[Foundation-l] Announcement: Priyanka Dhanda joins Wikimedia
Hello all, I'm very pleased to welcome Priyanka Dhanda to the Wikimedia Foundation as Code Maintenance Engineer. Priyanka joins us from SourceForge Inc., where she worked since 2002 as a software developer and also was involved in operations, working on most pieces of the infrastructure, and integrating third party software with the SourceForge platform (including MediaWiki). Priyanka holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Toledo, Ohio, and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pondicherry Engineering College in India. She is starting today and will work in the San Francisco office. Priyanka will be a key interface between software developers and the operations team, helping us to catch up with our code and bug review backlog, to mentor new developers, to push projects to completion, and to improve testing and automation. Please don't swamp her immediately with requests as she'll need some time to get more deeply oriented in the MediaWiki codebase. :-) You'll be seeing her in the IRC channels, on SVN, Code Review, BugZilla, wikitech-l, and so forth. Please join me in welcoming Priyanka to the Wikimedia team! :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] LiquidThreads almost ready for deployment
Hi all, With the Foundation's support, I've spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads [1], a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects. Essentially, it's an attempt to marry the radical openness of the wiki paradigm with the usability and practicality of a forum-like system. As the name implies, LiquidThreads is designed to allow any user to easily refactor discussions while maintaining edit history, to edit other users' comments, and to collaborate on a summary of an ongoing discussion. LiquidThreads also brings many standard communication features lacking from wiki discussion pages, such as watching and protecting individual discussion threads, RSS feeds of comments in a discussion or on a discussion page. In the world of online communication, its approach is entirely unique. LiquidThreads has been in alpha testing on Wikimedia Labs [2] for several months, and, more recently, it's been used in a production context on the strategy wiki, where it has been quite well-received. It's been easy to run these smaller trials, as the extension allows the activation and deactivation of LiquidThreads discussions on individual pages with a simple parser function. While there are still some issues remaining before wider trials, I believe I can resolve most of them quite quickly (within a few weeks when my vacation finishes at the end of next month), and I'd like to get the ball rolling in proposing small-scale trials on some of the larger wikis, so that a full discussion can be had, and so that adjustments can be made on the basis of ongoing feedback. I'd especially like to see LiquidThreads used on some of the higher-traffic discussion pages on English Wikipedia (such as the technical village pump), and progressive rollout on some of our mid to large sized wikis. So, I'd like to encourage you to have a play with LiquidThreads, either on the strategy wiki or on the test site (which generally runs a newer version). Tell me what you like about it, and (far more importantly) what improvements you think it needs before we can expand our trials to wider parts of the Wikimedia Universe, and perhaps move towards a full rollout of this very exciting technology. I should give the following caveats about LiquidThreads as it stands. These are all issues that I intend to address before any trial expansion occurs. * Presently the system is somewhat vulnerable to abuse. I intend to make changes to the way signatures work, and improve tracking and listing of thread actions by specific users. * While LiquidThreads allows for thread summaries and discussion headers, the system does not currently have support for collaboratively-edited posts which are unsigned or signed by a group of people. These are a key piece of any decision-making framework, and I intend to make adjustments to make this possible. * There is no support for embedding LiquidThreads discussion pages on other pages. * There are plenty of minor interface issues which I intend to clean up. Feedback is best directed to the dedicated Feedback page [3], or, alternatively, to bugzilla [4] (although before filing a bug, you should check the list of existing LiquidThreads bugs [5]). [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads [2] http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org [3] http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Feedback [4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=LiquidThreads [5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=LiquidThreads&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED -- Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
I actually liked the idea of a picture of the man whose making the appeal behind the text (regardless of the fact that Craigslist seemed very US-centric to me, and appreciating the fact that members of the Advisory Board would do such appeals) and I miss it from the Jimmy appeal. (It is an unsubstantiated hypotheses of mine, that probably the donor comments would also have worked with a picture of a real person as a background). Best, Bence Damokos ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 4:35 AM, Andre Engels wrote: > On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Thomas Dalton > wrote: > > We've advertised third party for-profits in the past with prominent > > matched donations notices before (albeit controversially). This isn't > > that different. > > As you say, that one was controversial and this one isn't that > different. Then it should not surprise you that this one is > controversial too, should it? > IIRC, the most "controversial" part about the Virgin Unite campaign was that I made a stub on the organization using a Single Purpose Account, mispelling the name of the organization, and a bunch of people came up with the conspiracy theory that the short mispelled stub was created by the actual organization (and that somehow there was something wrong with that). But I could be misremembering. What was the Virgin Unite ad like? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Andre Engels wrote: > On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Thomas Dalton > wrote: > > We've advertised third party for-profits in the past with prominent > > matched donations notices before (albeit controversially). This isn't > > that different. > > As you say, that one was controversial and this one isn't that > different. Then it should not surprise you that this one is > controversial too, should it? Or do people lose the right to complain > against something if it happens the second time? > > > -- > André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com At what point is something "controversial"? As far as I can remember there hasn't been a single decision in the history of Wikimedia that has received universal support. Some people will complain no matter what happens. When you're the person doing the complaining it is your POV that the issue is "controversial", whereas when you're the one who isn't complaining then it is your POV that the issue is NOT "controversial" and the complainers are just overreacting. There is no objective criteria to define controversy. Furthermore, if there is one place in the Wikimedia world where people complain the loudest, longest and for most obscure reasons - it's here on foundatio.nl So, whilst I'm not ignoring the fact that Geni et. al. genuinely feel that this was a bad decision on behalf of the fundraising team, I do not believe that this particular issue warrants the term "controversy". It is something that some people dislike but most people are either indifferent to it or see it favourably. Your concerns have been raised, elaborated and debated. I don't think there's anything more that can be said about this particular issue other than to reiterate already voiced points. -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata > > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] advertising craigslist
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: > We've advertised third party for-profits in the past with prominent > matched donations notices before (albeit controversially). This isn't > that different. As you say, that one was controversial and this one isn't that different. Then it should not surprise you that this one is controversial too, should it? Or do people lose the right to complain against something if it happens the second time? -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
