Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Thomas Morton  wrote:

> >
> > 1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
> > Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the
> > respective project communities.
> >
> >
> Uh oh - criticism time...
>
> WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of
> English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or
> lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those
> without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the
> devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in
> depth).


Wikilove was produced by Ryan Kaldari, and active Wikimedian and participant
on this list as well as a staffer, pretty much on his own time (from what I
understood as he explained it to me).  I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off
point, there.  I don't think he was out of touch with the issues in depth...


> It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again
> demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community
> (because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been
> controversial).
>

It was deployed with minimal discussion, but I still wouldn't assign the
blame to devs not understanding the community.  You're making some pretty
big assumptions.


-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Tim Starling  wrote:

> Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has
> proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of
> image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should
> tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive
> only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China.
>
> -- Tim Starling

There is a relevant anecdote to go with this. A physics teacher was telling
his students how compared to the other fundamental forces, gravity was
comparatively very very weak. Just as he said that, a wall attached speaker
failed its mountings and came crashing down behind him. Without missing
a beat he continued. "Weak, but non-neglible."


-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Phil Nash  wrote:
> Sue Gardner wrote:
>> On 12 September 2011 18:15, geni  wrote:
>>> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein  wrote:
 Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
 What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
>>>
>>> Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
>>> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
>>> original research and never really had very much of it. It is also
>>> operating in an extremely crowded market where as wikipedia had the
>>> field pretty much to itself when it started.
>>
>> Jimmy said once that part of the reason Wikipedia works so well is
>> because everybody knows what an encyclopedia article is supposed to
>> look like.
>
> Practical experience on a day-to-day basis would suggest that this is unduly
> optimistic. We are failing to attract new editors who can be, or wish to be,
> educated into "what an encyclopedia article is supposed to look like", and
> are discarding those experienced editors who do. Even those who remain but
> are becoming increasingly disillusioned with all the nonsense that goes on
> will eventually leave, or create a fork of Wikipedia, and to be honest, if I
> had the money right now, I'd do it myself, and cast ArbCom in its present
> form into the bottomless pit.
>
> I used to care about Wikipedia, as did others, but it's becoming
> increasingly difficult to do so.
>
>

If money is the problem, I can solve that. I recently came into an inheritance.



-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[M. Williamson]

 2011/9/13 John Vandenberg 

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Fae  wrote:
> > On 13 September 2011 18:23, M. Williamson  wrote:
> >> Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys
> >> doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what
> is
> >> supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a
> >> piece of stale bread? Wow.
> >
> > That's rather the point of putting up these examples for illustration
> > and as a test for any proposal. Where do you draw the line?
>
> Thanks Fae.  So far there are very few documented instances of
> external regulators rating/censoring Wikipedia content.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
>
> I think it is useful to put other what-ifs on the table to discuss.
> Most of the time we'll have good reasons to disagree with an external
> regulators desire to hide an image.  However there may be instances
> where we can fix the problem by removing gratuitous images from
> articles, and leave them in a Commons category.


Which images are "gratuitous"? Doesn't this vary based on your POV (and
degree of prudishness)? I wouldn't consider any of the images in any of the
articles Fae mentioned to be gratuitous, but some people certainly might. I
would hope that we would never resort to removing such images, which
certainly serve an educational purpose and definitely belong in those
articles, just because someone feels that they're "inappropriate". An
article about "Penis" should include an image of its subject, just like the
article "Banana" includes pictures of bananas; what I consider gratuitous is
if somebody tries to include pictures of penises in the article "Photograph"
as examples of photographs "because WP:NOTCENSORED" (for example). As long
as it illustrates the article, we shouldn't remove it just because some
person somewhere (or even a lot of people in a lot of places) finds it
objectionable. So [[pregnancy]] should keep the image of the pregnant woman;
(if someone tries to add an image of a penis saying "Penises tend to be
involved in causing pregnancy", that would be "gratuitous" I think) nudity
can be educational and illustrative without being pornographic. All of the
articles Fae mentioned should keep their images intact, given that the
subjects of those articles are directly depicted in the images.
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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Fae  wrote:
> On 13 September 2011 18:23, M. Williamson  wrote:
>> Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys
>> doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what is
>> supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a
>> piece of stale bread? Wow.
>
> That's rather the point of putting up these examples for illustration
> and as a test for any proposal. Where do you draw the line?

Thanks Fae.  So far there are very few documented instances of
external regulators rating/censoring Wikipedia content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia

I think it is useful to put other what-ifs on the table to discuss.
Most of the time we'll have good reasons to disagree with an external
regulators desire to hide an image.  However there may be instances
where we can fix the problem by removing gratuitous images from
articles, and leave them in a Commons category.

If it turns out to be a very limited problem, we should not build a
complex system that ends up over-engineered and not supported by the
community.  A few gadgets to hide individual images might suffice.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Kudu]

I guess it was time for a bold move.

~K

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Tempodivalse  wrote:
>  On 12 September 2011 21:02, David Gerard  wrote:
>
>> Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to
>> foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't
>> were clueless?
>
> Several Wikinews regulars have made comments about the fork on wikinews-l, if
> anyone wants to see another viewpoint on OpenGlobe and the future of Wikinews:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002034.html 
> (and
> several posts following)
>
> Regards.
>
> -Tempodivalse
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 90, Issue 76

[James Heilman]

Wikimedia Canada's Scholarship is now open for applications.
http://wikimedia.ca/wiki/Scholarship_application Have created some posters
to advertise it. Please post at your local Canadian University or College.
Will be gathering data on how successful this pilot project is. If we have a
good response hope to expand it to other countries/languages/subject areas.

https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.ca/document/d/1Bg9nt3_m8ekhRr_pimzA1h61ylpwLczsQezF3EY94w0/edit?hl=en_US

https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.ca/leaf?id=0B-O0FChng82cMWJkMjZhNzgtYjAxNy00ZWM1LTk5MTgtYzRiMjk1YTA0ZDdm&hl=en_US

Many thanks
-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Andrew Lih]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Fred Bauder  wrote:
>> Wiktionary is useful; perhaps you're referring to my comments, which were
>> not about Wiktionary at all. Wikiquote definitely does not belong as a
>> sister project. Maybe it is a "shining beacon" in the cesspool of
>> internet
>> quote sites; well, there are lots of things the rest of the Internet does
>> poorly, that doesn't mean it's automatically the WMF's job to create a
>> project to do it better.
>
> I think it is our mission to publish reference works. That is what we do.
>
> Reference works include Encyclopedias, dictionaries, collections of
> quotations, of images, and of texts.
>
> Wikinews is not a reference work, although it has archives.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're
doing." - Jimmy Wales

"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." Wikimedia vision
statement

Wikipedia may be the most famous site in the Wikimedia universe, but
there is nothing that limits projects to reference works.

-Andrew

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[Yann Forget]

2011/9/13 M. Williamson :
> Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys
> doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what is
> supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a
> piece of stale bread? Wow.

+1
I really hope that Wikimedia will never censor this kind of stuff...

Yann

> 2011/9/13 Fae 
>
>> > Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?
>>
>> Good candidates that I have had a hand in improving are:
>> # [[Gebelein predynastic mummies]] - surely gruesome close-ups of
>> naked dead bodies are PG?
>> # [[Warren Cup]] - explicit depiction of under-age homosexual anal sex
>> in the lead.
>> # [[Ain Sakhri lovers]] - depiction of penetrative heterosexual
>> intercourse in the lead.
>>
>> The discussion of how to make Wikipedia "child-friendly" has a long
>> history with no firm conclusion. Some would like to effectively censor
>> massive areas of history and culture, whilst others will take any
>> potential restriction as a direct challenge to the open movement.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Fae

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Fred Bauder]

> Wiktionary is useful; perhaps you're referring to my comments, which were
> not about Wiktionary at all. Wikiquote definitely does not belong as a
> sister project. Maybe it is a "shining beacon" in the cesspool of
> internet
> quote sites; well, there are lots of things the rest of the Internet does
> poorly, that doesn't mean it's automatically the WMF's job to create a
> project to do it better.

