Re: [Foundation-l] Call for POTY Helpers and Translators

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Will you use the Translate extension for translations or will you just ask
the translators to do it old-style? Please consider the extension - it's
far more convenient for the translators and for the managers. It's already
installed in Meta.
06.04.2012 6:42 пользователь "Mono"  написал:

> Hello Wikimedians,
>
> On behalf of the 2011 POTY committee, I'd like to invite you to join the
> Commons Picture of the Year (POTY) Committee. A volunteer-led contest,
> Picture of the Year is run by an organizing committee of Wikimedians. Since
> its inception in 2006, thousands of photos from people all over the world
> have been selected as Featured Pictures, and all of them are free for
> anyone in the world to reuse, remix and share. POTY is one of Wikimedia's
> most prominent events.
>
> The committee currently has several dedicated members, but we're looking
> for some more help. Last year, the committee counted 2,463 votes from
> Wikimedians! There are lots of ways to help out, including helping set up
> contest pages, posting messages in relevant locations, *translating
> interface messages,* assisting voters, and counting votes. We want to make
> POTY 2011 accessible to as many people as possible, so translating pages is
> a priority.
>
> We're looking for a handful of experienced and dedicated users. Together,
> we'll be able to run one of the most successful POTY contests ever. If
> you're interested in helping out, *please fill out this
> form<
> http://pictureoftheyear.wufoo.com/forms/picture-of-the-year-2011-committee/
> >
> * and we'll get in touch with you. You can also keep up with the POTY 2011
> contest on Twitter , in the #poty2011 IRC
> channel on Freenode<
> http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=poty2011&uio=MTE9MTMz98>,
> or by visiting the POTY page on the Wikimedia
> Commons.
> If you have any questions, feel free to email me.
>
> Thank you for your consideration,
>
> User:Mono
> Coordinator
> POTY 2011
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Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/3/14 David Gerard :
> On 14 March 2012 05:16, Béria Lima  wrote:
>
>> I will actually look for a copy of the 15th edition (for sentimental
>> reasons) to buy before they get too rare and too expensive :D Of course I
>> will miss it! If Britannica is gone we will need to start printing
>> Wikipedia ;-)
>
>
> I see old sets of Britannica and other encyclopedias cheap on eBay.
> The catch is usually "buyer must collect" :-)

The rather wonderful 34-volume Encyclopedia Hebraica can easily be
found on a popular Israeli "free giveaway" site with the same
condition... and at a lot of garbage containers :,,(

Even though it was last updated in 1980, i have all the volumes right
near my working desk and i actually open it at least once a month to
actually find information.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/3/14 Samuel Klein :
> "Today our digital database is much larger than what we can fit in the
> print set.

And yet the article "Gesenius, Heinrich Friedrich Wilhlem" has 745
words in the 1911 print edition and 175 in the current online edition.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Why is Arbcom is actively promoting Wikipedia Review?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Or, more precisely, the English Wikipedia list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l .

This list is for movement-wide issues. An ArbCom exists only in some
language projects and is not a movement-wide issue.


2012/3/11 Gerard Meijssen :
> Hoi,
> This would in my opinion be more appropriate on the Wikipedia-l. This list
> is for foundation related subjects.
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
> On 11 March 2012 12:19, Robert Alvarez  wrote:
>
>> Can anyone explain why Arbcom members are not required to refrain from
>> posting and responding to requests on Wikipedia Review while they are on
>> Arbcom? It seems a basic conflict of interest to be actively promoting the
>> opinions and drawing unnecessary attention to attack posts against
>> Wikipedia contributers by banned users.
>>
>> I see at least two current Arbcom members posting there quite recently and
>> even responding to requests of banned users to do things on their behalf on
>> Wikipedia (such as John Vandenberg working for Edward Buckner).
>>
>> One might argue that Arbcom members have a right to free speech, however
>> this seems to cross the boundaries into undermining the fundamental
>> principles and the values of the Wikimedia Foundation.
>>
>> Bob
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Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/3/7 Marcin Cieslak 
> I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic
> event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers
> who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia
> have virtually disappeared.

Thought provoking, thanks a lot for this.

> * They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible
>  to follow development of the railway infrastructure and
>  operations using only high quality published sources;

I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people
would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by
railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering
colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail.
The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway
geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job
that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.

So the root question is whom do we trust. It's the same problem as
with the recurring (and perfectly valid) "Oral citations" discussion:
What's important is not in which medium the source is published, but
how much do the no-original-research geeks trust it. And don't get me
wrong - in the vast majority of cases, both the railway geeks and the
no-original-research geeks are the good guys, who ultimately care
about the readers getting the best information possible.

I suppose that in this case of railways documentation, this problem
can be solved by some kind of a statement by a famous Polish
engineering college or the Polish railway company, which would say:
"We salute the work of the volunteers who document the Polish railways
on this wiki. We checked their work and found it to be correct and
useful." It would have little substance, but it would be a kind of a
quality control stamp. Unfortunately we haven't found a better quality
control stamp yet.

And by the way, this doesn't necessarily mean that all the information
from this wiki should be copied to Wikipedia. It would be fine if that
wiki would simply be recognized by the Wikipedia community as a
reliable source.

> (1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities
>  (preferably not only English-speaking ones)?

I can immediately remember similar cases in the Hebrew Wikipedia with
writing about sex and about Jewish religious communities and rabbis.
In the first case, this happened because the Hebrew Wikipedia
community is very averse to writing about pornography and anything
related to it - not because it's socially conservative, but because in
the first years of its existence writing about pornography was
strongly associated with trolls who disrupted other work. The
difference between pornography and sex is obvious, yet the
he.wikipedia community is very cautious now about both.

As for Jewish religious communities, many articles about them look
very similar to people who aren't involved, and this obviously raises
notability concerns, so Jewish religious wikis sprang up.

> (2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered
>  development of the knowledge-related content (test
>  wikis, "pre-wikis", sighted revisions) or shall we pursue
>  "flat development space" ideal?

It is perfectly legitimate. We are not supposed to want to swallow all
human knowledge; we are supposed to want it to be accessible.
Theoretically, such wikis could become new Wikimedia projects, but the
fact is that new projects have not been started by the Foundation in
the recent years. Another fact is that the Foundation gives little
attention to its own existing non-Wikipedia projects. So if
independent volunteers can make a good railway wiki by themselves, why
not?

> (3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be
>  generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research
>  some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable
>  effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia
>  movement?

See the answer to the previous question; The Foundation is mostly
preoccupied with Wikipedia. Though disappointing to Wikisource fans
like myself, it's not necessarily bad. I suppose that it's not even a
question of intent, but of capacity.

At the very least, it should be remembered that there are different
models of knowledge collection and sharing, so threads like this are
important.

> (4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't
>  we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like "no
>  original research", but not only) and try to address
>  the issue there?

*Wikipedia*'s core values are fine. Without the no original research
policy it wouldn't be as useful as it is now.

Such wikis can, theoretically, be adopted as other projects. Or maybe
as very particular namespaces in Wikipedia. The line must be drawn
somewhere, however.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Foursquare ditches Google Maps for OpenStreetMap

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/3/1 David Gerard :
> Other companies doing similarly:
>
> http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma
> http://www.fubra.com/blog/2011/11/24/google-maps-free-alternatives/

... And, in case anybody missed this piece of news, so will
Wikimedia's official mobile app in version 1.1, now in beta.

Test it now:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/272846

The developers will LOVE your bug reports!

(P.S.: Actually, the current implementation has some pretty severe
bugs in rendering right-to-left text, but it will probably be fixed
soon, and i'm happy about the direction in any case.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not "Foundation") matters

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/3/1 David Gerard :
> On 1 March 2012 10:23, Strainu  wrote:
>
>> If names are that important for you, go ahead and rename foundation-l,
>> but there is really no need for yet another list.
>
>
> +1
>
> Adding a new list would be largely redundant.

Another +1.

There just aren't so many Foundation matters to discuss on a public
list. Anything worth discussing about the Foundation can go to
Wikimedia-l. And "Wikimedia-l" would be a far better name for
"Foundation-l".

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Re: [Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/2/18 Steven Walling :
> Seems like a Catch-22 to me: documents about what we do at the Foundation
> are sometimes not plainly understandable, and yet you can't make them
> understandable unless you know what it is you're supposed to be describing.

It doesn't have to be based on external sources like an article, but
it should be readable.

If somebody doesn't understand a publication and doesn't hesitate to
ask for a clarification, that's already progress.

Thank you, Tom, for writing that email!

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] Improving outreach efforts in India

[Amir E. Aharoni]

See below for a great presentation of problems in conducting outreach
events and wiki workshop by Nitika Tandon.

It discusses events in India, but most of it is relevant for the whole world.

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‎-- Forwarded message --‎
From: Nitika ‎‎
Date: 2012/2/13
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Improving outreach efforts in India
To: Wikimedia India Community list ‫wikimediaindi...@lists.wikimedia.org‬


Dear All,

The following is a post I've put up on the India Program page on meta
regarding outreach (Please
see:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Outreach_Programs).
Please do comment on the page itself; I'm posting it on this mailing
list only to make sure it doesn't slip your attention.

We have conducted over 13 outreach sessions in the past one month and
have many more events scheduled to participate in over the coming
weeks. (Please see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Sessions).
 It's amazing that we're doing so many outreach events all over the
country to create awareness about Wikipedia, motivate attendees to
learn about editing and training newbies to contribute to Wikipedia in
their own special way.

The single biggest challenge is that we don't know the actual outcome
of these efforts in most cases, and the results are weak when we have
the data. I think most of us agree that outreach can be made to work
better. (For example, 2 outreach sessions conducted recently by the
Assamese community had about 80 participants, and 8 active editors
emerged - which is a hit rate of 10% - which is FANTASTIC!) For most
other sessions, the results have been closer to 1-2% or even lower -
which is depressing. What makes outreach work? How can outreach work
better? Is there anything you need from me?

Over the past 3 months, I have been working on building a handbook for
Outreach (Please see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Handbook)
where you can get presentation material and tips. Please do go through
it and help me build it.

My post consists of 5 (deliberately) provocative statements on the day
of and the days after an outreach session. These are framed with the
objective of generating debate and suggestions.

THE DAY OF

Hypthesis 1: Don't Shoot the Puppy: Outreach is not being done
effectively and we aren't adequately introspecting on what we can do
better; instead choosing to lose faith in attendees

Should we discontinue general introduction sessions completely and
just convert everything into Wiki workshops? Every second of volunteer
time is precious and we need to make sure that every second is made to
count. The good sessions appear to be those where people are actually
shown how to edit - rather than just doing a song-and-dance about
Wikipedia.
The best sessions are those where people have actual hands-on editing
opportunity. Shall we limit the intro session on Wikipedia to just 15
minutes and then spend 45 minute on basic editing, 30 minutes on
hand-on editing and leave 30 minutes for Q&A?
Not everyone is a natural presenter and might need help on basic
outreach skills. Is there value and interest in a capacity building
roadshow where we help existing editors who want to improve their
outreach and presentation skills? Is it useful to pair up a good
presenter with a not-so-confident presenter when we are doing
outreach?

THE DAY AFTER

Hypothesis #2: Staying in Touch: We assume the job is complete after
the outreach session when in fact the journey has only just begun

Can we gather (basic) information about attendees (e.g., names,
usernames & email IDs?) so that we can stay in touch with them after
sessions?
Can we get feedback on sessions (duration, level of detail, quality of
presenters, etc.?) so that we can all improve? Do we need some sort of
CRM solution for this or will something like Google Docs suffice?
How do we get more folks to actually provide their contact details and
feedback? Which of the following will get higher response rates:
asking for these just before the end, immediately after the end or the
day after a session?

Hypothesis #3: Nudge-Nudge: Newbies struggle with the most basic
things - including which article to select

Should we send links to useful wiki pages and tutorial videos where
they can read up more about how Wikipedia works and how to edit
Wikipedia? Can we leave handouts on basic editing after all sessions?
Can we send them links to the actual presentations made at the
session.
Can we suggest / elicit potential articles that individual newbies
will work on after the workshop? Can we give them individual pointers
on what they can do with each article by reviewing them there-and-then
during the session?
Can we schedule a follow-up session (even if virtually using google+
hangout) to clarify any doubts about Wikipedia editing or otherwis

[Foundation-l] RFC: local mirrors for cheaper and faster access

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Apparently, in the Sakha Republic in Eastern Russia, browsing sites
connected to the republic's network is cheap or free according to the
plan's the ISPs offers, while browsing sites outside the republic
costs more. So people often choose to read local news and forums and
request information from external sites only when necessary. This is
actually quite good for developing the local culture and fostering the
local language, but it may be detrimental for an international project
like Wikimedia.

