date:20100509

 Marcus wrote:
 Creating a technical solution like that is the task of the foundation.
 The _real_ task of the foundation.

Cimon wrote:
 Lot of momentum around the idea, is currently most
 persistently promoted by the same precise individual
 who began the ethical breaching experiment project

I wasn't thinking of privatemusings, but of Marcus's comment and the
recent comments on this bugzilla bug (about supporting ICRA):
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=982

Again, I'm generally opposed to this particular idea.  But Marcus is
right about the foundation's role in supporting technical solutions
where needed.  Community groups that need a well-defined technical
solution should ask boldly for it.

Wedrna, later:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support
 is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the
 content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly.
 The infrastructure would be technically simple.

Yes.  Our categorization system already exists and should suffice.


David Levy writes:
 Deletions are easily reversible.  Multi-wiki image transclusion
 removals, distrust in the Wikimedia Commons and resignations
 from Wikimedia projects?  Less so.

True. The resignations are deeply unfortunate, and I hope those who
have left will still contribute to the ensuing discussions - their
opinions are among those badly needed to find the right way forward.

SJ


Anthony writes:
 (BTW, shouldn't Larry Sanger have a founder flag too?)

No, he gets an Instigator flag, enabling him to chiefly instigate an
argument with the Cunctator on any page.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wedrna, later:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support
 is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the
 content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly.
 The infrastructure would be technically simple.

 Yes.  Our categorization system already exists and should suffice.

Our categorisation system is mentioned in any W3C Recommendation.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:14 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wedrna, later:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support
 is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the
 content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly.
 The infrastructure would be technically simple.

 Yes.  Our categorization system already exists and should suffice.

 Our categorisation system is mentioned in any W3C Recommendation.

is = isn't

sorry.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

2010-05-09 Thread Andrew Garrett

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wedrna, later:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support
 is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the
 content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly.
 The infrastructure would be technically simple.

 Yes.  Our categorization system already exists and should suffice.

To be specific, the technical infrastructure would involve parser
functions which can apply ICRA tags to images, and can pass them
through to the articles in question. It could be implemented with
parser functions and the page_props table in an afternoon, taking no
more than a week to tweak and review.

If you want this functionality, you should look at implementing it, or
you should lobby the Foundation to support it with staff developer
time.

-- 
Andrew Garrett
http://werdn.us/

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:14 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:14 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wedrna, later:
 The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support
 is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the
 content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly.
 The infrastructure would be technically simple.

 Yes.  Our categorization system already exists and should suffice.

 Our categorisation system is mentioned in any W3C Recommendation.

 is = isn't

I see what you mean.   SJ

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:06 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote:
 Mike Godwin wrote:

 All metaphors are at least somewhat misleading, and some metaphors are
 deeply misleading.

 At least no one is comparing Jimbo with Nazis or Hitler yet.

Err, that happened days ago on Jimbo's talk page and, less directly, here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:TheDJoldid=38893008

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-09 Thread Ting Chen

Hello all,

the following sentence from me is surely a very stupid sentense. I 
apology for it. And thanks for everyone, especially Aphaia and SJ for 
pointing this out to me.

Ting

Ting Chen wrote:
 Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational 
 value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide 
 repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of 
 Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. 
 The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as 
 the media files in Commons.

 Ting

 Victor Vasiliev wrote:
   
 On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote:
   
 
 Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
 in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
 no educational or informational value.
 
   
 I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most
 information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and
 materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or
 information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of
 Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as
 possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music.

 Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation
 feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]?

 --vvv

 [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
 [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure

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[Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

2010-05-09 Thread Gregory Maxwell

I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my
experiences with commons.


Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human
sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking Holy crap!
Thats a lot of [gallery name].  Freeking teenage pornofreaks!.

But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about
it:  I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well
respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least),
well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in
many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events.  I think it's likely
that a majority of my deletions have been technically out of
process, but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of
the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all.

To take action you have to understand a few things:  The problem,
The lay of the land, and The goal.

Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem?
(1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute  (it's
just a big porn site!)
(2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries
(3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
risk bumping into the law (underage models)

I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now.


The lay of the land


Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must
potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty
strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very
broadly.   In particular the commons community expects the public to
also use commons as a form of visual education, so having a great
big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers
the educational mission.

There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:

Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over
700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective
communication with these customers.  Some Wikimedia projects rely on
commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons
means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most
Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community.  This
relationship works because of trust which the commons community has
built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making
major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues
when hasty acts do cause issues.

Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a
strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a
fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF
projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly
inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only
excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human
decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on
matters of taste.  Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more
reliable as an image source for customer projects.


I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do
with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human
sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this
message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split
between people who believe the existing educational purposes policy
is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the
policy somehow.

There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are
offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to
curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values.  If
this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your
personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an
effort to remove redundant / low quality sexuality images while we
not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is
effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If
you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion
is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view
you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit.
In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the
spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.

Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time,
but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are
lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the
discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a
big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists
everywhere in our projects.

There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things
like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to
sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art,
basic anatomy photos... I think these

Re: [Foundation-l] A Board member's perspective

2010-05-09 Thread Ilario Valdelli

On 09.05.2010 02:04, Noein wrote:

 On 08/05/2010 20:52, Stuart West wrote:

 (1) There were some bad actors at work (e.g. hardcore pornography 
 distributors taking advantage of our open culture to get free anonymous 
 hosting).  (2) As a community (including the Board), we debated the issue 
 too long and failed to drive closure and implement.  (3) There are complex 
 issues around _some_ of the content that is in a gray area and those 
 complexities distracted us from dealing with the clearer cut cases.
  
 In order to help us understand better the situation, can you refer
 concrete examples of 1 and a link to the discussion mentioned in 2?


I would not speak for Stuart but I can give concrete cases of politic 
propaganda widespread in en.wikipedia and related cancellation of 
content with a different point of view.

All that without any action of the community and with an evident non 
neutral position of sysops.

I promise you to open another thread with all that points but I would 
like to discuss that like a different problem not related with hardcore 
pornography.

After that I hope to receive your feedback.

Ilario

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On Fri, May 7, Noein wrote:

 I'm powerless. Am I? I think many of us are having these very questions
 now. Is it good for the WMF that we're asking them?

Eloquence is power.  And it is good that you are asking.


On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote:

 I agree with Mike Godwin that this crisis is an constructive
 opportunity, not just a destructive event about fears (of FBI, of Fox
 News, of dictatorship), angers and disappointments.

 But an opportunity for what?
 - - to constructively discuss the censorship problem.
 - - to constructively discuss the vulnerability of the WMF
 - - to constructively discuss the Commons policy

 Let's start to pinpoint and synthesize the few big problems and link to
 a wikipage to BUILD discussion and answer.

You put this very well.  Each of these should be discussed in turn on
Meta.  I've made a start at the first one:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Censorship


 200 mails a day is not  the way, in my opinion,
 besides the fact that this current discussion
 is not  (and should not be) restricted to this mailing list.

True on both counts.  Any wiki discussion should also draw in
participants from other large projects (en:wp, de:wp, ja:wp, c).

@DGG: I'll respond to your comments in another thread.

SJ

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On 5/8/10 5:11 PM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
 If we believe, as Sue does, that this protection against outside
 influence is a good thing, then Jimbo is a weak link so long as he can
 enact the changes some outsider wants of his own accord.

Oh, but I can't really.  In this case, I was in - and remain in - 
constant communication with the Board and with Sue.  That doesn't mean I 
did everything exactly correctly - I didn't.

But I don't regard it in any way as within my personal remit to make 
major changes to policy.

Not only is it not true that I can get away with anything - it's also 
something that I wouldn't want to be true.

--Jimbo

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On 5/8/10 10:02 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote:
 The deletions themselves aren't the problem; the manner in which they
 were carried out is. As a lawyer you should understand that the due
 process is important.

I understand that and apologize for it.  There was a crisis situation 
and I took action which ended up averting the crisis.  In the process I 
stepped on some toes, and for that I am sorry.

I won't do it again.

The most important questions now have to do with policy on commons.

-- 
Jimmy Wales

Please follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On 5/8/10 5:38 PM, Mike Godwin wrote:
 On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com  wrote:


 Most of the egregiously bad deletions were quickly overturned, and Jimmy
 was
 the one re-deleting the images. Now that he has agreed to stop, most of the
 poor deletions have been re-reversed. I doubt Jimmy approves; there's
 absolutely nothing in his actions over the past few days to suggest that he
 does.


 I think you do Jimmy a disservice if you think he did not anticipate
 precisely this result.

And I do approve.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread William Pietri

On 05/08/2010 10:23 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
 Editors are saying, with a straight face, that there is no implied sexual 
 activity in BDSM images like 
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angel_BDSM.png and that images like 
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BDSM_Preparation.png are not 
 pornographic.


I'm going to stay quite thoroughly out of 99.9% of this discussion, but 
that last link is from a well-known local art gallery and performance 
space, Femina Potens, [1]  that happens to be just a few blocks from my 
house.