I think it is our mission to publish reference works. That is what we do.

Reference works include Encyclopedias, dictionaries, collections of
quotations, of images, and of texts.

Wikinews is not a reference work, although it has archives.

We could do a news aggregator which would be a reference work of a sort.
It would be a record of what was in the news that day. It might be useful
provided it was not full of dead links.

Fred


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[Fae]

On 13 September 2011 18:23, M. Williamson  wrote:
> Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys
> doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what is
> supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a
> piece of stale bread? Wow.

That's rather the point of putting up these examples for illustration
and as a test for any proposal. Where do you draw the line?

The mummy in question is a real person, regardless of age, and
detailed photographs of their dead body are problematic for a number
of reasons, not just their nudity, and we changed the Wikimedia
article title with the encouragement of the museum in order to explain
how they now comply with the UK's human tissue act. The Warren Cup is
one of the most famous erotic objects from the Roman period and the
two images of anal intercourse (with who in modern times would be
considered a boy) is fully explicit and for this reason used to be
locked away in a cupboard in the British Museum as it was considered
far too graphic for public consumption (it has recently been displayed
at a lower hight making it easier for those in wheelchairs to enjoy
and for children to ask about). The "piece of stale bread" has never
been interpreted as anything else but an artistic depiction of sexual
intercourse, should one introduce "PG" certificate style protection
for children (or schools), it would doubtless include this object too.

Cheers,
Fae

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[M. Williamson]

Wiktionary is useful; perhaps you're referring to my comments, which were
not about Wiktionary at all. Wikiquote definitely does not belong as a
sister project. Maybe it is a "shining beacon" in the cesspool of internet
quote sites; well, there are lots of things the rest of the Internet does
poorly, that doesn't mean it's automatically the WMF's job to create a
project to do it better.


2011/9/13 David Richfield 

> In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up
> some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote,
> referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.
>
> I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
> contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
> they're better.  Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and
> accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a
> separate citations tab) and is also going forward.  People are
> checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding
> citations to an article where the current list was in reverse
> chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking
> "someone else can fix this".  Before I got to the third citation,
> someone had fixed the sequence.
>
> The fact that progress is slowing isn't a sign of impending death.  As
> long as the wikis don't stagnate to the extent that they start to get
> taken over by spammers and trolls, I'm not going to hold a wake.
>
> As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's
> possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome!
> The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same
> misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is
> one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.
>
> --
> David Richfield
> e^(πi)+1=0
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[M. Williamson]

Are you kidding? Pictures of mummies, a cup with a depiction of two guys
doing it that can only be noticed if you look really closely, and what is
supposed to be a depiction of intercourse but actually looks more like a
piece of stale bread? Wow.


2011/9/13 Fae 

> > Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?
>
> Good candidates that I have had a hand in improving are:
> # [[Gebelein predynastic mummies]] - surely gruesome close-ups of
> naked dead bodies are PG?
> # [[Warren Cup]] - explicit depiction of under-age homosexual anal sex
> in the lead.
> # [[Ain Sakhri lovers]] - depiction of penetrative heterosexual
> intercourse in the lead.
>
> The discussion of how to make Wikipedia "child-friendly" has a long
> history with no firm conclusion. Some would like to effectively censor
> massive areas of history and culture, whilst others will take any
> potential restriction as a direct challenge to the open movement.
>
> Cheers,
> Fae
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Andrew Lih]

Hi all, reading this thread with much interest. Lots of ideas on this,
in bullet points:

- As a journalism professor, I've followed (and debated) Wikinews
since its very start. I say this not to claim authority, but simply to
say it has been something I've pondered continually for six years now.
See this interview I did with Harvard Nieman Lab for my thoughts, both
text and visual on why I thought Wikinews had problems:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collaborative-journalism-project/

- I remember having exchanges with Erik and others during Wikinews's
inception -- I didn't think wikis were well suited for producing news
(wire and breaking news) and predicted a long term problem. However, I
did support Wikinews in spirit and even took up arms as a Wikinewsie.
I received press credentials as a Wikinews reporter in 2005 to cover
the WTO conference in Hong Kong and saw potential in the spot
photography mission of Wikinews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikinews_creds-_Press_Pass_to_2005_WTO.jpg

- Where Wikinews has been successful and clearly valuable is in what
those in journalism call "feature" content. Interviews with political
leaders, photography of events, and investigative pieces. These
verifiable forms of reporting are not time critical and don't demand
"full coverage" like breaking news beats. The Wikinews interview with
Shimon Peres is a good example:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel

This got me to thinking about Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature that
says, "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."

The corollary to this is: "At some point, news stops being news. A
Wikipedia article never stops being an article." This is where the
tension lies, and why Wikinews is not a clean mapping over of
Wikipedia principles.

Wikis depend on eventualism: given an infinite timeline, pages
eventually get better. News cannot survive on that. The "decay" of the
value of breaking news and the long timeline for eventualism are at
odds with each other.

- Pointing at WMF's lack of support seems misplaced. Wikipedia took
off and had its viral growth well before WMF had a board or a budget
for more than simply paying for servers and bandwidth. Few, if any,
community projects in the Wikimedia universe depend on explicit WMF
support for their fundamental survival.

- But all is not lost. Here is where I think Wikinews can rise from
the ashes, and be a powerful project. I was inspired by Achal
Prabhala's "Oral Citations" project he presented at Wikimania 2011.
The basic gist: in Wikipedia, how do you reference knowledge that
isn't on the web or even written down yet? This is where our "first
world" standards of [citation needed] and strict referencing clash
with nascent Wikipedia editions (like in India and Africa) which don't
have nearly as many online sources as in English and European
languages. Achal's idea: make Oral Citations a project where you can
record folk and non-written knowledge and make your own material that
can be referenced in Wikipedia articles. His example was documenting a
children's game in India that is widely played, widely known, but not
written-down and referenceable in a way that would satisfy Wikipedia's
standards. See the "People are Knowledge" video here:
http://vimeo.com/26469276

Immediately, I saw how Wikinews could step up to this challenge. Oral
Citations is fundamentally an act of journalism (even if Achal and his
team never use the term). Wikinews could be doing what National
Geographic does, by creating multimedia-rich feature stories that
document corners of the world not yet covered by market-driven
journalism. In essence, if People are Knowledge, create referenceable
works and stories from those people.

And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
to have stalled lately. And I have to imagine how interesting this is
to GLAM cooperation that is now so prominent in the community. Putting
my educational hat on, I could see this project being something
journalism schools around the world could feed into, and be a powerful
global project that brings together many different storytellers to
help feed a feature journalism mission of Wikinews. It could be
something that museums and the cultural sector around the world
participate in. It's the next logical evolution of Wikipedia's
principles.

WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."

Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.

Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Fred Bauder]

> In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up
> some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote,
> referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.
>
> I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
> contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
> they're better.  Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and
> accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a
> separate citations tab) and is also going forward.  People are
> checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding
> citations to an article where the current list was in reverse
> chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking
> "someone else can fix this".  Before I got to the third citation,
> someone had fixed the sequence.
>
> The fact that progress is slowing isn't a sign of impending death.  As
> long as the wikis don't stagnate to the extent that they start to get
> taken over by spammers and trolls, I'm not going to hold a wake.
>
> As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's
> possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome!
> The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same
> misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is
> one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.
>
> --
> David Richfield
> e^(ði)+1=0

The appropriate timeframe is decades, even centuries. Modibund projects,
provided there is enough interest to control spam and vandalism are cheap
in terms of bandwidth and database resources. If there is concern about
their association with the Wikimedia brandname, a subsidiary could be
created to host them.

Fred



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[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Autoconfirmed article creation trial

[David Gerard]

It may seem a big goal, but perhaps en:wp can emulate the success of
en:wn. Will we achieve the best-practice level of seven layers of
review? We can but hope.


