[Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost
I think the responses are a credit to Wikinews. This one http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002035.html in particular. It seems that they need something like CorenSearchBot to trackdown copyvio and plagiarism. I appreciate that lack of coding resource isn't the only problem in smaller projects, but it may be one of the easier ones to make a difference on. I've had a couple of people do some coding for me just by making requests at the EN wiki bot requests page, now I realise if we were designing the project from scratch we'd have the spam filter and the bot requests page on Meta not EN wiki. But some problems are easier to work around than to fix. What I'm not sure about is, is this a communication issue, with people not knowing who to ask or asking the Foundation instead of asking for volunteer support; Or is this a shortage of volunteers willing to write code? If its the former then maybe it would help for each project to have a page explaining how you request Bot support with a link to the EN wiki Bot requests page. If its the latter then maybe we can help via hacking days such as the one the UK is planning for later this year, or even by going outside the movement and asking for volunteers willing to cut code. Regards WereSpielChequers -- > > Message: 10 > Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:51:11 -0500 (CDT) > From: Tempodivalse > Subject: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked > To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Message-ID: ><504508872.5953792.1315929071322.JavaMail.root@vznit170070> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > 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 > > > > -- > > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
> > I fundamentally disagree. If the content can be managed to be culturally > sound, that is effective to disseminate globally. If Islamic countries do > not want to see images of Mohammed, that is effect in maintaining other > content without blocking the site. Same applies to other religious imagery, > political imagery, sexual imagery, and whatever else. The filter is for > images, and while pictures are louder than words, we can at least have the > words while maintaining cultural integrity. The end game for this strategy of giving every (sub-) culture their own subset of the images and/or text (when every medium agrees all at once), and where everyone lives past each other is actually well known and well studied: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization. Then again, that's a deeply held cultural belief in the part of the world that I live in, and you might not share it. ;-) sincerely, Kim Bruning ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Kim Bruning wrote: > > > > I fundamentally disagree. If the content can be managed to be culturally > > sound, that is effective to disseminate globally. If Islamic countries > do > > not want to see images of Mohammed, that is effect in maintaining other > > content without blocking the site. Same applies to other religious > imagery, > > political imagery, sexual imagery, and whatever else. The filter is for > > images, and while pictures are louder than words, we can at least have > the > > words while maintaining cultural integrity. > > The end game for this strategy of giving every (sub-) culture their own > subset of the images and/or text (when every medium agrees all at once), > and where everyone lives past each other is actually well known and well > studied: >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization > > Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that > people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy > dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization. > > Then again, that's a deeply held cultural belief in the part of the > world that I live in, and you might not share it. ;-) > > sincerely, > Kim Bruning > Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias and forcing a discussion, it is also not very practical that we be the host for discussions on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. It fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated continuously on article talk pages. Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. But comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner perhaps leaving people feeling that no one cares about their views. And lots of people want to look up information or edit an interesting topic without having a consciousness raising discussion. There are many opportunities for people to interact and learn from each other without us placing them in a position where they feel like they need to do it or stay away. So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they are not comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF projects or the person. Sydney Poore User:FloNight ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On 14 September 2011 14:45, Sydney Poore wrote: > Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias > and forcing a discussion, it is also not very practical that we be the host > for discussions on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. It > fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated continuously on > article talk pages. Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. But > comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner perhaps leaving > people feeling that no one cares about their views. > And lots of people want to look up information or edit an interesting topic > without having a consciousness raising discussion. There are many > opportunities for people to interact and learn from each other without us > placing them in a position where they feel like they need to do it or stay > away. > So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they are not > comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF projects or the person. You appear to be confusing editor fatigue with reader fatigue. Doing stuff because it reduces editor conflict has, so far, been an effective way to reduce value to the readers. This is why we don't have POV forked articles: they solve a problem for the editors at the expense of the readers. You are also putting forward pretty much the same excuse for POV forks that Microsoft did in pushing POV forking for Encarta editions: where they wanted to make something marketable that would play nice and not risk upsetting people, rather than because the content was actually neutral, accurate or authoritative. That is: something for the convenience of the publisher, at the expense of the reader. The real world is holistic - everything links to everything else, and I'd have thought it *really obvious* that carving out chunks of that, particularly in the cause of making your own life easier over that of the reader, is POV-pushing. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Kim Bruning wrote: > The end game for this strategy of giving every (sub-) culture their own > subset of the images and/or text (when every medium agrees all at once), > and where everyone lives past each other is actually well known and well > studied: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization > > Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that > people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy > dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization. I think you're taking the use of an image filter to a bizarre absolute. There *are* shades of grey here. My understanding of the proposal is that it people will voluntarily have certain images that have the potential to cause offense hidden by default, with a click-to-show. When somebody starts saying that they want meaningfully different article content for every country or point of view, then I think you'd be justified in bringing this up. -- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarr...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:03 PM, wrote: > > 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. > > My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was. You are also making generalization about volunteers, that they might have only one or two hours to contribute. Even so, there are still thousands of them, many, many more than how many people can be employed at a time. My argument was, a) paying/hiring staff to edit a project is against the general ethos of our movement b) why only pay Wikinews staff to approach critical mass then? Why not Wikiquote or Wiktionary? or some new project? c) What happens when the staff finishes it's term? who sustains the project then? If people didn't care earlier they are likely to not care later and lastly d) You can not form a community from paid employees, they will leave and when the position ends, who runs the project? Regards Theo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:52 AM, David Gerard wrote: > On 14 September 2011 14:45, Sydney Poore wrote: > > > Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias > > and forcing a discussion, it is also not very practical that we be the > host > > for discussions on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. > It > > fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated continuously > on > > article talk pages. Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. > But > > comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner perhaps > leaving > > people feeling that no one cares about their views. > > And lots of people want to look up information or edit an interesting > topic > > without having a consciousness raising discussion. There are many > > opportunities for people to interact and learn from each other without us > > placing them in a position where they feel like they need to do it or > stay > > away. > > So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they are not > > comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF projects or the > person. > > > You appear to be confusing editor fatigue with reader fatigue. > > Doing stuff because it reduces editor conflict has, so far, been an > effective way to reduce value to the readers. This is why we don't > have POV forked articles: they solve a problem for the editors at the > expense of the readers. > > You are also putting forward pretty much the same excuse for POV forks > that Microsoft did in pushing POV forking for Encarta editions: where > they wanted to make something marketable that would play nice and not > risk upsetting people, rather than because the content was actually > neutral, accurate or authoritative. That is: something for the > convenience of the publisher, at the expense of the reader. > > The real world is holistic - everything links to everything else, and > I'd have thought it *really obvious* that carving out chunks of that, > particularly in the cause of making your own life easier over that of > the reader, is POV-pushing. > I see nothing about this image filter that hides images that is POV-pushing. Not when all that you are doing is putting in place an image filter that does not remove images but hides them, and still allows you to click through and see the image. Some people need it in place because the place they read articles prohibits controversial images. Other people want it because of a desire to keep controversial content out of their home. Giving these user control over image selection may bring * more* people to Wikipedia, and an article with controversial content. Intellectual curiosity may entice them to click through and see the image now or later. That is a Good Thing. Sydney Poore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