At least by local community standards, the event depicted was indeed not 
pornographic. San Francisco's long history as a home to both artists and 
people with different takes on sex and gender means that a lot of local 
art works with sex and gender as key themes. As they mention in their 
mission statement [2]:

 Since 2003, Femina Potens organized almost 450 performing, visual, 
 literary, media arts, educational and public arts programs that have 
 authentically explored the experiences of queer, women, transgender 
 people and others living outside the female-male gender binary. [...]
 We provide the lgbtqik community with a comfortable and inviting 
 environment to engage and learn about all facets of art, sex and 
 gender through cutting edge art work, literature, and media that 
 explores one's gender, sexuality, social issues, wellness, creativity 
 and kink.

You'll note that the explicitly mention education, art, and learning. I 
have no reason to think they're anything other than sincere; if one 
wants to make porn in San Francisco, one doesn't have to go to all the 
trouble of creating a well-regarded non-profit art gallery.

I bring this up only because it's a good example of how easy it is to 
see something that's educational or artistic in nature as porn. I'm sure 
by some community standards it would be thought obscene, but hereabouts, 
that's just another day in The Castro. [3]

William


[1] http://www.feminapotens.org/
[2] http://www.feminapotens.org/index.php?Itemid=62
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castro

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Re: [Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

Thank you Greg, for this brilliant and personal overview.  Very helpful.

A few thoughts:

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:

 Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem?
 (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute  (it's
 just a big porn site!)

This can be addressed in part by increasing the quality standard for
our images.  A well-ordered set of anatomy images, in standard
proscribed frame and format, from an established cross-section of
races or backgrounds : this would be excellent.  It would also be a
useful model to follow for all sorts of anatomical images (you could
use the same models to get entire sets of images of the body).

Likewise, a well-ordered set of images of jewelry and piercings,
perhaps organized in partnership with a large piercing/jewelry parlor
in a multiethnic community, would also be easy enough to set up -- and
would quickly replace the many lazily-shot and casually curated images
we have today.  (note that I didn't specify genital jewelry and
piercings; though that would be part of the series).

A gorgeous and professionally made encyclopedia of sexuality might not
be to some people's tastes, but wouldn't inspire them to say 'just a
big porn site!', just as the Museum of Sex has acquired a very
respectable following and media coverage in New York.  That is
something we should aspire to.

(And if some people want to debate whether we want to host such a
specialized sub-encyclopedia on Foundation servers, or on servers
belonging to the Dutch chapter, for fear of overly strict laws in the
US - that's fine. The point is, this is a topic worth covering
beautifully and comprehensively, like all important topics, and we
should not shortchange it.)

 (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries

I think there are good solutions here, beginning with communicating
directly with schools and libraries and find solutions that work for
them.  For instance, making sure that they have access to
schools-wikipedia.org and similar snapshot sites until they can find a
way to provide access to all of wikipedia.

Working on these solutions may be a good way to recruit new teacher
editors, as well.

 (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
 risk bumping into the law (underage models)

This is the easiest one to address.   Requiring proof of model
release, the way we require proof of copyright release, would be an
excellent start -- and doing this on general principle, not just in
cases where a face is recognizable: make sure you have the model's
permission.  This is simply a philosophical question; we can afford to
be picky and only host images that we are sure the model was
comfortable with publishing.


SJ




 The lay of the land


 Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must
 potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty
 strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very
 broadly.   In particular the commons community expects the public to
 also use commons as a form of visual education, so having a great
 big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers
 the educational mission.

 There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:

 Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over
 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective
 communication with these customers.  Some Wikimedia projects rely on
 commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons
 means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most
 Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community.  This
 relationship works because of trust which the commons community has
 built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making
 major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues
 when hasty acts do cause issues.

 Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a
 strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a
 fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF
 projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly
 inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only
 excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human
 decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on
 matters of taste.  Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more
 reliable as an image source for customer projects.


 I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do
 with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human
 sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this
 message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split
 between people who believe the existing educational purposes policy
 is sufficient and people who think we could probably

Re: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

2010-05-09 Thread Jon Davis

I refuse to believe you could read that novel and respond intelligently in
41 minutes.I'm still waiting for the cliff notes version.

^_^

-Jon

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 01:58, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thank you Greg, for this brilliant and personal overview.  Very helpful.

 A few thoughts:

 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem?
  (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute  (it's
  just a big porn site!)

 This can be addressed in part by increasing the quality standard for
 our images.  A well-ordered set of anatomy images, in standard
 proscribed frame and format, from an established cross-section of
 races or backgrounds : this would be excellent.  It would also be a
 useful model to follow for all sorts of anatomical images (you could
 use the same models to get entire sets of images of the body).

 Likewise, a well-ordered set of images of jewelry and piercings,
 perhaps organized in partnership with a large piercing/jewelry parlor
 in a multiethnic community, would also be easy enough to set up -- and
 would quickly replace the many lazily-shot and casually curated images
 we have today.  (note that I didn't specify genital jewelry and
 piercings; though that would be part of the series).

 A gorgeous and professionally made encyclopedia of sexuality might not
 be to some people's tastes, but wouldn't inspire them to say 'just a
 big porn site!', just as the Museum of Sex has acquired a very
 respectable following and media coverage in New York.  That is
 something we should aspire to.

 (And if some people want to debate whether we want to host such a
 specialized sub-encyclopedia on Foundation servers, or on servers
 belonging to the Dutch chapter, for fear of overly strict laws in the
 US - that's fine. The point is, this is a topic worth covering
 beautifully and comprehensively, like all important topics, and we
 should not shortchange it.)

  (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and
 libraries

 I think there are good solutions here, beginning with communicating
 directly with schools and libraries and find solutions that work for
 them.  For instance, making sure that they have access to
 schools-wikipedia.org and similar snapshot sites until they can find a
 way to provide access to all of wikipedia.

 Working on these solutions may be a good way to recruit new teacher
 editors, as well.

  (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
  risk bumping into the law (underage models)

 This is the easiest one to address.   Requiring proof of model
 release, the way we require proof of copyright release, would be an
 excellent start -- and doing this on general principle, not just in
 cases where a face is recognizable: make sure you have the model's
 permission.  This is simply a philosophical question; we can afford to
 be picky and only host images that we are sure the model was
 comfortable with publishing.


 SJ




  The lay of the land
 
 
  Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must
  potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty
  strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very
  broadly.   In particular the commons community expects the public to
  also use commons as a form of visual education, so having a great
  big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers
  the educational mission.
 
  There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on
 commons:
 
  Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over
  700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective
  communication with these customers.  Some Wikimedia projects rely on
  commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons
  means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most
  Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community.  This
  relationship works because of trust which the commons community has
  built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making
  major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues
  when hasty acts do cause issues.
 
  Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a
  strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a
  fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF
  projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly
  inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only
  excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human
  decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on
  matters of taste.  Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more
  reliable as an image source for customer projects.
 
 
  I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do
  with some reductions in the

Re: [Foundation-l] Where things stand now

On 5/8/10 3:29 PM, Amory Meltzer wrote:
 I recognize that the issue is more about the point and process of the
 whole thing, and that it's not just Wales who deleted images, but I
 think some perspective is useful.

 Jimbo deleted 71 images.

 That doesn't call for outright rage.

And I deleted some things that I assumed would be undeleted after a 
discussion.  I wanted us to take an approach that involved first 
deleting a lot of borderline things, and then bringing them back after 
careful case by case discussions.

That proved to be quite unpopular, and I'm sorry about it.

--Jimbo

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Re: [Foundation-l] Where things stand now

On 5/8/10 5:06 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
 Jimmy Wales wrote:
 We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography
 and doing nothing about it.  Now, the correct storyline is that we are
 cleaning up.  I'm proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way
 it did, and I'm sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen.

 So you created this much disruption as a public relations stunt?

No, and I'm glad that we're now moving forward on resolving the problem. 
  I'm sorry I acted with such urgency, but I think it was necessary.

--Jimbo

-- 
Jimmy Wales

Please follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

2010-05-09 Thread Noein

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On 09/05/2010 02:12, Pedro Sanchez wrote:
 On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote:
 

 I'm surprised it is apparently needed to be said, but I'm here too
 because I have faith in universal values. In fact I've been attracted
 like a magnet since the day, one year and five months ago, that I wondered:
 In this world rushing into its own demise, who is struggling to better
 the human condition and protect our Earth?

 I can certainly say you've been around /only/ a year and half, as you seem
 to believe all this is about  wikipedia.  It's about commons and wikimedia
 in general. (Here, and I've /only/ been around 5 years, but that's
 irrelevant)

No, no, I use wikipedia as a metonymy, because I don't know the word for
the idea behind all the WMF projects. Replace wikipedia by universal
access to knowledge if you wish.
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Re: [Foundation-l] What the board is responsible of (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)

2010-05-09 Thread Florence Devouard

On 5/9/10 3:16 AM, Casey Brown wrote:
 On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Mark Ryanultrab...@gmail.com  wrote:
 I have to agree with you, Anthere. It's starting to look like over
 time the role of the board has evolved from broad guidance and
 administration to some sort of twisted version of enwp's Arbitration
 Committee. When the board was first created, it wasn't particularly
 political and its members were simply those who were most well-known
 and respected from across the Wikimedia communities. Now, at least
 some of the board members appear to be of the opinion that they have
 become the ultimate arbiters of what should be included in Wikimedia
 projects. They are not, and this will eventually become patently clear
 to them when their seats are due for re-election.