- d.



-- Forwarded message --
From: Chad 
Date: 13 September 2011 17:18
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Autoconfirmed article creation trial
To: Wikimedia developers 


Forwarding to wikitech-l. Private e-mail threads are not a transparent
way to discuss this.

-Chad


-- Forwarded message --
From: Snotty Wong 
Date: Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:02 PM
Subject: Autoconfirmed article creation trial
To: Jimbo Wales , Jimmy Wales
, sgard...@wikimedia.org, Philippe Beaudette
, br...@wikimedia.org,
bhar...@wikimedia.org, rlan...@gmail.com, jalexan...@wikimedia.org,
ar...@wikimedia.org, aschulz4...@gmail.com, ro...@wikimedia.org,
swall...@wikimedia.org, innocentkil...@gmail.com,
tstarl...@wikimedia.org, mden...@wikimedia.org
Cc: Kudpung , yanksinfin...@aol.com


Dear WMF staff and developers,
I'm User:Snottywong on en-wiki and I'm emailing you on behalf of
several other en-wiki users who have been helping to organize a trial.
 The trial, which you may already be familiar with, is to temporarily
restrict new article creation to autoconfirmed users.  If you're
unfamiliar with the details, you can catch up by reading the original
bugzilla thread I started in an attempt to implement the trial.  (See
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208)
The bugzilla thread has largely become stale, there has been no
activity for several weeks.  It's clear that some developers are not
in favor of this trial, as they believe it will result in a reduction
in new editor retention.  It would be an assumption of bad faith to
say that the developers are purposely ignoring the bugzilla thread in
the hopes that the volunteers who organized it will give up on trying
to implement it, but sadly it appears this may be happening.  This
email is an attempt to reopen the lines of communication between the
volunteers who organized this trial and the developers, in the hopes
that this more private communication will facilitate coordination.  I
can assure you that nothing you send me in an email will be publicly
posted.
The situation, from the perspective of the volunteer editors who
organized the trial, is this:  We put together a proposal to restrict
article creation to autoconfirmed editors.  We posted notices to the
proposal in the most public places on Wikipedia, the village pump,
WP:Centralized discussion, etc.  Over 500 editors contributed their
opinions to the proposal over the course of 2 months.  The proposal
was then closed by an uninvolved admin, with the view that the
proposal had been widely endorsed and there was consensus for the
change.  The admin also noted that there was strong support for a
trial of the changes before they are made permanent, and that this is
the direction in which we should proceed.
Anyone familiar with Wikipedia knows that it is spectacularly amazing
for a proposal that was open for 2 months with 500+ editors
contribution to actually succeed.
So, we proposed the change, got strong support for it, and then we
asked you guys to make it happen.  And we feel like the response we
got was "we don't think that's a good idea, so we're not going to do
it."  This was a very disappointing response for us, partly because of
the hard work we had put in to organize the proposal and the trial,
and partly because it goes against the fundamental Wikipedia concept
of governing by consensus; one of the most important aspects of
Wikipedia which has gotten it where it is today.
After digesting this response for awhile and regrouping, we understand
your natural instinct to protect Wikipedia from a change that you
believe could hurt it.  This is the perspective we're coming from as
well: we believe that the number of inappropriate and very poor
quality articles that are created every day by very new users is
hurting Wikipedia in a different way.  We do our best to patrol these
new articles and we try to ensure that these inappropriate articles
don't make it past our defense mechanisms, but there are simply too
many to handle and plenty make it through.  This is evident when you
click the "Random article" button a few times.
It's also understandable that it's easy to assume that this trial, on
the surface, will lead to less new editors and less new articles.  On
the contrary, we believe that it will lead to more serious editors and
better quality articles.  Quality over quantity.  We believe that with
Wikipedia approaching 4 million articles, there is a natural decline
in the number of new things that can be written about; and that
instead of focusing on creating new articles, editors will begin to
focus on fixing the ones we already have.
But, we will never know what this change would bring unless we
actually try it.  This is why we want to implement it only as a
temporary trial, and reserve judgment until after the trial.  We need
your h

[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Tempodivalse]

  On 12 September 2011 21:02, David Gerard  wrote:

> Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to 
> foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't 
> were clueless?

Several Wikinews regulars have made comments about the fork on wikinews-l, if 
anyone wants to see another viewpoint on OpenGlobe and the future of Wikinews:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002034.html (and 
several posts following)

Regards.

-Tempodivalse

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[me]

Zitat von Theo10011 :
> I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
> competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing
> field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
> being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
> bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won
> that race.

My main point was (although I didn't make it overly clear) not that  
"professionals" do inherently better work than amateurs/volunteers,  
but that they constantly dedicate eight working hours every day to  
creating content. That's something you can count on to provide the  
base load of the critical mass. Most volunteers on the other hand can  
only dedicate one or two hours a day and only if they have no other  
obligations. Sometimes volunteers stop contributing for no apparent  
reason. You cannot create large articles, background pieces or  
interviews in just one or two hours. That's why professionals are  
useful.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox


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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Gerard]

On 13 September 2011 16:04, John Vandenberg  wrote:

> Supporting/Investing in the extensions used by OmegaWiki.
> http://www.omegawiki.org/Special:Version


Including one credited, I see, to "Alan Smithee" ...


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:46 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2011/9/13 David Richfield :
>
>>> It's possible. The interface part is even quite easy.
>>> The hard part is defining a data model to contain all the words in all
>>> languages, with definitions in all languages, with morphology tables,
>>> etc. Something like this is slowly being done at www.omegawiki.org and
>>> there are other projects, too.
>
>> OK, I didn't realize the depth of that problem.
>
>
> What's the barriers to OmegaWiki joining WMF?

Supporting/Investing in the extensions used by OmegaWiki.

http://www.omegawiki.org/Special:Version

see

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design
and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OmegaWiki

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Przykuta]

> > And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> > will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> > and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> > you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> > text. If not today then in a year.
> >

Sometimes people look for old news, but our category system in Wikinews is not 
too good (alphabetical). Bugzilla knows this problem for years.


But - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:Random

and next use http://stats.grok.se/

Articles in en Wikinews are more popular, than articles in smaller Wikipedias

przykuta

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[emijrp]

I prefer WMF caring about the currently hosted sister projects, instead of
adding more.

2011/9/13 David Gerard 

> 2011/9/13 David Richfield :
>
> >> It's possible. The interface part is even quite easy.
> >> The hard part is defining a data model to contain all the words in all
> >> languages, with definitions in all languages, with morphology tables,
> >> etc. Something like this is slowly being done at www.omegawiki.org and
> >> there are other projects, too.
>
> > OK, I didn't realize the depth of that problem.
>
>
> What's the barriers to OmegaWiki joining WMF?
>
>
> - d.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Gerard]

2011/9/13 David Richfield :

>> It's possible. The interface part is even quite easy.
>> The hard part is defining a data model to contain all the words in all
>> languages, with definitions in all languages, with morphology tables,
>> etc. Something like this is slowly being done at www.omegawiki.org and
>> there are other projects, too.

> OK, I didn't realize the depth of that problem.


What's the barriers to OmegaWiki joining WMF?


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Richfield]

> It's possible. The interface part is even quite easy.
>
> The hard part is defining a data model to contain all the words in all
> languages, with definitions in all languages, with morphology tables,
> etc. Something like this is slowly being done at www.omegawiki.org and
> there are other projects, too.

OK, I didn't realize the depth of that problem.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/9/13 David Richfield :
>> I am not a Wictionary contributor but I was never able to understand why
>> we have Wictionaries in different language, though a big part of those seem
>> to be translations on other languages, and they overlap. Would it not be
>> advantageous to have just one Wictionary (as we have just one Commons)?
>>
>> Sorry for the ignorant question, there might be obvious reasons why they
>> should not be the same.
>
> A valid question, and one I've asked myself.  I'm not actually deep
> enough into the project to say for sure, but it would look a bit
> different from the way it currently looks if you wanted to make a
> Grand Unified Project: not only the user interface, but also the
> policies would have to be multilingual: if a fr-ca user logs in, she
> should see a project in her language.  I don't think you can do this
> with the current setup.