>> Sydney Poore wrote: > Other people want it because of a desire to keep controversial content out > of their home. Giving these user control over image selection may bring * > more* people to Wikipedia, and an article with controversial content. > Intellectual curiosity may entice them to click through and see the image > now or later. That is a Good Thing. May or may not. Did you ever live in a politically restrictive country? //Saper ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Marcin Cieslak wrote: > >> Sydney Poore wrote: > > > Other people want it because of a desire to keep controversial content > out > > of their home. Giving these user control over image selection may bring * > > more* people to Wikipedia, and an article with controversial content. > > Intellectual curiosity may entice them to click through and see the image > > now or later. That is a Good Thing. > > May or may not. Did you ever live in a politically restrictive country? > > //Saper > Hello Saper, Could you explain how that you think an user controlled image filter would make a difference to a person who lives on a country politically restricted country? Do you think that it would hurt or help, or make no difference? Sydney Poore User:FloNight ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: > 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. > Since the leadership of the foundation seems to be unable to speak for themselves, let me speak *for* them. "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what we are being payed for. We do realize how demoralizing it must be for the people in the trenches trying to weed out behaviours that can be only charitably called "gaming the system", when -- it is admitted -- we egregiously did that at the highest of levels of Foundation goverment, and for that we are duly sorry. Lessons shall be learned." -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost
On Wed Sep 14 07:40:20, WereSpielChequers wrote: > I think the responses are a credit to Wikinews. This one > http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002035.html > in particular. It seems that they need something like CorenSearchBot to > trackdown copyvio and plagiarism. Here's another interesting post regarding copyrights, Wikinews, and the fork. I disagree with the conclusion the author draws, but it's good to have both sides of the argument. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002040.html The problem is that, on larger projects, it's impossible to check every word in the project against every possible website in a timely manner. Imagine: en.wp installs FlaggedRevs for every article. All edits and new pages, before going "live", have to undergo thorough checks for factuality against the sources and detailed copyright checks, down to the last word. Think of what would happen. There backlog would soar, as there are not enough reviewers to check every edit as it is made in such detail, even with the assistance of bots. This potential situation is somewhat similar to Wikinews', but WN's problems are compounded by the fact that they *must* be always up-to-date or they are not useful at all. I happen to think this approach is somewhat un-wiki-like, especially when there are very few reviewers. I note that most WMF projects don't follow this model, instead removing copyright violations and inaccurate statements as they find them. In theory, this means that the articles will not be of any quality, but didn't someone once say, "Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory?" CorenSearchBot would be quite useful for both Wikinews and OpenGlobe; in general, I think wiki projects should take advantage of copyright searches more often. If anyone can install the bot on OpenGlobe, please post at our Village Pump. Regards, -Tempodivalse ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: > > "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a > situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been > duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route > ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what > we are being payed for." "Let us now prostrate ourselves at the feet of that segment of the community which opposed this idea, who we realise are the just and righteous leaders of the Wikimedia movement due to having the loudest voices, and beg for their absolution." -- Stephen Bain stephen.b...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 wrote: > My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is > what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was > built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still > be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better > work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are > passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid > to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was. Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done. For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find someone who would program that bot? The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News services regularly have more than 100 news per day. I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news service is not a news service without constant care, which could be done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not one article on Wikipedia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost
> From: Tempodivalse > To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:30:44 -0500 (CDT) > Subject: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection > bot half a project was lost > CorenSearchBot would be quite useful for both Wikinews and OpenGlobe; > in general, I think wiki projects should take advantage of copyright searches > more often. If anyone can install the bot on OpenGlobe, please post at our > Village > Pump. > > Regards, > > -Tempodivalse CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo stopped allowing automated queries. Bing's terms of use don't permit this either and apparently the same is true for Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CorenSearchBot I do like the idea of a place to request bots for projects other than en.wiki (not *global* bots, but bots running locally by request). Things like the unsigned bot. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Desired_bots ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 17:44, Stephen Bain wrote: > On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen > wrote: >> "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a >> situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been >> duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route >> ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what >> we are being payed for." > > "Let us now prostrate ourselves at the feet of that segment of the > community which opposed this idea, who we realise are the just and > righteous leaders of the Wikimedia movement due to having the loudest > voices, and beg for their absolution." "We accept the fact that our motives and motives of those who supported us lay in our suppressed unconscious part of mind; that it shows how deep are our fears to face the real world. But, as we said, we've learned the lesson and we'll try to face reality, no matter how painful it is. That's our job, as we are the leaders of Wikimedia movement." ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:49:06AM -0500, Aaron Adrignola wrote: > CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo > stopped allowing automated queries. Bing's terms of use don't permit > this either and apparently the same is true for Google. It might be useful to have a community operated spider, then? In that way, we could also optimize our database for the kinds of queries we need. sincerely, Kim Bruning ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 wrote: >> My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work >> is >> what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was >> built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we >> still >> be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better >> work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are >> passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get >> paid >> to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was. > > Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be > accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were > replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the > problem of principle, but the problem of having job done. > Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid, uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
>> > Other people want it because of a desire to keep controversial content >> out >> > of their home. Giving these user control over image selection may bring * >> > more* people to Wikipedia, and an article with controversial content. >> > Intellectual curiosity may entice them to click through and see the image >> > now or later. That is a Good Thing. >> >> May or may not. Did you ever live in a politically restrictive country? >> >> //Saper >> > > Hello Saper, > > Could you explain how that you think an user controlled image filter would > make a difference to a person who lives on a country politically restricted > country? Do you think that it would hurt or help, or make no difference? Can you help me in understanding in why such a user control feature may possibly bring more people to Wikipedia? I am especially interested in countries where access to information is restricted by the environment, for example by governments, whether the same reasoning applies to them as to less restrictive regions. I am asking this because I happened to grow up and have first 8 years of my education in such an environment and I still remember those times and how we approached the limited access to information. //Saper ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 18:19, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: > On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic >> >> Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be >> accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were >> replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the >> problem of principle, but the problem of having job done. >> > > Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or > even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when > I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on > all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT > MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was > doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid, > uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments > about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things > if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very > frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one. I probably worded it wrongly, but, I think that you didn't get my point anyway. One thing is to do boring job, the same thing is to have responsibility for taken job, even it's about voluntarism; completely other thing is to do that on time for prolonged period of time. If it's not about really really motivating task (I mean, you could find such volunteers if it's about sex), it's hard to organize of volunteers to do something in particular time frame. The problem is the next: * There is a need to have news every day and to keep eye on important events 24/7. * Note that it's not about regular stewards' night shift, when we have bots and users who warn us about irregularities and that the most complex irregular tasks require 10-15 minutes of doing simple things, like clicking on right links is. * Take as many volunteers as you want and give them the task to care about it. * Try to cover 24/7. It is likely that you'll need ~5 persons per small amount of time (let's say, one hour per day) + some people to replace the core editors for weekends or so -- to be sure that everything is covered and that volunteers are still motivated as they don't have too harsh tasks. That's around 100-200 highly involved persons, which is around the top Wikipedias -- as 100 edits/month is not enough for being "highly involved": 10 edits per workday makes more than 200 edits requirement and I don't think that any of Wikipedia editors think that their productive Wikipedian day was when they made 10 edits. Now, just imagine how many edits have to be made during *one* day to create a decent news story. And note that you'll have to *organize* them, actually, unlike in the Wikipedia case. In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only other option is to hire someone to do that job. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:37, Marcin Cieslak wrote: >> Hello Saper, >> >> Could you explain how that you think an user controlled image filter would >> make a difference to a person who lives on a country politically restricted >> country? Do you think that it would hurt or help, or make no difference? > > Can you help me in understanding in why such a user control feature may > possibly bring more people to Wikipedia? I am especially interested in > countries where access to information is restricted by the environment, > for example by governments, whether the same reasoning applies to them > as to less restrictive regions. > > I am asking this because I happened to grow up and have first 8 years > of my education in such an environment and I still remember those times > and how we approached the limited access to information. > > //Saper > Saper, the feature (as I understand it) would allow you sitting at your computer to turn off certain images. But it would not allow you to make the existence of those images disappear. You would see that an image was on the page. You would be able to click on it to make it visible. See mock-up -- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIF-Proposal-Workflow-Anon-FromImage-Step5.png We already do something similar. Certain templates in articles are presented in a collapsed state. You have to click on them to see them. It would not be possible (as I understand it) for the filter to make the presence of an image disappear entirely. Some people would welcome not being forced, as a first option, to see certain images simply because other people have decided they must. It's the idea of "my freedom ends where your nose begins." The hope is that reading and editing Wikipedia will appeal to a broader range of people if they are given more personal options over what they see when they first look at a page. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Marcin Cieslak wrote: > Can you help me in understanding in why such a user control feature may > possibly bring more people to Wikipedia? By giving people who do not want to run the risk of seeing certain images that they disagree with one less reason to _not_ go to Wikipedia. > I am especially interested in > countries where access to information is restricted by the environment, > for example by governments, whether the same reasoning applies to them > as to less restrictive regions. > Probably, although there might be additional cases where they want to block images, not because they themselves disagree with them, but because possession on their computer might be illegal for them. > I am asking this because I happened to grow up and have first 8 years > of my education in such an environment and I still remember those times > and how we approached the limited access to information. > What was that approach and why does it have to do with the issue at hand? I don't suppose that you approached it by shying away from any source of information that offered you the option of either getting everything you were still allowed or voluntarily constricting yourself even further. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] board meeting minutes: Aug 3 2011
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Lodewijk wrote: > Hi Phoebe, > > thanks a lot! > > Reading the minutes, I am wondering - are the reports of the independent > companies (KPMG and Daniel J. Fusco & Company) available online so that the > considerations of the board can be better understood? If so, it would > probably be helpful to link them from the minutes :) > > Thanks, > > Lodewijk > > Am 12. September 2011 19:27 schrieb phoebe ayers : > >> FYI: the minutes from the August 3rd, 2011 Board meeting in Haifa (the >> Wikimania meeting) are now posted: >> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-08-03 >> >> Regards, >> Phoebe Ayers Hey Lodewijk -- they are not online now, but I am checking to see if they can be. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Milos Rancic wrote: > > In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor > pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only > other option is to hire someone to do that job. Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature 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 -- 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 eventualism are at odds with each other. The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter. -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
Hi Milos On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:18 PM, Milos Rancic wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 wrote: > > My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work > is > > what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was > > built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we > still > > be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better > > work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are > > passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get > paid > > to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was. > > Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be > accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were > replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the > problem of principle, but the problem of having job done. > You are arguing that volunteers do not care about accuracy, I think that's a sweeping assessment for a very wide spectrum of volunteers. What about the hundred of editors covering breaking news stories on enwp by the minute? Would you like to dispute that they don't care or strive for accuracy as a story develops? Yes, more volunteer position were replaced by paid staff, that did not necessarily make things any efficient. I can instead argue it created un-necessary bureaucracy and hierarchy where it didn't exist before and made things more inefficient. A lot of people would dispute if there is wisdom in replacing tasks that are handled by volunteers with staff- OTRS, IRC, certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1] In the mean time, there is an entire community department with more than a dozen staff members yet the appearance is, it is still preferable that the community handle it. > For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for > Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on > many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't > have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews > editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things > for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time > the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just > had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find > someone who would program that bot? > That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors. Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care about what happens next. > > The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I > have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow > without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews > edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News > services regularly have more than 100 news per day. > I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators, micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not hard if you know how to tap into it. > I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which > English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing > articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant > community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news > service is not a news service without constant care, which could be > done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per > month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not > at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not > one article on Wikipedia. > My point still stands, you can not sustain a project on paid staff. If you do, it is not a wiki, or a community, just office work. Theo [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2#Election_Committee ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih wrote: > 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 eventualism are at > odds with each other. > > The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for > sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the > latter. > > -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post) > There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd experiences, etc. It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On 13 September 2011 13:06, Milos Rancic wrote: > 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 If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. We shouldn't stray away from that. So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical mass of editors to overcome these issues. So... you could have a strict review system; if there were enough good reviewers you could cover a broad spectrum of news; if there were enough editors you could implement collaborative & freely edited original content; if there was enough interested editors The problem is that Wikinews already has a high barrier to entry - it doesn't fit a model of casual contribution once or twice a week (or month). Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a more leisurely model. For "news" that model does not simply cut-n-paste across. Tom ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote: > The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical > mass of editors to overcome these issues. > > So... > > Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial > full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia > doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a > more leisurely model. Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due to lack of it? sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih wrote: >> 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 eventualism are at >> odds with each other. >> >> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for >> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the >> latter. >> >> -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post) >> > There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of > interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews > should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. > Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary > people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd > experiences, etc. > > It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some > good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some > original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, > supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think. > I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread: 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 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. 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. -Andrew ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
2011/9/14 Andre Engels : > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Marcin Cieslak wrote: >> I am especially interested in >> countries where access to information is restricted by the environment, >> for example by governments, whether the same reasoning applies to them >> as to less restrictive regions. >> > > Probably, although there might be additional cases where they want to block > images, not because they themselves disagree with them, but because > possession on their computer might be illegal for them. My understanding is the images WILL be downloaded, just as collapsed tables are downloaded. So with or without the filter would not make much of a difference for the people Saper is talking about. Strainu ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih wrote: >>> 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 eventualism are at >>> odds with each other. >>> >>> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for >>> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the >>> latter. >>> >>> -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post) >>> >> There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of >> interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews >> should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people. >> Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary >> people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd >> experiences, etc. >> >> It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some >> good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some >> original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles, >> supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think. >> > > > I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread: > > 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 > > 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. > > 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. > > -Andrew Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain questions to those women? That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us a whole new depth of coverage. This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without stifling early efforts. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:54:07PM +1000, Andrew Garrett wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Kim Bruning wrote: > > The end game for this strategy of giving every (sub-) culture their own > > subset of the images and/or text (when every medium agrees all at once), > > and where everyone lives past each other is actually well known and well > > studied: > > ? ? ? ?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization > > > > Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that > > people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy > > dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization. > > I think you're taking the use of an image filter to a bizarre > absolute. There *are* shades of grey here. My understanding of the > proposal is that it people will voluntarily have certain images that > have the potential to cause offense hidden by default, with a > click-to-show. When somebody starts saying that they want meaningfully > different article content for every country or point of view, then I > think you'd be justified in bringing this up. Well, when I ask people why they want the feature, that's what it comes down to. They say they want to be able to hide things that are offensive to their own culture. (Given that it would work) This method would allow them to do so, without imposing straight-out censorship on their fellow (wo)man. Why else would you need to hide things from yourself, if not because somewhere in your past, you learned that it was "wrong" or "uncomfortable" to look at? sincerely, Kim Bruning ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
Unfortunately the proposed mechanism (which cannot with integrity be disentangled from the proposal, for juts such reasons as this) would download the images regardless, the filter would merely affect the display. It is possible that even a smarter mechanism might suffer the same drawback if a web accelerator is in use. On 14/09/2011 18:17, Andre Engels wrote: > Probably, although there might be additional cases where they want to block > images, not because they themselves disagree with them, but because > possession on their computer might be illegal for them. > > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih wrote: >> 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. >> >> 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. > > Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital > mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find > some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a > Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain > questions to those women? > > That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in > the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in > the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us > a whole new depth of coverage. > > This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news > organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and > collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have > that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give > people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to > have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without > stifling early efforts. Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's very much in line with this. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations http://vimeo.com/26469276 Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing typed words. -Andrew ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 09:45:38AM -0400, Sydney Poore wrote: > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization > > > > Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that > > people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy > > dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization. > > Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias > and forcing a discussion, Yes, and this bias against bias has a name, it's called "NPOV". If someone is POV pushing, then hell yes I'm going to confront them, NameTheProblem, and attempt force a discussion. If they don't want to talk after 3 such attempts (warnings), they can be blocked, or even banned permanently. We know many non self-preserving versus preserving systems: *lawlessness versus rule of law *bsd versus gpl *wordpress (1POV) versus wikipedia (NPOV). If wikipedia is to not merely be a collection of opinions, NPOV is rather important. And the combination of NPOV and consensus forces people to confront their biases, discuss them, and resolve them, and in that way reach the closest approximation to the truth that we can achieve. You may have heard of this process. ;-) It's what we use to write an encyclopedia. > it is also not very practical that we be the host for discussions > on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. Fortunately, this doesn't happen in most of the encyclopedia. Consensus has worked rather well for 10 years and counting. > It fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated > continuously on article talk pages. That's clearly pathological. Repeated discussions and positions fall under [[WP:3RR]]. The long consensus loop (also documented in [[WP:BRD]] for particular applications) applies. > Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. There is no other reason for talk page discussions. Wikipedia is [[WP:NOT]] a discussion board. > But comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner > perhaps leaving people feeling that no one cares about their > views. [Citation needed]. The rule of thumb is that if your concerns are not addressed on the talk page for 24 hours (enough time for every time zone to respond), you may go ahead and be [[WP:BOLD]] and apply your content change. > And lots of people want to look up information or This group I can sympathize with, somewhat, and I'm willing to discuss the upsides and downsides to catering to this group. My position here is that -in general- giving people the ability to hide within their own culture leads to pillarization in the long term. This is a most unpleasant state of affairs. If you have a rotten tooth, do you go to the dentist to have it pulled (even though this is briefly very unpleasant) or do you leave the tooth to rot further (where at some point, you will suffer pain all day) ? >[people want to] edit an interesting topic without having a >consciousness raising discussion. You mean edit an interesting topic using only their own POV, and not taking other POVs or NPOV into account? That's POV pushing. That's not permitted. Either reach consensus and adhere to NPOV, or leave. That's a founding issue. It is non-negotiable. > There are many opportunities for people to interact > and learn from each other without us placing them in a position > where they feel like they need to do it or stay away. The point of any wiki is to allow people to interact and learn from each other. Some of the things you will learn might be uncomfortable. If you can't deal with this, then yes you might want to stay away. Fortunately there are not many people who are like that in the 21st century. (Though more than I thought) > So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they > are not comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF > projects or the person. Participants/Editors are going to have to see all pages unmodified or they cannot judge the page for POV issues, vandalism, or etc. Pillarization among *participants* always leads to internal strife. That must be prevented. Non-participants are an interesting problem. We really want them to become participants, rather than passive fence-sitters. A wiki usually serves its participants first, (with the world at large being a secondary goal; after all - the entire world is invited and welcome to participate if they want to). I can't ASSUME things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we don't know. sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Thursday 15 September 2011 12:40 AM, Andrew Lih wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih wrote: >>> 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. >>> >>> 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. >> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital >> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find >> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a >> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain >> questions to those women? >> >> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in >> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in >> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us >> a whole new depth of coverage. >> >> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news >> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and >> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have >> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give >> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to >> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without >> stifling early efforts. > Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's > very much in line with this. > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations > http://vimeo.com/26469276 > > Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project > covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that > had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the > shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those > interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source > material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it > provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage > audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing > typed words. I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance, is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news channel's content per day. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the potential to be something really significant. As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project once a few things are done). A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala wrote: > It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the > Wikinews model. No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork. Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important enough to die for. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote: > On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala wrote: > >> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the >> Wikinews model. > > No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. > Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news > dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork. The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the infrastructure that could have really enabled it? > > Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important > enough to die for. > > > - d. > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Achal Prabhala wrote: > > > I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to > comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells > me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not > quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the > television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment > feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what > mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as > journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance, > is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a > firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news > channel's content per day. > It really wasn't ahead of it's time. It is actually quiet behind its time. Amateur news, bloggers broke that barrier much before. > > It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the > Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was > founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and > much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of > journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded > as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it > currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the > potential to be something really significant. > I disagree, the world follows instant news model. News is faster than it has even been, free and available in every conceivable format. You are treating Wikinews as some distinct model, it really isn't. It's a wiki where they add news instead of articles, nothing more. Let me tell you, what's plaguing it currently- The review process. > > As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews > to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be > delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like > perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought > about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as > Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be > used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have > fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I > think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia > squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the > limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge > that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion > on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project > once a few things are done). > I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work. > A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of > audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost > none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping > into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia on the > grounds of it constituting a 'primary source'. (This is also a problem > for Wikipedians who'd like to use private archives - even corporate > archives - as sources, but can't). But there is nothing to say that > Wikinews could not tap into this vast pool of curated material and > create 'news' out of it. In general, it would appear that Wikinews has a > set of very flexible policies and practices, and it seems as if they > could be put to boundless good use. > Wikinews policies aren't the problem. Wikipedia will still not accept them and it should not. You can also try Wiktionary or Wikiquote. The issue is the research is original, not peer-reviewed or published by a reputable third party and hence, would remain a primary source. And no, Wikinews will not be able to tap into the raw pool. That would be a different project all together. Since covering archives and Breaking news stories are two very separate areas. Theo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 13:10, Andrew Lih wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih wrote: >>> 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. >>> >>> 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. >> >> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital >> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find >> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a >> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain >> questions to those women? >> >> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in >> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in >> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us >> a whole new depth of coverage. >> >> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news >> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and >> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have >> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give >> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to >> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without >> stifling early efforts. > > Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's > very much in line with this. > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations > http://vimeo.com/26469276 > > Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project > covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that > had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the > shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those > interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source > material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it > provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage > audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing > typed words. > > -Andrew > I think the oral citation project is a wonderful idea. I would extend it to the whole world, including areas rich in written sources, because there are always stories out there that give you more depth. The student project you describe would be a great resource to add to the Wikipedia article. Could it be done? Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Achal Prabhala wrote: > > > On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote: > > On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala wrote: > > > >> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the > >> Wikinews model. > > > > No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool. > > Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news > > dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork. > > The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I > think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen > journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind > Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been > to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is > also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the > infrastructure that could have really enabled it? > > Ahh.Blogs? News-aggregators? 'Citizen journalism' etc. and repeatedly calling it ahead of the curve seems rather hyperbolic. Are you forgetting an entire generation of bloggers that dominated the mainstream media and continue to do. Theo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 wrote: > I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research > requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not > a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work. The no original research policy was never intended to keep out material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal view of what that means. Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and not interpreted. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 wrote: > > I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research > > requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is > not > > a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work. > > The no original research policy was never intended to keep out > material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own > opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original > research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have > to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push > the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal > view of what that means. > > Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about > the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of > people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV > issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. > Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and > not interpreted. > > Sarah > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those standards. Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found somewhere. Theo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On 14 September 2011 18:34, Kim Bruning wrote: > Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Yes, and that went really well, didn't it? ;) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
> > A wiki usually serves its participants first, (with the world at > large being a secondary goal; after all - the entire world is > invited and welcome to participate if they want to). I've commented at length already on why this is the wrong approach; and forces us into an even more insular community with greater biases (you only have to look at the different ways that different language Wiki's present topics to understand how little "neutrality" we have. There is a bias; it's just that each community agrees on it). This is a vicious circle that ignores our readers (who are a much wider cross section) and leaves a somewhat close minded and inaccessible community that believes it is the pillar of neutrality :) I can't ASSUME > things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do > (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we > don't know. > And this takes us full circle to just about my first question on this long thread has anyone actually asked our consumers what they would like to see? I am going to guess this will again go unanswered and un-actioned :) Tom ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Spiders and bots. Was "The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost"
I remember hearing a couple of times that CorenSearchBot was down, but just
assumed that something so important was being rescued, though I did wonder
slightly about the recent net increase in articles on EN wiki. 3,738,826
articles today means we've way overshot the 3 million projection, the 3.5
million prediction is looking distinctly cautious and and even the 4 million
by late 2012
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediapercgrowth.PNG looks
somewhat unceiling like.
Could we get Google and Bing to make an exception for CorenSearchbot? If not
then I'd agree that a spider would make sense, though I've no idea what that
would cost. Having our own spider could be useful for other things though,
including:
# bot adding of {{deadlink}} templates.
# creating our own wayback machine showing webpages as they were when they
were cited by our articles
# a "may have moved here" table so we could add possibly moved here and
wayback options to {{deadlink}}.
# A bot to update links as sites reorganise and organisations rebrand,
without it we could be mostly deadlinked as early as mid-century.
#A bot that listed probable deaths based on obituaries in reliable sources
and even updates to subjects' own websites would also be useful.
# Possible breaches of our copyright would be another potential use, but
maybe we just need to rename "what links here" as "what links here
(internal)" and add "what links here (external)".
WSC
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:09:44 +0200
> From: Kim Bruning
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio
>detection bot half a project was lost
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>
> Message-ID: <20110914170944.c22...@bruning.lan>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:49:06AM -0500, Aaron Adrignola wrote:
> > CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo
> > stopped allowing automated queries. Bing's terms of use don't permit
> > this either and apparently the same is true for Google.
>
> It might be useful to have a community operated spider, then? In that way,
> we could also optimize
> our database for the kinds of queries we need.
>
> sincerely,
>Kim Bruning
>
>
>
>
>
___
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through community efforts with no paid editors. 2011/9/14 Kim Bruning > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote: > > The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical > > mass of editors to overcome these issues. > > > > So... > > > > Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial > > full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an > encyclopaedia > > doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a > > more leisurely model. > > > Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps > wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due > to lack of it? > > sincerely, >Kim Bruning > > -- > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Spiders and bots. Was "The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost"
On 14 Sep 2011, at 23:05, WereSpielChequers wrote: > I remember hearing a couple of times that CorenSearchBot was down, but just > assumed that something so important was being rescued, though I did wonder > slightly about the recent net increase in articles on EN wiki. 3,738,826 > articles today means we've way overshot the 3 million projection, the 3.5 > million prediction is looking distinctly cautious and and even the 4 million > by late 2012 > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediapercgrowth.PNG looks > somewhat unceiling like. > > Could we get Google and Bing to make an exception for CorenSearchbot? If not > then I'd agree that a spider would make sense, though I've no idea what that > would cost. Having our own spider could be useful for other things though, If this is the approach taken we should talk to some of the smaller search operators with their own crawl databases Implementing and effective crawler is non-trivial at scale :-) DuckDuckGo springs to mind; they do their own crawling and the guy behind is quite approachable. Tom ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Milos Rancic wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 17:44, Stephen Bain wrote: >> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen >> wrote: >>> "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a >>> situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been >>> duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route >>> ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what >>> we are being payed for." >> >> "Let us now prostrate ourselves at the feet of that segment of the >> community which opposed this idea, who we realise are the just and >> righteous leaders of the Wikimedia movement due to having the loudest >> voices, and beg for their absolution." > > "We accept the fact that our motives and motives of those who > supported us lay in our suppressed unconscious part of mind; that it > shows how deep are our fears to face the real world. But, as we said, > we've learned the lesson and we'll try to face reality, no matter how > painful it is. That's our job, as we are the leaders of Wikimedia > movement." > This is not about who, or what, this is about how. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Kim Bruning wrote: > Well, when I ask people why they want the feature, that's what it > comes down to. They say they want to be able to hide things that are > offensive to their own culture. (Given that it would work) This > method would allow them to do so, without imposing straight-out > censorship on their fellow (wo)man. > > Why else would you need to hide things from yourself, if not because > somewhere in your past, you learned that it was "wrong" or > "uncomfortable" to look at? I'll answer with an example. I am very uncomfortable with medical images. It's not a cultural thing, you can get these things by in PG movies these days. But whenever I see an image of somebody being given an injection, or being seriously injured, or who is seriously injured, I am physically sick and in danger of passing out. It's called 'vasovagal syncope', if you're curious. When I want to look up a medical term (that I often don't understand in the first place and have no idea what to expect of) on Wikipedia, I have to very quickly scroll down or look away if it's illustrated with a particularly graphic image. Obviously, I would like to view Wikipedia in such a way that I am warned before I'm shown something that is going to affect me in such a way. However, I realise that I am not everyone and there is no reason to remove thousands of high-quality, educational images from articles because I'm not comfortable with medical imagery. That really would be "censorship". Therefore, it would be really nice if I could choose, just for my own sake and on my own behalf, to have these images hidden to start with, and if I want to see them I can click on them and have them shown to me. Maybe you don't have any problems viewing any image whatsoever, but there are plenty of people for whom it's more than just a 'preference' based on some cultural norm that you don't agree with because you're modern and you transcend cultural taboos. But I'd wager that, in general, (if you get away from Wikipedians) you're in the minority. —Andrew -- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarr...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Sep 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Theo10011 wrote: > On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah wrote: > >> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011 wrote: >> >> Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about >> the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of >> people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV >> issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text. >> Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and >> not interpreted. >> >> Sarah >> >> ___ >> foundation-l mailing list >> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >> > > I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources > from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why > their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those > thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement > exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those > standards. I'm not sure how this is related to the multimedia and images question? Will having multimedia illustrating an article mean that we have more cure-alls and diet-pills articles? Or is this a slippery-slope argument? > > Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found > somewhere. > > Theo > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Heather Ford Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org @hfordsa on Twitter http://hblog.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Milos Rancic wrote: > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 17:44, Stephen Bain wrote: >> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen >> wrote: >>> "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a >>> situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been >>> duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route >>> ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what >>> we are being payed for." >> >> "Let us now prostrate ourselves at the feet of that segment of the >> community which opposed this idea, who we realise are the just and >> righteous leaders of the Wikimedia movement due to having the loudest >> voices, and beg for their absolution." > > "We accept the fact that our motives and motives of those who > supported us lay in our suppressed unconscious part of mind; that it > shows how deep are our fears to face the real world. But, as we said, > we've learned the lesson and we'll try to face reality, no matter how > painful it is. That's our job, as we are the leaders of Wikimedia > movement." Could we not? This isn't very useful to anybody. -- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarr...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: > 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. Thanks for your interest; it isn't the only expression of support to have reached me. A *fresh* version of Wikipedia is obviously a major step to take, and I have to consider and reconcile the various inputs I've received, and am still receiving, and formulate a proposal document that is going to address the issues, and of course, it will be open for discussion to those who are interested. My current preference is for a partnership-based model, yet one able to generate revenue and still largely remain within the original objectives of Wikipedia. Squaring the circle may not be possible in this case, and good editors will be lost. Meanwhile, only time will tell whether it works, and that depends on achieving the proper mechanism for moving forward, and sticking to it. I'm hopefully moving premises shortly, so will be unlikely to be able to fully commit my efforts for about a month; but at least that gives time for interested parties to comment, since this is not something that should be rushed into. However, my spare time, such as it is, will be devoted to this project. Regards. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 wrote: > certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the > upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a > Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his > departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1] Stewards had difficulties because Cary is not Volunteer Coordinator anymore, although organizing elections is not too hard task. Cary organized the first elections in 2011, although he was not VC anymore. 2009-2010 were not so bright years for stewards. *Fortunately*, on last two elections we've got a couple of stewards who deal more with stewards meta issues, although both elections were on the edge not to be held. Just because of Cary we had those elections. > That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors. > Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I > never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am > all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more > bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community > members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they > should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care > about what happens next. The same is with positions which require more specific organizational and professional knowledge than just writing articles in wiki code. Editing encyclopedia is quite different than editing news edition. Tasks of Wikinews editors (not journalists/contributors, editors) are comparable to the tasks of WMF management. You have to have employed people to take care about paying bills, otherwise you won't have servers. Similarly, you have to have people who care about integrity of Wikinews, otherwise you won't have functional news source. While I prefer to see volunteers to do the job, I would be happy to explain to one employee (better from community background than not) how to program, maintain and develop those bots. On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton wrote: > If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we > should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional > project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to > do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. > We shouldn't stray away from that. > > So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using > volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the > critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to > stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that? The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees? I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would be Wikinews community. On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011 wrote: > I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it > can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty > of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators, > micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not > hard if you know how to tap into it. Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day (there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future more than any other project. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:50:55PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote: > > > > A wiki usually serves its participants first, (with the world at > > large being a secondary goal; after all - the entire world is > > invited and welcome to participate if they want to). > I've commented at length already on why this is the wrong approach; and > forces us into an even more insular community with greater biases Initially, this is how the system worked exclusively, and we got more and more participation. Since 2005, people have slowly been making things harder for new participants, and the trend reversed itself. So your conclusion does not match the statistics. The inverse conclusion is warrented. A stronger emphasis on anonymous participation and greater ease of access to talk pages (perhaps through tools such as liquid threads) will likely improve our situation considerably. I certainly doubt it will harm it :-P > (you only > have to look at the different ways that different language Wiki's present > topics to understand how little "neutrality" we have. There is a bias; it's > just that each community agrees on it). > The fact that we have different language wikis working past each other is actually a form of (inadvertant) pillarization. As a thought experiment: In fact, if culture issues are the reason for this filter, couldn't we just terminate commons? Then each project could keep images that are ok in their culture, and discard images that they are 'uncomfortable' with. If you have reasons why we shouldn't terminate commons, those reasons are likely to overlap with some reasons why we shouldn't filter. > This is a vicious circle that ignores our readers (who are a much wider > cross section) and leaves a somewhat close minded and inaccessible community > that believes it is the pillar of neutrality :) There is a vicious circle happening, but I really doubt that steps such as more openness, more outreach, clearer and easier editing, and more prominent access to talk pages are part of that circle. :-P The vicious circle I see is as follows: *START: Wikipedia works by having amateurs work together using a tight, rapid feedback cycle for editing. (More mistakes are made, but they're caught as quickly) * People start 'raising the bar for quality' * some people fall below the bar * more discussion is requested, and more pre-study is required. * It takes longer to make an edit to an article * less mistakes are made, but less mistakes are caught too. * Netto less articles are written, although only slightly higher quality quality (diminishing returns) * END: You practically have to write an article fully-formed in userspace. a lot of work done in mainspace ends up deleted or reverted. > > I can't ASSUME > > things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do > > (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we > > don't know. > And this takes us full circle to just about my first question on this long > thread has anyone actually asked our consumers what they would like to > see? Yes. We do. That's why we have a discussion tab on every single page. Would you like it to be more prominent, in blinking letters 3 miles high? Perhaps we should do something like that (within reason) if you think it will help. But the community attitude will have to change a bit too. Right now the community is becoming more and more insular, and unwilling to "talk to strangers". Outside participation is possible, permitted, and encouraged at page-level granularity. Where it is not, we have a problem with a known solution. At the moment, very few people are going page-by-page and solving it though. We may need some new forms of patrol. :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih wrote: > The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for > sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the > latter. As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet running. There is nothing artificial in that. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 09:41:41AM +1000, Andrew Garrett wrote: > On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Kim Bruning wrote: > > Well, when I ask people why they want the feature, that's what it > > comes down to. They say they want to be able to hide things that are > > offensive to their own culture. (Given that it would work) This > > method would allow them to do so, without imposing straight-out > > censorship on their fellow (wo)man. > > > > Why else would you need to hide things from yourself, if not because > > somewhere in your past, you learned that it was "wrong" or > > "uncomfortable" to look at? > > I'll answer with an example. > > Therefore, it would be really nice if I could choose, just for my own > sake and on my own behalf, to have these images hidden to start with, > and if I want to see them I can click on them and have them shown to > me. And that's fine. Your user agent can do this for you in part. If you don't understand how your user agent works [1], we could certainly add some options to wikipedia to do this for you. There is exactly 0 problem with this. The only problem is with people who make categories that say "this might be an offensive image". (They probably would miss medical anyway. The bias is against sex, nudity, and etc). It turns out that such categories are censorship tools, and should be avoided. Even if we don't use them to censor, others certainly can and will. Clicking something to "Hide all images until I want them shown", is a standard function of your browser[2], or a plugin could be made to provide an extra button in the wikipedia UI. Hmm, the default firefox image options are not that great actually. There's no way to tell that there were images there in the first place. HideImages plugin is close to what you want. Maybe we need a better firefox plugin. And maybe an extension could be written that does this function. sincerely, Kim Bruning [1] many people have never heard of F5 or CTRL-F, let alone suchd complex things as clicking in a menu. I don't understand this, but I've given up and am willing to work with it. [2] In firefox: Edit->Preferences [content] [X] Load images automatically -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 3:05 AM, Andrew Garrett wrote: >>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen >>> wrote: "We do realize that what we did was wrong, and this is clearly not a situation where we can go on with the 'your opinions have been duly noted' haughty attitude. We apologize for even going that route ever in the first place. The community rules, we serve, that is what we are being payed for." >>> >>> "Let us now prostrate ourselves at the feet of that segment of the >>> community which opposed this idea, who we realise are the just and >>> righteous leaders of the Wikimedia movement due to having the loudest >>> voices, and beg for their absolution." >> >> "We accept the fact that our motives and motives of those who >> supported us lay in our suppressed unconscious part of mind; that it >> shows how deep are our fears to face the real world. But, as we said, >> we've learned the lesson and we'll try to face reality, no matter how >> painful it is. That's our job, as we are the leaders of Wikimedia >> movement." > > Could we not? > > This isn't very useful to anybody. > Allow me to disagree. This very serious dysfunction in the proper allocation of roles in the foundation, and the boil *must* be lanced. I remember Florence Devouard (when she was still chair) describing to me a chart drawn by Brad Patrick about roles and the proper allocation of them. If either is listening, maybe they could copy the chart for circulation around the staff and current board. I genuinely believe that this can be an extremely useful learning experience for the leadership. Not to be repeated; once should be enough. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On 14/09/11 19:56, Kim Bruning wrote: > Why else would you need to hide things from yourself, if not because > somewhere in your past, you learned that it was "wrong" or > "uncomfortable" to look at? Because somewhere in your past, you found out that it was wrong or uncomfortable to look at. You have never seen an image and felt uncomfortable? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:53 AM, David Gerard wrote: > On 11 September 2011 17:22, Kim Bruning wrote: >> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 09:38:38AM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote: > >>> I wrote the questions, with Phoebe and SJ, in Boston at the Wikipedia >>> in Higher Ed conference. >>> It's not a secret -- I wrote about it here: >>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AImage_filter_referendum%2FResults%2Fen&action=historysubmit&diff=2880100&oldid=2880046 > >> Awesome. That puts so much into perspective :-) >> Thank you for answering that question, Sue! > > > Yes, thank you :-) > > I note SJ's comment on the lack of a "do you want this?" question: > > "I too wish that the separate question had been asked. –SJ talk | > translate 20:54, 5 September 2011 (UTC)" > > SJ, what can now be done to ask this - vital and missing - question? > > > - d. David -- and all -- I've been away for a week offline, so am trying to catch up. I'm picking a random point in the thread to try and answer lots of questions at once, from my own viewpoint. Re: the problems with the referendum -- it's my understanding that the committee in charge of running the referendum will be conducting a formal postmortem. But of course as someone involved I've been doing a lot of thinking about it, and reading comments, and a lot of what I've identified is just simple hindsight. Here are some of those things: a) In hindsight, of course we should not have called it a referendum; it was a survey, or a poll, on various design questions. I don't think anything specific was intended by the nomenclature one way or another -- it just started out being called a referendum, and the name stuck, and by the time people identified problems with that name the pages had already been translated and it seemed too hard to change it. Perhaps we should have anyway, given all the drama around the name. But nothing special was meant by it one way or the other; certainly no deception about intent. b) In hindsight I would wanted us to get better analysis infrastructure set up ahead of time, if I'd realized this would be the single largest vote in Wikimedia history :) That said -- I am glad we have learned some things about conducting votes, and I think that the committee did handle the vote quite well. There are always things to improve, but they did a great job at handling voting problems gracefully and getting the results out fast, and I would like to thank them for all of their work, as well as for handling a difficult topic well -- committee members got a lot of undeserved personal flak as a result of volunteering for this job. c) In hindsight I would have done more to clarify the role of the board in this process. The board didn't ask for the referendum to be conducted; Sue did, as part of being directed to implement the board's resolution. The board has naturally been sent the results, and I acted as board liaison to the referendum committee, and helped think through the questions -- but the referendum wasn't specifically a board project. (The board did ask for the feature to be built in the first place, however). d) In hindsight I would have made sure that we had more careful review of the questions for their utility as survey instruments, perhaps running them past the research committee. There's not much precedent for that, but we could start! e) The big question -- should we have asked "yes or no" or not? I pushed for not asking this directly because of the premise that we were asking for broad-scale community input on design, and because the board had already asked for the thing to be built, and because "importance" felt like a more subtle measure of where people stood. In hindsight, given all the controversy and the number of people who if they were consulted at all wanted to be asked simply yes or no, that was likely a mistake. People certainly made their views known in the comments and talk pages though, and I am glad we have that rich input. f) It's not a surprise to me, or the Board, that this is controversial; from what the referendum did measure, it seems clear that the community is fairly split. I am glad that we had the referendum though, because it did reveal that split to be bimodal and complex. I have reviewed a sampling of the comments, and along with the negatives and those opposed on practical and philosophical grounds there are many positives, and many arguments for why such a feature is needed. And remember, we did broaden the net so that both long-term heavy editors and occasional, mostly-reader editors had a chance to say their piece, which I think was a success in getting much wider and diverse input that we generally do just here on foundation-l or on meta talk pages. So given that, I think we owe it to the community to take both the negatives and the positives seriously; we cannot in good faith ignore either side. Contrary to some speculation on this list, the board did try to think hard through the pros and cons before a
Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome to Wikimedia D.C.
On 12/09/11 19:01, phoebe ayers wrote: > Congratulations and welcome to Wikimedia District of Columbia, the > 36th Wikimedia chapter and 2nd chapter to be formed in the U.S.: Welcome aboard Wiki D.C. :-D -- Ashar Voultoiz ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
> > > > I can't ASSUME > > > things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do > > > (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we > > > don't know. > > And this takes us full circle to just about my first question on this > long > > thread has anyone actually asked our consumers what they would like > to > > see? > > Yes. We do. That's why we have a discussion tab on every single page. > Would you like it to be more prominent, in blinking letters 3 miles high? > Perhaps we should do something like that (within reason) if you think it > will help. But the community attitude will have to change a bit too. Right > now the community is becoming more and more insular, and unwilling to > "talk to strangers". > > Outside participation is possible, permitted, and encouraged at page-level > granularity. Where it is not, we have a problem with a known solution. > > At the moment, very few people are going page-by-page and solving it > though. We may need some new forms of patrol. :-) > Whilst the discussion tab is good for a small sub-section of our readers, it doesn't cover everyone. A large swathe of people don't even notice those tabs. Or if they do they don't understand them. This is why OTRS gets emails saying "I saw X mistake on Y article"; because emailing in a problem makes more sense to some people. >From the perspective of broader product development, getting people to navigate the community discussion pages is non-trivial. In any decent organisation you go to your pool of passive users and force them to respond (i.e. pro-active surveys etc.) > The fact that we have different language wikis working past each other is > actually a form of (inadvertant) pillarization. This was the point I was making. The extension being... we should be condensing all of these view points and then allowing cultural perspectives to modify the experience as you want. Enforcing a cultural perspective on someone is one of the sneakiest forms of POV pushing. Tom ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
