Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:02, Fajro fai...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:28 PM, onthebrinkandfall...@aol.com wrote: What am I misunderstanding? Surely there is a difference between the filter bubble that decides what content to show me on it's own, and an opt-in filter where I can decide for myself what content I may or may not want to see? yes, but you still would be in a bubble. Hmm. I think the problem with filter bubbles is that you don't even see, say, stories from your political opponents. There is quite a substantial difference between not even knowing that Google or Facebook are removing news about a particular topic, and voluntarily choosing not to see, say, the images on the 'Fisting' article. That's not necessarily an argument for the opt-in filter, but I don't see how the comparison with the so-called 'filter bubble' is a good one. I'd have a problem if people started making overwrought comparison to Nazi book burnings too. Justifying such an overwrought comparison by saying well, the material would still be censored isn't helpful to the discussion. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
Tom Morris, 30/06/2011 11:28: I'd have a problem if people started making overwrought comparison to Nazi book burnings too. Wow, a reductio ad reductionem ad Hitlerum argument. Nemo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On 30 June 2011 10:55, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: Tom Morris, 30/06/2011 11:28: I'd have a problem if people started making overwrought comparison to Nazi book burnings too. Wow, a reductio ad reductionem ad Hitlerum argument. Trained professional philosophers can get away with that sort of thing. Omega can predict whether you'll try this at home, kids! - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Philippe Beaudette phili...@wikimedia.org wrote: *Call for referendum*: The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own account. Yay on several levels! A referendum--- good thing. Referendums are good things. The last I checked in on the filtration project, they appeared to be acting very thoughtfully and going in a direction carefully chosen to be consistent with our values. We're all a little jittery from last time, so everyone was reading the fine print very very closely and wringing their hands over tiny bits of the wording that could trigger some sort of negative experience--- but if my impression of what I think the plan will be is accurate, I suspect this discussion is likely to find support, or at the very least, little strenuous 'mission/values-based objections. -- Putting aside this referendum and this actual ballot item and thinking merely abstractly about referendums and process-- ;too long to read? 1. Pick the right referendum format for the right issue. 2. Let the board members speak up. 3. Public debates also have PR bonuses. ==Formats== One of the things to clarify in any given discussion, whether this is a non-binding discussion, a poll, or whether it's a secret vote intended to be binding (with the obvious understanding that regardless of prior intentions, the board does have a emergency veto option). Each of these options is completely valid-- you just need to communicate which of them we're going with on any particular occasion. A secret vote alone, devoid of rationales, gives us a very tiny bit of information-- yes or no, black or white. We know what the overall outcome is, but we have no clue why it was the outcome. A third-party poll or survey asks specific questions rather than seeking an up-down vote-- questions like Would you personally use this feature? vs merely Should WMF do this?. Answers to surveys can give us more information, but of course that extra information will 'gray' the outcome, making it sometimes harder to interpret the results. An on-wiki 'poll'/discussion-hybrid, of these sort used at RFA/AFD, is our most 'default' decision making process, but this process does not guarantee any clear outcome-- this style is the most prone to no consensus, and thus it's not as appropriate in cases where an actually black-white decision must be made (e.g. choosing board members). And lastly, there's always unstructured talk page style discussion alone. One of the challenges with referendums is matching the issues to the method. When people vote, they'll have certain expectations about how the outcome will affect things. When people survey, poll or discuss, they bring different expectations. Two nearly equally supported options are 'no consensus' in a on-wiki poll-discussion, but those same sentiments seen through the lens of a vote can result in a 'winner and a runner up'. Some of the other interesting effects-- you can always go from a discussion to a discussion + survey. You could transform a planned survey into a vote. But I suspect it will be more controversial to go the other way-- to take a vote in progress and turn it back into a mere discussion, discussion-poll, or survey. In whichever process you use, the more participation you get, the 'stronger' the result. The more discussion, the more nuanced the result.Voting gives you black or white, discussions give you all the shades of gray. Finding the 'optimum method' for any given occasion is always probably going to be tricky, especially when you factor in the language issues too. ==Show us Debates== Another issue, not necessarily relevant to this referendum but more to referendums in general-- when there's a disagreement on the board, we really want to know the reasoning and the question at issue. The board can and often should advise the community. Certainly, this could be just via on-wiki participation in the discussion by members of the board in their role as community members-- but there are other ways of doing it too. We don't necessarily need active, named participation-- the board could vote to release a statement written collaboratively that describes the diversity of opinion within the board. Where multiple opinions exist, multiple members could collaborate in making sure their advice gets to the community.Adding names to statements is nice because some people trust individual board members they know, but not the board as a whole-- and seeing names they know will help reassure them. I know no one on the board will want to public sign on to a statement that could wind up being controversial-- there's always the risk for blowback. I'd certainly prefer across the board