It's possible. The interface part is even quite easy.

The hard part is defining a data model to contain all the words in all
languages, with definitions in all languages, with morphology tables,
etc. Something like this is slowly being done at www.omegawiki.org and
there are other projects, too.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Richfield]

> I am not a Wictionary contributor but I was never able to understand why
> we have Wictionaries in different language, though a big part of those seem
> to be translations on other languages, and they overlap. Would it not be
> advantageous to have just one Wictionary (as we have just one Commons)?
>
> Sorry for the ignorant question, there might be obvious reasons why they
> should not be the same.

A valid question, and one I've asked myself.  I'm not actually deep
enough into the project to say for sure, but it would look a bit
different from the way it currently looks if you wanted to make a
Grand Unified Project: not only the user interface, but also the
policies would have to be multilingual: if a fr-ca user logs in, she
should see a project in her language.  I don't think you can do this
with the current setup.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome to Wikimedia D.C.

[Lodewijk]

Hi Tomasz,

Like Béria states, this is not very unusual. In some jurisdictions, the
usage of a trademark in your name is tricky, and sometimes there are other
legal reasons to choose a different official name. However, all chapters use
Wikimedia XX as their 'trade name' in everyday life. This is something
chapcom and the board is definitely aware of. Normally the official name is
used in the resolutions, but for some reason this must have slipped this
time. You can however see on
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Recognition_of_Wikimedia_District_of_Columbia
that
the linked bylaws (which is what is defining the entity) explicitely state
the legal name, even in the link. There is no confusion possible therefore,
also from a very formal point of view.

Best regards,
Lodewijk


Am 13. September 2011 15:17 schrieb Béria Lima :

> Tomasz,
>
> Some chapters use "Wikimedia" as official name, and some don't. Wikimedia
> UK
> for example has "*Wiki UK Ltd*" as official name. There are no real problem
> with that, since the chapter use the "Wikimedia " as
> working name.
> _
> *Béria Lima*
>
> *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
> livre
> acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a
> fazer .*
>
>
> 2011/9/13 Tomasz W. Kozłowski 
>
> > Errrm.. this is an official approval of the organisation called "Wiki
> > Society of Washington, DC Inc." or I miss something?
> >
> > From a *very* formal point of view, the Board has just recognised a
> > non-existing organisation, as there is no single mention of the name
> > "Wikimedia" in the bylaws of "Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc.".
> > Why does Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc use the name "Wikimedia
> > District of Columbia" as their official/convenient name, then?
> >
> > Am I the first one to spot such a difference in the name of the
> > chapter? All (or almost all) existing chapters use the name
> > "Wikimedia" -- WMNYC's official name, for example, is "Wikimedia New
> > York City".
> >
> > --
> > Tomasz W. Kozłowski
> >
> > ___
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome to Wikimedia D.C.

[Béria Lima]

Tomasz,

Some chapters use "Wikimedia" as official name, and some don't. Wikimedia UK
for example has "*Wiki UK Ltd*" as official name. There are no real problem
with that, since the chapter use the "Wikimedia " as
working name.
_
*Béria Lima*

*Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre
acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a
fazer .*


2011/9/13 Tomasz W. Kozłowski 

> Errrm.. this is an official approval of the organisation called "Wiki
> Society of Washington, DC Inc." or I miss something?
>
> From a *very* formal point of view, the Board has just recognised a
> non-existing organisation, as there is no single mention of the name
> "Wikimedia" in the bylaws of "Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc.".
> Why does Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc use the name "Wikimedia
> District of Columbia" as their official/convenient name, then?
>
> Am I the first one to spot such a difference in the name of the
> chapter? All (or almost all) existing chapters use the name
> "Wikimedia" -- WMNYC's official name, for example, is "Wikimedia New
> York City".
>
> --
> Tomasz W. Kozłowski
>
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[Foundation-l] New project: encycloPDia

[Humor writer Master]

There will be a new Wikimedia encyclopedia-computational knowledge engine 
project called encycloPDia. URL: http://encyclopdia.org
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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:55:37 +0200, David Richfield
 wrote:
> In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up
> some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote,
> referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.
> 
> I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
> contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
> they're better.  Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and
> accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a
> separate citations tab) and is also going forward.  People are
> checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding
> citations to an article where the current list was in reverse
> chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking
> "someone else can fix this".  Before I got to the third citation,
> someone had fixed the sequence.
> 

I am not a Wictionary contributor but I was never able to understand why
we have Wictionaries in different language, though a big part of those seem
to be translations on other languages, and they overlap. Would it not be
advantageous to have just one Wictionary (as we have just one Commons)?

Sorry for the ignorant question, there might be obvious reasons why they
should not be the same.

Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome to Wikimedia D.C.

[Tomasz W . Kozłowski]

Errrm.. this is an official approval of the organisation called "Wiki
Society of Washington, DC Inc." or I miss something?

From a *very* formal point of view, the Board has just recognised a
non-existing organisation, as there is no single mention of the name
"Wikimedia" in the bylaws of "Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc.".
Why does Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc use the name "Wikimedia
District of Columbia" as their official/convenient name, then?

Am I the first one to spot such a difference in the name of the
chapter? All (or almost all) existing chapters use the name
"Wikimedia" -- WMNYC's official name, for example, is "Wikimedia New
York City".

-- 
Tomasz W. Kozłowski

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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/9/13 David Richfield :
> I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
> contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
> they're better.

Absolutely true. In the last year or so i've been using English,
Dutch, French, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Lithunian and Catalan
Wiktionaries more and more and i find them really useful and reliable.

What i would like to see, however, is two main things:

* More collaboration and sharing of tools between different language
versions of each project. For example, the citation tab and the "Add
translation" gadget, which make the English Wiktionary so much better,
should be available in all language versions.

* More mentions of non-Wikipedia projects in all the online and
real-life forums - mailing lists, meetups, Wikimania, hackathons, etc.
It mostly depends on the people behind the projects - they should just
speak up! (Personal example: I wanted to make a big presentation about
Wikisource in Haifa, but was too busy organizing the actual event; I
hope to do it in DC.) But it also depends on the leaders - Jimmy, Sue
and the Board members could mention the other projects more in their
talks ;-)

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrea Zanni]

I'm no expert here,
but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises.
I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians,
and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals,
especially because, right now, it relies on them.

Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and
secondary sources,
Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it
collects links about (not so recent) news.
Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place.
As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New
York Times website, which is much more update.

I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last
a single day, but instead
needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill
an informative gap,
because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different
articles on the same subjects,
but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them.
This could be an interesting direction.

Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia:
in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events)
people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial
facts on something that already happened.
If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place
where to write all that stuff.
Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things
have slowed down,
relying on the Wikinews article.

My 2cents, obviously.

Aubrey

2011/9/13 Tom Morris :
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011  wrote:
>> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
>> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
>> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
>> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
>> never able to capitalize on this.
>>
>
> When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
> wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
> smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
> French and Hungarian.
>
> At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
> Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
> of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
> have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
> access both current news and a historical archive of news with
> verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
> provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
> democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
> available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
> free-as-in-freedom are good too.
>
> This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
> availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
> yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
> BBC...)
>
> [1] 
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
> [2] 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> 
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Lodewijk wrote:

> Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 :
> 
>
> >
> > The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> > most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> > countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred
> languages
> > and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews
> was
> > never able to capitalize on this.
> >
> > Theo
> >
> >
> Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
> diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
> white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the
> 'global
> south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
> etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
> only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
> language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
> Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
> be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
> but on many others we're not.