Is anybody familiar with other places in which Internet access works like this?

Would it make sense to create some kind of a local mirror of Wikimedia
Projects to facilitate participate in such areas? Creating a data
center in every such place would probably not be cost-effective, but
maybe there's some clever networking trick that could help people
overcome these costs, a proxy or some such? Or collaborating with
local Universities, Free Software groups or ISPs to host mirrors of
content in a language relevant to that area, that would be editable,
too?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Duolingo, potential way of getting good quality translations?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

It is not 280+ languages, but it is more than English to Spanish and
most likely more languages can be added. I already tried using it to
study German, and i was very positively impressed with their nice
exercise system.

My guess is that at a later stage they'll want to employ crowdsourcing
techniques to get people to manually translate sentences as exercises
to build a large corpus of translations, or maybe somehow use the
language courses to correct machine translations. There's nothing
wrong about it and we can try to collaborate there and get their users
to translate some things that would be useful for us. For example,
summaries of important articles from English and French Wikipedias to
smaller languages that don't have them yet, or articles about the
local cultures to larger languages.

They seem to be rather open and friendly to modern technologies and
Free software: When I noticed that they use Flash for audio, i emailed
them about it and said that it's unfortunate that they use this
outdated technology instead of HTML5. They actually replied and said
that they plan to replace it with HTML5 as soon as modern browsers
support the audio features they require. So it's probably possible to
approach them with more ideas for collaboration.

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2012/1/16 Gerard Meijssen :
> Hoi,
> It is nice but it is from English to Spanish and seriously, we support 280+
> languages so it is interesting but not that relevant.
> Thanks,
>    Gerard
>
> On 16 January 2012 02:19, Liam Wyatt  wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> I just found this today, from New Scientist: "learn a language, translate
>> the web"
>>
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328476.200-learn-a-language-translate-the-web.html
>> It's an article about a startup (from the same fellow who did ReCaptcha)
>> that provides language lessons by asking the students to translate
>> sentences from websites - Duolingo http://duolingo.com/ The examples used
>> in their own video and also the New Scientist article are all about
>> translating the English Wikipedia into Spanish. Has anyone had any contact
>> with them before?
>>
>> Whilst this project provides language lessons at no-cost I do NOT expect
>> this system to be "free" in the FOSS sense. Nevertheless, if the
>> translations are valuable, and the project proves to be popular (generating
>> lots of translations), do we think it would be worthwhile to contact the
>> organisation to try and feed their "best" wikipedia translations back into
>> the Wikipedias as suggestions? Perhaps a bot could place it on the talkpage
>> of existing articles by under the heading of "suggested content from en.wp
>> by crowdsourced translations"? Though, I don't know how it would work for
>> articles that don't exist in that language yet...
>>
>> From a legal standpoint I believe translations are derivative works and
>> therefore, because of the Share-Alike principle, the translations are
>> already legally compatible to be re-imported.
>>
>> Just a thought, no idea if it can work in practice though. In any case,
>> Duolingo seems to be an interesting project and time will tell whether it
>> actually is a useful method for people to learn a language (or not)!
>>
>> -Liam
>>
>> Peace, love & metadata
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Re: [Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I tend to agree. At times of Fundraising, public interest grows
noticeably. People have been asking me aobut the banners almost every
day for the last few weeks. (A few times they even asked me whether
they are going to see a personal appeal from Amir Aharoni soon.)

I don't think that i ever saw a focused "personal appeal + photo"
banner that asks people to edit instead of asking them for money. I
did sometime see graphical banners in Wikipedias in various languages
that invite people to edit or participate in writing contests.
Something like this is happening in the Tamil Wikipedia now (
http://ta.wikipedia.org/ ). I don't know how effective it is - it's
worth checking.

2012/1/2 James Heilman 
>
> The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our
> number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a
> fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use
> Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a
> banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor
> numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the
> effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine
> if it works.
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/12/31 geni :
> We appear to have actual blinking ads. Unfortunate. Still I suppose
> the occasion should be marked.

They are not blinking in a manner that is even remotely obnoxious. And
they are also used for displaying bilingual messages, which is very
useful for areas in which you can't be sure whether people prefer
English or the local language, like India.

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[Foundation-l] We now accept $$$

[Amir E. Aharoni]

The popular Russian blogger Artemy Lebedev [1] is known for changing
the title of his blog every few days. Usually it is a line from spam
emails. The current title is the translation into Russian of "We now
accept rubles (RUB)", most likely taken from the Wikipedia fundraising
banners.

Lebedev also happens to be a designer who created the ruble symbol; it
is not official yet, but used here and there.

[1] http://tema.livejournal.com/

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Re: [Foundation-l] Error message

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/11/28 Dirk Franke :
> Seriously: Could we please create something like the Twitter Fail Whale?
> Maybe a Sad Jimbo? Could help fundraising as well..

Scattered pieces of the puzzle globe.

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Getting the dreaded community consensus for useful features and fixes
is indeed a painful experience and i'm not joking.

One way to counter it is to present the communities with results of
research that has been conducted and shown that these features
actually achieve something positive.

Was such research conducted about WikiLove?


2011/10/29 Gerard Meijssen :
> Hoi,
> Given that the English Wikipedia has a problem, its page views is going
> down for instance, there is a well documented division between the oldies
> and the newbies. There is a natural attrition as well as open conflict
> resulting in their being not as many editors as there used to be.
>
> Wikilove, the dashboard are all mechanisms to show appreciation and learn
> from newbies. This functionality is developed with the English Wikipedia in
> mind.
>
> My question what is the point in stagnating in old functionality when the
> established community is to approve new features especially new features
> not addressing the needs of the established community and seeking consensus
> only once these features have been developed?
>
> With respect, these features are introduced, experience is gained and
> consequently these features will be adapted. Does constant community
> consensus make sense and if so what is it that you hope to achieve? How is
> a no going to help given the need for a more healthy English community ?
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
> On 29 October 2011 14:49, WereSpielChequers 
> wrote:
>
>> > Message: 1
>> > Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:31:07 -0700
>> > From: Brandon Harris 
>> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On certain shallow, American-centered,
>> >        foolish software initiatives backed by WMF
>> > To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > Message-ID: <4eab2d2b.3020...@wikimedia.org>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On 10/28/11 3:27 PM, Etienne Beaule wrote:
>> > > It's disabled on certain wikis because of technical problems.
>> > >
>> >
>> >        Oh? I wasn't aware that it had been disabled anywhere as yet.
>> >
>> >        WikiLove was not rolled out "en mass"; the policy for deployment
>> of
>> > the
>> > tool is that it is by request only, and the requesting wiki must:
>> >
>> >                a) Make sure the tool is localized (via TranslateWiki);
>> >                b) Make sure they have a local configuration; and
>> >                c) Show community consensus.
>> >
>> >        So if it was enabled and then *disabled*, I have not heard of
>> this.
>> >  Is
>> > there a bug report I can look to?  Or if you know of a wiki where this
>> > is the case, I can do a search.
>> >
>> >        Thanks!
>> >
>> >        -b.
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
>> >
>> > Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>> >
>> >
>> Good to hear that wikilove is only going in on wikis where there is
>> consensus for it. Can anyone give me a link to the discussion that
>> established consensus on EN wikipedia? The nearest I could find was
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29/Archive_33#Thoughts_on_WikiLove.3F
>>
>> Ta
>>
>> WerepielChequers
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Re: [Foundation-l] On certain shallow, American-centered, foolish software initiatives backed by WMF

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/10/29 Ryan Kaldari :
> I don't think that's accurate. WikiLove only has a single bug filed
> against it, and it's just a feature request:
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=WikiLove&list_id=42901

Well, since you complained, here's another one:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32033

(Is it really not a dupe?)

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Foundation-l] 6 reasons we're in another book-burning period in history

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/10/14 David Gerard 
>
> I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes.
>
> http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html
>
> To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all
> bother doing this.

It depressed me. Thank you for ruining my weekend.

But seriously:

1. It's not really news for me: My professors have been talking very
angrily about the secret book destruction operations for years and
Asaf Bartov, the founder of BYP [1], who now works for the WMF, have
been frequently lecturing about this. But Cracked have put it in a
very understandable format.

2. Since Cracked is rather popular, this is an opportunity to
publicize Wikisource, one of Wikimedia most wonderful endeavors. It is
criminally under-publicized now.

3. Is there any project, anywhere, to systematically find books that
are going to be irrecoverably destroyed and to digitize them? I'd
argue that it's more important to digitize them before the more
popular titles, which are less likely to be lost forever. I would also
support the WMF investing money in collaborating with libraries doing
it. BYP, mentioned above, is doing something like this; it is a bunch
of volunteers, working on a shoestring budget in a small country. Is
anybody else doing it?

[1] http://www.benyehuda.org/e_faq.html

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] Blanking a Wikipedia, a very bad idea

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/10/4 emijrp 
>
> Hi all;
>
> The events regarding Italian Wikipedia blanking[1][2] of all its content are
> a serious precedent IMHO. They can make a lot of noise using other
> procedures, like a big blinking site notice, but giving no choice to read
> the content is against the main goal of Wikipedia.[3]
>
> Italian Wikipedia has about 500,000 page views per hour,[4] and readers are
> getting worried about how long is this going to last. A global encyclopedia
> managed in these ways is not trustworthy. This is worst in public image than
> any gender, global south or image filtering media flame war.
>
> Furthermore, this only make me more concerned about the missing updated,
> secure and trustworthy mirrors of Wikipedia content.
>
> Fortunately, you still can read the mobile version, but it is "limited".[5]
> (Please, spread the word about this)

1:
In 1995 the famous Russian TV journalist [[Vladislav Listyev]] was
murdered. A day after the murder most Russian TV channels were blanked
for a whole day in protest against the rampaging lawlessness and
violence. As far as i know, most people who watched TV in Russian - in
Russia, as well as in Israel, Germany and elsewhere - identified with
the protest.

2:
A few weeks ago the Israeli court required the Channel 10, a Hebrew TV
channel, to apologize to the millionaire [[Sheldon Adelson]] after
broadcasting a journalistic investigation that showed him in negative
light. The channel tried to claim that the investigation was
well-based, but broadcast an apology nevertheless. A few minutes after
the apology the news presenter Guy Zohar told the viewers that he
quits his position in Channel 10 in response to the events; in
addition, the news bulletin ended with blank credits list. The whole
thing took about 30 seconds and received wide attention iring the few
days after that.

3:
Is this Italian law proposal as bad as a murder of a journalist? As
bad as a court-forced TV apology? Maybe it is and maybe it is not. I
know too little about this affair to state an opinion here; I am just
giving a couple of cross-cultural points of comparison.

--
Amir

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

[Amir E. Aharoni]

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

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

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

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

[Amir E. Aharoni]

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

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

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

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

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

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Re: [Foundation-l] Movement Roles: my suggestion of "Language Contact Persons"

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Let me start by saying that Ziko's "Tell us about your Wikipedia"
project was wonderful and i really expect its second edition. If Ziko
or someone else doesn't beat me to it, i'll probably just create one
myself, with additional questions that interest me ;)

I support the idea of language contact persons, or ambassadors, but
their appointment shouldn't be as rigidly regulated as the appointment
of administrators. (The appointment of administrators also shouldn't
be regulated half as rigidly as it is now, but that's a different
topic.)

Instead of "appointing" contact persons by forced discussion,
something else can be done: The Foundation can publish a call to the
different language communities to become more active on Meta and
mailing lists. I am a de-facto contact person for Hebrew, but i joined
this mailing list years ago simply because it seemed the natural thing
to do, because i came from the software world. It may not seem as
natural to plenty of other people who can be excellent language
contact persons.

At first such call can be published in the village pumps of different
languages. A few new people will probably join the global discussions
as proud representatives of their respective language communities as a
result of it, but many communities will definitely remain
unrepresented. After some time the Foundation should check which
language communities are still not represented and think what should
be done differently to bring them along.

As in foreign relations between countries in general, it's just
impossible to have the same kind of relationship and communication
channel with every project.