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On 30 June 2011 12:31, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: The further we can get away from the model of elementary schools and towards the model of the global universities, the better. +1 (This entire post is gold.) One *big* problem we have now is: Wikipedia has won. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone actually consults, ever. Wikipedia now defines what an encyclopedia is in popular conception. So we don't have any tail-lights to chase. What sets our direction? Do we just drift? This gives a conceptual model to work to: We are the sum of all university libraries.[1] This is just one. We need more. We need conceptual goals on that level, so that we know what the heck we're doing here. This will then allow us to say to people demanding we do things a certain way no, and this is why. - d. [1] In some regards. Maybe. I expect nitpicking shortly. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
On 30 June 2011 12:31, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: The further we can get away from the model of elementary schools and towards the model of the global universities, the better. +1 (This entire post is gold.) One *big* problem we have now is: Wikipedia has won. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone actually consults, ever. Wikipedia now defines what an encyclopedia is in popular conception. We are actually affecting the English language at this point through the choices we make for our article titles. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It Is not Us
Of course, that could either help or hinder, with no way to know for sure in advance; perhaps encouraging more social interaction would exacerbate and personalize the disputes and conflicts that drive people away. From my perspective, this is exactly what is happening. Too many people want to be in the focus of attraction, and too many are doing politics instead of writing an encyclopaedia. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for referendum
One *big* problem we have now is: Wikipedia has won. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone actually consults, ever. Wikipedia now defines what an encyclopedia is in popular conception. So we don't have any tail-lights to chase. What sets our direction? Well, this is now completely and utterly off topic, but since I'm here... I _think_ maybe I've known the answer for several years now, but I still don't really know how to communicate it. But since you asked--- The most exciting thing I've heard of is kinda hard to explain in English-- at least it's hard for me to explain it. It can be described in geekspeak by saying How would Wikimedia be different if it had been made after Git? Go ask the Free Software people that question and watch their faces light up with possibilities.To other people you can say What if Wikimedia projects were less like a website and more like the internet itself? and they'll get very interested, even if they don't know precisely what you mean. Our business model is to take the lessons of Free Software and apply them to the challenges traditionally faced by librarians and educators. In 2002, we sort of 'forked off' from the 'mainstream' Free Software movement, and this 2002ish model of revision control is the model we use in our wikis. Since 2002, literally some of the best minds on the planet have been working on the question of how large groups of strangers can work together to create documents when they don't all want the exact same finished product. The lessons they've learned, and the tools they've created, are truly mindblowing. Imagine if virtually every editor's computer had copies of whole chunks of Wikimedia projects, starting first and foremost with your own contributions to the projects. Each editor could effortlessly, automatically, seamlessly share their contributions with the whole world. A users could create a whole new 'project' without using any Wikimedia resources at all-- not a single dime. If a new project was popular, it could be seamlessly and automatically shared with the entire world, again, at no expense to the foundation. Bad projects would get weeded out because no one would share them, while good projects would rise to the top automatically. All with zero external oversight, zero external support from the foundation. On such new model projects, two editors could simultaneously edit the same article without those pesky software-triggered edit conflict warnings that interfere with their editing. Interested editors could have edit wars if they want, but edit wars would not wipe out a third party's contributions the way they do now. Each editor controls and hosts their own private 'sandbox versions' of the articles. Writers could just write, individually or collaboratively, as they chose. Their contributions would only get shared if they were popular, their contributions might or might not wind up in a version directly hosted by the foundation, but either way, their contributions could be easily and widely shared so long as people were willing to donate the space and bandwidth of their own computers to share it. On new model projects, there would never be any one version of such a project at any fixed time. Instead, the version of the project at a given time can vary, depending on who you ask.If you ask our canonical servers, we'll give you 'the' one answer-- but if you want to ask your roommate's computer instead, you can see if he knows something about the subject that our server's consensus does not. A fun bonus of this would be that it would instantly set a fire to independent development of the mediawiki software and its extensions. Once hosting was distributed, new features