 Just throwing in a link to a page Anthere wrote summarizing the role
 of a board member, which might be useful here:
 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_member

 --
 Casey Brown
 Cbrown1023


Well, thank you for reminding us of this link explaining what the role 
of a board member is and is not.

Just a clarification. I am not the author of this statement.

This statement comes from the board itself, and was crafted and 
officially approved during a board meeting in June 2007.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_board_(June_2007)



Anthere


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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Alec Conroy

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.

I appreciate this step, but the community has now firmly rejected your
continued status as Founder flagged-- you have not been asked to cut
back on your privileges, you are being ordered to relinquish your
founder flag.

I'm happy that you're beginning to question your earlier actions, but
your founder status is not for you to decide.   Currently it's 3-to-1
against you continuing in this role.   If that doesn't change, you
need to abide by it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Andre Engels

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.

 I appreciate this step, but the community has now firmly rejected your
 continued status as Founder flagged-- you have not been asked to cut
 back on your privileges, you are being ordered to relinquish your
 founder flag.

 I'm happy that you're beginning to question your earlier actions, but
 your founder status is not for you to decide.   Currently it's 3-to-1
 against you continuing in this role.   If that doesn't change, you
 need to abide by it.

I disagree. Those objections are not against the idea of a founder
flag, but against his rights, or rather the way he used these rights.
If those rights are significantly curtailed, we have a different
situation, and not everyone who was against the extensive rights will
be against the narrower ones as well. In fact, I would say that
letting Jimbo remain Founder, but remove several rights from that
position would be very fitting in the Wikimedia way of working: Not
voting, but searching consensus for a compromise.

-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

You have kept 'protect', which I am guessing overrides the
'autoconfirmed' that you removed.

You have also kept 'Edit membership to global groups' and 'Manage
global groups', which means you can change these permissions at any
time.  When you have time, I think it is necessary to explain why you
need those, or to relinquish them.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

On 9 May 2010 07:30, Samuel J Klein s...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:31 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 It's board members directly asserting control over content. Of
 course it's a major issue.

 Perish the thought.  The Board is not controlling content - I would
 oppose any Board action that did so.


You seem to be saying what you saw happening did not in fact happen.
You'll appreciate I find this difficult to go along with.


 Phoebe writes:
 I'm not sure that's how I'd frame it. The board statement
 seemed pretty clear; reaffirming existing policy. I guess it
 depends a bit on what capacity you think Jimmy was acting in;

 On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote;
 I find it shocking that the board has chosen to explicitly support
 this 'wild west' approach.

 The Board does not support this - although individuals may -  it is
 not the role of the Board or the Foundation to get involved with
 project policy or content discussions.  Jimmy represents himself when
 he contributes to the projects.


The board members that have bothered speaking up have so far supported
it. Ting has expressly endorsed Board control over project content.

Again, you're telling me that what I saw happening, and what I saw
people saying, was not what was happening or what people were saying.
Again, you'll appreciate I find this difficult to go along with.


 I hope that noone in the Commons community feels threatened or unable
 to speak their mind (or to exercise their administrative abilities in
 carrying out their work).


I think it will take considerable work to make that hope come true,
given the actions so far.


 As to a way forward -- it is (as ever) up to the Commons community to
 work out what its policies are to be, with Jimmy if they are willing.
 I encourage those who feel strongly about these issues to engage
 directly in discussions there.


The overriding question will be the editorial role of the board.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On 9 May 2010 02:20, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote:

 Given that several Commons admins had dropped out, and bearing in mind the 
 clean-up campaign called for by the board and Jimbo, I put in an RFA at 
 Commons, saying I would help clean up pornographic images *that are not in 
 use by any project*.
 The result so far: 14 Opposes, 1 Support.
 You get the same result if you nominate a pornographic image for deletion.


At this point it is because the issue of pornography has been
completely overshadowed by the issue of the actions taken and Board
support for them.

The pornography issue *cannot* be resolved until these other issues
are resoved. Cannot.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On 9 May 2010 07:45, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 True. The resignations are deeply unfortunate, and I hope those who
 have left will still contribute to the ensuing discussions - their
 opinions are among those badly needed to find the right way forward.


deeply unfortunate is, far too often, a codeword meaning too bad,
but we'll ignore them.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-09 Thread Aphaia

Thanks for your prompt response, Ting. Fine to see we come to
agreement so quickly :)

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote:
 Hello all,

 the following sentence from me is surely a very stupid sentense. I
 apology for it. And thanks for everyone, especially Aphaia and SJ for
 pointing this out to me.

 Ting

 Ting Chen wrote:
 Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational
 value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide
 repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of
 Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies.
 The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as
 the media files in Commons.

 Ting

 Victor Vasiliev wrote:

 On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote:


 Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
 in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
 no educational or informational value.


 I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most
 information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and
 materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or
 information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of
 Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as
 possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music.

 Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation
 feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]?

 --vvv

 [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
 [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure

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-- 
KIZU Naoko
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese)
Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

On 9 May 2010 06:09, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote:

 Bugzilla 982[1]  MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling.
 From my understanding without reading much about it, It [ICRA] is ment
 to be a international or at least a standard for these things which
 most people seem to abide by (i see it splashed around on a lot of
 education sites that they are compliant with that standard).


This came up in discussion a while ago on WHATWG - PICS is actually
dead. Even its creators have given up on it. No-one implements it. As
a standard, it's got no backing. So we'd be the first significant
organisation to actually take it seriously, and would be reviving it.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread Noein

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On 09/05/2010 05:46, Jimmy Wales wrote:
 On 5/8/10 10:02 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote:
 The deletions themselves aren't the problem; the manner in which they
 were carried out is. As a lawyer you should understand that the due
 process is important.
 
 I understand that and apologize for it.  There was a crisis situation 
 and I took action which ended up averting the crisis.  In the process I 
 stepped on some toes [...]


I'm sorry to step in opposition since we never had the opportunity to
met before, Mr. Wales, and I do respect you. It's with great sadness
that I must disagree with your systematic and apparently deliberated
minimisation or ignorance of the grief you've done. I wouldn't call my
freedom of self-determination my toes. It's the core of my being.

I feel I have the right to decide for myself about censorship issues. I
feel that my voice should count as one vote, no more no less. I feel
that my intelligence deserves access to the knowledge you used to
declare a crisis. I don't feel inferior. I am not. Respect should be
reciprocal, and I don't feel this is the case.


[...] for that I am sorry.

 I won't do it again.
 
 The most important questions now have to do with policy on commons.


The most important questions for you are not the most important
questions for the community, it seems. The most important question for
ANY person is to be free to decide (and alive). If you negate that then
you can't be sorry. We want a real talk about that, not a dodge. You owe
us some listening.

By promising that you won't do it again you don't understand (or
probably don't want to) that the problem is not adressed. The majority
of the community, I think, don't want the WMF projects to be at the
mercy of just one person's tastes, no matter what he or she promises.

This is too big and important to be that vulnerable. Too many users
depend on these universal knowledge projects. Too many years of work
from thousands of editors were put. You cannot subject the governance of
the universal knowledge to you (or an small elite), because nobody can
hold enough open-mindedness to represent all the humanity. You
contributed the most important milestone for the liberation of mankind.
Don't become a needless tyrant.

Sorry for my arrogance. I know most people will judge my ideas on the
basis that I am nobody and no recognized trajectory, while your
contributions are unquestionable. So be it, I'll take the chance.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

2010-05-09 Thread Andre Engels

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:09 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote:

 Bugzilla 982[1]  MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling.
 From my understanding without reading much about it, It [ICRA] is ment
 to be a international or at least a standard for these things which
 most people seem to abide by (i see it splashed around on a lot of
 education sites that they are compliant with that standard).

I'm not sure if it was PICS, but in general I have bad experience with
trying to rate the content of my page. I had a website (it still
exists, but I cannot reach it any more to change it) that contained a
number of biographies. It was sometimes used by middle and high school
children for schoolwork. However, trying to rate it, it came out in
one of the heaviest categories. Why? As said, it contained
biographies. And some were of people who died in a violent way. Thus,
the pages were portraying extreme violence. That's when I decided that
this rating system wasn't really useful for my site.

-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Milos Rancic

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

 I do not want to be a tyrant or dictator.  I do not want us to fight
 about that kind of thing, as it's really a distraction from our work.

Thank you Jimmy very much!

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:46:50AM +0100, Jimmy Wales wrote:
 
 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real 
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I 
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do 
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit 
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

In the immortal words of Judge Judy; Perfect, PERFECT!. 

== Perfect ==

I was just about to post about the need to assure the commons community
that there would be no repeat performance. This is a risk-management
issue: why would a commons user take an initiative that might be
marginalized or rendered futile in the near future? 

That kind of situation has a paralysing effect on a community. 