You seem to have misunderstood my point. The diverse base is the number of
communities we have, not a mix of it. There are homogeneous language groups
and communities, I never disputed that but there are so many of them. It has
something to do with sociology, why certain type of individuals or groups
gravitate towards certain things. I think you know, but others might not, I
am from the Global south. There is something different that attracted me
towards the projects. It is and was open for me to join, as I am sure it was
for anyone in my part of the world, the difference is, you can not go and
get people to care and recruit just for the sake of having diversity. This
in no way means the projects are not diverse, there are projects in both my
native tongues, I merely chose enwp.

For example, can you tell me how many similar Dutch language projects exist
similar to ours? in Netherlands? and from those, who work side-by-side by
French, German, Swahili or Hindi? I can make a call to translate and have
any message translated in 2 dozen languages within a day. In order to do
that, they have to have knowledge of multiple languages and how to edit.
These groups exist, there are volunteers in those languages willing to
contribute their time for nothing in return, we just can't tap it well
enough.

The case of English Wikipedia only echoes what the Dutch projects might
have. It *is* the language of old, white intellectuals, all the history of
the world reaffirms this notion, most anthropology looked at the world from
this perspective and in doing so, negated its own neutrality.

I beg to differ, we most certainly are diverse. You are just looking at a
single project or language and trying to find diversity in it, I am saying
look at the bigger picture and all the languages. English might be the most
widely spoken language and that is why you even have as much diversity as we
do now, compared to several other Romance languages you'd find even less
diversity in the contributor base, its simply a matter of a larger
contributor base. Maybe not on this list or the English Wikipedia as much as
we'd like to be, but there are dozens of mailing lists and projects in other
language, we are discussing this issue on just one of them.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Gerard]

2011/9/13 David Richfield :

> As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's
> possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome!
> The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same
> misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is
> one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.


Speaking as an occasional reader, this is in fact the case - it's the
one quote site that actually aspires to not being rubbish, and it
shows.


- d.

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[Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[David Richfield]

In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up
some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote,
referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.

I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
they're better.  Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and
accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a
separate citations tab) and is also going forward.  People are
checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding
citations to an article where the current list was in reverse
chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking
"someone else can fix this".  Before I got to the third citation,
someone had fixed the sequence.

The fact that progress is slowing isn't a sign of impending death.  As
long as the wikis don't stagnate to the extent that they start to get
taken over by spammers and trolls, I'm not going to hold a wake.

As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's
possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome!
The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same
misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is
one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Tom Morris]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011  wrote:
> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
> never able to capitalize on this.
>

When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
French and Hungarian.

At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
access both current news and a historical archive of news with
verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
free-as-in-freedom are good too.

This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
BBC...)

[1] 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response

-- 
Tom Morris


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Lodewijk]

Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 :


>
> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
> never able to capitalize on this.
>
> Theo
>
>
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global
south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
but on many others we're not.

It is this potential that does matter though - but to achieve that, we
should work on it.

But more importantly - you are correct that Wikinews' user base is simply
too small. You can theoretically write an encyclopedia with 3 skilled
people, as long as you take your time and do a hell lot of research.
However, this is not true for a news source - to make that work you always
need up to date everything, you need to cover the latest news and have
interesting research. If Wikipedia stands still for a week (no edits) we can
just continue after that. If the New York Times would do the same, most
likely they have lost a lot of their readers. Continuity and masses are even
more important for Wikinews than for Wikipedia to make it work.

Therefore, I'm not so sure if forking is good per se. Wikinews was already
too small to my liking, and splitting it up might bring the community even
further below the critical mass. At the same time it might bring the
apparently needed changes for some, and make them work - I do hope though
that both communities will quickly figure out what methods work best, and
join together again to make it more likely to pass this threshold of
activity.

Lodewijk
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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[Lodewijk]

Yes, there is (thanks Béria for linking) - however I think I speak for many
on that list that it would be appreciated if you can hold off the more
general 2012 discussions until October :) Just to state the obvious.

Best regards,

Lodewijk

Am 13. September 2011 12:28 schrieb Béria Lima :

> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
> _
> *Béria Lima*
> (351) 925 171 484
>
> *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
> livre
> acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a
> fazer .*
>
>
> On 13 September 2011 11:26, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:39:52 +0300, Strainu  wrote:
> > > Hi Naoko,
> > >
> > > Thanks for your pointers. What I'm seeing this year is that in order
> > > to go global, we'll probably need around 10 people to coordinate the
> > > event (I'm thinking that this year there were only 2 people involved
> > > in all the steps and a few more that helped in different areas).
> > >
> > > This means that it's not too early to start talking about WLM2012, but
> > > perhaps a better place for this is the WikiLovesMonuments lists. We
> > > would like to see you participate in discussions there :)
> > >
> >
> > Is there a public WLM list open for discussion?
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
> >
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[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome to Wikimedia D.C.

[phoebe ayers]

Congratulations and welcome to Wikimedia District of Columbia, the
36th Wikimedia chapter and 2nd chapter to be formed in the U.S.:

Board resolution approving the chapter:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Recognition_of_Wikimedia_District_of_Columbia
For more information about the chapter:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_District_of_Columbia

-- Phoebe Ayers

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24,   wrote:
> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> the project always stays above the critical mass.

That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news
source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned
that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I
said, heresy, For his ears :P

The main difference between Wikipedia (projects with similar dynamics)
and Wikinews is necessity for maintenance. And that's -- huh.

Serbian Wikinews is driving on deal with the news agency Beta and bot
which I wrote. But, for ~10 days it doesn't have content added by bot
because formatting of Beta pages changed. I have to: (1) remember on
which server I run that bot; maybe password, as well; (2) analyze four
years old code; (3) change it; (4) but, most importantly, I have to
have free time for that. And willingness.

Now, imagine news source without that bot and with necessity to have
news between ultra important events. Five persons would be needed to
cover 24/7, not counting editor. But, let's say that we just need
those 5 persons and that editors would be people from the community.
~40 stewards, volunteers, are able to cover most important issues
24/7, mostly. And stewards are volunteers of the system which works.

Wikinews is not working and up to ~10 days ago the only useful
Wikinews -- as general source of information -- was Serbian Wikinews
and just thanks to the deal with a news agency and one bot. I tried to
do the same with English Wikinews, but, maintaining harvester from a
couple of sources is a job which uses a lot of time, on daily basis.
(Still, if anyone with Python knowledge is willing to share workload
with me to cover English [and other] Wikinews editions, I am still
willing to activate bots.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:37 PM, emijrp  wrote:

> I agree with this analysis.
>
> 2011/9/13 
>
> > English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional
> > competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create
> > reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good
> > encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news
> > were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage
> > for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
> >
> > A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if
> > you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.
> > On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there
> > are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if
> > you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
> >
> > And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> > will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> > and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> > you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> > text. If not today then in a year.
> >
> > Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an
> > increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.
> > If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the
> > project will never lift off.
> >
> >
> > It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> > paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> > the project always stays above the critical mass.
> >
> > Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English
> > language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language
> > news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I
> > guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and
> > hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the
> > diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer
> > reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and
> > original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per
> > village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places
> > and propagate sharing.
> >
> > Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native
> > content before.
> >
> > That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I
> > think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At
> > least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a
> > difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much
> > else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead
> > to anything making a difference.
> >
> > Marcus Buck
> > User:Slomox
> >
> >
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I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing
field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won
that race.

The same point applies to Encyclopedias- Wikipedia is proof that just about
anyone can contribute to an encyclopedia, not just a published versions  by
white, old, Academicians and instead refine it, continuously to compete with
any other Encyclopedia. Now, the difference of concept between an
Encyclopedia and a News source are undeniable, you can not refine a news
article and you have to be correct and quick at the same time. The
difference is, Wikipedia already does this, breaking stories do link back
Wikipedia article from Google News. The difference between the two projects
is the number of contributors.

The concept of this movement is based mainly on volunteers. it has proven
that random volunteers from around the world can accomplish anything, if we
pay people to contribute, it goes against the ethos of all the projects.

The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
never able to capitalize on this.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Thomas Dalton]

On 13 September 2011 00:04, MZMcBride  wrote:
> Wikimedia indisputably now exists to serve the English Wikipedia. Wikimedia
> is quick to call Sue "Wikipedia Executive Director," isn't it? Or plaster
> "Wikipedia founder" on every fundraiser-related publication? Out of the last
> X extensions enabled on Wikimedia wikis, how many were written primarily for
> the English Wikipedia (MoodBar, WikiLove, ArticleFeedback, etc.)? If you
> can't provide percentages to the question above, do you know of any
> resources that have gone to a site other than Wikimedia Commons or a
> Wikipedia in the past five years? What resources have been devoted to
> Wikinews in particular?

The "Wikipedia Executive Director" thing was a short-lived, misguided
(but well-intentioned) attempt to avoid confusing donors by refering
to brands they weren't familiar with. "Wikipedia founder" is just
correct. Jimmy did (co-)found Wikipedia. "Wikimedia founder" would be
controversial - Jimmy didn't found the other projects. He did found
(or, at least, was involved in founding) the WMF, but that's not the
same thing as founding Wikimedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[WereSpielChequers]

It isn't entirely clear from the posts on this list whether this is  a fork
of half the community of WikiNews or half of EN Wikinews. Looking at the
OpenGlobe site I get the impression it is the latter. Clearly there is a
difference in impact between the two, and it would be good to hear from
those who've chosen not to fork as to how healthy the rest of Wikinews is
and how they intend to respond to the fork.

If OpenGlobe succeed in creating an equally open but more inclusionist fork
that is more friendly, and also more welcoming to new editors, then they
will be hard to compete with. It is a good aim though and very sad that they
thought they had to fork to achieve it. When the anti advertising fork
happened wikimedia responded by dropping plans for advertising, and I hope
that we can respond to this fork with a similar attitude of seeking to
address the problems that drove people away.

I wish both forks well. We now need to be realistic that News is a yet more
crowded market, and other than closer synergy between Wikinews and Wikipedia
I see difficulty in getting WikiNews to the point where the problems that
inspired the fork can be resolved. One possible solution would be to try and
get the WikiProjects to be more generically Wikimedia rather than as at
present very Wikipedia focussed. This could be done by running  a bot on
WikiNews to inform relevant Wikiprojects, so when someone submitted a
wikinews story relating to Archaeology in India, Wikiprojects India and
Archaeology both had requests for reviewers.

Another solution would be to upend our approach to IT development, whether
you are a fan of Wikilove and article feedback both are very much topdown
initiatives. I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget
for bottom up initiatives, the image filter consultation had a question as
to how important that development was, but lacked the comparators that would
have made the question meaningful.   What I'd like to see is a
prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential
developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way
projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their
communities actually had consensus for - currently even EN wiki can get
consensus for change but not get IT resource for it to happen.

Regards

WereSpielChequers



On 13 September 2011 06:39, wrote:

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>
> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Stephen Bain)
>   2. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (geni)
>   3. Re: Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity,  cats and
>  scapegoats) (Milos Rancic)
>   4. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Erik Moeller)
>   5. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Sue Gardner)
>   6. Re: A Wikimedia project has forked (Phil Nash)
>   7. The Wikinews fork: updates (Tempodivalse)
>   8. Re: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats (Keegan Peterzell)
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:36:54 +1000
> From: Stephen Bain 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> >
> > I would characterize WMF's prioritization as an "A rising tide lifts
> > all boats" policy. Improvements are generally conceived to be widely
> > usable, both in Wikimedia projects and even outside the Wikimedia
> > environment, and to have the largest possible impact. Even if a first
> > deployment is Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as
> > well.
>
> I believe the correct name for that is the trickle-down effect :)
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.b...@gmail.com
>
>
>
> --
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:15:51 +0100
> From: geni 
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID:
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 12 September 2011 23:45, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> > Now: what do we need to do to make Wikinews better and more useful?
> > What are the costs and technical or other work involved?
>
> Very little. Mostly wikinews is misstargeted. Yet another website
> rewriting AP reports is never going to draw crowds. Wikinews needed
> original research and never

Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[emijrp]

I agree with this analysis.

2011/9/13 

> English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional
> competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create
> reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good
> encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news
> were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage
> for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
>
> A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if
> you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.
> On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there
> are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if
> you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
>
> And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> text. If not today then in a year.
>
> Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an
> increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.
> If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the
> project will never lift off.
>
>
> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> the project always stays above the critical mass.
>
> Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English
> language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language
> news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I
> guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and
> hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the
> diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer
> reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and
> original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per
> village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places
> and propagate sharing.
>
> Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native
> content before.
>
> That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I
> think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At
> least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a
> difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much
> else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead
> to anything making a difference.
>
> Marcus Buck
> User:Slomox
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

MZMcBride, 13/09/2011 00:24:
> Wikimedia has made its decision and the community has largely sat quiet on
> the issue.

Rectius: the Wikimedia Foundation (as you say below). Other Wikimedia 
people, groups and organizations don't think so and are even accused not 
to have the "legitimacy" (!) to invest resources (especially money) on 
projects other than Wikipedia. That's the message: working on 
non-Wikipedia projects is not only risky and probably useless (in terms 
of revenue) and anyway something we don't want to do ourself, but even 
immoral.
I don't know, it might be right: nobody has the monopoly of the truth; 
but for this very reason, when I see such dogmas stated or implicitly 
assumed, I'm very worried that we might have overlooked something and be 
going to do something very wrong.

> Wikimedia has made it clear in promotional materials, donation
> drives, and nearly anywhere else that its focus is the English Wikipedia. Of
> all the criticisms you can make about the Wikimedia Foundation, I wouldn't
> say that "it's not being upfront about its intentions or motivations on this
> issue" is a valid one.

Nemo

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

M. Williamson, 13/09/2011 00:13:
> English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most
> pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more
> than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic
> language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous.

You're honest in reminding your own prejudices against the project, but 
that's a very bad example for your own thesis.
First, Wikiquote (in several languages) serves his purpose quite well 
and successfully; a dictionary of quotations can be considered a niche 
product compared to a vocabulary or an encyclopedia and this explains 
the not so high numbers but this doesn't mean it's less worthwhile of 
other more ambitious projects that don't work at all.
Second, the English edition has a particularly high number of anonymous 
edits and edits performed by less active editors: the ability to get 
contributions by readers seems a success to me, not a fault.
Third, you should not consider only absolute but also relative numbers. 
I remember a presentation of Erik Moeller at Wikimania 2010 where he 
showed views and activity stats of our projects to prove how some of 
them are failing; he even forgot to mention Wikiquote, but his own 
numbers showed that it was the project with the highest "return on 
investment", i.e. the views/activity (work) ratio.

In short, your own argumentation is an example of the problem itself, 
that is considering non-Wikipedia projects with Wikipedia-only criteria, 
creating the premises of the failure.

Nemo

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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Erik Moeller, 13/09/2011 03:55:
> That's of course a risky project and it may not live up to our
> expectations. But it's IMO a smarter bet to make than just picking
> (with an unavoidable element of arbitrariness) one of the many
> specialized areas in which we currently aren't succeeding and throwing
> $ and developers at it.

But that's exactly what the WMF is doing. The Usability Initiative, the 
WikiLove extension, ArticleFeedback, MoodBar, StructuredProfile and so 
on (you didn't mention LiquidThreads, but that's another one if it's not 
freezed) all are risky projects with which the WMF is intervening on 
areas and problems of the software which have always been overlooked: 
all of them have [had] their (big) issues but the WMF has decided to 
take the risk.[1]
So your point is just the usual one: Wikipedia is currently a success, 
it's probably the only thing we're able to do, so let's put all 
resources and risks there,[2] we can fail but considering the past we 
are also likely to succeed.
The idea that others should take the risk of working on non-Wikipedia 
projects is the logical consequence and ecnouraging innovation is a good 
thing, but it doesn't change the fact that the premise is highly dubious.

