tim Starling]

I thought I'd better write up a report about the conference I went to
last week, to justify the time I spent there. I'll give some general
observations followed by some technical ones.

GLAM-WIKI was a two-day conference billed as a meeting between
Australia's GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and
Wikimedians. GLAM representatives outnumbered Wikimedians, but we had
enough people there to make sure our point of view was heard both inside
and outside of the formal program. Many of the talks were from people in
the GLAM sector who were already converted to our way of thinking, and
who endeavoured to convert the rest of the GLAM audience by speaking in
their language.

The GLAM representatives were generally very receptive. When dissenting
questions came up, they were often answered in our favour by another
GLAM representative. I asked one of the delegates about this favourable
mood, and he said that the delegates were generally self-selected people
who had a favourable opinion of Wikimedia and free content, and that the
skeptics did not attend. However, the discussions had at the conference
would provide valuable ammunition against those skeptics back in the office.

As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary
opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian
MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council. He said, in essence, that
institutions need to prevent reuse or modification of the content they
hold in order to preserve its purity, which risks sullied by the
cumulative distortions of the general public. This was passionately
countered by Jessica Coates during question time, with some success
judging by nearby whisperings. MacDonald also warned the audience about
evil Wikimedians like the one who "hacked into" the NPG (UK) website and
stole a million pounds worth of images. The factual errors in this
statement were briefly addressed during question time.

I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would
need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large
amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of
terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of
this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of
pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if
we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise
with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width
and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems
like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a
significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage.

A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be
reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a
large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would
seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet,
the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed.

There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more
readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to
upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but
found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large
scale.

Special:BookSources came up a couple of times. The libraries would love
to see software improvements, such as geolocation giving the ability to
present the nearest few libraries at the top of the page, without the
user having to click on the world map. Liam mentioned the geolocation
projects based on detecting nearby 802.11 access points. I think
MaxMind's GeoIP City would be a better as a software development
starting point.

Delegates from the National Library of Australia reported that they have
an ongoing project to collate collection metadata from all libraries in
Australia. It may be possible to replicate this data to Wikimedia
servers, or otherwise make it available. This would enable a feature
whereby the user is told which libraries have the book being searched
for, in the requested edition or a different edition. It may even be
possible to report whether the book is on the shelf or not.

-- Tim Starling

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