The paralysing effect has now been largely negated. 
Perfect.

== PERFECT! ==

Do you know how long I've been trying to encourage experienced/high profile
admins to hand in their flags? 

Why? It's a Poka-yoke / idiot-proofing measure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke 

As a precaution, one should not take (high profile) actions, without 
confirming it with at least one other person in the relevant community.[1]

By not having the requisite permissions oneself, one is forced to talk
with someone who does, no matter how impatient, panicked, or tired one
is.  Obviously this doesn't catch all edge-cases, but it certainly
reduces the number of ways in which things can go wrong.

In this case, Jimbo Wale's founder flag gave him _Uber_-Admin powers.
That's Got to Lead To Uber-Pain. And It Did. 


So now that's fixed. I wouldn't be surprised if Jimmy's influence
in the community didn't actually *increase* due to this. [2]

PERFECT!

== Me three? ==

Jimmy Wales correctly identifies the fact that experienced
users who do hand in their flag should still be able to view 
things, such as deleted pages, etc. 

In fact, the reason that I haven't been able to convince fellow
admins to retire, is because they really didn't want to lose
their viewing abilities.

drama
Before, I was but a single voice, calling in the dark. But Now! Now that
the world's most high profile Wikipedian has *de-facto* finally 
vindicated my position, after all these years...
/drama

... it would be really nice to have a similar set of permissions
for retired admins and stewards.  Please? Puppy-dog-look

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

[1]It is always wise to work in pairs anyway. Ask Ward Cunningham, or 
any other Agile-type person you know!

[2] This wouldn't be immediate. First some wounds will need to heal,
of course. And people still need to vent their catharthic
venting for now.




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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread Peter Coombe

On 9 May 2010 09:50, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
 On 5/8/10 5:38 PM, Mike Godwin wrote:
 On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com  wrote:


 Most of the egregiously bad deletions were quickly overturned, and Jimmy
 was
 the one re-deleting the images. Now that he has agreed to stop, most of the
 poor deletions have been re-reversed. I doubt Jimmy approves; there's
 absolutely nothing in his actions over the past few days to suggest that he
 does.


 I think you do Jimmy a disservice if you think he did not anticipate
 precisely this result.

 And I do approve.


This is absurd. You wheel-warred to re-delete numerous images, and had
threatened to desysop anyone restoring them. You even said they
couldn't be discussed until June! And now you say you approve of the
Commons community reversing your bad deletions. This capricious
behaviour is driving people from the projects.

Pete / the wub

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 04:36:19AM -0400, Samuel Klein wrote:
 On Fri, May 7, Noein wrote:
 
  I'm powerless. Am I? I think many of us are having these very questions
  now. Is it good for the WMF that we're asking them?
 
 Eloquence is power.  And it is good that you are asking.

I always knew there was something about that man... ;-)

sincerely,
Kim Oh, you meant the *concept*, not the *person* Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

2010-05-09 Thread Nikola Smolenski

Дана Friday 07 May 2010 12:53:59 Milos Rancic написа:
 On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org 
wrote:
  Milos Rancic wrote:
  The MMORPG Ryzom goes Free Software [1]. Although it was just a matter
  of time, this event is very important for shaping our future. MMORPG
  is virtual reality and VR worlds will be [a significant part of] our
  future.
 
  Nice to see our resident futurist making some more predictions. This
  reminds me, we're almost halfway to May 29, 2011, the date by which
  the Google Wave client will be the basic component of a modern
  operating system, replacing the web browser.

 Unlike in prophecy, in speculative prediction will be means:

 It will be if:
 1) Nothing cataclysmic happens.
 2) Nothing radically different happens.
 3) Matter of prediction goes through the most possible path of development.

OMEN, n. A sign that something will happen if nothing happens.

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[Foundation-l] Jimbo hasn't actually given up anything

2010-05-09 Thread Alec Conroy

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
 I was just about to post about the need to assure the commons community
 that there would be no repeat performance.
That need is still there, Kim.

Just in case anyone hasn't noticed, Jimbo kept his power to give
himself whatever powers he wants.

So, instead of giving up virtually all of his founder powers, he
actually still has total access to all of them.

This looks, to my eyes, to be one of those subtle miscommunications
where Jimbo implies one thing is true, we all buy it, and then it
turns out we all just misunderstood him.


For example, that new policy the board was about to announce any
second-- only to see that the new policy is that the board is not
starting any new policies.

Or, the time Jimbo somehow got us all to think that this was a legal
issue, before the foundation lawyers  set us straight.

Or the time Jimbo claimed to have lost virtually all of his powers
except 'view delete', and it turned out he actually still had access
to all of his powers.   Oh wait-- already mentioned that one.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

2010-05-09 Thread Milos Rancic

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:29 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 9 May 2010 07:45, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:

 True. The resignations are deeply unfortunate, and I hope those who
 have left will still contribute to the ensuing discussions - their
 opinions are among those badly needed to find the right way forward.


 deeply unfortunate is, far too often, a codeword meaning too bad,
 but we'll ignore them.

I think that Jimmy should ask them to back.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:23 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 9 May 2010 07:30, Samuel J Klein s...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 Perish the thought.  The Board is not controlling content - I
 would oppose any Board action that did so.

 The Board does not support this - although individuals may -  it
 is not the role of the Board or the Foundation to get involved
 with project policy or content discussions.

 The board members that have bothered speaking up have so far supported
 it. Ting has expressly endorsed Board control over project content.

They are still speaking as individuals - and were mainly commenting on
whether they thought it was appropriate for Jimmy to spur a policy
discussion as a community member.  Please do not confuse personal
opinions - including my own - for a stance of the Board.

Our mandate as a Board explicitly precludes meddling in Project
policy, community disputes, and the like.
  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_member

And the Board has always taken care in its official statements not to
suggest it is directing project policy or content, except where -- as
with the 2007 licensing policy -- this is the explicit intent, and the
policy change crafted after extensive discussion with the Projects.


 As to a way forward -- it is (as ever) up to the Commons
 community to work out what its policies are to be, with Jimmy
 if they are willing.  I encourage those who feel strongly about
 these issues to engage directly in discussions there.

 The overriding question will be the editorial role of the board.

The Board has no editorial role, on Commons or on any other Project,
unless you consider high-level goal-setting and prioritization ( like
http://j.mp/wmfblp ) editorial.

SJ

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[Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 04:17:29AM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
 I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my
 experiences with commons.
 


== It has begun.==

En.wp has moved -and the motion seems likely to carry- that all images
deleted by Jimmy Wales on commons be reuploaded to en.wikipedia. This
weakens Commons politically.

In addition, they have forwarded a request to commons to hold ALL
editing for the time being. (This request seems unlikely to carry,
unless we get a stampede that the inter-wiki diplomacy can't keep up with)

Where en.wp leads, others are sure to follow.

== Potential Consequences ==

What was not understood by the people involved in the commons-action
is that they have inadvertantly hit thousands of pages, on perhaps as
many as ~100 wikis, in as many countries. This is not a storm in a
teacup. 

Let's be explicit about potential consequences -if no action were to
be taken-:
* Commons might be shut down or much reduced, due to demands and
  actions from it's customer-wikisa.
* The foundation might fragment, as local chapters take it upon
  themselves to host content safely away from foundation control.


== Why it probably won't be SO bad ==

That sounds pretty alarming, when put in plain text like that.
However, there are several mitigating factors :-)  :

* Obviously, commons is currenly doing a lot of diplomacy and damage
control. [*]
* The affected wikipedias themselves are also doing damage control and
diplomacy.
* Some chapters themselves are starting to wise up to the situation.
  (I'm not up-to-date on exactly what is happening there. Can someone
  provide more info?)
* Some of the board members, and several of 
  the old school wikimedians have jumped into the fray and are 
  cooling things down.


== The role of the board ==

The board is clearly not competent to intervene directly in the
management of local wikis. (least of all wikimedia commons). We
shouldn't expect them to be. Their task is to deal with foundation
matters, that is their remit. Direct intervention in Wiki-communities 
must be considered outside their remit. 

To prevent some of the unpleasant edge cases from occurring, I think
that -in the best case scenario- what we need is something along the
lines of an immediate blanket apology from the board, to the effect of
sorry, we're only human, we panicked, we didn't mean to cause harm,
it won't happen again.

But let's be constructive too: In the same message, the board might
want to explain the fox news situation, and encourage people to work
on it carefully and properly.

I would like to point out that the board's position and power is somewhat
precarious at this point in time. They need to move quickly but
*carefully*, should they wish to retain it.  The cannot afford to get
back on this in a few weeks. I forsee a few emergency midnight
sessions... ;-)

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

[*] This is where I've been helping a little too, via IRC.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board members positions toward Jimmy's last action

On 9 May 2010 13:26, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:23 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:


 The overriding question will be the editorial role of the board.

 The Board has no editorial role, on Commons or on any other Project,
 nunless you consider high-level goal-setting and prioritization ( like
 http://j.mp/wmfblp ) editorial.