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬



2011/8/14 Ziko van Dijk :
> Dear friends,
>
> One element of the discussions on "Movement Roles" was about other /
> new entities within our movement, aside the already existing
> Foundation and the Chapters, which I prefer to call "national
> Wikimedia organizations". I would like to present to you here my idea
> of "Language Contact Persons" who form a link between the Foundation
> and the Wikipedia language versions.
>
> == New entities?==
> James Forrester and his group (sorry, I don't remember who was the
> official primus inter pares) presented in/before Haifa a list of new
> kinds of Wikimedia entities:
> * Chapters not based on national boundaries, but subjects such as
> railways, art, ethnic cultures, mathematics etc.
> * informal groups
> * Official partners, e.g. a museum we (the Foundation? a national
> Wikimedia organization?) that already exists outside our movement
>
> ==Scepticism==
> I myself, and also some people I have talked to, are very sceptical
> about such new entities. I believe that in theory it is possible to
> create and maintain them, but in practice there can come up a lot of
> problems. Imagine that a group wants to join that is occupied with
> Marxism, or Zionism, or other potentially controversial subjects. And
> then groups with antimarxism, antizionism etc.  What subjects exactly
> (and what kind of behavior) do we want to allow? And what actual
> problem we would try to solve with such new entities?
>
> One particular question is the organization of ethnic or linguistic
> groups which cannot have a national Wikimedia organization (chapter),
> but which also cannot or don't want to integrate into existing
> national Wikimedia organizations. The best known example are the
> Catalans together with the Scottish Wikipedians (or just some of
> them?).
>
> == A concrete problem to be solved ==
> I must mention here my personal interests. I am an editor of Wikipedia
> in Esperanto, a small, transnational language that never can have a
> national Wikimedia organization. We Esperanto-Wikipedians can also not
> easily integrate into existing national Wikimedia organizations
> because we live in many different countries, where other (national)
> languages are dominant. So, as an Esperantist I would like it very
> much to see a Esperanto "chapter" of Wikimedia, but as a Wikimedian in
> general I am afraid that it would open a box of Pandora.
>
> Thinking of practical problems, I remember that we small language
> Wikipedians often don't have good connections with the Wikimedia
> organizations. We don't know well how to make use of the existing
> material and other ressources. And the Foundation and the national
> Wikimedia organizations know little of us. When I go to the Foundation
> and ask whether we are allowed to use the logos for a flyer in my
> small language, then the Foundation might ask itself: *Who is this
> Ziko, can we trust him, does he speak for more people than only
> himself?*
>
> == Language Contact Person (LCP) ==
> I would like to suggest a small solution to solve a part of the
> problems. Every language version of Wikipedia should designate a
> "Language Contact Person" for relations with the Foundation (and
> natio

Re: [Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/8/2 Yaroslav M. Blanter :
> Any chance it would be agreed in the future? There are at least three
> working versions on big projects, German, Polish, and Russian Wikipedias
> (though I believe in Russian Wikipedia it was recently killed by users
> trying to set records and consequently reviewing 500 articles per hour, but
> at least the idea was nice and worthwhile to discuss); it has also been
> implemented on smaller-scale projects like Hebrew or Hungarian Wikipedias
> and other projects.

Just for the record: It was implemented on the Hebrew Wikisource, not
the Hebrew Wikipedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/12 Milos Rancic 
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 11:16, Gerard Meijssen
>  wrote:
> > So you understand what a macro language is. Why the kicking then ?
>
> Because the category is comparable with the categorization of animals
> in encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge [1].

It looks like a big misunderstanding that's about to blow. Let's
discuss this over a beer in Haifa! :)

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/11 Thomas Goldammer 
> > How many people don't
> > understand any Wikipedia today?
>
> Of those who can read at all, probably much less than 1%. The problem
> are those people who can't read.

For persons who can't read it's far better to learn reading first in
their own language.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/11 Thomas Goldammer 
>
> It won't be possible to save languages going extinct. Even if two or
> three people start writing a Wikipedia in such a language, it will die
> out as a spoken language, eventually, not later than it would without
> a Wikipedia. I think it's nice to have a corpus of encyclopedic
> articles in such languages, but more important for the goal of
> Wikimedia to make knowledge accessible to all people of the world, is
> that there is a useful Wikipedia in at least one language any given
> person can read. I would estimate that we won't ever reach 300 (open)
> Wikipedia language versions, because many of the smaller ones will be
> closed sooner or later due to permanent inactivity, and that's
> perfectly fine.

I'll never lose hope that we'll have a full-blown encyclopedia in each
of the 7,000 languages, but even if we won't, it's still very much in
the scope of Wikimedia's mission to have full collections of free
texts in all of them - folk tales, religious texts, any spoken
recordings, whatever. So for many languages a WikiSource project may
be even more relevant than an encyclopedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/10 Milos Rancic :
> and one in revived language (Manx).

Ahem.

The definition of a "revived language" is very controversial, but if
you count them, don't forget Hebrew (120,000+ articles) and Cornish
(2,000+ articles).

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] Languages and numbers

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/1 Milos Rancic :
> As Russia is fairly developed country, it is likely that reaching people
> who speak those languages and teaching them how to use Wikimedia
> projects would the task for WM RU. Besides that, I think that all
> languages of Russia have writing systems and support in Unicode.

Actually, a few small languages in Northern and Eastern Russia don't
have writing systems, but at least for some of them one is being
developed by the government.

And all the current languages of Russia are indeed supported in
Unicode, but in a few discussions i had just a couple of weeks ago i
learned the shocking truth: While we take Unicode for granted for
about a decade, it is not so for quite a lot of people around the
globe. In less developed parts of Russia there are still computers
with Windows 98 and even earlier, and Unicode support there is poor to
non-existent. Maybe in Russia WM-RU can indeed handle this - for
example, to organize sending donated second-hand computers to key
organizations in these regions (schools, libraries, local newspapers
etc.)

This, however, happens in many other countries, some of which need
Unicode even more desperately than these Russian regions, and which
don't have a chapter. For example, Ethiopia. There the Foundation or
other chapters will be able to help. WM-IL, for example, sent
second-hand computers pre-installed with Ubuntu and offline Wikipedia
to African countries, and maybe other chapters did similar things,
too.

Long story short: Unicode support cannot be taken for granted, but
something can be done about it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Languages and numbers

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/7/1 Yaroslav M. Blanter :
> Adyge is almost
> identical to Kabardino-Circassian, and Adyge speakers probably will never
> have their own Wikipedia.

From what i hear about this, Adyge and Kabardian may be two varieties
of a Circassian [[macrolanguage]]. Maybe someone who cares about it
will submit a request to ISO to consider redefining their codes
accordingly.

The recently created Kabardian Wikipedia ( kbd.wikipedia.org ) is
developing quite nicely. It already has contributors in both varieties
of this language and they get along well.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/17 Peter Gervai :
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
>> In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not
>> clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that
>> person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things
>> often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months
>> thinking how i could avoid it.
>
> I am not sure it is a valuable contributor who do not accept the base
> of the community work, who do not spend time to understand the legal
> license what is being used publishing and don't even take the time to
> listen to others.

Well, yes, but this solution is too easy.

This can be a valuable contributor, because he has extensive knowledge
about a certain topic and has the time and the skill to write about
it. We have a community tradition of doing things wiki way, but people
who don't like the wiki idea can still be excellent physicist,
historians or engineers, and we should want them to write for our
projects.

Experts with writing skills can find other venues to publish their
writings. It is us who want to publish these writings more widely and
with a free license - "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". So
we need them more than they need us.

> S/he may be a future valuable contributor after serious education.
> Time. Energy.

Again, it's true, but in practice i feel too awkward to "educate" a
person who is often older and much more educated than i am.

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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/17 Lodewijk :
> I guess that Amir was rather referring to the cultural aspect than the legal
> aspect.

You guessed correctly.

> Amir, is there a specific background that you are thinking of which is why
> you are asking this? Maybe that helps people answering your question.

Nothing in particular. Dozens of times every day i edit articles in
which i see mistakes. Usually nobody complains, but sometimes the
people who wrote most of the article get very upset about the fact
that i touched it at all and send me messages saying this. I used to
reply and politely explain that that, by definition, is the way wikis
work and to cite WP:OWN or its Hebrew counterpart. Sometimes it helps,
but sometimes it makes the person even more upset.

In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not
clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that
person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things
often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months
thinking how i could avoid it.

Of course, i am not the only person to whom this happens and Hebrew
and English are not the only languages in which this happens.

So, are we doomed to experience such things every once in a while? Or
does anyone have a bright idea about improving the balance between
ownership and wiki-ness?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Election results?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/17 Austin Hair :
> It's now the afternoon of the 17th (UTC), and this list—of which I
> have the dubious distinction of being custodian—hasn't seen a single
> thread about the WMF board election results.
>
> I'm honestly not sure if I should be proud of or disappointed with you
> guys.

Proud :)

2011/6/17 MZMcBride :
> The Election Committee seems to have completely dropped the ball, either in
> setting an unrealistic deadline and/or in not effectively communicating why
> it's been unable to meet the deadline.

It may be true, but please calm down. They are volunteers, too.

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Re: [Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/17 Strainu :
> I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in
> other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the
> wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot
> consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA
> license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control
> offered by copyright laws.

It's not so much about CC-BY-SA as it is about the fact that it's a
wiki, where content is constantly changed by different people. This
breaks the usual idea of authorship and makes quite a lot of people
terribly uncomfortable and sometimes even violent. It's unpleasant,
but i understand how their feel and i want to find a way to work with
them.

But since you mention licensing, one possible solution to this problem
that i though of is to suggest such people write their content on some
other website where others can't change their text, but to release it
as CC-BY-SA, so Wikipedia would be able to use. That could be a good
use case for a project like Knol, which was advertised as "Wikipedia
killer" once, but didn't grow much. Used wisely, these Wikipedia and
Knol could actually help each other grow. This would cause forking, of
course, but forking isn't really bad - a forked freely-licensed
article is better than no freely-licensed article.

This solution is far from perfect, of course, because many people want
Their articles on The Wikipedia, not on some other non-notable
website...

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[Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

The problem of content ownership hits any wiki at some point.

In the English Wikipedia it is governed by a policy called "WP:OWN"
[1]. There's a similar policy in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Is this policy
any different in other projects?

I am asking, because i agree with the English Wikipedia's policy in
principle, but the reality is that sometimes instead of helping people
write together, this policy drives people away from the project -
people who could be very positive contributors, but who don't like
their contributions edited by others without being asked. So i am
wondering: maybe en.wp and he.wp can learn something from other
languages here?

Thank you,

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikis and the direction hardware is taking

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/12 David Gerard :
> On 11 June 2011 00:27,   wrote:
>
>> You are third person to respond as if my email was about me personally 
>> looking for help editing. And the second to snip my writing out of all 
>> context.  Steven seemed to actually get what my concern was.  You can hate 
>> whatever you like, or dislike as the case may be.  It is not going to help 
>> WMF reach all the people who will be using apps despite your opinion.  I 
>> don't need any help, as I have figured out a workable solution. There are 
>> thousands of people, going by the ratings number, that are consuming 
>> Wikipedia in way that will make it very difficult to convert them editors 
>> and possibly even to communicate with them through banners. That is what 
>> concerns me.
>
>
> +1
>
> This is the actual problem.
>
> What would happen to a Bugzilla entry flagging systemic problems of
> the sort Birgitte flags? It would get marked INVALID in short order.

I'm not talking about systemic problems. A particular bug saying "It's
hard/impossible to edit Wikipedia using device X, because the Save
button is too small" is perfectly valid. Even if it's a bug in the
browser of that device - that's what upstream is for. I have at least
one example of productive communication between MediaWiki developers
and Mozilla developers [1] and i'm sure that there's more.

An app may be a temporary solution when all else fails, but submitting
to this ecosystem, which causes the proliferation of non-standard,
over-customized and often proprietary solutions is not the way to go.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629878

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikis and the direction hardware is taking

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/10  :
> In setting up my iPad this is what shocked me.
> It is near impossible to edit a wiki.  Well that wasn't
> to worrisome. I figured "there's an app for that".

I hate the whole idea of "apps" for accessing websites through iPhone,
iPad, Android, OVI or whatever. And i hate it with a passion. Websites
should be accessed through web browsers, not through a custom app for
every website and for every brand of mobile device.

Please report any difficulties with reading or editing Wikipedia
through your regular mobile web browser in Bugzilla (
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org ). If you never reported bugs through
Bugzilla, it may be a bit intimidating at first, but this is the right
thing to do for our websites and for the whole movement.

There's also the Mobile Feedback mailing list (
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-feedback-l ),
where people who don't use Bugzilla report bugs quite often.

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[Foundation-l] Elections email

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hallo,

I just received an email (see below) that invites me to participate in
the elections.