Nemo

[1] And I agree, although I disagree on some details and I'm not 
convinced at all that all of them can actually be useful for other 
languages.
[2] And mostly on the English edition for the same reasoning.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[Béria Lima]

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
_
*Béria Lima*
(351) 925 171 484

*Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre
acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que estamos a
fazer .*


On 13 September 2011 11:26, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:39:52 +0300, Strainu  wrote:
> > Hi Naoko,
> >
> > Thanks for your pointers. What I'm seeing this year is that in order
> > to go global, we'll probably need around 10 people to coordinate the
> > event (I'm thinking that this year there were only 2 people involved
> > in all the steps and a few more that helped in different areas).
> >
> > This means that it's not too early to start talking about WLM2012, but
> > perhaps a better place for this is the WikiLovesMonuments lists. We
> > would like to see you participate in discussions there :)
> >
>
> Is there a public WLM list open for discussion?
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Tim Starling  wrote:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content
>
> However, the editor community could sabotage it in various ways. For
> example, there's no guarantee that anyone will tag any images, or that
> tagged images won't be untagged by bots run by administrators. If the
> Board really does want a useful image-hiding feature, then it's
> essential that the community be persuaded that it is a good idea.
>
> Personally, I think the filter will be mostly harmless, and that it's
> not worth the effort to rail against it. It will be useful for PR --
> it will seem as if we are trying to accomodate all points of view even
> if the feature is not particularly useful for parents.
>
> -- Tim Starling


Because of the dictat nature of the board resolution, I think the key
question omitted  from the questionnaire was:

When (not if) we implement this feature, would you be willing to
participate actively in a fork of Wikipedia?

Not kidding.


-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:39:52 +0300, Strainu  wrote:
> Hi Naoko,
> 
> Thanks for your pointers. What I'm seeing this year is that in order
> to go global, we'll probably need around 10 people to coordinate the
> event (I'm thinking that this year there were only 2 people involved
> in all the steps and a few more that helped in different areas).
> 
> This means that it's not too early to start talking about WLM2012, but
> perhaps a better place for this is the WikiLovesMonuments lists. We
> would like to see you participate in discussions there :)
> 

Is there a public WLM list open for discussion?

Cheers 
Yaroslav

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[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[me]

English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional  
competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create  
reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good  
encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news  
were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage  
for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.

A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if  
you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.  
On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there  
are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if  
you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.

And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts  
will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article  
and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if  
you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your  
text. If not today then in a year.

Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an  
increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.  
If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the  
project will never lift off.


It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by  
paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that  
the project always stays above the critical mass.

Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English  
language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language  
news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I  
guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and  
hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the  
diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer  
reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and  
original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per  
village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places  
and propagate sharing.

Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native  
content before.

That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I  
think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At  
least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a  
difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much  
else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead  
to anything making a difference.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[Fae]

> Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?

Good candidates that I have had a hand in improving are:
# [[Gebelein predynastic mummies]] - surely gruesome close-ups of
naked dead bodies are PG?
# [[Warren Cup]] - explicit depiction of under-age homosexual anal sex
in the lead.
# [[Ain Sakhri lovers]] - depiction of penetrative heterosexual
intercourse in the lead.

The discussion of how to make Wikipedia "child-friendly" has a long
history with no firm conclusion. Some would like to effectively censor
massive areas of history and culture, whilst others will take any
potential restriction as a direct challenge to the open movement.

Cheers,
Fae

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Stephen Bain  wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 1:24 PM, John Vandenberg  wrote:
>>
>> Are there any encyclopedia which have been
>> classified/banned/bowlderised by any country in the last 50 years?
>>
>> If Wikipedia is a quality encyclopedia, most rating agencies would
>> decide that the content is appropriate for all ages.
, >
> Britannica never had authors putting pictures of their own genitals
> throughout each volume "because NOTCENSORED".
>

Britannica didn't only have problems witn NOTCENSORED, they also had
*humongous* problems with NPOV.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 07:39, Keegan Peterzell  wrote:
> Milos, you state that Americans see everything involving nudity under the
> label as porn and offensive, and filtering with that mindset is a bad idea.
>  You're correct about Americans acting that way in general.

Just a short note: No, I didn't say that "Americans see
everything..."; I said that it's about particular part of American
society. Majority of Americans which I know are sane.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[KIZU Naoko]

Agreed with Lodewijk, and thanks for your clarification

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Lodewijk  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> just a few clarifications:
>
> I totally agree with Naoko of course. However, for me the main goal is not
> even just the photos itself, but the reach it gives us to involve more
> people. If I understand the statistics correctly; up to date, we have been
> able to involve roughly 1000 people throughout Europe in this contest who
> never before uploaded/edited anything.

Thank you for raising that. I then implied, but did not mention
explicitly, avoiding for scholastic redundancy (or decadence?).
Picking up monuments for reach people out is a good idea corresponding
with the main reason d'etre of so-called monuments; monuments are
intersubjective, that is,  a monument is what we as a community think
as monument. I am not sure if any other themes had got the same level
success. A monument, or precisely a certain object which the local or
wider level of society is considered as a monument, is a focal point
of interest by definition.

It's a corollary of art concepts so ideally we could go to the art
works in general, but the copyright issues might then arise, so
beginning with monuments placed in an open are seems a modest but good
step. 'D
>
> Involving new people was also the reason to set WLM up as a contest - that
> assists at least in Europe very well in attracting attention of people who
> normally do not edit Wikipedia, and persuade them to participate. However,
> in the end they often keep participating because it is fun and because they
> like it that their images appear on Wikipedia.
>
> @Yaroslav: the main reason to focus on Europe this year was the large
> concentration, intergovernmental support (European Commission & Council of
> Europe) and lack of resources (mainly man power). If there are next year
> enough people to carry on the idea, I'm sure we can include more countries,
> *if* the concept works for them.
>
> Then lists etc are a very practical precondition - not a fundamental one. If
> we can find other ways to make it work, that is find of course. Also, if
> countries rather run a project on different topics (volunteer involvement is
> important, otherwise it won't work) they should definitely do that (I heard
> suggestions for Wiki Loves Wildlife, Wiki Loves Rivers and many others!).
>
> Finally a note about chapters. Yes, having a chapter is very helpful -
> usually it is a group of organized volunteers who has existing experience
> with media and volunteer coordination (because some coordination is
> necessary) and they have access to some kind of budgeting / bank accounts.
> But also this is very practical - this year four countries without any
> chapter participated: Andorra (with the help of Amical), Belgium &
> Luxembourg (with a lot of dedicated volunteers, mostly in Belgium) and
> Romania (with the help of a local pro-linux association and local
> volunteers). So there is definitely no rule against chapters without a
> chapter to participate, but it does require a steeper learning curve, and
> some extra dedication.
>
> You can find much of the thinking behind this concept in our post-mortem of
> 2010 and the notes on the Berlin meeting last May with many participating
> countries; all available on Commons. Of course I invite all comments
> regarding improvements for next years in our post-mortem after September.
>
> Best regards,
> Lodewijk
>
> Am 12. September 2011 07:49 schrieb Yaroslav M. Blanter :
>
>> On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:51:33 +0900, KIZU Naoko  wrote:
>> > Off topic alert:
>> >
>> > I haven't given a closer look to your main topic, Milos, so I cannot
>> > give a responsible statement in any way. But your reference to Wiki
>> > Loves Monuments, while I agree it's heavily Europe-focused, I strongly
>> > disagree with you on its decadency, as an (retired) aesthetic. While
>> > the determination what artworks are heavily depends on the community
>> > to appreciate, so partly I understand your concern, if WLM is carried
>> > on only by European chapter people, it can hardly of NPOV at some
>> > future moment, but artworks belong to the critical part of "the sum of
>> > human knowledge" along with the information who created them and then
>> > have appreciated or rejected them.
>> >
>>
>> Only countries which have lists of monuments compiled by the government
>> and having the status of the law are eligible for WLM. This is in some
>> sense POV but no more POV than say writing articles of members of
>> parliament who were elected by direct vote. If Japan has such a list (I
>> hope it does) next year it would be eligible to participate. My
>> understanding is that somehow the organizers did not expect such interest
>> and did not try to contact chapters outside Europe. Presumably next year
>> they will do. On the other hand, by the next year some of the European
>> countries may exhaust their monuments (in the sense that the most of the
>> pictures will be ta

Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[Strainu]

Hi Naoko,

Thanks for your pointers. What I'm seeing this year is that in order
to go global, we'll probably need around 10 people to coordinate the
event (I'm thinking that this year there were only 2 people involved
in all the steps and a few more that helped in different areas).