Then (a) actions in the present case (b) Ting's express statements in
the present case do not match this. As such, you need to be addressing
the actions rather than just repeating but our mandate doesn't allow
us to do what we so egregiously actually did.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread Nikola Smolenski

Дана Sunday 09 May 2010 10:53:23 William Pietri написа:
 On 05/08/2010 10:23 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
  Editors are saying, with a straight face, that there is no implied
  sexual activity in BDSM images like
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angel_BDSM.png and that images
  like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BDSM_Preparation.png are not
  pornographic.

 I'm going to stay quite thoroughly out of 99.9% of this discussion, but
 that last link is from a well-known local art gallery and performance
 space, Femina Potens, [1]  that happens to be just a few blocks from my
 house.

 At least by local community standards, the event depicted was indeed not
 pornographic. San Francisco's long history as a home to both artists and
 people with different takes on sex and gender means that a lot of local
 art works with sex and gender as key themes. As they mention in their

Just because someone says that their pornography is art doesn't make it so. 
Next thing you'll be telling us is 
that art[http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Mappleth/MappPg1.html] of 
Robert Mapplethorpe isn't pornographic.

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Re: [Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

Hi, Kim.

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

 En.wp has moved -and the motion seems likely to carry- that all images
 deleted by Jimmy Wales on commons be reuploaded to en.wikipedia.

That discussion was started over a day ago; now that images which were
in use elsewhere are being restored, it's a bit passe.  Reuploading
images would be a pain... as the Commons editors weighing in on that
page indicated, I don't think they have any interest in deleting any
useful images.

 In addition, they have forwarded a request to commons to hold
 ALL editing for the time being.

You mean TheDJ's request from Friday night?  He's a Commons admin
(assuming he returns), he's not forwarding a request from en!


 Where en.wp leads, others are sure to follow.

Thank goodness this is often not true ;)


  VISIONS OF DRAMA

Actually, things seem to be settling down, and admins are returning to
Commons.  (though I'm sure you can find more drama if you look for
it.)


SJ

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[Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?

Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/

Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books?

Sam.

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Re: [Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 08:42:16AM -0400, Samuel Klein wrote:
 Hi, Kim.
 
 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
   VISIONS OF DRAMA
 
 Actually, things seem to be settling down, and admins are returning to
 Commons.  (though I'm sure you can find more drama if you look for
 it.)

Yes, hence I included the visions of *undrama* that followed the
visions of drama. Everyone is working on cooling this down, and I
hope you count me among those people.

What I wanted to show clearly was the level of risk that we've been
exposed to. Hence my trotting out the worst case scenarios, instead of
the best case, for this one post. 

Several people at the foundation appear to not be entirely aware of
what they've been causing. I wanted to make at least one post that
emphasizes the risks.  The intent is for some of the people at the
foundation proper (you know who you are) to realise that *yes* they've
been wrongly informed, and *yes* they've made a big mistake, and they
need to learn from it, and show what they have learned.

Is that fair enough? :-) Was there a better way I could have put it?


sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Derk-Jan Hartman

This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this 
potential approach
---

Dear reader at FOSI,

As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the 
software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. 
This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely 
uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world that is largely 
censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to provide 
Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are presented with the 
problem of what some people might consider, information that is not 
child-safe. They have several options in that case, either blocking 
completely or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, 
that can cost some of these institutions their funding.

Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the 
world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for 
instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, 
the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has been 
concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the world 
is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects because so 
many people are not able to access large portions of our content due to a small 
(think 0.01% ) part of our other content.

This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content 
of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, 
hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According to 
statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported 
rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA 
RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of the page and the 
images contained within them. I have a few questions however, both general and 
technical.

1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this 
size to label their content with ratings, is this correct?
2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags
3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. 
This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from 
the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? 
(Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you 
are aware of that controversial image 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer)
4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF 
file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the 
website ?
5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings 
for non-Western world sensitive issues ?
6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate namespace that we could 
potentially use for our own labels ?

I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue our 
community debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of 
content rating. If you have additional suggestions for systems or problems that 
this web-property should account for, I would more than welcome those 
suggestions as well.

Derk-Jan Hartman
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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Mike.lifeguard

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)
 
 I do not want to be a tyrant or dictator.  I do not want us to fight
 about that kind of thing, as it's really a distraction from our work.

Thank you, I think this is actually enormously helpful.

I think you'll find that whenever you want to have something done that
should actually be done there will be no problem convincing community
members to do it. By contrast, if you ask them to do something that
shouldn't be done, it may be more likely they won't do it. Of course,
your opinion carries much weight, so people are likely to acquiesce, but
all the same, I think this will make folks much more comfortable in
accepting your guidance.

At the same time, it simply removes a large part of what folks have been
grappling with this weekend.

I think this is quite a positive change,

- -Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?

2010-05-09 Thread Mike.lifeguard

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
 Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for
 English.
 
 http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/

  Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books?
 
 Sam.
 
 

Are the hardcover books new? IIRC, they were only paperback when this
was first introduced. But I'd be surprised if they didn't have some
images for promotional purposes. I don't suppose we could ask them
oh-so-nicely to release them under a free license? :D

BTW, User:Whiteknight on enwikibooks likely has some images of paperback
ones.

- -Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 09:46:02PM -0400, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
 On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:22 PM, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote:
  Hooray for letting American prurience and Larry Sanger's oddities shape the
  project.
 
 The tolerance of sexual imagery on Wikimedia is a byproduct of Western
 liberal provincialism.  Putting sensitivity to the cultural attitudes
 of others above (thoroughly hypocritical) ideals of non-censorship is
 essential to Wikimedia's long-term success, and I'm glad to see that
 people are finally being forced to deal with this.

I would prefer those ideals to be applied non-hypocritically. Isn't the
whole concept of peacefully sharing knowledge (wikis) a byproduct of
western liberal provincialism? 

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] Where things stand now

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:11:40AM +0100, Jimmy Wales wrote:
 On 5/8/10 3:29 PM, Amory Meltzer wrote:
  I recognize that the issue is more about the point and process of the
  whole thing, and that it's not just Wales who deleted images, but I
  think some perspective is useful.
 
  Jimbo deleted 71 images.
 
  That doesn't call for outright rage.
 
 And I deleted some things that I assumed would be undeleted after a 
 discussion.  I wanted us to take an approach that involved first 
 deleting a lot of borderline things, and then bringing them back after 
 careful case by case discussions.
 
 That proved to be quite unpopular, and I'm sorry about it.

Sure, your strategy was fairly sound. And things always go wrong in the
heat of battle. So that part actually went fairly well.

There were some issues in communications, though:
As part of a root cause analysis at some future date:
* You did not adequately communicate your strategy or urgency
  beforehand. (Though you did clearly try)
* You did not pick up on signals from others when you were causing
  collateral damage. (Don't reject what people are telling you.
  When warned: Act with caution, use discretion)
* Some of your early statements created an atmosphere where people
  did not feel comfortable cooperating or communicating with you, which
  meant that you were somewhat precluded from receiving optimal,
  reliable, timely intelligence in the first place. (Don't threaten
  to block people for talking back at you)

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

2010-05-09 Thread Alec Conroy

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

 I would like to point out that the board's position and power is somewhat
 precarious at this point in time. They need to move quickly but
 *carefully*, should they wish to retain it.  The cannot afford to get
 back on this in a few weeks. I forsee a few emergency midnight
 sessions... ;-)


Here here.

300+ users have ordered the removal of Jimbo's founder powers.  Not
some of those powers, not half of those powers, ALL of those powers.
He doesn't get to negotiate his own remedies-- the community wants
doesn't want him to play the founder role.

He has disrupted the project and damaged our reputation far more than
any measely porn story ever could have, and he broke all our rules in
the process, and the community has ruled.

The *only* sane response for the board to this is for them to say:
   Pursuant to consensus, Jimbo Wales powers are revoked

But if they're not going to say that, they might as well say Jimbo
Wales is more important than the entirety of the commmunity, and if
you have a problem with that, go away.  Call the board together,
have a nice vote, and give Jimbo his project back, dissolve the
foundation, and let the rest of us be on our way.

Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis.   It's
community vs jimbo day.  WE hoped this day would never come, but it's
here.   Who trumps who?   The board needs to decide in no uncertain
terms and enforce its decision.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 12:29:28PM +0100, Peter Coombe wrote:
 On 9 May 2010 09:50, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
 This is absurd. You wheel-warred to re-delete numerous images, and had
 threatened to desysop anyone restoring them. You even said they
 couldn't be discussed until June! And now you say you approve of the
 Commons community reversing your bad deletions. This capricious
 behaviour is driving people from the projects.

Actually, in Jimmy Wale's defence: This is the behaviour of someone who
is a fast learner. :-) 

sincerely,
Kim Bruning


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Re: [Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

2010-05-09 Thread Pedro Sanchez

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote:



 Here here.

 300+ users have ordered the removal of Jimbo's founder powers.  Not
 some of those powers, not half of those powers, ALL of those powers.
 He doesn't get to negotiate his own remedies-- the community wants
 doesn't want him to play the founder role.

 He has disrupted the project and damaged our reputation far more than
 any measely porn story ever could have, and he broke all our rules in
 the process, and the community has ruled.