There are several technical issues with it:

1. I already voted. It may be a good idea to send this only to people
who didn't.

2. The subject says "2009".

3. The email is sent in English and Hebrew. I don't know how did the
system find out that that is my preferred language, so it's a bit
weird, but in general i'm happy about this localization. There is
still a problem, however: since the text is bidirectional and this
email is sent in plain text, the Hebrew text is garbled and hardly
readable. One way to solve this is to send the email as HTML and to
define the Hebrew part as dir="rtl". This is relevant for all RTL
languages - Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Divehi and many others.

Thank you,

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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‎הודעה שהועברה‎
מאת: Wikimedia Board Elections Committee ‎‎
תאריך: 10 ביוני 2011 14:56
נושא: Wikimedia Foundation Elections 2009
אל: Amire80 ‫amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il‬


Dear Amire80,

You are eligible to vote in the 2011 elections for the Board of
Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates projects such as
Wikipedia. The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is
ultimately responsible for the long term sustainability of the
Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection.

For more information, please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/en . To remove
yourself from future notification, please add your user name at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_nomail_list .



שלום Amire80,

הנך זכאי להשתתף בבחירות 2011 לחבר הנאמנים של קרן ויקימדיה, המפעילה
מספר מיזמים כגון Wikipedia.
חבר הנאמנים הוא הגוף המחליט הנושא באחריות הכוללת לקיומה של הקרן בטווח
הארוך, ולכן אנו מקבלים בברכה השתתפות רחבה בבחירתו.

למידע נוסף, אנא ראו please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/he . להסרת שמך
מקבלת הודעות דומות בעתיד, אנא צרפו את שמכם בדף
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_nomail_list .
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Re: [Foundation-l] deleting old versions of fair-use files

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/5/31 Michael Snow :
> On 5/30/2011 2:32 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> There's a bit of discussion about deleting old versions of fair-use
>> files in the Hebrew Wikipedia and it may be interesting to other
>> projects as well.
>>
>> The main questions is: Should old versions of fair-use files be
>> deleted? The two main points that support the deletion are that it
>> saves space on the server and that keeping a version of a non-free
>> file violates the fair use policy, because the old version of the
>> image can be viewed, but is not actually used in any relevant article.
> I just want to see if I understand this correctly. Is this a reference
> to files where the current revision is included in some article based on
> a fair use rationale, but the file also has earlier versions that are
> not so used?

Yes, that's exactly what i referred to.

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[Foundation-l] deleting old versions of fair-use files

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hello,

There's a bit of discussion about deleting old versions of fair-use
files in the Hebrew Wikipedia and it may be interesting to other
projects as well.

The main questions is: Should old versions of fair-use files be
deleted? The two main points that support the deletion are that it
saves space on the server and that keeping a version of a non-free
file violates the fair use policy, because the old version of the
image can be viewed, but is not actually used in any relevant article.

The first point, about saving server space, is probably irrelevant,
because to the best of my understanding, space is a cheap asset in the
first place, and the file is not actually deleted, but only has its
description in the database changed to hide it from non-sysop users,
so the deletion actually adds to the server load, although not much.
(Correct me if i'm wrong.)

But what about fair use validity? Since i am not a copyright lawyer -
and really don't want to be one - this is something that should be
answered by more knowledgeable people.

Also, are there policies about this in other projects? Commons is
irrelevant and i couldn't find anything about it in the English
Wikipedia. If from the legal point of view old versions of non-free
files should be deleted, then it probably should be implemented in all
projects. (I would hate it and i apologize in advance for opening this
Pandora's box.)

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] Stalking on Wikipedia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/5/22 Thomas Morton :
> Supreme Deliciousness, whose actions are being discussed...
>
> I noted that he hadn't been told so dropped him a note as common courtesy.

Oh.

This initialism may be well-known to some English Wikipedia editors,
but not to all of them, and certainly not to all members of
foundation-l.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Stalking on Wikipedia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/5/22 Thomas Morton :
> Has anyone notified SD about this discussion? Pretty much essential given
> the allegations made by Dror K (which are clearly unfounded, but may be
> damaging).

Notified whom?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Stalking on Wikipedia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/5/22 Ryan Lomonaco :
> That said, to me, I don't see any stalking whatsoever.  It is common when
> investigating sockpuppets to send evidence privately to other trusted users,
> so that the (suspected) sockpuppeteer does not change their habits to avoid
> detection.  I don't see any other evidence presented to substantiate the
> claim that someone is stalking Dror.  If there is no stalking, then this is
> not a foundation issue.

It may not be a foundation-l issue, but it does raise a point: This
whole discussion is about stalking and sockpuppetry and not about
content. Of course, particular content disputes have no place here
either, but the mere mentioning of the name Dror immediately renders
the discussion pointless and that is troublesome.

An "extensive sockpuppetry history" is by itself not a reason for
moderation or for ignoring valid concerns about privacy policy
violations. Even an extensive history of bad edits is not a reason for
any of these.

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[Foundation-l] translating POTY

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I asked this in another thread, but didn't get a response. The POTY
banner appears on English-language projects. Why wasn't there a
request to translate it as it usually happens with such banners?

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Re: [Foundation-l] CentralNotice use

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/5/19 church.of.emacs.ml 
>
> Hi all,
>
> Do we have any guidelines limiting the use of CentralNotices? I noticed
> there are a lot lately (fundraising, wikimania and most recently board
> elections and commons POTY), some of which are not of much interest to
> the audience.

... And since you mentioned it, why is the POTY banner English-only?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editor survey - finished?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/27 Daniel ~ Leinad :
>> Is it disabled? I don't remember any notice about it.
>
> Yes, survey campaign is inactive:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralNotice

Thank you... is there any way i could know it? I volunteered to help
with it and it would be nice to know when i could stop and go do some
university homework :)

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[Foundation-l] Editor survey - finished?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I unofficially appointed myself to be the "Editor Survey ambassador"
to the Hebrew Wikipedia. For a few days i helped people fill it and
gathered some feedback.

Now people are complaining that they can't see the banner. I tried
telling them to clean the cookies and it didn't help; i tried it
myself, and it doesn't help me either.

Is it disabled? I don't remember any notice about it.

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[Foundation-l] "How many articles have you created?"

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Being a linguist i am often asked how many languages do i speak. I
don't like that question, because that's not exactly what Linguistics
is about.

Being a Wikipedian i am often asked how many articles did i write. I
don't like that question either, because most work on Wikipedia is
about improving existing articles, not about creating new ones.

On the discussion about the "Proposal to require autoconfirmed status
in order to create articles" in the English Wikipedia some people
commented that creating articles is not so important anyway, that the
growing amount of articles makes it harder to maintain them and that
there should be more effort to explain people that they should join
Wikipedia to improve the existing articles and now just to create new
ones.

This is not a strong argument to support this anti-wiki proposal to
further restrict article creation in en.wp, but it is true by itself.
There have been attempts to tackle it: SJ's lightning talk about The
Best Page On Wikipedia (WP:BACKLOG) in the NYC meetup last August and
advertising WP:BACKLOG in the en.wp watchlist are examples of that.
The Hebrew Wikipedia conducts "no new articles" days every now and
then, where the editors are encouraged - not enforced - to improve
existing articles rather than create new ones; unfortunately, i have
no data about how well it works.

I would be happy to hear about such efforts in other projects.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/8 Dror Kamir :
> Had someone
> followed the administrators' decisions on the biggest projects, and
> publish a monthly newsletter with copies of the most prominent decisions
> about bans and sanctions, it would increase transparency and make
> administrators much more careful about checking cases and providing
> justifications for their actions, especially in what concerns treatment
> of new users. It would also give a better picture about disruptive
> behaviors of users.

The Wikimedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's de-facto newspaper,
publishes something like this in every issue. AFAIK it's published by
volunteers and i salute their perseverance. Every Wikipedia edition
can do this with a little motivation and persistence.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/4 Rodan Bury :
> As for the quantitative analysis, the one made during the beta testing of
> Vector was detailed. It clearly showed that most users - and especially
> newbies - preferred Vector over Monobook (retention rates of 70 - 80 % and
> more).

It means that for most people Vector wasn't worse than Monobook; it
doesn't necessarily mean that it was significantly better. Putting a
lot of money and volunteer effort into a Big Project is supposed to
create something *better* than the current thing.

That's the problem with grants, i guess. If a rich - and certainly
well-meaning - foundation invests money in a Big Project that doesn't
hurt free knowledge, but doesn't advance it too much either, it's not
a big problem by itself. But it becomes a problem when it has a hidden
cost in the form of work that volunteers in all the wikis have to do
to adjust their home sites to that Big Project. If this work has real
results, such as making the articles significantly easier to edit or
bringing a lot of new editors, then this is perfectly justified. But
if it's just a nice new skin that doesn't really change anything
significant, then it's kinda frustrating.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/5 David Gerard 
>
> On 5 April 2011 03:02, MZMcBride  wrote:
>
> > A lot of the projects that Wikimedia is investing in today are small and
> > focused on particular needs of the Wikimedia Foundation, not the Wikimedia
> > community. One example might be an article feedback tool that's largely
> > focused on ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Public Policy grant
> > requirements rather than actually being a useful tool for rating and
> > evaluating articles. (Imagine if you could find the most fascinating
> > articles, similar to ted.com's system; now look at what Wikimedia has
> > implemented.)
>
>
> *cough* From 2005:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0
>
> Magnus put together a quick version, but Brion didn't like the code
> and it never happened. However, mine is just one such proposal.
> Article rating has been a wanted feature for *years*.

... And in the Hungarian Wikipedia it was even implemented quite a
long time ago. If i recall correctly, at some point i saw it in the
Polish, too.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/4 David Gerard 
>
> On 4 April 2011 16:20, Amir E. Aharoni  wrote:
>
> > I understand that WMF's resources are limited, but the development and
> > the deployment of Vector did cost some money and also forced a lot of
> > volunteers in English and in all other language projects to make
> > adjustments to their sites. Measuring volunteer effort is harder to
> > measure than money, but it's certainly not negligible.
>
>
> If this is a valid argument - that technical changes should not be
> made if it would make work for other volunteers - then God forbid
> development continue on MediaWiki.

Of course every change makes volunteers work and it's perfectly
understandable. The problem is that sometimes it is justified and
sometimes it is not. As nifty as Vector, SimpleSearch and the new
toolbar are, i have doubts about their contributions to Wikimedia's
mission. But again, i might be wrong, and that's why i am asking what
measurements were made.

> See the current thread on
> wikitech-l about how chronically broken most site JavaScript is and
> what to do about the problem, given that freezing MediaWiki in
> perpetuity is really just not going to happen.

... I am following it closely. It is, in fact, strongly related to
this topic: Polishing and modernizing gadgets developed by volunteer
JS gurus in local projects and exporting them to other projects and
languages is a much better investment of time and money, simply
because it is quite certain that these gadgets were created to answer
real needs of real editors, whereas Vector grew out of very small
usability studies.

For example, in the Hebrew Wikipedia there was a Search and Replace
gadget long before the advent of Vector's Search and Replace dialog.
It was developed due to popular demand, bottom-up, by a volunteer, and
- here's the scariest part - without any grants. It is still used in
the Hebrew Wikipedia, probably much more often than the Vector thingy,
which is still rather useless due to bugs such as 20919 and 22801.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/2 Rodan Bury :
> The analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results of the Usability
> Initiative is not a question anybody can answer. Comments like "I personally
> prefer monobook" (fictional example) does not help to make an analysis based
> on facts.
>
> Erik Möller's answer is professional and detailed in this regard.
>
> I could add a little summary of the goals and priorities of the Usability
> Initiative as I understand them, which will help us understand its result.
> The Vector was a high priority change rated "easy to do", and as such they
> focused on deploying it first. It is aimed at readers and editors, and the
> result was new editors felt more comfortable when clicking on the edit link
> and attempting to edit.

Well, that was my original question: Did they? Because, frankly,
Erik's reply hardly answers this question. The most recent study he
cited was a study of 10 San Francisco residents. What about other
cities, other countries, other languages, other projects?

I understand that WMF's resources are limited, but the development and
the deployment of Vector did cost some money and also forced a lot of
volunteers in English and in all other language projects to make
adjustments to their sites. Measuring volunteer effort is harder to
measure than money, but it's certainly not negligible.

And i am wondering whether anybody measured how well these resources
were spent. It's not that i'm strongly against Vector; it's nice and
all, but for the last few weeks i switched back to Monobook and to the
old editing toolbar and i don't feel any difference. But since that's
just me, i might be wrong, so i am asking again: 10 people in San
Francisco? Is that all the measurement that was conducted after the
switch? And did anybody try to measure the influence of Monobook and
Vector on editor *retention*, another hot topic recently?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads redesign?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/4/2 Erik Moeller :
> It's not getting the resource push it would need to reach major
> milestones quickly -- just because we don't have the resources (see
> [1] for where most resources are going and why). But the work is
> continuing and we'll be able to ramp up resourcing if/when we progress
> in other areas.

Since the subject was raised: I would happily test it in an RTL
environment. If it is being developed, whether slowly or quickly, RTL
should be kept in mind, and i'd like to help Andrew and Brandon with
it. To let me do this, please install LQT on he.wikinews, a
low-traffic Wikimedia project. There's a bug about it:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27937

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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[Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Amir E. Aharoni]

The Vector skin, the main product of the Usability Initiative, was
deployed on Wikimedia projects in April 2010.

Quoting usability.wikimedia.org: "The goal of this initiative is to
measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by
improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral
studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation."

In the year that passed since then, did anyone measure whether the
usability of Wikipedia for new contributors increased?

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Arthur, thank you so much for this reply!

The Hebrew translation of the survey is practically complete. It would
take us just a few minutes to create a version for women, who will,
without doubt, appreciate it. (There are women among the translators,
too.) If there's a chance that it will be used, we'll create it.

Is there anything else that we can do to make this work? Maybe we can
help copying the answers to LimeSurvey? I have no experience with it,
but i am willing to invest some time in learning from someone who has.

This is a chance to create a very positive precedent!

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

2011/3/23 Arthur Richards :
>
>> Actually, this is technically possible in LimeSurvey.  LimeSurvey has
>> the ability to display a particular question based on the response to a
>> previous question.
>
> For the curious, documentation on 'conditional' questions in LimeSurvey
> can be found here:
> http://docs.limesurvey.org/Setting+conditions&structure=English+Instructions+for+LimeSurvey
>
> Incidentally, there's a 'Gender' question type available in LimeSurvey -
> documentation can be seen here:
> http://docs.limesurvey.org/Question+type+-+Gender&structure=English+Instructions+for+LimeSurvey
>
> Arthur
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] keeping localization in mind

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/23 Ryan Kaldari :
> On 3/23/11 6:17 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> ==WikiLove, Twinkle and Huggle==
>> Sue mentions the WikiLove gadget in her letter. To the best of my
>> knowledge WikiLove only works in the English Wikipedia, but the letter
>> invites all readers to use it. Believe it or not, some Wikipedias
>> don't even have barnstars.
>
> All of these gadgets, including Wikilove, exist in other languages. Not
> mentioning them because they haven't been ported to every language would
> be a bit extreme.

It exists in some languages; I didn't count, but it probably doesn't
exist in even half of them. Correct me if i'm wrong. The letter is
addressed to community members in all language projects and it
mentions Wikilove as if it was universal.

Consider this wording: "In the English Wikipedia there's a tool called
'WikiLove'; if your Wikipedia has it, try it; if your Wikipedia
doesn't have it, consider adapting it." It's factually correct and
constructive. Just saying "Wikilove" and linking to the English
Wikipedia ignores the existence of other language projects.

In the Hebrew translation i took the liberty to translate it
accordingly and added "this tool works only in the English Wikipedia"
in parentheses. (It works in some others, but i didn't have an easy
way to find out in which ones, and in he.wp we don't hand out
barnstars at all, although we are considering to start doing it.)
Translators to other languages just translated that part
word-for-word, leaving the readers confused.

> I also don't really understand your point about
> linking to 'Eternal September'. You say that you aren't suggesting that
> people not link to English Wikipedia, but then what is the point of your
> argument? Are you suggesting that we pre-translate every linked article
> into all 269 languages and then protect them all as well? Obviously that
> isn't very practical.

Yes, it isn't practical. I'm not telling anyone to do that. I'm just
asking people who write something that is supposed to be translated to
keep that in mind. See the subject.

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] interwiki links

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/23 WereSpielChequers :
> But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki
> article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki
> link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as
> a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would
> the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as
> redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE
> wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?

It should be an error to link those two articles, but in reality links
to a section in another language are quite common.

I don't really have a clever solution up my sleeve, but putting the
links in one place will likely make these situations easier to handle
but allowing the editors to focus on content and ontology, without
worrying about updating a long list of links in a lot of projects (and
no, bots don't always help).

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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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[Foundation-l] please announce translations earlier

[Amir E. Aharoni]

... And continuing with the previous theme of translation: Please
announce the need for translating texts such as surveys, sitenotices,
fundraising and long announcements (such as the recent Sue's letter)
earlier. MUCH earlier.

For quite a lot of languages, even languages with millions of
monolingual speakers in developed countries, there are very, very few
people who bother to make the needed translations for Wikimedia
projects. Sometimes there's only one such person! We all have day jobs
and we do get tired every now and then.

How much earlier should it be? I did Sue's letter mostly by myself and
it took me two full days. That's right: two full days. It was
announced two days in advance, so i spent an  entire weekend doing it.
I'm a hopeless Internet geek, but i do like to take a walk in the park
every now and then. As for the Editors survey, there are several
people working on the Hebrew translation of that gargantuan page and
we still haven't finished.

If you want to expose the text to the wide audience as closely as
possible to the actual event (such as a fundraising or a survey), you
may consider doing the translation in a closed site that is only open
to translators, but it's not really desirable.

I'm sending this to foundation-l and not to translators-l, because
people who write the original texts do not necessarily read
translators-l.

Thanks again for understanding.

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[Foundation-l] keeping localization in mind

[Amir E. Aharoni]

In the last few months i was deeply involved with several big
translation projects for Wikimedia: The Fundraising, Sue's March
Update letter, and the Editor's survey.

What's common to all of them is that the original English texts were
written without keeping localization in mind, or maybe not keeping it
in mind *enough*. I wouldn't ask for such a thing from a poet or a
journalist, but i would expect it from a writer of a text that has a
particular function - to raise money from various countries, to
describe the state of a multilingual community, or to conduct a
worldwide research - and about which it is known that it will be
translated to dozens of very different languages, each with a culture
behind it.

I can give several examples:

==Eternal September==
Sue's letter links to the English Wikipedia article [[Eternal
September]]. The fact that it's an English Wikipedia article is
already a problem - for people who don't know English linking there is
pointless.

But there's more to it. Since the letter was published, it was
translated to several languages, and some translators also went the
extra mile to create the [[Eternal September]] article in their
respective Wikipedias. Until here, all good. Now, i don't know about
other languages, but in the Hebrew Wikipedia such articles are
sometimes proposed for deletion, because they are about "foreign
expressions which are not used in Hebrew". I completely disagree with
such reasoning and i created this article nevertheless, but the fact
is that it happens and in addition to translating it could have had to
jump through the hoops of a deletion discussion.

This is only one possible implication out of many that are imaginable.
I'm not telling the future writers of letters to the community not to
link to the English Wikipedia; i'm just telling them to keep in mind
that it may involve more than they think it does.

==WikiLove, Twinkle and Huggle==
Sue mentions the WikiLove gadget in her letter. To the best of my
knowledge WikiLove only works in the English Wikipedia, but the letter
invites all readers to use it. Believe it or not, some Wikipedias
don't even have barnstars.

The survey mentions Twinkle and Huggle. These gadgets are also
specific to the English Wikipedia. They were adapted to other
projects, but not to all of them; for example, i couldn't find them in
the very large French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Asking editors of
these Wikipedias about Twinkle and Huggle is not just pointless, but
patronizing, too.

(This gadget thing is a part of a larger issue: gadgets development is
not coordinated, even though many of them could be useful to all
projects.)

==Gender in the survey==
I already wrote about this: Surveys tend to be long lists of questions
in the second person. This is not a problem in English, but in some
languages the second person is strongly gender-dependent. IIRC, the
translations are supposed to be finished by today. If the survey would
be announced earlier, the translators would have time to write a
feminine version and developers would have time to think of modifying
LimeSurvey to actually support it. (Actually i haven't completely
given up on it yet.)

==Nationality in the survey==
The survey asks about "Nationality". This term is not consistent even
in English: it may mean the place of birth, the place of current
citizenship, the genetic ethnic group, the national identity and other
things. In Russian, my native language, the related word
(национальность) refers *only* to the ethnic group. I happen to be
aware of the ambiguity in English, so i bothered to ask about the
precise meaning, but another translator - certainly, in good faith -
translated it as "ethnic group" (i asked to correct it). And in the
first place the survey should have been written as unambiguously as
possible.

==Currencies in the Fundraising==
In the Fundraising letters currencies were mentioned. These currencies
are not relevant for the whole world.

==Repetition==
Some texts are repetitive, for example whole sentences in the
Fundraising letters and "choose all that apply" in the survey. But
they aren't marked as such - they are just copied and pasted.
MediaWiki has templates for that! Another thing that must be done to
reduce repetitiveness is migrating to a proper translating platform
instead of plain MediaWiki; see
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28021 .

I have many more examples of such problems. Of course, i understand
that a writer in English cannot think of everything in advance and i
don't want to stifle the creativity of the writers; and i do believe
that there is creativity behind this texts, even though they are more
functional than artistic. All i'm asking is to think about these
examples and to remember that
a. texts had to be translated.
b. translation has more implications than you initially imagine.

Thank you for understanding.

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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"We're living in piec

Re: [Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I guess that if it's really impossible, we'll think about something,
but i'm just curious: What are the technical reasons? Does LimeSurvey
have a limited list of languages? Isn't it open source? Can't anyone
just add another language to the list, saying "Hebrew-feminine"?

2011/3/22 Mani Pande :
> Hi Amir,
> I understand your concern. As a woman, I would not be happy to answer
> questions that are addressed to a man. But it is near impossible to have
> two versions of the survey in Hebrew due to technical reasons. Is it
> possible to rewrite questions with options for both gender? For example,
> he/she.
> Thanks
> Mani
>
> Mani Pande, PhD
> Head of Global Development Research
> Wikimedia Foundation
> Twitter: manipande
> Skype: manipande
>
>
> On 3/22/11 4:17 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> What i say here about Hebrew may be useful for many other languages, too.
>>
>> I am translating the Editors survey into Hebrew. The survey is written
>> as a long series of questions in the second person ("you"). In Hebrew
>> the second person is very gender-dependent - the wording is
>> significantly different for women. When translating MediaWiki
>> messages, we more or less manage to avoid it and though it's not
>> perfect and we should use {{GENDER}} more, it's not a disaster. In the
>> survey, however, it would be very, very bad with all the personal
>> questions about family life etc.
>>
>> It's not just a matter of being politically correct and welcoming -
>> the language simply doesn't natural.
>>
>> Would it be possible to have the Hebrew translation in the feminine
>> gender, too? The default can be masculine, but putting a button at the
>> beginning that opens another form in the feminine would be really
>> great. In the Meta talk page Casey said that it's not possible with
>> LimeSurvey, but i nevertheless want to try asking it again: Can i
>> write two versions of the survey, for example "Hebrew-masculine" and
>> "Hebrew-feminine" and let the reader switch it? The results can be
>> combined later.
>>
>> Thanks a lot for the understanding.
>>
>> --
>> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
>> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
>> "We're living in pieces,
>>   I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
>>
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[Foundation-l] Editors survey and gender

[Amir E. Aharoni]

What i say here about Hebrew may be useful for many other languages, too.

I am translating the Editors survey into Hebrew. The survey is written
as a long series of questions in the second person ("you"). In Hebrew
the second person is very gender-dependent - the wording is
significantly different for women. When translating MediaWiki
messages, we more or less manage to avoid it and though it's not
perfect and we should use {{GENDER}} more, it's not a disaster. In the
survey, however, it would be very, very bad with all the personal
questions about family life etc.

It's not just a matter of being politically correct and welcoming -
the language simply doesn't natural.

Would it be possible to have the Hebrew translation in the feminine
gender, too? The default can be masculine, but putting a button at the
beginning that opens another form in the feminine would be really
great. In the Meta talk page Casey said that it's not possible with
LimeSurvey, but i nevertheless want to try asking it again: Can i
write two versions of the survey, for example "Hebrew-masculine" and
"Hebrew-feminine" and let the reader switch it? The results can be
combined later.

Thanks a lot for the understanding.

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

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Re: [Foundation-l] New projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/21 Gerard Meijssen :
> On 21 March 2011 20:40, Federico Leva (Nemo)  wrote:
>
>> Milos Rancic, 19/03/2011 10:45:>
>> > And there are three new Wikisource editions:
>> > * Wikisource in Sakha language [9]: http://sah.wikisource.org/
>> > * Wikisource in Sanskrit [10]: http://sa.wikisource.org/
>> > * Wikisource in Esperanto [11]: http://eo.wikisource.org/
>>
>> This is especially good news; Wikisource is actually the best project to
>> start with, for "small languages" with some written texts, IMHO.
>> (Note that there's https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26136
>> for eo.source.)
>
> As to Wikisource being a good start for a small language. I do not see why.

I do agree with Nemo here. It may not true for all languages, but it
is true for some. It makes much more sense to create a Wikisource
rather than a Wikipedia for some ancient or artificial languages,
which few or no people use for communication.

It is even more relevant and important to develop a Wikisource for
certain living languages. For example, some minorized languages in
Russia enjoyed periods of development when the political situation was
favorable, especially in the 1920s - in particular, textbooks were
written and distributed to schools and collections of original and
translated literature were published. In the periods when state
support diminished, these textbooks weren't updated anymore and the
literature books went out-of-print and became rare. In some cases the
modern community of speakers may not be strong enough to start writing
original encyclopedic articles, but it may be able to create digital
versions of existing published books; in case of textbooks, they can
also be updated and return to the schools (although Wikibooks is
probably more suited for that). This may re-ignite the interest in
that language and even if it doesn't, digitalizing these works is
desirable in any case.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] wiki for interwiki (was: Foundation too passive)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/21 Gerard Meijssen :
> Hoi,
> One technical resource lacking is time. The 1.17 code is not stable enough
> for a full release. There is a lot of code that wants to go into 1.18 and
> until new releases are going to appear regularly a lot of stuff will
> continue to wait for it to happen. At this moment the feet of the developers
> are stuck in clay and agile programming and delivery is still a dream.

For the Narayam extension, very short time passed from development to
installation in a live Wikipedia and it happened just a few days ago,
in the middle of the 1.17 work. I'm happy that it happened; Why can't
the same happen with the Interlanguage extension? From the testing
that i carried out, i saw that this extension, as it is now, doesn't
break anything and the wiki in which it is installed just keeps
working as it did (correct me if i'm wrong).

FWIW, there is consensus that the functionality that the Interlanguage
extension provides is very much needed. On the Meta talk page
dedicated to it and in the bug comments no serious objections were
expressed; several proposals to do similar things were created in the
Strategy wiki; when i meet Wikipedians from around the world, they all
tell me in person that they really, really want it.

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] wiki for interwiki (was: Foundation too passive)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/21 Marcus Buck 
>
> An'n 21.03.2011 09:27, hett Andre Engels schreven:
> > I guess I'm awfully inadequate at that then... Moving interwikis to a
> > separate site is something that I first proposed back in 2002
> > (although then saying it was 'something for the (far?) future'), that
> > has many community members and I think also developers behind it, and
> > yet it's 2011 now, and it still seems that it will not be there in the
> > near future.
> Peter17 had a Google Summer of Code project in which he developed code
> that allows interwiki transclusion. And Nikola Smolenski's Interlanguage
> extension is developed since 2008.
>
> So it's not the volunteers who lack. Apparently the main problem is "get
> it applied to the live site".

... So that's another opportunity to mention the request to enable it,
open since September 2008:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607

Are there still any technical barriers to enabling it?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editor Survey, 2011

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/11 Dario Taraborelli :
>> The simple answer: Maybe, but how could i know that?
>>
>> The smartass answer: Maybe, but how could i know that after clicking
>> 'Next' i wouldn't be presented with a stupid JavaScript error message,
>> punishing me for clicking 'Next' before filling the required fields?
>
> on the frontpage you can read in a prominent box:
>
> "Please note that you can skip any question (or select "No answer") that you 
> do not wish to answer or that you think does not apply."
>
> there is not a single required field in this survey.

I felt so bad about not noticing it (really), that i came back to the
survey to try to fill it again, but in the middle of the first page i
had a break. When i completed the first page and clicked Next, i
received a message saying:

We are sorry but your session has expired.
Either you have been inactive for too long, you have cookies disabled
for your browser, or there were problems with your connection.

I was away for maybe half an hour. That's not "too long".

And if that's not enough, i couldn't use the Back button to restore my answers.

Such things must not happen in WMF surveys.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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Re: [Foundation-l] Editor Survey, 2011

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/11 Nikola Smolenski :
> On 03/11/2011 10:52 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> I noticed the "Take a WMF-sponsored survey on barriers to expert
>> participation in Wikipedia." banner on the top of English Wiktionary
>> the other day. I clicked it and answered a whole page of questions
>> that were interesting and relevant. And the next page presented the
>> same bunch of questions again, somewhat rephrased. I hate it when that
>> happens and i immediately closed the survey; my answers to the
>
> This is sometimes done so that if someone is not seriously answering the
> form, the answers to similar questions will be different, and so they
> may be disregarded. But yeah, experts are probably not going to not
> seriously answer the form.

I know - it's not the first time i see a survey with repeated
questions and it's not the first time i fill up a long one. But
sometimes enough is enough. Experts may be severely offended by the
thought that someone suspects they aren't seriously answering the
form. I certainly was and i'm just a B.A.; i suspect that many Ph.D.'s
gave up long before i did.

>> relevant questions on the first page probably went to the drain.
>
> You could've just clicked 'Next' to the end.

The simple answer: Maybe, but how could i know that?

The smartass answer: Maybe, but how could i know that after clicking
'Next' i wouldn't be presented with a stupid JavaScript error message,
punishing me for clicking 'Next' before filling the required fields?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Editor Survey, 2011

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/11 Mani Pande :
>
>
>> MzMcBride wrote:
>
>> "After having looked at the survey content, the survey software, and the
>> survey format (particularly the length), I have very, very low confidence
>> that anything of value will come from this (beyond lessons of what not to do
>> next time)."
>>
> Based upon my experience having conducted surveys and quantitative
> research for over 12 years, this is a very incorrect assessment of the
> survey. The survey answers questions that are important to the
> foundation, and will help us understand the editor community so we can
> provide them an engaging  editing environment, ensure we can increase
> their needs to increase retention and increase the diversity among
> editors.

...Except the results will be based only on the answers of people who
have patience for a 20-minute survey. It's the year 2011 - in 20
minutes i receive about 20 emails and i have to read them and answer
them. Does the Foundation knowingly want to exclude busy people from
this survey?

I noticed the "Take a WMF-sponsored survey on barriers to expert
participation in Wikipedia." banner on the top of English Wiktionary
the other day. I clicked it and answered a whole page of questions
that were interesting and relevant. And the next page presented the
same bunch of questions again, somewhat rephrased. I hate it when that
happens and i immediately closed the survey; my answers to the
relevant questions on the first page probably went to the drain.

Please consider breaking the twenty-minute into five four-minute
surveys conducted along several months.

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> As for Lime Survey, it is a great open source tool that is able
> to meet all our needs.  Again based upon my experience, a 20 minute
> survey is standard for most surveys. A learning from our last survey was
> that our community is very engaged and I believe the length of the
> survey is the least of our problems.



>
>> The pool of people who will click the banner is already fairly small. The
>> people who will want to start a 20-minute survey is even smaller.
>>
>
> When we did UNU-Merit which was a similar length, we got over 100,000
> complete responses so your assessment that the pool is fairly small is
> unsubstantiated.
>
> If you have more feedback, please post it on the wiki.
> Mani
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/5 Casey Brown :
> All translation work is done by volunteers, and who were we to say
> "your language isn't as important, we'd rather you translate into X",
> especially if we hadn't really researched how to make those priority
> lists?  If you translate something into Hopi, Kunama, Irish, or
> Pirahã, it'll get published just as quickly as if you translate
> something into French, Spanish, German, or Chinese.

Yes, but in practice this creates strange situations, when a very
active linguistic community, such as Catalan or Macedonian, has the
messages translated, but major languages such as French or Russian are
left untreated. This happened quite a lot during the latest
Fundraising, for example. Of course this means that translators into
Russian and French should be more active, but maybe some other model
can be considered.

This can be yet another topic for the discussion in the Language
committee meeting in May :)

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Re: [Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/5 Teofilo :
> The fact that 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Trans#Core_set_of_languages
> is now marked as "obsolete" disappoints me. It seems to mean that
> multilingualism has been rejected.

This is an interesting idea that should be revived.

Put mildly, Wikimedia really shouldn't be focused on English. There
are a lot of people who don't know English and don't plan to learn it;
to paraphrase Larry Wall, it is not occasionally forgotten, but
occasionally remembered.

A UN-like model, with several major languages, into which important
Foundation releases *must* be translated, is a realistic solution that
will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the
danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example,
translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who
know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put
Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said
about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages.
Nevertheless, done properly, it's better than staying English-only.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wikisource's translation efforts, Babel and Translate extensions

[Amir E. Aharoni]

> John Vandenberg commented recently that Wikisource has been looking to
> have the Babel extension installed, and Siebrand notes the Translate
> extension is ready for wider use, say on Meta or Mediawiki.org:

Babel is great and i'd love to see it enabled everywhere, but there's
a little odd bug that should be fixed:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23034

I tried to fix it myself, but got lost in the language code tables.

Another i18n extension that has matured recently is Interlanguage:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607

Enabling it will:
* stop the countless interwiki bot edits and clean up Recent Changes
* allow resolving interlanguage links conflicts easily and efficiently
* help clean this backlog:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/4 Ray Saintonge :
> On 03/03/11 5:44 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
>> The name "administrator" gives the impression of some mythical
>> "balance of power", although administrators don't actually
>> administrate - they (un)delete, (un)block and (un)protect, in addition
>> to editing articles and participating in discussions just like
>> everybody else. The name "sysop" (system operator), used occasionally
>> in English, and more frequently in some other languages (e.g. Hebrew),
>> sounds less like a managerial role, but it's technical and cryptic and
>> requires explanation.
>>
>> Giving user groups exact and real names will likely change the
>> attitude of many users who see these user groups as "the powers that
>> be" and think that they're impenetrable.
>
> You make a strong point. People cherish their titles and the
> self-esteem.  Being able to say "I am a Wikipedia administrator," to
> someone who has never edited Wikipedia gives an impression of
> importance. Breaking the task into its components leaves each part less
> prestigious.

Most admins with whom i am familiar aren't using their adminship to
gain prestige.

I'd rather be "the guy who wrote a detailed encyclopedic article about
every diacritic sign in the Hebrew alphabet" than an admin - i find a
lot more prestige in it. I am happy about being an admin, not because
of prestige, but because having the permission to delete pages without
going through some request page is simply useful for writing articles
and making the wiki better.

Put simply, good admins, who use their permissions to create a better
wiki, are not supposed to object to such a change.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/3 Samuel Klein :
> Amir writes:
>> Now i, in general, think that these permissions should be given
>> liberally to as many reasonable Wikimedians as possible.
> 
>> In fact it's quite likely that communities will want to give as little
>> permissions as possible to users.
>
> Can you explain the apparent paradox above?

It's not a paradox: I think that they should be given liberally, but
many community members may think otherwise. It's not very logical, but
in all languages that i can read there are many discussions about it,
full of confusions and suspicions. I believe that the name
"administrator" is one of the main reasons for this and that's why i
suggest retiring it completely.

The name "administrator" gives the impression of some mythical
"balance of power", although administrators don't actually
administrate - they (un)delete, (un)block and (un)protect, in addition
to editing articles and participating in discussions just like
everybody else. The name "sysop" (system operator), used occasionally
in English, and more frequently in some other languages (e.g. Hebrew),
sounds less like a managerial role, but it's technical and cryptic and
requires explanation.

Giving user groups exact and real names will likely change the
attitude of many users who see these user groups as "the powers that
be" and think that they're impenetrable.

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[Foundation-l] Language committee meeting in May - open discussion

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hello all,

The Wikimedia Language committee members are going to meet in May.

I created a new page in Meta for the open discussion of this meeting:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/May_2011_meeting

Everyone is welcome to influence this meeting by proposing to discuss.
Please edit this page and propose your ideas.

Thanks,

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[Foundation-l] for those of you who don't follow the PHD comics

[Amir E. Aharoni]

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1422

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Re: [Foundation-l] Document Foundation fundraising

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/2/18 David Gerard :
> On 18 February 2011 15:15, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
>> While it is likely that they will achieve $50.000 somehow [1], it
>> would be good that WMF (1) donate them some sum of money and (2) to
>> cover the remainder, if they would have any.
>
> It's a good cause, but doesn't look on the surface tremendously
> WMF-mission-relevant. Do we have a significant usage of
> OpenOffice/LibreOffice?

I frequently use it to convert documents written by people
uncomfortable with MediaWiki syntax. Encyclopedic articles, documents
for WikiSource, word-lists for Wiktionary etc. Last time i checked,
MediaWiki exporter was included in the default installation of
LibreOffice. There supposed to be an equivalent add-on for Microsoft
Office. I tried installing it, but it didn't actually work; YMMV. But
then, we love Free Software anyway anyway, don't we?

This doesn't necessarily mean that i support donating money to that
foundation. I love and use the product, i help localizing it, and i do
hope that it will be independent from Oracle, but i haven't made up my
mind about this particular organizational move yet.

> (I installed LibreOffice 3.3 in Ubuntu 10.10 from the PPA. It's quite
> nice. They're getting out a lot of little annoyances that Sun and now
> Oracle never bothered with. Recommended.)

+1.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Showing the difference between the sexes

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/2/12 Gerard Meijssen :
> Given that we want to be more welcoming to women, I think it is awesome that
> we will be able to address women as women. The fact that we gain some
> statistical insight is a fringe benefit.
>
> The only question left is, when can this be implemented..

I raised this question in the Hebrew Wikipedia Village Pump. All the
people who replied–female, male and of unknown gender–were generally
in favor of implementing such a thing.

As it often happens in Wikipedia, the discussion veered off into
proposals to change the translation of the word "User" itself into
something else, such as "Editor", "Contributor", "Participant", etc.,
but even then, all the proposals were m/f pairs.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Planned 1.17 deployment on February 8]

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/2/10 Liam Wyatt :
> On 09/02/2011, at 4:35, Guillaume Paumier  wrote:
>
>> Le mardi 08 février 2011 à 22:48 +0530, Bartol Flint a écrit :
>>>
>>
>>> Is there someplace I can follow what the status is - like on twitter??
>>
>> A public status dashboard is available at http://status.wikimedia.org
>>
>> Technical details are automatically pushed to identi.ca and twitter:
>> http://identi.ca/wikimediatech
>> http://twitter.
>
> On a more general note, does the error page we display when the site goes 
> down (for whatever reason) link to theses places? From what I remember from 
> last time I saw that page it only links to an IRC channel. Perhaps it should 
> refer people to the status dashboard and also link to the donation page?

See also:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_1.17/Wikimedia_deployment

Summary: A page that explains about the problem or the upgrade should
not hosted be on the same server which being upgraded and is
experiencing the problem.

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[Foundation-l] "share in Facebook/Twitter/etc" icon

[Amir E. Aharoni]

User:HalanTul from the Sakha Wikipedia asked me to ask about this here.

The writers of the Sakha Wikipedia want to add icons to "share in
Facebook/Twitter/etc" to some articles to promote the project, but
they are concerned about the legal and ideological implications of
such a move: Doesn't putting the logo of a commercial company right in
the article violate the no-advertising principle?

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[Foundation-l] Usability wiki

[Amir E. Aharoni]

The main page of the Usability wiki ( http://usability.wikimedia.org ) says
that it's discontinued and the whole wiki appears to be locked for editing.
I don't remember this being discussed, although i may have missed it.

I understand that after completing the Vector rollout and the using up of
the grant that particular project is over, but it certainly must not mean
that all the usability problems have been solved and that the Foundation
won't work on usability anymore. Quite the contrary, usability should be one
of the Foundation main concerns - it makes sense in general and it is also
directly related to four out of five movement priorities as listed at the
main page of the Strategy wiki ( http://strategy.wikimedia.org/ ; the only
priority to which usability is not directly related is "Focus on quality
content"). I have dozens of ideas for much-needed usability improvements
that will benefit both beginning and experienced editors, even before anyone
mentions WYSIWYG, and dozens of ideas for new rounds of usability testing,
which, without a doubt, will occur one day. And i am sure that i am not the
only one.

I suggest unlocking the Usability wiki and re-opening it as a community hub
for ideas about usability. It should be a completely unlocked wiki, with
anonymous users allowed to edit etc.; if spam becomes a problem, editing can
be allowed for registered users only.

Of course, such discussions can take place on Meta or on the Strategy wiki,
but since the Usability wiki already exists, it can be recycled as a site
focused on these matters.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Since Egypt has shutdown internet, should we too?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/28 David Gerard :
> The idea of getting samizdat copies of Wikipedia into Egypt appeals.
> Airlift in current-article dumps of ar:wp and en:wp on SD cards by the
> thousand?

Don't forget arz.wikipedia. It's small, but shouldn't be ignored.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Translatewiki illustrates how low internationalisation is in the priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/27 Teofilo :
> Before Translatewiki existed it was possible for Wikimedia/Wikipedia
> users to improve the translation of the Mediawiki software's message
> used on their project into their own language.
>
> It is no longer possible now,

As Chad said, it's still possible and it's often done in many wikis.

> because Translatewiki exists, and there
> is a powerful Translatewiki lobby within the local Wikipedia/Wikimedia
> communities which actively fights against the translation of messages
> on-wiki, and compells users to open a user account on Translatewiki
> (1).

It's "powerful" simply because it makes sense not to duplicate the
effort by translating messages on-wiki. If a certain message makes
sense for MediaWiki in general, but not for Wikipedia, then it can and
should be changed on-wiki after community discussion. The existence of
a whole page devoted to such discussions in the French Wikipedia is a
proof that this system works.

> * Let awkward translations go on being displayed on their language
> version of Wikipedia

... Or discuss changing them and ask the admins to implement the decision.

If you think that changing that particular message in fr.wikipedia
should be done locally and not in Translatewiki.net, express your
opinion there.

> * Or open an account on a non-Wikimedia project, which means providing
> non-Wikimedia managers access to your personal data. That means you
> are loosing the guarantees of
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy (the guarantee that
> your data are accessed only exceptionally and in such exceptional
> cases, always handled by people trusted by the Wikimedia Foundation)

Translatewiki.net has a privacy policy, too.

> I ask the Wikimedia Foundation to protect its users from the
> aggressions of non-Wikimedia projects. And to implement a set of
> policies to prevent this sort of non-Wikimedia project lobbying.

This is not aggression. Even though it's not officially connected to
the WMF, the people operating Translatewiki.net are important
contributors to Wikimedia projects and to MediaWiki. Thanks to
Translatewiki.net localization became simpler and faster. It's true
that the WMF could have made it, but the WMF didn't do it, and
Translatewiki.net did and it fit pretty well into the way MediaWiki is
developed.

> I ask the Wikimedia Foundation to support people involved in
> translation work, rather than expell them to non-Wikimedia projects.

I do hope that the collaboration between Translatewiki.net and the WMF
will become tighter, but there's nothing terribly broken in the way
things work now.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/18 Sage Ross :
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
>>
>> That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or
>> more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because "RFA is broken"
>> discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning
>> communities of about 50 regular writers or more.
>>
>
> [citation needed]
>
> And I don't mean that all facetiously.  It'd be worth documenting the
> relative "brokenness" of admin selection processes across languages.

Ziko van Dijk's "Tell us about your Wikipedia" project [1] in 2008 was
advertised through sitenotice on Meta and it was quite successful.
Something like this could be repeated with focused questions about
adminship. It won't be complete and precise, but it is reasonable
low-hanging fruit.

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tell_us_about_your_Wikipedia

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/16 Joseph Seddon 
>
> I am going to be quite frank and say that it is pointless to have this
> discussion on this list. Only a fraction of the english wikipedia community
> are on it. If you are genuinely serious about this then propose it on the
> english wikipedia. This is not a foundation level issue nor will it ever
> become one so put it to the community.

That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or
more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because "RFA is broken"
discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning
communities of about 50 regular writers or more.

And in Wikipedias in small regional languages, which have only a
handful of writers i often see very confused discussions about
adminship which show that they misunderstand the concept - they think
that an admin is supposed to "administrate", or that they shouldn't
write articles until the Foundation appoints an admin, or that they
must draft a detailed voting process document to appoint admins - but
can't really vote until they have a quorum, etc. (This doesn't mean
that i know a lot of languages. These discussions are often held in
Russian or English.)

I believe that this confusion is caused by the heavy word
"administrator". Eliminating it and calling the permissions by their
actual names - "blocker", "deleter", "protector", "reviewer" - will
likely eliminate this confusion.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/16 Yaroslav M. Blanter :
>
>> Nope, it doesn't have to be this way. There should be no "full admins"
>> and "partial admins"; there should be no "admins" at all. There should
>> be people who protect pages and people who block vandals. Some people
>> may have both permissions.
>>
>
> The suggestion sounds reasonable to me, but I do not see any way it could
> be implemented.

You think that the community will object? I understand where that
feeling comes from, but if the community really wants to have
"administrators" that have both privileges, it may continue with the
current deal by granting both of them to whoever passes "RFA".

In fact it's quite likely that communities will want to give as little
permissions as possible to users.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

1/16 Thomas Dalton :
> On 16 January 2011 07:45, Amir E. Aharoni  
> wrote:
>> What they do in the Portuguese Wikipedia is not what i propose; it's
>> only close to it. What's listed at [[en:Wikipedia:Perennial
>> proposals]] is very different from what i propose. I don't propose
>> limited adminship; i propose to retire the concept of adminship
>> entirely, because it's an outdated lump of very different things. (And
>> by the way, i have a habit of re-reading Perennial proposals every
>> couple of months.)
>
> You would have some people that have all the different things and some
> that only have a few. The former would, in essence, be admins and the
> latter limited admins.

Nope, it doesn't have to be this way. There should be no "full admins"
and "partial admins"; there should be no "admins" at all. There should
be people who protect pages and people who block vandals. Some people
may have both permissions.

>> A checkuser, for example, is not a limited admin. He's a checkuser and
>> it's good that it is this way.
>
> Are there any checkusers that aren't admins already? Checkuser is an
> extra tool given to admins, not a tool given out independantly of
> other tools.

It's perfectly possible. Why does one need the permission to block,
protect and delete in order to check IPs? I can see how blocking is
related to that, but protection and deletion? - Not necessarily. It's
just historical residue. In fact, some people may say that a checkuser
shouldn't have the permission to block. It is simple to solve this:
The technical permissions should be separate and each community can
decide whether to allow checkusers to block.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/16 Thomas Dalton :
> On 15 January 2011 21:55, Amir E. Aharoni  
> wrote:
>> Before writing that proposal i reviewed many, many pages of "RFA is
>> broken" discussions not just in the English Wikipedia, but in Hebrew,
>> Russian and Catalan ones, too. Nowhere have i found a proposal to dump
>> the concept of adminship completely and to split it into several
>> roles, although i admit that i didn't read all the archives through.
>> The closest thing that i found to my proposal is what happens in the
>> Portuguese Wikipedia, which has the "Deleters" group (it has a lovely
>> name in Portuguese - "Eliminadores").
>
> It has been suggested before. It's even on the "Perennial proposals"
> page on the English Wikipedia. The page about this proposal
> specifically is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Limited_administrators

What they do in the Portuguese Wikipedia is not what i propose; it's
only close to it. What's listed at [[en:Wikipedia:Perennial
proposals]] is very different from what i propose. I don't propose
limited adminship; i propose to retire the concept of adminship
entirely, because it's an outdated lump of very different things. (And
by the way, i have a habit of re-reading Perennial proposals every
couple of months.)

A checkuser, for example, is not a limited admin. He's a checkuser and
it's good that it is this way.

What i would really like to hear in this discussion is opinions
outside of the English Wikipedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Happy Birthday Wikipedia, from Jimmy Wales

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/15 Magnus Manske :
> On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Jay Walsh  wrote:
>> Birthday wishes from Jimmy on our blog, with embedded video greetings.
>
> Implemented as Flash. Oh the irony ;-)

A web video without patent restrictions:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WalesCalltoAction.ogv

The Foundation blog could use more cowbell^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ogg videos.

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Re: [Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/15 geni :
> On 15 January 2011 15:26, Amir E. Aharoni  
> wrote:
>
>> Now, fight.
>
>  First review the discussion that has already taken place at WT:RFA

I suppose that you refer to the English Wikipedia. This list is about
more than just the English Wikipedia.

Before writing that proposal i reviewed many, many pages of "RFA is
broken" discussions not just in the English Wikipedia, but in Hebrew,
Russian and Catalan ones, too. Nowhere have i found a proposal to dump
the concept of adminship completely and to split it into several
roles, although i admit that i didn't read all the archives through.
The closest thing that i found to my proposal is what happens in the
Portuguese Wikipedia, which has the "Deleters" group (it has a lovely
name in Portuguese - "Eliminadores").