would become distributed too. If I want to add a feature to a new model project, I need only convince my own computer, I don't have to build it and then hope I can convince strangers that it should be used. It's not my idea, I believe it's been independently suggested at least five different times that I know of. But it's a HUGE step that would require a big, bold push from developers and thus potentially a large initial commitment from the foundation to spur development of such a thing. That commitment might not be huge in terms of resources-- a few professional lead developer-coordinators, perhaps. But it would require some courage, leadership, and a vision to rally volunteer developers around. If you visibly agree to it being built, an amorphous 'they' will likely show up to actually build it for you, free of charge. It would will radically change things for everyone the instant such a tool is actually created. Such a wiki is inevitable, I just hope we can be the ones to develop it. Alec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It Is not Us
Of course, that could either help or hinder, with no way to know for sure in advance; perhaps encouraging more social interaction would exacerbate and personalize the disputes and conflicts that drive people away. From my perspective, this is exactly what is happening. Too many people want to be in the focus of attraction, and too many are doing politics instead of writing an encyclopaedia. Cheers Yaroslav Yes, that was the thinking behind suppression of full development of userboxes. Probably wise. But it still leaves us with underground movements, some with governments behind them--Turkey China Israel and doubtless more. And there are the professional, and amateur, public relations people promoting commercial and religious products. Actually, it is a miracle we do as well as we do. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)
On 30 June 2011 17:00, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: [a git-like distributed wikisphere] It's not my idea, I believe it's been independently suggested at least five different times that I know of. But it's a HUGE step that would require a big, bold push from developers and thus potentially a large initial commitment from the foundation to spur development of such a thing. That commitment might not be huge in terms of resources-- a few professional lead developer-coordinators, perhaps. But it would require some courage, leadership, and a vision to rally volunteer developers around. If you visibly agree to it being built, an amorphous 'they' will likely show up to actually build it for you, free of charge. It would will radically change things for everyone the instant such a tool is actually created. Adapting MediaWiki to git has been tried a few times. I suspect the problem is that the software deeply assumes a database behind it, not a version-controlled file tree. Wrong model for an easy fix to MediaWiki itself. Pouring en:wp's entire history into git is feasible (Greg Maxwell posted about doing it, IIRC). svnwiki exists - a wiki engine which uses files version-controlled by Subversion. Perhaps something like that - articles as files in a git repository, read by the new parser when that's done. Such a wiki is inevitable, I just hope we can be the ones to develop it. Someone else could actually do it without our weight of organisational inertia and NIH. We need competitors. Further to your idea: people developing little specialist wikis along these lines, and said wikis being mergeable. This makes such wikis easier to start, without having to start yet another wiki-based general encyclopedia that directly competes with Wikipedia. Disruptive innovation starts in niches, not in a position where it'll just end up a bug on Wikipedia's windscreen. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:35 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Adapting MediaWiki to git has been tried a few times. I suspect the problem is that the software deeply assumes a database behind it, not a version-controlled file tree. Wrong model for an easy fix to MediaWiki itself. Yeah, I don't mean it 'quite' that literally. I agree that literally incorporating git would be unlikely to be a simple solution-- I mostly mean 'incorporate the lessons of git'. A lot of those lessons could be implemented with existing software if the culture changes. Sandbox articles, for example, would be trivial to implement-- just stop deleting them.New project creation is about to get a LOT easier with Incubator extension. We don't yet have the technology to do distributed hosting, but we could do some sort of 'donated funds' hosting for specialist wikis that we might not feel comfy actually using our regular donations for. (or, we could decide the cost of such specialist wikis is negligible and just host them ourselves with our own donations.. case by case). The biggest barriers are cultural, not technological. We all 'grew up' hearing that forks are evil, but funny story, turns out forks aren't only not evil, they're a huge advantage in collaborative document creation. Forks are only evil because we haven't learned the lessons of git yet, so we don't have a 'merge' yet. Alec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 7:35 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 30 June 2011 17:00, Alec Conroy alecmcon...@gmail.com wrote: [a git-like distributed wikisphere] It's not my idea, I believe it's been independently suggested at least five different times that I know of. I have added your postings to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals Regards, HaeB ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)
On 30 June 2011 19:49, HaeB haebw...@gmail.com wrote: I have added your postings to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals :-D Do you have an index of this sort of perennial proposal? Apart from, of course, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals . Anyone else got ideas for tail-lights we have failed to follow as yet? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It Is not Us
It looks like we understand the potential risks of adding social features, but I don't know that the merits have sunk in. ==Don't call it a Social Network, don't think of it as a revolution== Th first thing to do is banish the word Social Network from the discussion. Social Network evokes Myspace and Facebook, which aren't exactly popular around here, a sentiment I share.When we talk about adding social features to Wikimedia, you must delete all your preconceptions about what a 'social network' is, and break it down into the most fundamental concept-- socializing on a network. Nobody here wants us to just become 'another' Facebook, shudder at the thought. We want to learn from social networks and keep the usable bits-- we don't want to literally become one. If that sound scary, remember changes around here are either optional or gradual or both-- never dramatic, unforeseen, controversial, and imposed. We wouldn't just make a facebook host on Wikimedia Instead, we'd start by little tiny things--Extension:Wikilove on prototype's a great example. We saw a feature of social networks that WAS consistent with our values-- the per-user thumbs up. We wouldn't just feed that global social space straight into en.wp, we'd put it on incubator and probably start off with very boring projects like Copy your home-project user page here and we'll help you translate it.Rules might eventually loosen, but a good starting point would be 'the kind of content projects routinely allow in user space or meta space-- but in one single unified space, the logical extension to the single unified login. The point is, 'social features' on existing projects would be slow, gradual, with lots of talking, lots of debate, and maybe a couple referendums thrown in for good measure. We're not going to devolve overnight from our current status literally, The most useful single collection of information on the planet to merely a useless innane personal trivial overnight. We're easing into a slightly more social outlook, we aren't having a revolution or anything :) .We're mining other successful internet projects for the lessons we can learn from their-- we aren't out to blindly copy them and abandon our own mission. Terms like A Facebook for Wikipedia communicate an important idea in very few characters-- but it also brings a lot of misconceptions too. And we really do need these need these semi-social features. We have important work ahead of us, and we absolutely do need to increase our intercommunication/socialization abilities if we're going to do our best at that job. And it will NOT make us Facebook or Myspace. == Socializing is essential to intelligently running a Global Foundation== The community is a part of the leadership of the foundation. The community contributed in a billion ways throughout the year, but elections especially require the global community to come together intelligently make very important decisions. To help run a foundation, we need to be able to talk to each other. talk to each other, and we need to understand each others values, not just their votes, not even just their direct rationales-- we have to understand each others values. I have to intelligent collaborate with people without knowing _anything_ about their culture, their values, or their traditions. I know what my projects' missions are, but I don't automatically presume to know what their projects' purposes are just because the sign on the door says Wikipedia. If you ask me to make a global decision, one of the first things I want to know is what editors of other projects and other languages believe. There are changes I feel comfortable supporting for my own home project, but I wouldn't want to 'impose' as a global policy unless I can hear from the people being affected. Right now, there's no permanent venue for that kind of discussion. We can't really form policy with a community that can't communicate with itself.Having a semi-social space where everyone's in the same place, can use the same templates, can see the same user pages, etc-- that alone would be good. ==Socializing promotes high-quality, NPOV articles== If I am editing the English language biography of a historical Arabic-language subject, I want to be able to communicate with the Arabic-language users and enlist their help understanding whatever it is I need help with.When I see articles on wars fought by English-speaking nations against non-English-speaking nations, I always wonder what the other side's article's look like, but machine translation only goes so far.Right now, it's hard for bilingual editors of corresponding articles to ever get to share notes unless the idea occurs to them on their own-- socializing would help promote the idea that cross-language collaboration is a good thing. Spanish-American War, you should talk to the editors of the corresponding article on es! Here's a list of a some users who
Re: [Foundation-l] It Is not Us
On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: As we did not know the extend to which we generally edit in many languages, we have not considered the needs of this majority. Our view has always been on single projects. We can do better and we should do better for our majority. Thanks, GerardM http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-defence-of-social-networks-ii.html I can second this massively-multilingual finding-- going through the language data, it's very clear that we do not have hundred of separate populations, we populations that are highly interconnected and full of overlap, in really interesting ways. Early in the last election, I had an instinct that our lack of discussion was being caused by a lack of communication skills. This instinct turned out to be dead wrong-- glad I actually looked. Certainly there are language barriers, but they are smaller than I expected.The untapped potential for a viable a global community IS in fact here-- we just have to rally that nascent community. Alec See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alecmconroy/Language_study#Visualizing_our_languages ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