 The *only* sane response for the board to this is for them to say:
   Pursuant to consensus, Jimbo Wales powers are revoked

 But if they're not going to say that, they might as well say Jimbo
 Wales is more important than the entirety of the commmunity, and if
 you have a problem with that, go away.  Call the board together,
 have a nice vote, and give Jimbo his project back, dissolve the
 foundation, and let the rest of us be on our way.

 Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis.   It's
 community vs jimbo day.  WE hoped this day would never come, but it's
 here.   Who trumps who?   The board needs to decide in no uncertain
 terms and enforce its decision.

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I've argued in the past that founder flag is anachronic and has to go.
But this black-white, us-or-them rethoric is nonsense. This is not a war
jimbo vs community (as much as you'd like to present this) and it's a
sophomoric way to carry a thoughtful debate where main point is that
community has enough maturity to take high level decisions.

This is not Jimbo the tyrant vs poor community. Please.
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Re: [Foundation-l] It Has Begun Re: Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:14:26AM -0400, Alec Conroy wrote:
 Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis.   It's
 community vs jimbo day.  WE hoped this day would never come, but it's
 here.   Who trumps who?   The board needs to decide in no uncertain
 terms and enforce its decision.
 

Neither. We're all cooperating with each other. What needs doing is for
everyone to reassure everyone else that some mistakes were made, that
we're sorry, and that we all would like to keep cooperating with each
other.

Would you mind putting that pitchfork down now, sir? :-)

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread Anthony

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.comwrote:

 On 9 May 2010 09:50, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
  On 5/8/10 5:38 PM, Mike Godwin wrote:
  On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:24 AM, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com  wrote:
 
 
  Most of the egregiously bad deletions were quickly overturned, and
 Jimmy
  was
  the one re-deleting the images. Now that he has agreed to stop, most of
 the
  poor deletions have been re-reversed. I doubt Jimmy approves; there's
  absolutely nothing in his actions over the past few days to suggest
 that he
  does.
 
 
  I think you do Jimmy a disservice if you think he did not anticipate
  precisely this result.
 
  And I do approve.
 

 This is absurd. You wheel-warred to re-delete numerous images, and had
 threatened to desysop anyone restoring them. You even said they
 couldn't be discussed until June! And now you say you approve of the
 Commons community reversing your bad deletions.


Sure, he tricked the press into thinking the images were permanently
removed, then when the story blew over, you added them back.  Everything
went perfectly according to plan.

Right Jimmy?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
 This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this 
 potential approach
 ---

   


You asked for comments... Here is one we prepared earlier...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_censorship#ICRA

In other words, we have been here, we have done this, and we
have the T-shirt.

This *HAS* been suggested before, and soundly defeated.
Nothing has changed in this respect. I would heartfeltly ask
that folks just quit trying to stuff this down the throat of a
community that simply does not content labeling.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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[Foundation-l] Jimbo's sysadmin flag

2010-05-09 Thread Woojin Kim

I noticed Jimbo has also sysadmin flag recently. The change was about 2
months ago on enwikiversity.[1] The reason was need to view deleted
revisions, but sysadmin group does hold no rights about deleted revisions.
Instead they have globalgroup[permissions/membership].

Originally, Jimbo doesn't need to have sysadmin flag and doesn't have root
or shell access. So sysadmin bit should be removed.

Best regards.

-- 
김우진
Woojin Kim
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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Thomas Dalton

On 9 May 2010 10:46, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

 I do not want to be a tyrant or dictator.  I do not want us to fight
 about that kind of thing, as it's really a distraction from our work.

Thanks for this, it is a very good move. I think this will have the
desired effect of allowing us to move on from discussing you and
discuss the actual issue.

I notice you have kept protect and undelete. Is that intentional?
If so, can you explain your thinking behind that decision?

As someone else has mentioned in this thread, you have kept the rights
necessary to change your own rights in the future. It would probably
be best to remove them too. I'm assuming you don't intend to give
yourself back rights should you want to use them (that would make this
a meaningless gesture, which I've never known you make before), so you
have no need to keep those rights.

I think you should also consider your admin rights on English
Wikipedia. I know they are historically a separate issue from your
founder rights, but since you have already voluntarily given up your
enwiki block rights, now might be the time to give up the rest too.
(You can use the founder flag for the various view rights, which I
think you are right to keep.)

Thank you again for doing this - despite the fact that I've just been
picking holes in it, I really do think that even with these issues it
is an excellent thing to have done. The important this is the good
attitude you've shown in doing this.

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[Foundation-l] Final thoughts on Jimbo

2010-05-09 Thread Adam Cuerden

I think it's time to back away from this issue.  Jimbo may,
technically, be able to restore his powers, however, if he decided to
use them in order to  make another controversial action, they wouldn't
last five minutes.

Let the man save a little face, by doing this voluntarily instead of
having it taken away by force. If nothing else, it avoids a bit of bad
publicity for the project.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread David Goodman

I agree that this   ends the need for any immediate action by the
community in this aspect of things.

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



On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 9 May 2010 10:46, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 In the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real
 philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I
 acted, I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)

 I do not want to be a tyrant or dictator.  I do not want us to fight
 about that kind of thing, as it's really a distraction from our work.

 Thanks for this, it is a very good move. I think this will have the
 desired effect of allowing us to move on from discussing you and
 discuss the actual issue.

 I notice you have kept protect and undelete. Is that intentional?
 If so, can you explain your thinking behind that decision?

 As someone else has mentioned in this thread, you have kept the rights
 necessary to change your own rights in the future. It would probably
 be best to remove them too. I'm assuming you don't intend to give
 yourself back rights should you want to use them (that would make this
 a meaningless gesture, which I've never known you make before), so you
 have no need to keep those rights.

 I think you should also consider your admin rights on English
 Wikipedia. I know they are historically a separate issue from your
 founder rights, but since you have already voluntarily given up your
 enwiki block rights, now might be the time to give up the rest too.
 (You can use the founder flag for the various view rights, which I
 think you are right to keep.)

 Thank you again for doing this - despite the fact that I've just been
 picking holes in it, I really do think that even with these issues it
 is an excellent thing to have done. The important this is the good
 attitude you've shown in doing this.

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[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales founder flag.

2010-05-09 Thread Carl Lindstrom

This may seem overly melodramatic but I want to quote from Gore Vidal:

Tiberius, when he became Emperor, the Senate sent him a message saying that 
whatever he wanted enacted would become law. And he sent it back to them and he 
said, 'Now don't be stupid. Suppose the Emperor has gone mad. Suppose he's ill. 
Suppose he's been replaced secretly. You can't give such powers.' And they sent 
it back to him, and he sent back a message, 'How eager you are to be slaves.'

Jimbo has allegedly removed some of his rights on Commons but he still has his 
founder flags and can restore all his rights if and when he pleases. As long as 
he still has those rights, he's still a risk to the project. He's shown over 
the last few days that he's abused his powers. Very few people still trust him 
(people have questioned whether I'm right about this but I think various polls 
speak for themselves) and shouldn't have any special priviliges. These are 
priviliges that other users ''earn'' because they are trusted. Wales isn't 
trusted by the community and therefore shouldn't have any special powers. And 
this is not just a matter about deleting pictures on a whim, but about the 
integrity of the entire Wikimedia project. How can it be trusted when one man 
has absolute power to override consensus and policy? It's bad enough that Wales 
is a member of the foundation board, but as long as he's still here (the best 
thing would be if he left and never
 came back) he should have no special powers to wreak havoc on the projects. 
Please remove his founder flag, like well over 200 people have petitioned. 

This wonderful project that Mr. Wales started has grown to a collaborative 
project with thousands of users who volunteer their time, talent and energy to 
make it what is's become. It must not be ruled by the whims of one man. Again, 
I may sound melodramatic but I gues just like Wikipedia too much to see it 
potentially destroyed by an emperor gone mad. 

User:Entheta



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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Anthony

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)


The community recognizes that you have given up certain permissions under
controversial circumstances and reminds you that you that those permissions
may not be reinstated without a proper request for permissions on meta.
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Re: [Foundation-l] What the board is responsible of (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)

2010-05-09 Thread Marcus Buck

Florence Devouard hett schreven:
 To be fair, I am *extremely* disturbed by the above statement.

 Since when is the board DEFINING the scope and basic rules of the 
 projects ?

 As a reminder, the WMF was created two years after Wikipedia. The scope, 
 the basic rules did not need WMF to be crafted. Over the following 
 years, the scope and even the basic rules have evolved, usually for the 
 better. The WMF certainly pushed on some issues, but largely, the rules 
 and scope have been defined by the community.

 And this is the way it should be.

 You are shifting the role of the WMF in a direction that I find greatly 
 impleasant.

 The original reason for creation of WMF was that we needed an owner for 
 our servers, we needed a way to pay the bills. We needed a way to 
 collect money. WMF was here to support the project and to support the 
 community dealing with the project. It was here to safegard our core values.