The discussions that i did read say that RfA *process* is broken
because the questions are repetitive, because the nominees are not
required to identify themselves, because there's no provisional
adminship, because the desysopping process is dysfunctional, because
the bureaucrats' cabal decides whatever it wants without regard to
discussion etc.

I say that that the "A" in RFA shouldn't exist.

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[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

In his 10th anniversary address Jimmy Wales says: "Today is a great
moment to reflect on where we've been."

What my reflection brings up is that the single thing that probably
raised more controversy among the widest range of Wikimedians is not
the content of articles about sex, celebrities or geopolitical and
linguistic conflicts, but the procedures of appointing administrators.
It should have never been a big deal, but it is, in all projects in
all languages.

The "administrator" privilege lumps together several very different permissions:
* rollback
* blocking and unblocking
* deleting and restoring pages and versions of pages
* viewing deleted versions of pages
* protect and unprotect pages and edit protected pages
* some PendingChanges/FlaggedRevisions-related permissions, which i
haven't quite figured out yet :)

Now i, in general, think that these permissions should be given
liberally to as many reasonable Wikimedians as possible. I always
believed in it, and since most of these actions became visible in the
watchlist a few years ago, this belief became even stronger.

But some re-thinking is needed. The administrator privilege, as it is
now, should be retired and broken up to several separate privileges:
* block/unblock
* protect, unprotect, edit protected, config PendingChanges on the page
* edit highly technical pages - the MediaWiki: namespace, common.css, etc.
* revert, delete/undelete, view deleted

The permission to revert, delete and undelete unprotected pages can be
given to those users who can create and move pages ("autoconfirmed").
There is no big functional difference between deleting a page and
deleting a paragraph in an existing page or doing a major re-write.
The difference between reverting and undoing is a matter of civility
and a lot of uncivil things can be done without permissions anyway.
Limiting these actions only to certain users is quite pointless.

Viewing deleted pages shouldn't be a big deal either. Deletion is not
so much eliminating non-notable topics and nonsense from existence, as
about separating them from encyclopedic articles. It shouldn't be a
big deal to let bored people read them somewhere. Eliminating
egregiously offensive and illegal content, major copyright violations
and BLP issues can be accomplished today with the oversight
permission.

Controlling Pending Changes, although i haven't figured out all of its
intricacies, is essentially an improved version of page protection. It
makes sense to give this permission to (many) selected people. It will
probably evolve over time, and i believe that it will evolve more
organically if conceptually separated from blocking and deletion.

Another comment about protection is that protecting system messages
(the MediaWiki: namespace) and sensitive CSS and JS pages (commons.css
etc.) is very different from protecting vandalism-prone articles
(Obama etc.). The protection of these technical pages and sensitive
articles should be a different concept.

The permission to block should be a separate one. Separating the
discussions about giving users the permission to protect pages and to
block vandals will not stop the holy wars, but it will focus them.
There will be no more comments such as:

* "User:PhDhistorian may be a good editor who understands
Verifiability and who can be trusted to edit sensitive BLP articles,
but he has personal grudges with User:FatMadonna and he may block her,
so he shouldn't be given the Administrator privilege."
* "User:VandalFighterGrrrl is excellent at patrolling RC, but she's
too inclusionist and shouldn't be given the right to decide about
content protection."

All of the above is formulated in the English Wikipedia terms. I
believe that the English Wikipedia policies for deletion, protection
and blocking make a lot of sense and should be adopted by all
Wikipedias, but this obviously can't be forced on any Wikipedia. Other
projects may have very different understanding of these processes and
it's OK. I'm only talking about the technical separation of the
privileges.

Now, fight.

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

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki[p/m]edia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2010/12/11 Federico Leva (Nemo) :
>> Say the projects were all renamed.  Great.  What's changed?  Only the name
>> on each page and likely the logo in the upper left.  Will the smaller
>> projects magically get more readers and editors and Google page rank?  No.
>
> In fact the proposers of renaming or merging want to kill the
> sisterprojects, see e.g. the proposal linked above. I don't think this
> proposal is worth discussing again, at least not here.

I participate eagerly in one of the sister projects and occasionally
in the others and i don't want to kill them, but i do think that
renaming is an idea worth considering. I am certain that most of the
other people who think that it's a good idea don't want to kill them.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki[p/m]edia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I also think that it is worth considering and that it's not a suicide,
although other opinions are welcome.

I am mostly active in Wikipedia, but i am also quite active in
Wikisource and Commons. I wouldn't be offended if Wikisource's name
would change. When i talk about my biggest Wikisource project -
Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar - i usually say that i do it in a "project
affiliated with Wikipedia". I always do mention the name "Wikisource",
but most people don't recognize it.

As for Commons - I would love to see it branded and marketed as a
sophisticated competitor to Flickr and commercial stock photo
agencies, but until that happens, most of us will probably think of it
as the image repository for Wikipedia and the other projects and the
general public doesn't even know it exists, even though everybody sees
these images every day.

2010/12/10 Strainu :
> At first thought, this proposal seemed like a "branding suicide", but
> considering the enormous difference in awareness between Wikipedia and
> the other brands, it could be a subject worth discussing. It would
> also help avoid composed word that sometimes sound strange or are just
> plain weird in languages other than English.
>
> Strainu
>
>
> 2010/12/10  :
>> I was about to write a suggestion similar to the one indicated by Ziko
>> van Dijk. I second it and recommend that the following be given serious
>> consideration:
>>
>> Change as soon as practically possible the naming of the Foundation to
>> the "Wikipedia Foundation" and the naming of the projects to Wikipedia,
>> Wikipedia Commons, Wikipedia Books, Wikipedia Wiktionary etc. That would
>> simplify matters enormously while at the same time broadening the
>> Wikipedia brand to all projects in a much more effective and
>> comprehensible way.
>>
>> "We" would of course still talk internally about Commons, Wikibooks,
>> Wiktionary and so on for the sake of brevity.
>>
>> It is never too late...
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sir48/Thyge, da:wiki
>>
>>
>> - Original meddelelse -
>>
>>> Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com [mailto:zvand...@googlemail.com]
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>
>>> Whether the names amplify the problem, whether "Wikimedia" was a good
>>> name choice - maybe WMF should rename itself "The Wikipedia
>>> Foundation" and call Wiktionary "The Wikipedia Dictionary" and so on.
>>
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[Foundation-l] the only site in the top X sites that doesn't sell you anything

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Quite a lot of people know that Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular
sites in the world.

Much less people notice that among the most popular Wikipedia is the only
one that doesn't sell them anything: Google has Adwords, Microsoft sells its
products and all the other websites have advertising banners or animations
of some kind. I didn't notice it until Sue Gardner mentioned it in a meet-up
in New York city last August. It is a very impressive piece of information;
since i heard it, i tell it to people and it makes them raise their
eyebrows. Sue mentioned BBC as the only popular website that gets anywhere
near Wikipedia in terms of being a non-profit, but even BBC shows some ads
in its videos.

I look at Alexa's top websites every few days and i see that this assertion
is quite true: among the top 100 Alexa websites there are usually no
non-profit organization. WordPress.org and Mozilla.org appear there
occasionally, but nothing except that (WordPress.com is high on that list,
but it shows ads on some blogs).

But is Alexa precise? Is it a good measurement of a website's popularity, or
should i base myself on a better ranking when i talk to people about it?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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Re: [Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 15:42, Fred Bauder  wrote:
>
> If the copyright license has been followed -wikipedia should exclude all
> clones. However, often, material is copied without crediting it to
> Wikipedia.

Yes, but that may also exclude sites that are useful and original, but
happen to mention Wikipedia.

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[Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching

[Amir E. Aharoni]

The "Google test" used to be a tool for checking the notability of a subject
or to find sources about it. For some languages it may be also used for
other purposes - for example in Hebrew, the spelling of which is not
established so well, it is very frequently used for finding the most common
spelling, especially for article titles. It was never the ultimate tool, of
course, but it was useful. With the proliferation of sites that
indiscriminately copy Wikipedia content it is becoming less and less useful.

For some time i used to fight this problem by adding "-site:wikipedia.org-site:
wapedia.mobi -site:miniwiki.org" etc. to my search queries, but i hit a
wall: Google limits the search string to 32 words, and today there are many
more than 32 sites that clone Wikipedia, so this trick is also becoming
useless.

I know that some Wikipedias customized Special:Search, adding other search
engines except Wikipedias built-in one. I tried to see whether any Wikipedia
added an ability to search using Google (or Bing, or Yahoo, or any other
search engine) excluding Wikipedia clones. Does anyone know whether it's
possible to build such a thing? And maybe it already exists and i didn't
search well enough?

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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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Re: [Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 17:42, Fred Bauder  wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard  wrote:
> >> On 18 November 2010 11:30,   wrote:
> >> > Any one signed up yet?
> >> > http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
> >
> > I couldn't find anything wrong in their code of ethics
> > http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
>
> Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to
> break Wikipedia rules, not follow them.

... Or rather, they hire someone to follow Wikipedia rules, because
they don't have the time to read through dozens of our policy pages.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard  wrote:
>
> On 18 November 2010 11:30,   wrote:
>
> > Any one signed up yet?
> > http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135

I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics
http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html

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Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking Wikibooks (was Re: PediaPress)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:11, Robert S. Horning
 wrote:
> Something is missing here.  I'd like to think it is this tangible medium
> of a physical book that is what is wrong, but I'm really not sure.  If
> there are other ideas, I'd like to hear them.
> ...
> What is wrong?


My theory about the very high profile of Wikipedia and the mostly low
profile of the other projects is that in Wikipedia it is very easy to
predicate. People love to predicate. Look it up in a dictionary - i
refer to all of that word's meanings.

Put simply, Wikipedia is the world's largest and most convenient
soapbox. There's a policy page in the English Wikipedia that says that
Wikipedia is not a soapbox ([[WP:SOAP]]). But people try to use it
this way anyway. It is very, very attractive. Some of them eventually
understand that NPOV is a good thing and become good Wikipedia
editors.

An encyclopedia, by its nature, is the perfect platform for saying
things like "X is a Y". We are all familiar with that: Kosovo IS A
country / unrecognized country / partially recognized country /
de-facto independent country / province of Serbia / occupied province
of Serbia. This opportunity to easily disrupt the NPOV - even
temporarily - with one's own version of the predication is a
necessarily evil that makes Wikipedia so popular. Other projects are
nowhere near offering the opportunity to say such things, at least not
as easily.

Wiktionary is supposed to consist of almost nothing but predications,
but it's too linguistic. Wikisource is a great place for lovers of
archiving and typesetting (like myself), but you can't be original
there. Wikinews and Wikiquote... nobody is quite sure what they are at
all.

Wikibooks can, theoretically, be a place for making predications and
for spreading POV. But most people, given the choice of writing a book
about a subject or an encyclopedic article about it, will write an
encyclopedic article. Not just because it's shorter, but because it
looks like a more natural way of answering the question "What is
X?"... the way they want to answer it.


How to solve it? Sorry, no idea. I love textbooks for all ages, so i
would love to see Wikibooks flourish. I made a few corrections to
existing Wikibooks, but i find it strange to start a Wikibook from
scratch.

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Re: [Foundation-l] wikimedia fundraiser

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 17:17, luke lenny  wrote:
> why can't wikimedia publish advertisements and generate revenue and
> become self-reliant,self-sustainable  , instead of asking for funds
> from user every year again and again...
>

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Advertising .

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 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] New projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 00:03, Mohamed Magdy  wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> > Our family has got new projects:
> >
> 
> > * Wikinews in Esperanto: http://eo.wikinews.org/
> >
> This project is a joke, are there really people who are going to read
> news in Esperanto?

It is not a joke any more than the other Wikinews projects.

There are dozens of websites and printed news magazines in Esperanto,
so people are reading them. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Esperanto_publications (that
category is far from being comprehensive).

Besides, the Language Committee checked that this project is actually
active in the Incubator before approving it, so there certainly are
people who are writing news in Esperanto for that project.

--
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי · Amir Elisha Aharoni
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Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 10:47, MZMcBride  wrote:
> Can someone explain the Wikimedia / PediaPress relationship to me?

The basic relationship is explained at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable

It would be nice to have some more detailed and up-to-date information
about this relationship, though.

(To alleviate any doubt, i have nothing to do with it myself.)

> I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia
> article.

Me neither, but if some people want it, why not.

One thing that i can think of is that it's useful for people and
societies who cannot have a reliable internet connection.

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