This means that it's not too early to start talking about WLM2012, but
perhaps a better place for this is the WikiLovesMonuments lists. We
would like to see you participate in discussions there :)

Thanks,
Strainu

2011/9/13 KIZU Naoko :
> Hello there,
>
> Japan has a such (thanks Yaroslave for your concern) and iirc Taiwan
> has too. Perhaps other countries.
>
> If people are ambition enough to spread coordination efforts to the
> large international orgs, I'd point out not only UNESCO but also
> International Society of Aesthetics would be a good candidate to
> contact. In particular where the government doesn't provide such a
> list. ISA itself won't be so excited but you could ask them to have
> you contact to the local appropriate associations which are keen and
> open to collaborate with guys coming outsides from adacemia.
>
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
>>> @Yaroslav: the main reason to focus on Europe this year was the large
>>> concentration, intergovernmental support (European Commission & Council
>> of
>>> Europe) and lack of resources (mainly man power). If there are next year
>>> enough people to carry on the idea, I'm sure we can include more
>> countries,
>>> *if* the concept works for them.
>>>
>> <...>
>>
>>> Finally a note about chapters. Yes, having a chapter is very helpful -
>>> usually it is a group of organized volunteers who has existing
>> experience
>>> with media and volunteer coordination (because some coordination is
>>> necessary) and they have access to some kind of budgeting / bank
>> accounts.
>>> But also this is very practical - this year four countries without any
>>> chapter participated: Andorra (with the help of Amical), Belgium &
>>> Luxembourg (with a lot of dedicated volunteers, mostly in Belgium) and
>>> Romania (with the help of a local pro-linux association and local
>>> volunteers). So there is definitely no rule against chapters without a
>>> chapter to participate, but it does require a steeper learning curve,
>> and
>>> some extra dedication.
>>>
>>
>> Well, as one example, we had some private correspondence about involvement
>> of Russia: The chapter failed to organize anything, mostly because they
>> failed to realize that the database they were pointed out to is workable,
>> they did not want or dis not manage to contact other people who understand
>> the subject, and there was no way for any other group of people to organize
>> the contest. As the result, I just had to fill up the (previously empty)
>> category "WLM 2011 in Russia" myself single-handedly, not obviously
>> expecting any credit for this, but just to avoid creating an impression
>> that there are no monuments in Russia.
>>
>> Also, if there was no group let us give a random example - in Macedonia -
>> who wanted to organize the contest, still it would be a good idea to open a
>> category for WLM in Macedonia, just to get a chance to indeed involve new
>> people and to possibly get a number of good quality image previously
>> missing. Especially if people would know this in advance and could take
>> pictures for instance during the summer holidays.
>>
>> Just to be understood correctly, I think WLM is in general a good idea,
>> and my criticism is not to undermine it is any way, but to possibly create
>> some input for the next time. (I am a WLM supporter and I uploaded so far I
>> believe about 1% of the total amount of images).
>>
>> Cheers
>> Yaroslav
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
> member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki Loves Monuments (Was: On curiosity, cats and scapegoats)

[KIZU Naoko]

Hello there,

Japan has a such (thanks Yaroslave for your concern) and iirc Taiwan
has too. Perhaps other countries.

If people are ambition enough to spread coordination efforts to the
large international orgs, I'd point out not only UNESCO but also
International Society of Aesthetics would be a good candidate to
contact. In particular where the government doesn't provide such a
list. ISA itself won't be so excited but you could ask them to have
you contact to the local appropriate associations which are keen and
open to collaborate with guys coming outsides from adacemia.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
>> @Yaroslav: the main reason to focus on Europe this year was the large
>> concentration, intergovernmental support (European Commission & Council
> of
>> Europe) and lack of resources (mainly man power). If there are next year
>> enough people to carry on the idea, I'm sure we can include more
> countries,
>> *if* the concept works for them.
>>
> <...>
>
>> Finally a note about chapters. Yes, having a chapter is very helpful -
>> usually it is a group of organized volunteers who has existing
> experience
>> with media and volunteer coordination (because some coordination is
>> necessary) and they have access to some kind of budgeting / bank
> accounts.
>> But also this is very practical - this year four countries without any
>> chapter participated: Andorra (with the help of Amical), Belgium &
>> Luxembourg (with a lot of dedicated volunteers, mostly in Belgium) and
>> Romania (with the help of a local pro-linux association and local
>> volunteers). So there is definitely no rule against chapters without a
>> chapter to participate, but it does require a steeper learning curve,
> and
>> some extra dedication.
>>
>
> Well, as one example, we had some private correspondence about involvement
> of Russia: The chapter failed to organize anything, mostly because they
> failed to realize that the database they were pointed out to is workable,
> they did not want or dis not manage to contact other people who understand
> the subject, and there was no way for any other group of people to organize
> the contest. As the result, I just had to fill up the (previously empty)
> category "WLM 2011 in Russia" myself single-handedly, not obviously
> expecting any credit for this, but just to avoid creating an impression
> that there are no monuments in Russia.
>
> Also, if there was no group let us give a random example - in Macedonia -
> who wanted to organize the contest, still it would be a good idea to open a
> category for WLM in Macedonia, just to get a chance to indeed involve new
> people and to possibly get a number of good quality image previously
> missing. Especially if people would know this in advance and could take
> pictures for instance during the summer holidays.
>
> Just to be understood correctly, I think WLM is in general a good idea,
> and my criticism is not to undermine it is any way, but to possibly create
> some input for the next time. (I am a WLM supporter and I uploaded so far I
> believe about 1% of the total amount of images).
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
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-- 
KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp

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Re: [Foundation-l] The Wikinews fork: updates

[Dan Rosenthal]

Sounds like a solid reason to fork and looks like the start of a promising
project -- I hope you guys have the best of luck.

Dan



> To be clear, OpenGlobe was not created due to a dispute with the
> Foundation.
> The main reason for forking was the perceived hostility and rudeness among
> Wikinews editors,
> especially to newbies and outsiders, which makes it difficult to get
> anything done
> and drives off new recruits. Bureaucracy also
> played a role: article standards have become so high that very few stories
> make it to the front page; the project currently averages fewer
> than two published pages a day and 75%+ of stories are deleted as old news
> before they see
> "daylight". The stories that are published generally go live only after a
> lengthy delay and
> some time after the event has taken place, making their usefulness
> questionable.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Thomas Morton]

>
> 1) WikiLove has been enabled on Swedish, Malayalam, Hungarian, Hebrew,
> Arabic, and Hindi Wikipedia, as well as Commons, all on request of the
> respective project communities.
>
>
Uh oh - criticism time...

WikiLove was developed supposedly to address one of the major problems of
English Wikipedia (a problem which also affects other Wiki's to a larger or
lesser extent). It is an example of a solution being developed by those
without a full understanding of the problem (which is no criticism of the
devs involved; there is no reason they should understand the issues in
depth). It was ten deployed with minimal discussion, once again
demonstrating the lack of links between the developers and the community
(because just about anyone could have pointed out it would have been
controversial).

WMF failed it's role in several critical ways there.

And it a wider one too; because it seems to me there are more critical
technical issues in smaller projects that are not being fixed or addressed
or supported. And instead things like WikiLove appear feels like a bad
application of resources.

Just my view; but I think that the idea that sister projects do not get the
developer support they need is a fair assessment.

Tom
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