Thanks for that comment. It gives me hope that there are sane people out 
there ;-) We need people like you back in the board. I too am disturbed 
by the attitude that board and foundation rule over the projects. As I 
have expressed previously:
 In my opinion it's not the task of board or foundation to push the 
 community in any direction. It's the other way round, the community 
 forms board and foundation. The task of board and foundation is to 
 operate the servers, to develop the software needed to operate our 
 projects, and to stop members of the community or of the outside world 
 from doing things harmful to the community, e.g. by violating the law. 
 But they should not decide on the actual content, that's the task of 
 the community. 
It's a common misunderstanding/misrepresentation that governments rule 
over the citizens. That was the case in absolutist and feudal systems 
where the power of the rulers came from I make the rules, cause I can. 
In a democracy the government is just an executive branch of the overall 
society that takes measures to improve the society's welfare.

The Foundation is just the executive branch of the Wikimedia community. 
It's sole purpose is to serve the community by doing tasks that cannot 
possibly evolve from community self-organization.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox

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Re: [Foundation-l] Final thoughts on Jimbo

2010-05-09 Thread Todd Allen

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Pedro Sanchez pdsanc...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Adam Cuerden cuer...@gmail.com wrote:
   I think it's time to back away from this issue.  Jimbo may,
   technically, be able to restore his powers, however, if he decided to
   use them in order to  make another controversial action, they wouldn't
   last five minutes.
 
  You may well be right, but you may well be wrong.  But it's not fair
  to ask us to contribute our time, energy, and money to a project that
  'may'  have an abusive superuser, ya know?   If the Wikimedia
  Foundation  is going to continue to a functional relationship with its
  projects, this needs to be resolved with absolute crystal clarify.
 

 This is silly. There are many users that /may/ have superuser powers.
 Live with it. Even if jimbo is removed from all flags, there are people
 with
 shell access that can do (right now) much more than jimbo can with the
 founder flag.

 You may want to close your eyes,but truth is, you must trust. There will
 always someone able to do more than you or anybody else. Or what, are you
 proposing removing all devs access just because they in theory could abuse
 it?

 Again: face it. There will always someone with the capability to become
 superuser. It's always been the case and it will continue being so, jimbo
 or
 not
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Might is far different than has. If one of the devs did use their
superuser access to intervene in content in a controversial manner
(especially even after significant objection began), I think you would find
calls to remove them as well.

We don't remove sysop flags because they might be abused, either. But we do
allow for their removal if they in fact are used in a manner inconsistent
with consensus and the admin in question refuses to stop even after being
made aware of that. Talking about permissions being removed because they
might be abused is a straw man, and is not at all the same thing as talking
about removing them because they were in fact abused.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Jiří Hofman

I am afraid we will never be able to label our content properly. There will be 
no chance to keep NPOV regardless how implemented labels will be. Our content 
is free. If somebody needs labeled content he can label it himself in his own 
copy of Wikimedia projects.

It is a bad idea. Let's not do it. We have better things to do.

Jiri

 Personally, I tend to see ICRA labeling as just another kind of
 categorization, albeit one with definitions that were defined
 elsewhere.


signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
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Re: [Foundation-l] [OT] Am I the only one...

2010-05-09 Thread Steven Walling

You are definitely not alone in that regard.

Steven

On Sunday, May 9, 2010, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote:
 ...who hopes posting limits will be enforced this month?

 -Chad

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Re: [Foundation-l] [OT] Am I the only one...

2010-05-09 Thread Mike moral

I certainly hope limits are enforced. 120-ish messages in the time I was
asleep.

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote:

 You are definitely not alone in that regard.

 Steven

 On Sunday, May 9, 2010, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote:
  ...who hopes posting limits will be enforced this month?
 
  -Chad


-- 
Regards,

Mike
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Mikemoral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mikemoral
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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Michael Peel


On 9 May 2010, at 17:57, Anthony wrote:

 On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
 
 I've just now removed virtually all permissions to actually do
 things from the Founder flag.  I even removed my ability to edit
 semi-protected pages!  (I've kept permissions related to 'viewing' things.)
 
 
 The community recognizes that you have given up certain permissions under
 controversial circumstances and reminds you that you that those permissions
 may not be reinstated without a proper request for permissions on meta.

Daft question: the community here being ... you? Or is there a wiki !vote page 
saying this?

Mike Peel
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Robert Rohde wrote:
 Personally, I tend to see ICRA labeling as just another kind of
 categorization, albeit one with definitions that were defined
 elsewhere.
   
This is precisely and completely absolutely wrong.
Labeling is enabling censorship. Labeling images
is the worst kind of enablement of censorship, in
that it can effect the way a pages informational
content is presented to the viewer.

 If there are people in the community willing to sort content into the
 ICRA categories and maintain those associations, then I see no problem
 with Wikimedia supporting that.  Having images tagged with
 [[Category:ICRA Nudity-A (exposed breasts)]] is useful information for
 people that care about such things.  As with most other projects on
 Wikimedia, I think it mostly comes down to whether there is a
 community of volunteers who want to work on such issues.
   
Not so. As an argumentum absurdum, let me offer the
following proposition:

If there are people in the community willing to sort content
into categories depending on whether the content is suitable
reading material for Catholics (insert your own ideology,
religion, political affiliation, or other orientation here) and
maintain those associations, then I see no problem with
Wikimedia supporting that.

See the problem with your argument there? I am sure
there would be people who would care about such things.
But we just don't do that. And the same applies to ICRA.

It does not come down to whether there are enough hands
to do the work. It comes down to the fact that our *mission*
is to distribute the *whole* of human knowledge to every
human in their own language. Period, no ifs or buts.

 There are, by my rough count, ~75 tags in the current ICRA vocabulary.

 These cover nudity, sexuality, violence, bad language, drug use,
 weapons, gambling, and other disturbing material.  In addition there
 are a number of meta tags to identify things like user-generated
 content, sites with advertising, and sites intended to be educational
 / news-oriented / religious, etc.
   
We don't do censorship. Period.

 It appears we could choose to use tags in some categories, e.g.
 nudity/sexuality, even if we didn't use tags in other categories, e.g.
 violence.

 On balance I suspect that participating in such schemes is probably
 more helpful than harmful since it allows schools and other
 organizations that would do filtering anyway to block only selected
 content rather than blocking wide swathes of content or the entire
 site just to get at 0.01% of content that they fine intolerable.  It
 also provides the public relations benefits of showing we are
 concerned about such issues, without having to remove or block the
 content ourselves.
   
The public relations effects would be devastating. There
is a reason Wikipedia was blocked in China. It was because
we would not help in stuff like this, just to appease the
Chinese government. We haven't buckled on this yet.
And we won't.

The worst possible argument imaginable is that they
would do that anyway. That is their option, but we
won't help them a red cunt hairs distance on their
way. (pardon my french)

 To be clear, I don't think we should be removing or blocking any
 content ourselves.  Wikimedia is designed for adults and that
 shouldn't change.  However, if there is a content filtering standard
 that some segment of the community wants to support, then I'm
 perfectly happy to see that happen.

   
You know what. You may be happy to see it happen.
But this question has been put to the community
time and again. There have been scores of attempts
to vote labeling in. ICRA has been put to the vote
at least three times. Each time, no matter how people
have tried to dress their proposal as innocous, we
have rejected it resoundingly. No, not only resoundinly,
but angrily, furiously. We don't do censorship. Period.


Sorry about the length of the posting, but this
continues to be important, vital, to our community.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen




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[Foundation-l] Jimmy, Commons, and the discussion on Foundation-l

2010-05-09 Thread Austin Hair

Hi guys,

As everyone can see, the list is a-flurry with discussion about
Jimmy's recent actions on Commons.  (And whatever other topics people
want to spin the situation into.)

I'm not commenting on the topic itself, but I would like to urge
everyone to direct their comments to the appropriate discussions on
(meta|commons|enwiki).  There are a lot of posts in a lot of threads,
and if this debate is going to be useful, it should take place on a
medium better organized than a mailing list.

I thank everyone for being remarkably civil to date, and for keeping
the signal:noise ratio fairly high despite the large volume of
messages.  With this in mind, I'm hopeful that you can direct your
energies in the most productive way possible.

Thanks,

Austin Hair
List administration

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Re: [Foundation-l] [OT] Am I the only one...

2010-05-09 Thread Mohamed Magdy

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote:

 ...who hopes posting limits will be enforced this month?

 -Chad

 Yes. I received a ridiculous amount of messages about the same silly
topic.  move along people..

user:alnokta
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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

On 5/9/10 4:18 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 I notice you have kept protect and undelete. Is that intentional?
 If so, can you explain your thinking behind that decision?

I just removed undelete, manage global groups, and edit membership to 
global groups.  I did that before I saw your note, so I missed 
protect.  It's not important one way or the other.

My purpose here is for us to stop chattering about this aspect of things 
- which I don't care about.  People seem to want to fight me on it, 
perhaps expecting me to dig in my heels.  Everyone loves a good fight, 
even me, but this is not a fight that we need to have.

--Jimbo

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales founder flag.

On 5/9/10 4:27 PM, Carl Lindstrom wrote:
 Jimbo has allegedly removed some of his rights on Commons but he
 still has his founder flags and can restore all his rights if and
 when he pleases.

No, actually, I can't.

  Again, I may sound melodramatic but I
 gues just like Wikipedia too much to see it potentially destroyed by
 an emperor gone mad.

Yeah, that's pretty melodramatic my friend. :-)

--Jimbo


-- 
Jimmy Wales

Please follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

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Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's sysadmin flag

On 5/9/10 4:10 PM, Woojin Kim wrote:
 I noticed Jimbo has also sysadmin flag recently. The change was about 2
 months ago on enwikiversity.[1] The reason was need to view deleted
 revisions, but sysadmin group does hold no rights about deleted revisions.
 Instead they have globalgroup[permissions/membership].

 Originally, Jimbo doesn't need to have sysadmin flag and doesn't have root
 or shell access. So sysadmin bit should be removed.

I don't think I have the ability to change that, but I'll email the 
stewards and ask them to sort out any remaining details.

(I'll keep my admin bit on en.wikipedia.org - since that's my home 
project.)



-- 
Jimmy Wales

Please follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

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Re: [Foundation-l] Removing questions about me and my role from this discussion

2010-05-09 Thread Thomas Dalton

On 9 May 2010 18:56, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:
 On 5/9/10 4:18 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 I notice you have kept protect and undelete. Is that intentional?
 If so, can you explain your thinking behind that decision?

 I just removed undelete, manage global groups, and edit membership to
 global groups.  I did that before I saw your note, so I missed
 protect.  It's not important one way or the other.

Good man! I think we can ignore you still having the technical ability
to protect pages - I assume you don't actually intend to use it?
Hopefully we can move on now and discuss what our policy ought to be
on pornographic/non-educational images. Thanks, Jimmy!

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

On 5/9/10 3:41 PM, Anthony wrote:
 Sure, he tricked the press into thinking the images were permanently
 removed, then when the story blew over, you added them back.  Everything
 went perfectly according to plan.

 Right Jimmy?

Of course not.  We are engaged in a process that will lead to some 
much-needed changes at Commons, including the continued deletion of some 
of the things that we used to host.


-- 
Jimmy Wales

Please follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

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Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

2010-05-09 Thread Anthony

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote:

 We are engaged in a process that will lead to some
 much-needed changes at Commons, including the continued deletion of some
 of the things that we used to host.


Where?  Behind the scenes?  On one of the internal mailing lists?
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Gregory Maxwell

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote:
This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this
potential approach
---

Dear reader at FOSI,

As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the
software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and
omnipresent. This has led to enormous

I am strongly in favour of allowing our users to choose what they see.
If you don't like it, don't look at it is only useful advice when
it's easy to avoid looking at things— and it isn't always on our
sites. By marking up our content better and providing the right
software tools we could _increase_ choice for our users and that can
only be a good thing.

At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the
EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling
systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are
overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to
restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly
confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these
systems to content providers and politicians.

(For more information on the current state of compulsory filtering in
the US I recommend the filing in Bradburn v. North Central Regional
Library District an ongoing legal battle over a library system
refusing to allow adult patrons to bypass the censorware in order to
access constitutionally protected speech, in apparent violation of the
suggestion by the US Supreme Court that the ability to bypass these
filters is what made the filters lawful in the first place
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf
)

It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual
information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't
really acceptable to assist it.

And even when not used as a method of third party control, these
systems require the users to have special software installed— so they
aren't all that useful as a method for our users to self-determine
what they will see on the site. So it sounds like a lose, lose
proposition to me.

Labelling systems are also centred around broad classifications, e.g.
Drugs, Pornography with definitions which defy NPOV. This will
obviously lead to endless arguments on applicability within the site.

Many places exempt Wikipedia from their filtering, after all it's all
educational, so it would be a step backwards for these people for us
to start applying labels that they would have gladly gone without.
The filter the drugs category because they want to filter pro-drug
advocacy, but if we follow the criteria we may end up with our factual
articles bunched into the same bin. A labelling system designed for
the full spectrum of internet content simply will not have enough
words for our content... or are there really separate labels for Drug
_education_, Hate speech _education_, Pornography _education_,
etc. ?

Urban legend says the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, it's not
true... but I think that it is true that for the Wiki(p|m)edia
projects we really do need 10 million words for education.

Using a third party labelling system we can also expect issues that
would arise where we fail to correctly apply the labels, either due
to vandalism, limitations of the community process, or simply because
of a genuine and well founded difference of opinion.

Instead I prefer that we run our own labelling system. By controlling
it ourselves we determine its meaning— avoiding terminology disputes
without outsiders; we can operate the system in a manner which
inhibits its usefulness to the involuntary censorship of adults (e.g.
not actually putting the label data in the pages users view in an
accessible way, creating site TOS which makes the involuntary
application of our filters on adults unlawful), and maximizes its
usefulness for user self determination by making the controls
available right on the site.

The wikimedia sites have enough traffic that its worth peoples time to
customize their own preferences.

There are many technical ways in which such a system could be
constructed, some requiring more development work than others, and
while I'd love to blather on a possible methods the important point at
this time is to establish the principles before we worry about the
tools.

Cheers,

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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Sydney Poore

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com
wrote:
This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this
potential approach
---

Dear reader at FOSI,

As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops
the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and
omnipresent. This has led to enormous

I agree and I'm in favor of WMF allocating resources in order to develop a
system that allows users to filter content based on the particular needs of
their setting.

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf
)

It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual
information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't
really acceptable to assist it.

Urban legend says the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, it's not
true... but I think that it is true that for the Wiki(p|m)edia
projects we really do need 10 million words for education.

The wikimedia sites have enough traffic that its worth peoples time to
customize their own preferences.

I agree and prefer a system designed for the special needs of WMF wikis and
our global community. We may take some design elements and underlying
concepts from existing systems, but

Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's sysadmin flag

2010-05-09 Thread Lars Åge Kamfjord

Den 09. mai 2010 19:59, skrev Jimmy Wales:
 I don't think I have the ability to change that, but I'll email the
 stewards and ask them to sort out any remaining details.


Sysadmins have the ability to change all rights on all wikis (not just 
from meta), but I have removed that group from you now =)


/Laaknor

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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread David Goodman

This is the first step towards censorship, and we should not take it.

We have no experience or expertise to determine what content is
suitable for particular users, or how content can be classified as
such.Further, doing so is contrary to the basic principle that we do
not perform original research or draw conclusions on disputed
matters, but present the facts and outside opinions and leave the
implication for the readers to decide. This principle has served us
well in dealing with many disputes which in other settings are
intractable.

What we do have expertise and experience in is classifying our content
by subject. We have a complex system of categories, actively
maintained, and a system for determining correct titles and other
metadata that reflect the content of the article. No user wants to
see all of Wikipedia--they all choose what the see on the basis of
these descriptors, and on the basis of external links to our site,
links that are not under our control. They can choose on various
grounds. They can choose by title, by links from another article, by
inclusion in a category. Anyone who wishes to use this information to
provide a selected version of WP can freely do so.

To a certain extent , we also have visible metadata about the format
of our material: the main ones which are easily present to visitors
are the language, the size, and the type of computer file. There is
other material that we could display,such as whether an article
contains other files of particular types (in this context, images), or
references, on external links. We could display a separate list of
the images in an article, including their descriptions.

We could include this in our search criteria. They would be useful for
many purposes; someone might for example wish to see all articles on
southeast Asia that contain maps, or wish to see articles about people
only if they contain photographs of the subjects. This is broadly
useful information, that can be used in many ways. it could easily be
used to design an external filter than would, for example, display
articles on people that contain photographs with the descriptors in
place of the photographs, while displaying photographs in all other
articles. The question is whether we should design such filters as
part of the project.

I think we should not take that step. We should leave it to outside
services, which might for example work by viewing WP through a site
that contains the desired filters, or by using a browser that
incorporates them.

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

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com
wrote:
This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this
potential approach
---

Dear reader at FOSI,

As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops
the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and
omnipresent. This has led to enormous

I agree and I'm in favor of WMF allocating resources in order to develop a
system that allows users to filter content based on the particular needs of
their setting.

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf
)

It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual
information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't
really acceptable to assist it.

And even when not used as a method

Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

2010-05-09 Thread Mike Godwin

Greg Maxwell writes:

At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the
 EFF and the ALA,  I am opposed to these organized content labelling
 systems.  These systems are primary censorship systems and are
 overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to
 restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly
 confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these
 systems to content providers and politicians.


I just want to chime in, in support of Greg's assessment here. I worked for
EFF for nine years, and I have done extensive work with ALA as well, and I
am absolutely certain that these organizations (and others, including
civil-liberties groups) will be extremely critical if any project adopts
ICRA labeling schemes. Moreover, Greg's characterization of the existing
systems as primary censorship systems ... overwhelmingly used to subject
third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will is entirely
accurate.


--Mike
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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

On 9 May 2010 21:17, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote:

 The tags applied should be clear and fact-based. So instead of tagging a
 page as containing pornography, which is entirely subjective, we
 should rather tag the page as contains a depiction of an erect penis
 or contains a depiction of oral intercourse.


We can do this with the existing category system.

The objection of the objectors will remain that the material is
present at all. No system of categorisation will alleviate this
concern - only actual censorship of Commons will.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia