Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009-
2009/9/12 Thomas Dalton : > While I don't doubt that the > Portuguese Wikimedians are acting in good faith, trust requires two > things - good faith and competence. They are almost certainly not > competent since they haven't had an opportunity to develop that > competence yet, so they should not be trusted to be making the right > decisions. I'm a bit worried about this sort of approach. Taken to extremes, we wouldn't let the local chapter organise itself at all, because clearly none of them would know how to do it until after they've had experience running it, etc etc etc. People will make bad decisions, estimates, projections, guesses, conclusions sometimes; it happens. We spot them the second time around, once we've realised they're wrong, fix them, and move on. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] strategic planning process update
2009/9/15 Brian : > I poked around a bit, and I think they have to actually sign in with the new > account before its in the table, which makes sense, and means the #s are > reasonable. This is certainly my understanding - the account is created as-and-when you log in at the new wiki, or visit it whilst remaining logged in. (This latter part, especially with people looking at article interwikis, will probably account for quite an upsurge in account creation post-SUL...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining "Non-commercial"
2009/9/15 Anthony : > On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Hay (Husky) wrote: > >> with its 255 pages >> this might be something that you would rather like to skim through >> instead of fully read :) > > Anything to disrupt my view that the NC licenses suck because it's unclear > what they mean? Not a view I disagree with, personally! One interesting example the blog post brings up - a nonprofit-with-ads, paying for hosting costs that way, is that commercial? 60% of creators say it is non-commercial, whilst *70%* of reusers think so - which really does begin to sound like a recipe for unintentionally annoying a lot of people releasing material under the license. I wonder, perhaps, if the best thing the next generation of the -nc- licenses could include would be a long list of worked examples... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining "Non-commercial"
2009/9/15 Mike Linksvayer : > It's not that bad. What you see is a scale where 1=noncommercial and > 100=commercial, and creators rated the case you mention 59.2 on that > scale, users 71.7 -- so creators see that case as less commercial than > users, which is ideal if fewer disputes are a good outcome (and as far > as I know there aren't many). You are entirely correct, and I seem to have thoroughly misread that section! > Of course one of the ways disputes are avoided is that users just > avoid NC licensed content, as Wikimedia projects do. Kudos. Yeah. Not the most desired outcome for the creator, though. One of the benefits of CC is to encourage worry-free distribution by helping creators be entirely up-front about what they're happy to have happen with their material, but this sort of ambiguity seems to bring us full circle. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Security holes in Mediawiki
2009/9/15 Gregory Kohs : > I was sort of surprised to learn today that Mediawiki software has had 37 > security holes identified: > > http://akahele.org/2009/09/false-sense-of-security/ > > Are most of these patched now, or are they still open? If still open, is > the Foundation making site & user security more of a priority in 2010? The most recent one (the only 2009 notice) which that blog links to is explicitly resolved; http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2009-0737 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2009-February/83.html Note that it was entered into the database on 25 February, two weeks after solution and marked as not affecting the most recent release version on the same day. Skimming down the list, it looks like most of them are in the same boat - CVE-2008-5688: "MediaWiki 1.8.1, and other versions before 1.13.3, when the wgShowExceptionDetails variable is enabled..." CVE-2008-5687: "MediaWiki 1.11, and other versions before 1.13.3, does not properly protect against the download of backups of deleted images..." The database appears to record *known* problems in all versions of the software, rather than just "open problems". I haven't checked each one, but all the recent ones look solved, so I think we're safe - at least, safe from the problems we know about, which is always the important caveat! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] It's not article count, it's editors
2009/9/23 Gregory Maxwell : > The reason "how we have not reached large parts of the world yet" is > because access to Wikipedia is significantly influenced by things > outside of Wikimedia's control and scope. A dramatic demonstration of this: if someone in Beijing flips a switch tomorrow, and zh.wp becomes blocked, our potential audience changes by three hundred million (internet users) or a billion (speakers) overnight (depending if you count population or internet users) and our nominal penetration among Chinese-speakers would presumably collapse as a result. > Surely someone must have a respectable count of internet users by > language that we could use for comparison? That would be a much better > metric for our success today; while raw literate speaker numbers would > be a useful comparison for what we could start reaching with > non-internet mechanisms. There's a couple of estimates on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage though they look a little dated. Alternatively, users by country is reasonably well estimated, I think, and you could try estimating based on languages from that. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Status of flagged protection (flagged revisions) for English Wikipedia.
2009/9/29 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen : > Absolutely commendable. >>> c) ensure that the extension is fully scalable to en.wp traffic volume; >>> > Why on earth would we like to ensure that, particularly > *before* point d) ? (...) >>> d) deploy on en.wp as per proposal (potentially, per c, initially in >>> some scale-limited fashion). >>> > Not doing d) before being sure of c) seems very much like > putting the cart before the horse to me. Whether c) will be > relevant at all would necessarily be contingent on the > success of d), and the logical order thus should be to just > do d) and see later if there is any relevance to c) at all. I believe that "scalable" here refers to putting it on pages which recieve the kind of traffic and editing (or editing attempts) that very high-profile page on enwiki do, rather than "scalable to being applied to three million pages". At the time Michael Jackson's death was being reported last month, for example, the page was recieving hundreds of thousands if not millions of hits; we protected it. Had we flagged-protected it - which we probably would have done - what would have happened? Would the system have coped? Would we have been able to handle that flood of edits, technically and organisationally? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF
2009/10/8 Gregory Kohs : > "Our data shows that 7 out of 10 charities we've evaluated spend at least > 75% of their budget on the programs and services they exist to provide. And > 9 out of 10 spend at least 65%. We believe that those spending less than a > third of their budget on program expenses are simply not living up to their > missions. Charities demonstrating such gross inefficiency receive zero > points for their overall organizational efficiency score." > > While the WMF seemed to be narrowly meeting these guidelines (according to > the site's "Revenue/Expenses Trend" histogram) in perhaps 2007, it appears > that in 2008, the trend got decidedly worse. Perhaps I am misinterpreting > the criteria and/or the graphic. But, the 2-out-of-4 stars rating is > decidedly clear. As far as I can see, the "...at least 75% ... at least 65% ... less than a third" relates to the proportion of program expenses to overall expenditure, which as the table and pie-chart shows is ~66% for the WMF. The histogram doesn't seem to directly relate to those numbers or that criteria; it shows absolute program expenses against absolute overall *income*, not expenditure. I think interpreting the proportions of the histogram using the rules applied to a different ratio is going to get confusing. (The reason it seems to have got "substantially worse" is a $4.3m increase in income against a $800k increase in expenses, compared to an increase of $1m in income versus $800k in expenses from 2006-2007. I do not know to what extent this will continue in 09.) WMF could no doubt spend a lot more in program expenses, though defining exactly what those are is a pretty fun game. But it's certainly not spending as inefficiently as the histogram might seem to suggest. > For comparison, witness an organization cited by Charity Navigator as > "similar" to the WMF -- the Reason Foundation -- and see how their Expenses > are a much larger portion of revenue for them, and thus obtain a 3-star > rating: > http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=7481 Again, expenses/revenue isn't where the rating comes from; it's program expenses/total expenses. Reason are indeed doing better at this than WMF - 87% versus 65% - but it's important to distinguish between the two ratios. It's interesting to note that Reason show the same expenses pattern as WMF; they have program expenses increasing at a fairly linear $1m/year, but unlike WMF their income is plateauing - they'll be exceeding their income this year at that rate! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF
2009/10/8 Thomas Dalton : > 2009/10/8 George Herbert : >> The WMF is not entirely unique in that regard; many other charities >> are largely volunteer (cf Red Cross). > > According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cross#Activities: > > "Altogether, there are about 97 million people worldwide who serve > with the ICRC, the International Federation, and the National > Societies. And there are about 12,000 total full time staff members." > > That is a ratio of about 8,000 volunteers per staff member. I think before we get too tied up in using the Red Cross as an example, we should note that it doesn't have ninety-two million volunteers; it has less than a quarter of that number. Most of them are not volunteers as we would meaningfully use the term, but are instead described variously as "members" or "supporters" - in other words, people who give money. "The Movement currently has some 97 million members and volunteers throughout the world, including some 20 million active volunteers" http://www.ifrc.org/voluntee/index.asp?navid=12 As to the 11,000 staff... well, the American Red Cross alone states that it has "more than half a million volunteers and 35,000 employees". I think we're on a bit of a hiding to nothing trying to make a meaningful comparison here, because we don't know how vaguely meaningful the source figures are, beyond "at least partly wrong". As to your second question, a tenth of that figure - about 30,000 - seems right as a number for "active volunteers"; it's about the order of magnitude of people active enough to vote for the Board, for example. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] (no subject)
2009/10/13 Gregory Kohs : > These people are not Wikipedia editors. Is it appropriate and/or > legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a > freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by", > which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage, > would connote authorship? Personally, I don't think it is appropriate > (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier). But, I'm not a > highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better. I've been in > situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in > the light of the law. I think, from past experience, this may be a failing of Amazon (etc) and not necessarily the result of any malfesance on the part of the publishers, annoying little sods though they are. The title page - I haven't seen one, I confess - probably has something like "edited by Smith, Jones, etc." under the title. Here, they're just stating the defensible (if, as we've discussed, somewhat misleading) claim of editorship. In cataloguing parlance, this is the "statement of responsibility" - the verbose description of who's responsible and what they did. When you properly catalogue a book, you would make two entries; one is the statement of responsibility, and one is simply a list of named individuals in that statement. a) edited by Susan Smith, with foreword by Charles Clark. b) Smith, Susan / Clark, Charles Bookseller data tends to be of the form of (b) - a list of entries in a field - and not verbose like (a), though it's common to have them expanded with notes like (editor) (translator) etc. So, Amazon would take b), and turn it into: "by Susan Smith (editor), Charles Clark (foreword)" simply by tidying the list up and putting "by" at the front to make it human-readable They're the ones interpolating the "by" here; the original data probably never had it. [It's actually worse on the main search, incidentally - there, it's just "by X", and the (editor) note is dropped entirely] This is, annoyingly, one of those things that it would probably be relatively easy for Amazon to fix - code the system up so that "by X, Y, Z" becomes "edited by X, Y, Z" when all of X, Y and Z are noted as editors. Beats me where you file a bug report with them, though... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
2009/11/2 Magnus Manske : >> One bug: I got a graph of Imran Khan's bowling statistics rather than >> his portrait... > > And if you give me code to identify a person's image, I'll be happy to > implement it, as would the NSA. As it stands, I chose a random article > from e.g. [[November 2]], then chose a random picture from that. First image is probably your best bet - the odds are reasonably high it'll be a picture, or something else "representative", in the conventional top-right slot. Certainly better odds than random selection! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
2009/11/2 Nikola Smolenski : > Дана Monday 02 November 2009 18:31:50 Andrew Gray написа: >> First image is probably your best bet - the odds are reasonably high >> it'll be a picture, or something else "representative", in the >> conventional top-right slot. Certainly better odds than random >> selection! > > First image could easily be an icon. Mmm, true. "First image directly invoked in the wikitext", or something, I guess. I'm not sure how the standard popups select their image, but that seems a fairly efficient method to look at - it fails sometimes, but in the cases where it fails there's rarely a better image it *should* have used. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews has not failed
2009/11/5 Peter Coombe : > Wikinews has it's problems, and is often overshadowed by it's bigger > brother Wikipedia. But it certainly hasn't failed. There's a > respectable amount of content being produced, including original > reporting that just would not fit on Wikipedia. Articles are picked up > by Google News (at least, they will be again once a bug is fixed). And > there is a fairly small but dedicated community. Mmm. It's fair to say that Wikinews has not exploded massively, or become a first-rank household-name service like Wikipedia has. It'd be great if it did, of course, but not doing so isn't a sign of failure! We did astonishingly, staggeringly, unbelievably, improbably well with Wikipedia. Failing to replicate that is to be expected; it's unlikely we could deliberately manage such a success without a shedload of good luck. "It's got a wiki in it" isn't a magic spell, after all. Wikinews is, as Pete says, flourishing quietly; it has a community, it has readers - though I'd be interested to see figures - and it is making steps in the outside world, reaching people and making a niche independently of its "big sibling" Wikipedia. It's not become a top-ten website, it's not a household name, but then, neither are the other sites working in this field. The readership of the English Wikinews is 8m pageviews/month; this is only about 50% less than the English Wikiquote or Wikisource, both quite stable and regarded projects. There's certainly a core of people out there who read it, and who are presumably satisfied enough to keep doing so. The authors enjoy writing it; the readers continue to, well, continue to read it. Administratively and technically, it's a small cost; from a volunteer perspective, the loss to the other projects of people who might be working on them is offset by the fact that there's a definite social benefit to keeping multiple projects so that people can change what they're working on for a whle rather than burn out and leave entirely. And, of course, people who actively want to write journalism have somewhere to do it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Follow up: Fan History joining the WMF family
2009/11/29 Laura Hale : > As some one who has proposed a new project for the WMF (which would really > probably be an acquisition if it happened), some changes need to be made: (...) This sort of presupposes that WMF, on the whole, wants to acquire projects. My understanding for several years has basically been that we don't; we build very large-scope projects in house, and gently encourage people who come to us with more specialised projects to either find a way to work them into one of the umbrellas, or to find a more appropriate home elsewhere. So, if WMF is going to begin to acquire projects, it first needs to decide that it wants to do that at all. And *that's* a big step; it'll need discussion and debate, a rethinking of what we conceive of as WMF projects, and how we decide on what is an appropriate use of funds; it's not just something someone in the office can sign off on. Once we have that - if we have that - then we can decide on a policy to handle such cases. That's the sticking-point here; deciding on the merits or demerits of the FH proposal are somewhat secondary to deciding whether we should be thinking about entertaining the proposal at all, and we can't just finesse past that stage. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from?
2010/1/14 Nikola Smolenski : > Nikola Smolenski wrote: >> In Page Views Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown I also notice something >> that should affect chapter relations: there are some Wikipedias which > > Also, any ideas why is Commons so popular in Spain and Latin America? Some Wikipedias - the ones which insist on only-free-images - do not use local uploads at all, and instead direct everyone to Commons. Both es.wikipedia and pt.wikipedia work this way, so they'll send a lot more of their users to Commons than a project which uses local image uploads. As a result, I suspect you'll find that traffic to Commons increases proportionately with traffic to Spanish/Portuguese Wikipedia usage. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Werner Icking Music Archive may be closing
On 1 March 2010 00:06, church.of.emacs.ml wrote: > Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work out. I sent Christian Mondrup > an Email asking for more details and he responded that he had already > contacted Wikimedia. As the majority of the works cannot be licensed > under a Creative Commons license (from which I conclude that the works > are non-free), WMF won't host the website. Judging from (an older version of?) the website, it's a general non-commercial license on all submissions: ::: The archive contains "free" sheet music, free for non-commercial usage. This ::: means that you may download the files and print paper copies, but neither ::: the files nor the paper copies may be sold. (...) http://www.daimi.au.dk/~reccmo/scores/Introduction.html#copyright I suspect the older (& definitionally public domain) material, could be rehosted, but we'd have to seperate that out from the rest, and then tackle the problem of whether any "editing" people have done to them gives rise to new copyrights... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Building up the reserves
On 3 March 2010 13:35, effe iets anders wrote: > I assume you do realize that this 12.5M is /after/ the fundraiser, hence > including the huge amount of donations that has been raised? ...as, indeed, was last December's glut. Looking at both mid-year and end-year reports, the cashflow status becomes clearer: Assets (cash) versus monthly running costs (estimated) mid-2007 - - - - - $1m end-2007 - - - - - $2.3m - - - - - $0.21m - - - - - 11 mos. mid-2008 - - - - - $3m - - - - - ($0.32m) - - - - - 9 mos. end-2008 - - - - - $6.7m - - - - - $0.43m - - - - - 15 mos. mid-2009 - - - - - $6.2m - - - - - ($0.54m) - - - - - 11 mos. end-2009 - - - - - $12.5m - - - - - $0.65m - - - - - 19 mos. Reserves jump dramatically each year-end report, but then idle until the next fundraiser - as running costs increase roughly linearly, though, the average number of months funding in reserve seesaws. I don't know what's considered a normal margin to have - I'd presume around a year or so is considered quite good - but hopefully someone more au fait with standard practice in the field could enlighten us. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Building up the reserves
On 3 March 2010 20:53, Andrew Gray wrote: > mid-2007 - - - - - $1m > end-2007 - - - - - $2.3m - - - - - $0.21m - - - - - 11 mos. > mid-2008 - - - - - $3m - - - - - ($0.32m) - - - - - 9 mos. > end-2008 - - - - - $6.7m - - - - - $0.43m - - - - - 15 mos. > mid-2009 - - - - - $6.2m - - - - - ($0.54m) - - - - - 11 mos. > end-2009 - - - - - $12.5m - - - - - $0.65m - - - - - 19 mos. It occurs to me this morning that there's a major problem with that last column - it's x months reserves *at the previous six month's averaged operating costs*. Costs are increasing all the time. (Fun fact: the WMF's operating costs seem to have increased linearly, at a steady $18ish-k/month, over the past few years) Adjusting for that, we end up with... hmm, something like end-2007 - - - - - 7 mos. mid-2008 - - - - - 6 mos. end-2008 - - - - - 11 mos. mid-2009 - - - - - 9 mos. end-2009 - - - - - 15 mos. Still pretty good (after the last two fundraisers), but not quite as comfortable as it originally looked - and, presumably, it gets a little tighter right before the fundraisers. That said, it suggests that purely from a "safe margin" perspective, we could safely lower the target amount for the late-2010 fundraiser - we did very well last year, after all. On the other hand, William's suggestion about treating this as the nucleus of an endowment rather than as an operating margin is an interesting one. Hrm. Further research, as they say... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy
On 4 March 2010 19:41, wrote: > Which means of course that a person could claim copyright to the very > technology underlying Wikipedia, and demand the entire project be taken down. > In fact a different mentally ill person could make this claim every month > and force the project offline. > > That's the world you're advocating? No responsibility on the part of the > office to even make the slightest attempt to verify the claim? I think we're falling into the trap of constructing strawmen to fight here. I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that if someone wrote to the WMF claiming to hold the rights to the text of, oh, /Bleak House/, that we would then be obliged to take a copy of it down - because the claim itself is patently nonsensical and can be ignored. But the fact that we can ignore patently invalid demands - and I am quite sure we do, without a qualm - doesn't mean that we ought to feel we can or should start adjudicating on the reasonableness of any not-entirely-clear-cut case that turns up, such as this one... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Vector skin on Wikisource
On 4 June 2010 03:40, John Vandenberg wrote: > If the interwikis are not displayed in the vector skin, either > Wikisource cant use the vector skin, or Wikisource will need to move > these links into the content of the pages. I've started a discussion > about this on the multilingual wikisource scriptorium A question: rather than modify the main vector skin, I believe it's possible to alter the *local* vector skin for an individual site or project? See, for example, the local changes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector.css If so, Wikisource could set the toolbox section to be expanded by default in the same way the interaction section is... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 21:21, David Levy wrote: >> They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the >> negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort >> required to find things. > > I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English > Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but > not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. FWIW, the only time I've heard a complaint about the visual effect of the interwikis is where we have a very short article on an internationally popular topic, such as: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa ...here, 90% of the page "area" is blank space, as the article has stopped but the interwikis keep on going, and it feels as though the page is a very weirdly laid-out way of referring people to different languages. (This is quite rare on enwiki these days because due to sheer numbers, it's unusual to find a topic covered in ten or more languages which is a mere stub on en. But there's still plenty of cases out there.) Interestingly, even with the full list of languages, the page above looks better in Vector than in Monobook: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=vector http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=monobook - dropping the "solid boxes" from the left-hand column means that it doesn't look so dominant when expanded. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 7 June 2010 08:42, Ray Saintonge wrote: > Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not > even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki > link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a > double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article > in its original form or in its machine translation. There is a piece of user js which was implemented on en which does this, incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manishearth/Scripts#Wikipedia_interwiki_translator - it turns, eg, "Espanol" into "Spanish (t)", with the (t) link going to a Google translate link for the target page. I haven't used it much, but it's a useful tool to have. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia"
On 24 June 2010 15:52, Pharos wrote: > What about wikipediajr.org ? > > And so we would have en.wikipediajr.org, fr.wikipediajr.org etc. Or even just a modifier - jr.en.wikipedia.org jr.de.wikipedia.org ...to which we could also alias "simple", "kinder", etc etc. This helps emphasise the distinction between languages and subsets-of-languages, and also means we can be more fluid about the "simple"/"for children" presentation on a project-by-project basis. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Call for a moratorium on all new software developments
On 7 September 2010 11:01, Teofilo wrote: > No and there won't be (at least from me). Because I don't know if it > is a bug or a feature. Show me the specification of the pdf tool > first. I will see if the specification says that pictures' > photographers should be credited. If the specification says so, I will > report it as a bug. But if the specification does not say so, it > simply means that I disagree with the specification. And I don't think > bugzilla is the proper forum to discuss specifications. Given that you report below it's working for some images and not the others, it's very unlikely it's working to spec, unless that specification is itself deeply flawed! Glancing at the image files, it seems that it may be having trouble parsing the author sections of the Commons credits. I'll try and look into this more closely soon - for now, has anyone else identified attribution problems with the PDF generators? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site notice suggestion needed.
2008/12/5 Rand Montoya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hey All- > > If you have the time and energy, take a look at this site notice here: > http://dev.donate.wikimedia.org/index.php/Donate/Notice8a/en > > I'm looking for a few different/better ideas of what text should go on > the left side (in place of the 250 million visitors/11 million > articles). Right now there is strictly a data/numerical piece, but it > can better. Is there going to be something on the right-hand side? -- - Andrew Gray [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site notice suggestion needed.
2008/12/5 Robert Rohde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics gives 268 million+ for >> enwiki alone, but I agree that would be a good one. > > That 268M is for all edits, not just article edits. "268,000,000 contributions" would be fun; probably ~500,000,000 for all wikis put together. (A total aggregate edit counter for all wikis, updating on the fly, would be delightful to watch. But perhaps logistically impractical...) -- - Andrew Gray [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Annual Fundraiser 2008 update
2008/12/8 David Gerard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 2008/12/8 Rand Montoya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >> 1) A quick update of the community giving stats (gifts less than >> $10,000) for the first 35 days of the fundraiser: > > > How many donations in the name of The Scorpions? ;-D At least one this morning - "Re Scorpions: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (Voltaire on censorship)" It'd be interesting to see if this whole nonsense helped at all. -- - Andrew Gray [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
2008/12/16 Michael Peel : > It is still a very useful feature, though. It's a pity that you can't > have two watchlists on en.wp, such that you can use one to keep an > eye on articles you're particularly attached to, with the other > handling all the rest. I find that a useful method is to have a subpage of your userspace, link to every article you care about, and keep an eye on Special:Recentchangeslinked. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chinese wikinews in China Blocked
2009/1/9 shi zhao : > Today Chinese wikinews in China Blocked. GFW keyword is "zh.wikinews.org". > other wikinews can acess. Do we have a page somewhere listing exactly which sites of ours are blocked in China? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller : > A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for > their context in Wikipedia. Apropos of which, a thought. We have spilled a good bit of ink over whether or not it is appropriate for the reuser to attribute "Wikipedia users" either alone or in addition to the usernames - should the project have a right to attribution, etc etc etc. In practice, wouldn't it be almost essential to name the site where the work was done *as well* as the usernames? Many of the pseudonyms, in effect, depend on that context... (Apologies if this was raised before - I don't remember seeing it) An article which has had many developments and been passed on might then wind up with an amalgamated attribution line like: "by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (1962), Wikipedia contributors "NukeUser", John Smith, Jane Doe and Mike Placeholder (2004-2007), Citizendium contributors Alan White, John Smith and Betty Green (2007-2009), and anonymous contributors." It's not exactly smooth, but it is comprehensible, and it does seem helpful to name the project to give some context to the names. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski : > Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes > (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an > encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the > list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To > me, this looks reasonable. It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-) I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/23 Andre Engels : >> I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to >> take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what >> the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result >> would be like? This might be a useful bit of data... > > If you define "nontrivial" for me, that should not be too hard... Nikola's cutoff above was "If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded..." - this sounds not unreasonable, since adding three words or more will take you over it. I'm not sure quite how the results were obtained via WikiBlame, but it certainly seems a little more meaningful than just dumping every name which appears in the article history. (Admittedly, that has the advantage of not accidentally excluding anyone...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
2009/1/23 Marco Chiesa : > To be honest, that link is not that different from what > [[Special:Booksources]] does, apart from the fact that for the moment there > is only one company offering the service. Nothing prevents other companies > to offer something comparable and feature in that link. Yeah; I was writing something about this earlier but never got around to posting it. It's relatively easy to imagine some kind of similar thing for a dozen different image-printing suppliers; obviously you wouldn't be linking to a preexisting sales page, you'd need to create some kind of interface to send the file through, but the basic concept remains. Go to image page, press button, and bang, a list appears. The problem is, it could get massively unwieldy very fast - the frwp booksources list is tidy and clear and has thirty or forty entries, but the enwp list has ballooned to around six hundred! Especially for something like this, we might well have to exert editorial control sooner or later as to who gets listed - I'm all for doing it, of course, but I think we need to be aware from the start that the ideal "everyone gets listed" might break down in the long run. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/1/28 geni : > Copyright issues mean that it will be heading for deletio n once we > switch toi CC-BY-SA-3.0. Yes, along with all the other imported GFDL material... oh, wait, sorry, I mean all the material which a contributor has chosen to license under GFDL 1.2 or later... oh, wait. How is this a special case? The CC switch, when and if it happens, will be complex enough without inventing extra problems! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
2009/1/28 Sam Johnston : >> Material in the public domain or under a fully free licence does not >> require any kind of fair use consideration. > > I'm not talking about genuinely free material, I'm talking about protected > (copyrighted/trademarked) material being uploaded by others - for example a > periodic table of elements or medical charts which would normally be subject > to deletion (except that they are currently immediately available for > sale!). I'm a little confused - surely we would delete this stuff whether or not there's a "buy a print now" clickthrough button? I can't see anyone arguing to keep it because they want to run off a poster... (and to a degree this is rendered moot by that helpful "lowest useful resolution" requirement of the unfree material rules) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/1/28 geni : >> Yes, along with all the other imported GFDL material... oh, wait, >> sorry, I mean all the material which a contributor has chosen to >> license under GFDL 1.2 or later... oh, wait. How is this a special >> case? >> >> The CC switch, when and if it happens, will be complex enough without >> inventing extra problems! > > It is imported GFDL material. Which is a problem. Normaly we have very > little imported stuff so not something I worry about overmuch but > someone might want to give a heads up to the publishing company and > author that we will be looking to switch it (and since it is imported > we can't do that automagicaly). This is pretty silly. The author is... an active Wikipedia user, and has been for three and a half years. All his GDFL contributions made to Wikipedia can be relicensed without any fuss, but his writing first published elsewhere under *exactly the same license* and then re-uploaded, by himself, licensing his own intellectual property and ticking all the implicit boxes in exactly the same way as if he had first written it here, can't be? But even if it weren't, I'm stull confused over how we have the right to use one set of GFDL v.1.2 or later contributions, and not the other. It is, after all, *exactly the same license*... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?
2009/1/28 Thomas Dalton : > The new GFDL license only allows relicensing under CC-BY-SA of things > either published for the first time on the wiki or added to the wiki > before the new license was announced. Since this was published in a > book first and added to Wikipedia since the new license was announced, > it isn't eligible (without explicit permission from the copyright > owner - which shouldn't be difficult to get). Ha, that clause. I'd forgotten about it. Even so, I think we can reasonably not worry ourselves overly. The author has consented to publish it under the GFDL as normal when he uploaded it to enwp, right? You have to split hairs very fine to distinguish between: a) Author uploads own work, chooses to license the "new copy" of it under license X. b) Author uploads own work *as licensed copy* of material previously published elsewhere, and must be treated as such. Which is to say, if you look hard you have a point, but there's a perfectly legitimate interpretation going the other way, which complies with the letter just as well and the spirit perhaps better! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution
requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our
prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of
names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or
steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-)
On this list, a minority will be real names ("John Smith"); the rest,
if we discount the thousand variants on "anonymous" via our IP
editors, are pseudonyms ("WikiUser") or modified names
("JohnSmith78").
In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but
in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision
that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general
habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that "John
Smith" was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer
to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de
plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to
use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc.
It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being
able to have a given username "translate" into a different name when a
list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better
reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a
little "neater" for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly
Publication. Win-win situation.
So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging:
* each user has a "credit" field which they can (optionally!) set
through preferences
* when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever
way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off
this "credit name" rather than simply using the normal internal
username, if one is available.
I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we
use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
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Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian : > Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be > printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this > pseudonym can be linked to their real identity. I can't say I agree with your general thrust here - I think that if people contribute to a massively open project, well, they have to accept "massively open". Bending over backwards to retroactively provide anonymity gets impractical fast. However, this proposal could allow an effective opt-out from any form of downstream attribution - some kind of "NOCREDIT" magic word, perhaps. This would neatly sidestep the worry of people not wanting credited downstream... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?
2009/2/2 Brian : > I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors > or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a > sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find > the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a > link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata. There's two different issues, here, really, and I think you're chasing a different one to my original suggestion. I'm certainly not saying that this method for generating names is automatically a mandate to require they be used to top and tail every article - just that if someone does attribute that way, it'll help them do it better. *However* we decide that downstream reused material should be attributed, be it heavily or as lightly as possible, there's going to be a step in the process - perhaps only an optional one - where someone takes a Wikipedia article and tries to shake out some authors. Figuring out how to make that work efficiently and cleanly and helpfully is a good thing in and of itself, whatever conclusion the main debate comes to. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Content on Wikimedia
2009/2/2 Yaroslav M. Blanter : > In any case, aside from the usefulness of the images, I do not see any > rationale for the existence of the above category. We have a few categories already for source-of-images, don't we? Certainly all the Bundesarchiv images are organised this way... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikinews-l] Increased incivility at wikinews [en]
2009/2/5 Marc Riddell : > When will you people finally acknowledge that there is something terribly > wrong with the deteriorating level of discourse occurring in the Projects? Marc, this may be a surprise to you, but you're not a lone voice in the wilderness. Everyone with experience knows that many of our communities are dysfunctional to a greater or lesser degree; we have hordes of people who fundamentally don't get along and don't seem to want to do so. It's not like we've all ignored it forever. Everyone who is committed to the projects wants a more pleasant working environment. We've wanted it for years, we've discussed it for years, and we've all tried to lance the boils in our own way (in some cases more dramatically than others). You can see the results we've had: viz, not a lot. It's not like we can put our foot down and say "play nice, now, guys" and things get better. If we could solve this problem easily, we'd have done it years ago. The reason you keep getting a "there he goes again" response on the lists is, well, that we keep hearing demands to do more from you, to somehow change the system. But the fact that we haven't done that yet isn't because no-one has ever listened to you - it means it's a damn big problem, and everything we've tried so far doesn't work. Being told to do it, when we all want to do it *and can't*, just gets people's backs up. So, please, if you know how we can make this situation better, *tell us*. Please explain, clearly and practically, what you think we need to do. You clearly have some understanding of the issue, but I hope you can see that you've really not been managing to communicate it to any of us! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Top posters, special edition
2009/2/19 Mark Williamson : > I still hold the crown on Wikipedia-l. Whatever happened to that list, > anyways? Most of the people wanting to have abtruse cross-project theological debates just took it to foundation-l :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] An technical idea on spreading and improving Chinese Wikipedia
2009/2/20 Mingli Yuan : > Since "Songhu Hui" use Wordpress, so I just propose a technical idea to > improve the cooperation between Wikimedia and "Songhu Hui". How about a > keyword-link-generator to Wikipedia for Wordpress? This new Wordpress plugin > will query Wikipedia to get a keyword list, and then make links in article > in Wordpress automatically. But some technical problems still be there, for > example, the Chinese word segmentation. Some googling throws up this existing tool: http://www.dijksterhuis.org/wordpress-plugins/keyword-link-plugin/ which isn't *quite* what you want, but you can see the potential. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] An technical idea on spreading and improving Chinese Wikipedia
2009/2/20 Thomas Dalton : re/ the earlier comments, remember that we don't have to invent keyword identification from scratch. There's quite a bit of stuff out there already - I've seen a tool for writing blog posts, for example, which automatically adds in "contextual" Wikipedia links to the end of the text - which reduces the amount of work needed on the obvious problems of linking irrelevant words etc. > Link suggestion is much easier - perhaps we could write a plugin that > suggests possible words to link to Wikipedia and the author can choose > which ones are appropriate. Or, even simpler (for the user), a plugin where the author selects a word or phrase and the system generates a Wikipedia link for it. Should be relatively effective for nouns and names, at least... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Simple English Encyclopedia
2009/2/25 Gerard Meijssen : > Hoi, > When the use case of the Simple Wikipedia is better understood, it may even > make room for more simple projects as in simple projects in the biggest > languages. This is quite an interesting thought. The language used by Simple English is (apparently) derived from two defined "simplified versions" of English which were deliberately designed - have there been projects to do the same for, say, French or Spanish, or would we have to do the heavy lifting ourselves? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Simple English Encyclopedia
2009/2/25 Gerard Meijssen : > No, > Absolutely not. The Incubator is a vital resource that can easily accomadote > any language any project. If anything I would make the Incubator compulsory > for ANY project. The reason for this is obvious; the Incubator works. I think this is exactly what he was suggesting - I'm not sure why you're objecting to it... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Simple English Encyclopedia
2009/2/25 Lars Aronsson : > Work for easy-to-read Swedish was started in 1968, and since 1987 > operates as a government-sponsored foundation, described in this > Swedish Wikipedia article, > http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrum_f%C3%B6r_l%C3%A4ttl%C3%A4st > > On that Swedish foundation's website, you can also find > information about them in English, French, German, and Spanish, > http://www.lattlast.se/ > > (Le Centre Facile à Lire; La fundación sueca de nombre Centro de > Lectura Fácil) Marvellous, thanks! > Someone should compile an article on en.wikipedia about such > initiatives in various countries. The article [[Simple English]] > branches out to various special forms, but doesn't provide the > international overview of the topic. Yes, I was thinking much the same. I browsed a bit, and could find an article on a simplified form of Latin, but mostly it's all conlangs... ...oh, well, another on for the to-do pile :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/3 David Gerard : > 2009/3/3 Sue Gardner : > >> Can I ask: does anyone reading this thread 1) think raising the notability >> threshold is a bad idea, 2) believe defaulting to deletion upon request is a >> bad idea, or 3) disagree with the notion that other Wikipedias should shift >> closer to the German Wikipedia's generally-less-permissive policies and >> practices, particularly WRT BLPs? > > Deletion upon request is a terrible idea. It will lead to only > hagiographies - violations of NPOV - being kept. (This has been > discussed at length on wikien-l, fwiw.) That said, reacting the other way and *prohibiting* deletion on request is also counterproductive - we've skirted close to this on enwp in the past, where people have interpreted "subject has asked us to delete it" as being an automatic cast-iron reason to keep it in place. I mean, I've seen cases where someone's stood up and said "this article is atrocious, subject wants it deleted" and it's been kept (with a variety of snide comments), whereas had they just said "this article is atrocious", it'd have been killed with no objections. We can go too far; after all, when someone says "delete this please", it's at least as common that they're reflecting that the article has major fundamental problems as that they're making a frivolous request! We do need to recognise that the subject of an article is often one of the people (counting readers and editors together) who has the closest knowledge *of the article*, and is well-placed to see real problems - finding some way of using that is potentially an excellent tool in identifying the real dross that we ourselves don't want, and keeping the material we *do* want up to a high standard. The trick is taking advantage of their perspective, without turning it into a (real or imagined) conflict-of-interest issue, or letting it degenerate into the kind of thing that breeds automatic assumptions of bad faith. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard : > (My usual answer: "Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia > with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of > contacting us end up there anyway." This seems to work a bit.) Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with "Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org" in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard : > As far as I can make out, the present situation on en:wp is: a > proposal was put which got 59% support. That's not a sufficiently > convincing support level. So Jimbo is currently putting together a > better proposal, with the aim of at least 2/3 support and hoping for > 80% - it'll be more robust. Timeframe, er, I just asked him as well. Bleh. Well, at least it's *something*. I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and "uncomplicated" BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. This leaves lots of BLP stuff (the systematic POV problems, etc) that it wouldn't address, certainly, but I reckon at a stroke it would pre-empt a good *third* of our email load. It'd probably prevent even more by proportion if we turned on a "report this" function, since that'd heavily be skewed towards vandalism. Enabling both, together, would be excellent. But I think making it something for after we get the thrice-blesséd FlaggedRevs might be the most efficient approach. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] phishing with wikipedia?
2009/3/13 Pedro Sanchez : > ¿How's that possible? Income generated by Black Wikipedia ads, minus > the cost of maintenance and administration for servers, will be used > by the WMF with ordinary donations. Therefore, each person using > BlackWiipedia is directly participating in Wikipedia supporting. Is this clearly phishing? It looks like what we've always wondered about, a functioning mirror carrying advertising... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Court: Congress can't put public domain back into copyright
2009/4/6 Birgitte SB : > While this is definitely encouraging news, we might want to hold off on > changing our evaluation of > URAA restorations. The tenth circuit doesn't include Florida. I don't know > exactly what the next > level of appeals would be, but we might want to wait for a ruling that covers > WMF servers before > we act on it. I hope these restorations continue to be struck down in the > courts. It will be much > simpler to determine copyright if they go away. Somewhat tangentially, do we still need to worry about Florida? I was under the impression we'd moved wholesale, servers and all, to California, so we were in the ninth circuit jurisdiction... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Stategic planning : Sharing textbook knowledge
2009/5/7 Samuel Klein : > Certainly not zero. Perhaps 10%? Neither textbooks nor wikipedia are > normally designed to give a total soup-to-nuts explanation of how to > do something. Ha. [[Wikibooks:Constructing an Industrial Civilisation from Scratch]]. ==Chapter 1: on flint nodules== (...) ==Chapter 307: smelting copper== (...) ==Chapter 87,823: the basics of nuclear fission== (...) I love it as an intellectual exercise, but the plausible *utility* of the whole thing might be open to question! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/21 Robert Rohde : >> I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to >> me! >> Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope >> there will be a board resolution soon. > > As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 > votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
2009/6/4 Tim 'avatar' Bartel : > I think we should stop the current use of Google Analytics ASAP. Indeed. For the record, we've discussed Google Analytics before: * in July 2007, for pms.wiki - nothing implemented, I think * in October 2007, for en.wikibooks - implemented but then stopped. at the same time, en.wikinews had implemented it and then stopped it again; the Wikimania07 site also ran it for most of the year and then had it taken out when discovered. * in December 2007, for fi.wiki - implemented but then stopped * in July 2008, for th.wiki - discovered and removed. a check then found it on vls.wiki and th.wikisource; the discussion doesn't record that these were removed, but checking the sites shows they were. The vls one is interesting - it was removed by Drini in July, per the foundation-l discussion, and only added back in at the end of April 2009... and there we get this problem. So, yeah. Pretty solid consensus that this is something to avoid. If we have some "explanatory notes" to go with the privacy policy anywhere, it might be worth explicitly mentioning the use of external logging services and Why Thou Shalt Not. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies
2009/6/4 Unionhawk : > So how do you propose we enforce this? I'm thinking we need to prevent this > from happening in the first place. Analytics like this could pretty much > give checkuser powers to anybody! There's not that many places where this sort of thing could be implemented - would it be too impractical to just regularly run a script to check those for things like Google Analytics links, and remove them with a polite note when found? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Issues about Copyright
2009/6/25 Samuel Klein : > What are examples of something which is fair use under chinese law but > not under US law? http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China_(2001)#Section_4_Limitations_on_Rights I believe (10) is not very effectively protected in the US, but I could be wrong. (3) is quite a common provision, but (4) takes it further than usual. (I really like the spirit of nr. 11, but I can see how it's not really applicable here...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Issues about Copyright
2009/6/25 Jimmy Xu : > And here is the issue that in Berne Convention Article 2 (8), it says > "The protection of this Convention shall not apply to news of the day > or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press > information." So whether these kind of stuffs can be used as if they > were in public domain? Or some other steps has to be taken. Here's my interpretation of this: there are two sides to copyright, the "concept" and the expression - the idea, and the way you write it. If you've written a novel, you have both kinds of copyright. I can't tell the same story by changing all the words without infringing - the idea is still the same. If you're just writing about simple factual information, however, then you don't have copyright in the underlying facts - but you still have copyright in the way you write about them. So, a newspaper can't claim copyright on the "concept" of one of its stories - I can't copyright the idea of writing stories about an election! - but the actual text of them is still copyrighted, so we can't simply reprint copies of it as though it were public domain. > Additionally, if so, that means for a news, the "five Ws" are not > eligible but the comment by the author is eligible for copyright. Am I > right? Thanks. I'd extend "comment" to be "the words they've actually written", but that's about it. They can't stop you paraphrasing or rewriting it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why "Wikipedia" and not "the Wikipedia"?
2009/6/27 Ziko van Dijk : > Hello, > Could someone explain to me why "Wikipedia" is without definite > article? In English you say "the Britannica", so why not "the > Wikipedia"? I am wondering that also in German Wikipedians and > non-Wikipedians tend to drop the article, although we say "der > Brockhaus". We do indeed say "I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica", but we also say "I looked it up in Encarta" or "I looked it up in Whitaker's". Whether or not something gets an initial article is a bit erratic, on the whole... (Perhaps Britannica gets it because "Encyclopedia" is a common word - we'd feel silly with the sentence "I looked it up in Encyclopedia Britannica", because "I looked it up in encyclopedia" would itself be wrong) For what it's worth, I've noticed that "the Wikipedia" is becoming more common, but more among third parties than among people associated with the project. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
2009/7/1 Robert Rohde : > An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow > defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example: > > An article might start: > > > Thomas Jefferson was the third president... This is a marvellous idea, and presumably a lot of the code for it is already in existence (what with etc). It'd also solve the issue with people wanting to "templatise" content such as infoboxes in order to reduce the clutter on a specific page. Can anyone see any obvious downsides? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution on small interactive devices and systems
2009/7/17 Harald Krichel : > Shouldn't we set up our own URL-aliasing service? > This would also have the advantage that you could be sure that the > wikimedia shortened urls only lead to wikimedia domains. > > eg.: > http://wp.cx/3tT5u7Z > redirects to > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=302589573 I discovered yesterday that: enwp.org/Article redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article Sadly, it doesn't work with revision IDs, but it's a start! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Donation Button Enhancement : Part 2
2009/7/21 Robert Rohde : > Testing should be done in parallel, not in sequence. History has > demonstrated that donors have a tendency to respond disproportionately > to "the new thing". Which means that whatever button you test first > will have an advantage over whichever one you test last. Probably the > easiest way to get a reasonable distribution is to vary which button > people see based on their IP. Or simply to randomise it entirely. If either of those aren't possible for technical reasons, it might be practical to rotate them - run each button for x many hours at a stretch, rotating them so as to ensure they don't regularly go up at the same time (of the day or of the week) and so that they get roughly equal coverage. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?
2009/8/1 John Vandenberg : > On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: >> Also... >> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published work, >> statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion about its >> usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with OpenLibrary, merging >> WikiCite ideas) > > Why not just do this in the Wikisource project? > > 99% percent of "every published work" are free/libre. Only the last > 70 years worth of texts are restricted by copyright, so it doesnt make > sense to build a different project for those works. I think your estimate's a little off, sadly :-) Firstly, copyright lasts more than the statutory seventy years, as a general rule - remember, authors don't conveniently die the moment they publish. If we discount the universal one-date cutoff in the US eighty years ago - itself a fast-receding anomaly - extant copyrights probably last about a hundred years from publication, on average. But more critically, whilst a hundred years is a drop in the bucket of the time we've been writing texts, it's a very high proportion of the time we've been publishing them at this rate. Worldwide, book publication rates now are pushing two orders of magnitude higher than they were a century ago, and that was itself probably up an order of magnitude on the previous century. Before 1400, the rate of creation of texts that have survived probably wouldn't equal a year's output now. I don't have the numbers to hand to be confident of this - and hopefully Open Library, as it grows, will help us draw a firmer conclusion - but I'd guess that at least half of the identifiable works ever conventionally published as monographs remain in copyright today. 70% wouldn't surprise me, and it's still a growing fraction. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
2009/8/13 Milos Rancic : > Yesterday, new projects were opened: > > * Sorani Wikipedia (http://ckb.wikipedia.org/) > * Western Panjabi Wikipedia (http://pnb.wikipedia.org/) > * Mirandese Wikipedia (http://mwl.wikipedia.org/) > * Acehnese Wikipedia (http://ace.wikipedia.org/) > * Turkish Wikinews (http://tr.wikinews.org/) For those curious as to overall statistics, that's about 270 language editions of Wikipedia, now. (The various lists seem to disagree slightly, and it's a little lower if we omit two "empty" projects). Turkish Wikinews is the 28th Wikinews project - there's now Turkish editions of wikinews, wikiquote, wikisource, and wikitionary, as well as wikipedia. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
2009/8/20 Erik Zachte : > There is another way to detect 100% reverts. It won't catch manual reverts > that are not 100 accurate but most vandal patrollers will use undo, and the > like. > > For every revision calculate md5 checksum of content. Then you can easily > look back say 100 revisions to see whether this checksum occurred earlier. > It is efficient and unambiguous. A slightly less effective method would be to use the page size in bytes; this won't give the precise one-to-one matching, but as I believe it's already calculated in the data it might well be quicker. One other false positive here: edit warring where one or both sides is using undo/rollback. You'll get the impression of a lot of vandalism without there necessarily being any. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
2009/8/20 Gregory Maxwell : > Going back to your simple study now: The analysis of vandalism > duration and its impact on readers makes an assumption about > readership which we know to be invalid. You're assuming a uniform > distribution of readership: That readers are just as likely to read > any random article. But we know that the actual readership follows a > power-law (long-tail) distribution. Because of the failure to consider > traffic levels we can't draw conclusions on how much vandalism readers > are actually exposed to. We're also assuming a uniform distribution of vandalism, as it were. There's a number of different types of vandalism; obscene defacement, malicious alteration of factual content, meaningless test edits of a character or two, schoolkids leaving messages for each other... ...and it all has a different impact on the reader. This has two implications: a) It seems safe to assume that replacing the entire article with "john is gay" is going to get spotted and reverted faster, on average, than an edit providing a plausible-sounding but entirely fictional history for a small town in Kansas. So, any changes in the pattern of the *content* of vandalism is going to lead to changes in the duration and thus overall frequency of it, even if the amount of vandal edits is constant. b) We can easily compare the difference in effect for vandalism to be left on differently trafficed pages for various times - roughly speaking, time * traffic = number of readers affected. If some vandalism is worse than others, we could thus also calculate some kind of intensity metric - one hundred people viewing enormous genital piercing images on [[Kitten]] is probably worse than ten thousand people viewing "asdfdfggfh" at the end of a paragraph in the same article. I'm not sure how we'd go ahead with the second one, but it's an interesting thing to think about. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
On 18 August 2011 17:39, Tom Morris wrote: > More useful for smaller wikis. Tweeting new pages or recent changes > for enwiki would probably destroy Twitter very quickly. > > When I was more involved with Citizendium, I wrote a script to pipe > new pages into Twitter. It's still running: > http://twitter.com/cz_newdrafts Wikimedia article feeds on twitter: @en_wikinews @dewikinews @wikinews (Chinese) @el_wikipedia is an article counter @wikipedia_de is the daily FA @zhwiki_newpages is all new pages @ZHWP is some form of selected article feed Anyone know of other active ones? The German approach here seems a pretty good one, at least to test the water - daily featured article, plus possibly other front-page content. Perhaps a feed of all new (rather than featured-that-day) "quality" content would be interesting, to give people something they might not see from the main page? A feed of enwiki's newly graded FA + GA + FP would be about ten a day, which seems quite a reasonable figure; I'm not sure what the figures are like for others, though, and this would be a bit more unpredictable than the daily feeds. As far as new articles, well. Feeding an unfiltered list would get a lot of junk (and, perhaps more annoyingly, a lot of quickly dead links). If we look at *surviving* pages, and assume we somehow would be able to not send out the ones that are going to get deleted, then we're looking at an article every forty seconds on enwiki, five minutes on itwiki, ten minutes on jawiki, twenty minutes on huwiki... (This might be an interesting tool for trying to stoke interest in less active projects - feeds slow enough to not be annoying, but varied enough they might catch people's attention. Hmm. I wonder what overlap there is between [language groups common on twitter] and [small WP projects needing users].) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Genuine, Generous, and Grateful
On 18 August 2011 22:33, MZMcBride wrote: >> Anyone know of other active ones? > > It'd be great if you could start a list of these accounts on Meta-Wiki. > "Microblogging accounts" or something. I actually stole this list from there :-) I'll have a look at tidying it a bit... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Twitter -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to free something from Wikipedia in the public domain?
On 26 August 2011 12:37, Fae wrote: > Sounds a little problematic depending on the details. If the text was > released on Wikipedia first, then the contributors agreed "to release > your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License". If the all the > authors of the article can identify themselves as the same people who > contributed under the named accounts for the original Wikipedia > article then release to PD is no problem, in practice few articles > only have a history of contributors who are using accounts associated > with their legal identities. Legal identity is a bit tangential here, I think; if we accept a pseudonymous account as good enough to release the content under CC licenses to begin with, then all you'd need for relicensing would be for those same accounts to agree to it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 26 August 2011 02:15, David Goodman wrote: > make it plainer, that people who find Wikipedia articles appropriate > for advocating their religious beliefs may use the content for that > purpose, to that the WMF should find some universally acceptable sets > of spiritual beliefs, and use its content to advocate them. Taking one > of the proposed possibilities (probably the one that instigated this), > providing for censoring images on the grounds of sexual content is > doing exactly that for views on sexual behavior. We're officially > saying that X is content you may find objectionable, but Y isn't. > That's making an editorial statement about what is shown on X and Y. I've finally twigged what's worrying me about this discussion. We're *already* making these editorial statements, deciding what is and isn't appropriate or offensive for the readers on their behalf, and doing it within articles on a daily basis. When we, as editors, consider including a contentious image, we have a binary choice - do it or don't do it. It's not like text, where we can spend a nice meandering paragraph weighting the merits of position A and position B and referring in passing to position C; the picture's there or it isn't, and we've gone with the "inclusionist" or the "exclusionist" position. At the moment, there is a general consensus that, more or less, we prefer including images unless there's a problem with them, and when we exclude them, we do so after an editorial discussion, guided by policy and determined by our users on the basis of what they feel is appropriate, offensive, excessively graphic, excessively salacious, etc. In other words, we decide whether or not to include images, and select between images, based on our own community standards. These aren't particularly bad as standards go, and they're broadly sensible and coherent and clear-headed, but they're ours; they're one particular perspective, and it is inextricably linked to the systemic bias issues we've known about for years and years. This is a bit of a weird situation for us to be in. We can - and we do - try hard to make our texts free of systemic bias, of overt value judgements, and so forth, and then we promptly have to make binary yes-or-no value judgements about what is and isn't appropriate to include in them. As Kim says upthread somewhere, these judgements can't and won't be culturally neutral. (To use a practical example, different readers in different languages get given different sets of images, handled differently, in comparable Wikipedia articles - sometimes the differences are trivial, sometimes significant. Does this mean that one project is neutral in selection and one not? All sorts of cans of worms...) As such, I don't think considering this as the first step towards censorship, or as a departure from initial neutrality, is very meaningful; it's presuming that the alternative is reverting to a neutral and balanced status quo, but that never really existed. The status quo is that every reader, in every context, gets given the one particular image selection that a group of Wikipedians have decided is appropriate for them to have, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
On 26 August 2011 12:35, Kim Bruning wrote: >> This implies that the proposed image hiding feature is a less repressive >> form of censorship. I do not see the proposed feature as censorship - all >> the images remain on the site. Nothing is removed. Nothing is suppressed. >> Everything remains. > > The image hiding feature itself is not a form of censorship, as far as > I'm aware of. Just as an interesting point I've not seen mentioned yet: ar.wp has an image-hiding feature, implemented using a template (قالب:إخفاء صورة) and which effectively conceals the image until the user clicks to display. It's manually added to pages, is currently used in ~100 (predominantly medical/sexual?) articles, and has been used for approximately three years. I'm not aware of any other projects currently using a similar one, but it doesn't seem to have caused the end of the world there :-) My Arabic is basically nonexistent, so while I can tell there *are* some past discussions about it, I've no idea what they were saying. Anyone? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 4 September 2011 21:38, David Gerard wrote: > Yes (maybe). It's not at all clear that this use case should not be > ignored to avoid the possibility of compromising the encyclopedia. > > I have to ask: if there's such a demand for a censored Wikipedia, > where are the third-party providers? Anyone? This is a serious > question. Even workplace filtermakers don't censor Wikipedia, as far > as I know. It is worth noting here that even if they wanted to partially restrict access to "live" Wikipedia, it would currently be impractical to do so - there's no easy way of identifying all the problematic sections other than with fairly haphazard keyword matching, meaning that it's an all-or-nothing affair, and "all" is decidedly unpopular (though we do hear of it sometimes). As to why no-one is distributing a "filtered" version of Wikipedia, I think that falls more under the general heading of "where are the major third-party reusers that anyone actually cares about?" - the non-existence of a commercial filtered version is less of a surprise when we consider the dearth of commercial packaged versions at all... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
On 5 September 2011 17:00, Andre Engels wrote: > Yes, but most mirrors are just that - mirrors. As far as I know, there is no > Wikipedia mirror that actually contains extra functionality - like improved > searching, wisiwyg editing, automatic translation, image filtering, or > whatever else one could think of. There have been a couple of attempts to make more-or-less curated mirrors, but they've found it hard to gain traction. It's a bit of a vicious cycle - to get readers you need lots of content, to get the resources to curate lots of content you need readers (this holds whether you rely on volunteers or whether you run it commercially). To have a chance of getting enough readers to make the project a viable going concern, you'd need to invest a lot of resources up front, banking on the assumption that: * a) your difference from the status quo is enough to attract some fraction of users; * b) the search engines would actually work in your favour rather than treating you as Wikipedia-With-Adwords Dump #41,875; and * c) it wouldn't be cloned fifty-three times by next week. This holds regardless of what it is - whether it's stable-versioning or image-filtering, any prospective reuser is gambling on an uncertain level of takeup and a massive unknown in terms of search-engine response. If you have a target audience who you know want your specific flavour of curation, you can bypass this and go straight to them - see, for example, the Wikipedia For Schools offline projects - but it's not clear how you could then use this to bootstrap a successful internet service, since projects like this are usually selections rather than whole-content curation. Some kind of partnership with a portal might work, but I don't know if anyone's tried it yet. In short, the current model for online mirrors serves to discourage people from putting much effort into them, and so all sorts of potentially desirable (or potentially interesting, or even potentially amazingly-bad-example) experiments with reusing our content just aren't happening. It's not a problem we can solve (and it's perhaps not one we should be trying to solve) but it does mean we shouldn't draw any firm conclusions from the absence of any specific types of project - there's an absence of *all* sorts of projects, good and bad ones alike. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats
On 9 September 2011 13:31, Strainu wrote: > 2011/9/9 Jimmy Wales : >> If you don't like the feature, then don't use it. > > Every single proposal I've seen on this feature from the staff assumed > that the filter will be enabled by default and could (perhaps) be > disabled. Did I miss something? My understanding is that the filter *software* will be enabled for all wikis. The default *setting* for that software will be to display all images, and then any individual user can choose their own settings apart from that default. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/FAQ/en "All Wikimedia content loads on all user browsers by default. The feature is activated only after all content has been loaded, and then only when specifically requested by a user." (A comparison: user email is enabled on all wikis. But users have to individually turn it on for it to work.) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] Summary of findings from WMF Summer of Research program now available
On 8 September 2011 10:58, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: > From what I see, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WantedPages > is just misleading: For instance, one of the most ranking missing articles, > [[Alison Campbell]], has all 5000+ links leading not from other articles, > but from article talk pages, where it is not explicitly present, which > means someone put this red link into one of the highly used templates for > project evaluations (I did not investigate which one). I actually doubt > that the person is even notable, though there is a short stub in Dutch > Wikipedia. There is no way that this is really one of the most wanted > articles. Others I tried from the first page share the same problem. It's in a project-specific to-do list - for a fairly minor project, as these things go, but even a smallish project on enwiki has a lot of articles! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Northern_Ireland_tasks (If anyone's wondering, Alison Clarke is the former Miss Northern Ireland, engaged to marry a prominent sportsman, and thus presumably something of a minor local celebrity. I make no comment on notability.) For future research on redlinks, it would definitely be worth distinguishing between "links in article text" and "links from projectspace / inline templates". Technically more difficult to figure out, of course, but that's why we call them researchers ;-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows
On 21 September 2011 16:53, David Gerard wrote: > They do it by crowdsourcing a mass American bias, don't they? > > An American POV being enforced strikes me as a problematic solution. > > (I know that FAQ says "global community". What they mean is "people > all around the world who are Silicon Valley technologists like us - > you know, normal people." This approach also has a number of fairly > obvious problems.) I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I think, but this effect cuts both ways. We already know that our community skews to - as you put it - "people all around the world who are technologists like us". As a result, that same community is who decides what images are reasonable and appropriate to put in articles. People look at images and say - yes, it's appropriate, yes, it's encyclopedic, no, it's excessively violent, no, that's gratuitous nudity, yes, I like kittens, etc etc etc. You do it, I do it, we try to be sensible, but we're not universally representative. The community, over time, imposes its own de facto standards on the content, and those standards are those of - well, we know what our systemic biases are. We've not managed a quick fix to that problem, not yet. One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that "Wikipedia must not be censored because it would stop being neutral". But is the existing "Wikipedian POV" *really* the same as "neutral", or are we letting our aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our discussions... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows
On 21 September 2011 18:04, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: >> One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is >> that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that "Wikipedia must not be >> censored because it would stop being neutral". But is the existing >> "Wikipedian POV" *really* the same as "neutral", or are we letting our >> aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state >> of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our >> discussions... > You describe us as geeks and that we can't write in a way that would > please the readers. Since we are geeks, we are strongly biased and write > down POV all day. If that is true, why is Wikipedia such a success? Why > people read it? Do they like geeky stuff? ...no, that's really not what I said. We've known for ten years that Wikipedia editors have systemic biases, and we've tried to avoid them by insisting on NPOV. This is one of the reasons we've been successful - it's not the only one, but it's helped. But being neutral in text is simple. You give both sides of the argument, and you do it carefully, and that's it. The method of writing is the same whichever side you're on, and so most topics get a fair treatment regardless of our bias. We can't do that for images. A potentially offensive image is either there, or it is not. We can't be neutral by half including it, or by including it as well as another image to balance it out - these don't make sense. So we go for reasonable, acceptable, appropriate, not shocking, etc. Our editors say "this is acceptable" or "this is not acceptable", and almost all the time that's based on *our personal opinions* of what is and isn't acceptable. The end result is that our text is very neutral, but our images reflect the biases of our users - you and me. That doesn't seem to be a problem to *us*, because everything looks fine to us - the acceptable images are in articles, the unacceptable ones aren't. People are saying we can't have the image filter because it would stop us being neutral. If we aren't neutral to begin with, this is a bad argument. It doesn't mean we *should* have the image filter, but it does mean we need to think some more about the reasons for or against it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 12:23, David Gerard wrote: > On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers > wrote: > >> So is there a simpler way to do this, is there some flaw in this that would >> prevent it working, or is this the flying unicorn option? > > I believe it was envisioned as working for anonymous casual readers as well. > > There *should* be some way to at least have the no-images option for > anonymous readers without ruining caching ... Cookies? It would work on at least a per-session basis, I'd think. One issue here is that if we make it registered-user-only we need to work out how this interacts with account creation - and IP blocks. It clearly will cause problems if people *want* to turn on the filter, go to create an account, and discover one of our famed cryptic block messages telling them they can't... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers wrote: > One of the objections is that we don't want a Flickr style system which > involves images being deleted, accounts being suspended and the burden of > filtering being put on the uploader. The objection to a flickr-style concept was to the "one size fits all" safe/not-safe rating done by a central staff. As Stephen notes, Flickr's specific approach does involve deletion, suspension, etc etc etc, but none of the proposals for the filter have suggested anything like this - there's no desire to remove the images, just to label them for display [or not] in articles. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
On 22 September 2011 14:46, WereSpielChequers wrote: > I'm uncomfortable about a session cookie based system for IP readers, many > of our readers are in Internet Cafes and I'm not sure if PCs in those sorts > of environments get rebooted and the session cookies wiped between > customers. It varies depending on the specific location - some effectively reboot and wipe the profile between users, some merely kick one user out of the seat and put a new one in without even closing the browser tabs. Same with domestic one-computer-per-household situations! On the other hand, the proposed implementation is relatively transparently reversible - concealed images are shown as a placeholder with a trivial "click to display again" option - and this sort of "legacy filtering" should be fairly easy for a user to switch back on or off. It's not perfect, but it's probably no *less* clunky than requiring people to sign in (and the associated forgetting-to-sign-out...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 19:05, Andre Engels wrote: > >> I still can't the a rational difference between images included in >> articles by the will of the community and text passages included by the >> will of the community. > > It's much easier to note offensive text fragments before reading them than > to note offensive images before seeing them. But I guess the more > fundamental issue is: there are, I assume, people who have requested this > feature for images. There are either no or only very few who have requested > it for text. I've almost never seen complaints about specific fragments of text in five years of handing OTRS mails, other than vandalism or the sort of bad writing that we discourage anyway. I assume the sort of thing that provokes this is taboo vocabulary - swearing, etc - but we tend to keep that to a minimum in articles anyway. We *do* get more generalised "how dare you have articles on this sort of thing", as you'd expect, but those are subtly different. When the objection's to having an article at all, any demand for a filtering system would involve filtering the entire article... and an article you've specifically told the system not to show you is really just the same as an article you've glanced at and decided not to read. It's a bit circular - the filter wouldn't do anything more than your interaction with the site does anyway, so why agitate for one? For images, on the other hand, it's a relatively coherent position to be willing to *read* about sex or violence without wanting to look at pictures of it - a system which allows someone to choose to read the article without looking at the pictures thus makes more sense in comparison. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
On 22 September 2011 22:28, Fae wrote: >> I've almost never seen complaints about specific fragments of text in >> five years of handing OTRS mails, other than vandalism or the sort of >> bad writing that we discourage anyway. I assume the sort of thing that >> provokes this is taboo vocabulary - swearing, etc - but we tend to >> keep that to a minimum in articles anyway. > > Beyond the vandalism problem, I have dealt with complaints on OTRS > relating to weight, such as emphasis on stories about paedophiles on > school articles. However it is hard to imagine how a filter would deal > with this and I suspect the majority of our community would not want > to start hiding paragraphs that include difficult words such as > "paedophile", particularly when they are likely to be accurate and > verifiable even for articles likely to be accessed by young readers. Yeah. Weighting and appropriate inclusion and so on are basically editorial issues, and any sort of filtering wouldn't help (though sometimes I wonder if some people would secretly like an "in popular culture" heading filter...). Keyword-matching based filtering is also something that's very easy for a reader to do on their side, so there wouldn't be much reason for *us* to do anything like that even were we being pestered for it. While we're on a tangent, though, it's interesting to imagine what reaction we'd get were there a filter which screened out articles under a minimum quality threshold! Opt-in to see articles with more than two cleanup tags, etc. :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 14:14, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: > The real problem here is that if there was a real market for stupid > sites like that, they would already be there. And they are not, which > does seem to point to the conclusion that there isn't a real market > for such sites. Doesn't it? Not really. There are basically no major WP-derivative sites of any kind in existence - the ones that exist are either plain dumps studded with ads, or very small-scale attempts to do something good and innovative. As far as I can tell, it's just very hard to get a fork or a significantly different derivative site up and running successfully; it requires a large investment on fairly speculative predictions. Given this, it's hard to say that the absence of a particular kind of derivative site is due to there being a lack of demand for that *kind* of site - there might be demand, there might not, we just can't tell from the available evidence. (To steal David's analogy, it's a bit like saying that unicorns can't be trained, as there are no trained unicorns. Of course, there are no unicorns at all, and their trainability is moot...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter
On 21 September 2011 18:20, Tobias Oelgarte wrote: > Truthfully, i see not different approach to include images and text > passages. Both are added, discussed, removed, re-added the same way as > text is. Now i heard some say that text is written by multiple authors > and images are only created by one. Then i must wonder that we are able > to decide to include one source and it's arguments written by one > author, while it seams to be a problem to include the image of one > photographer/artist. There really is no difference in overall progress. If we've a choice of several different images, we can pick the one which is most neutral - so if we're writing about a war, we can choose not to use a photograph of the Glorious Forces of Our Side Marching In Victory, and instead pick a less loaded one of some soldiers in a field, or a map with arrows. But there's a problem when the issue is whether it's appropriate to *include an image at all*. If one position says we should include an image and the other position says we shouldn't, then whichever way we decide, we've taken sides. We can't really be neutral in a yes-or-no situation. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug
On 12 December 2011 19:22, Möller, Carsten wrote: > >> > It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally >> > got around to writing it > > Who has asked for such a silly feature? > Every uploader sees the image he/she is uploading and has made the necessary > rotation beforehand. I've certainly uploaded screwily-rotated files before; it's fairly common, especially with some Windows software, for an image to be shown to the user as rotated while retaining its "set" rotation in a way that's not visible until it's sent somewhere. I agree applying it to old images was a bit of an odd thing to do (if they were visibly wrong, someone usually went to the effort of re-uploading them), but that doesn't mean applying it to later ones was somehow a stupid thing to do. As to how common it might be in general... testing on Commons is tricky, but I've spent a few minutes sampling the Flickr live upload feed. Over about 20 pages of 20 images each, I found eight wrongly-rotated shots, or eight in 400 ~~ 2%. It's not Commons, of course, but it is indicative. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Research assistance
On 21 January 2012 13:42, James Heilman wrote: > While we have a list here > http://toolserver.org/~tim1357/cgi-bin/wikiproject_watchlist.py?template=WikiProject%20Medicine&order=desc&limit=200&t=0&m=1&b=0&user=&off=0&cat=0&hip=0&q=1 > if multiple edits > are made to the same page in a single day it only shows the last one. Is it > possible to get a list of all edits? If should be possible to work with > this list if another is not available. This is slightly clumsy, but it works: Produce a list of all the articles you want to "watch" (which is the most tricky part of the process) and format them as a long list of wikilinks. Drop this into a userspace or projectspace page - it should just be a sea of blue links to individual articles. Then, use "Related Changes" from the sidebar - this will produce a list of all the edits made to every article linked. It isn't treated as a watchlist, so it shows all edits and not just the "top" ones. One caveat, though - it doesn't handle redirects or pagemoves very well. You need to make sure the links go direct to the target page, not via a redirect, or you'll end up watching for changes to the redirect page; and if a page linked from there is moved, you may miss any changes to it. > If I am able to get approval and funding from UBC I am hoping to run a > second round collecting the same data but with "pending changes" turned on > for a week on all medical articles. This students would be required to > handing all pending changes to all medical articles and will be collecting > the same data as before. This will allow us to determine 1) if pending > changes affects the numbers of IPs editing 2) if and to what degree pending > changes reduces the visibility of poor quality content. The proposed As David says, I fear you may have more trouble getting agreement from the community! I'd love to see this part of the study done (and make a small bet as to what the results might be...), but it's going to be a hard sell. If you're planning to get this running in the summer, you might want to start the negotiations quite soon... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Strike against the collection of personal data through edit links
On 4 February 2012 13:57, Teofilo wrote: > Also it is becoming uncomfortable to edit section 0 of an article. On > a normal wiki article, to edit section 0, one copy-pastes the edit > link of section 1 and changes "1" into "0". This is no longer possible > in a reliable enough way, as the effect of changing the URL becomes > obscure. Changing section=1 into section=0 should still work fine - I've just tested it. The token values seem to be the same for every section, so it's unlikely even to confuse the data! However, this is a bit of a hack in the first place - there's an option in preferences to provide an edit link actually on the page for section 0. Preferences > Gadgets, and the first entry under "Appearance". -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 14 February 2012 06:02, David Richfield wrote: > Relevant: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#.22No_Evidence.22 > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haymarket_affair#Dubious As with so many cases, causing a stink gets the giant searchlight directed on the article, and things get worked out... it's just a pity it doesn't scale well! This followup may be of some interest: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/does-wikipedia-have-an-accuracy-problem/253216/ I particularly liked this comment: "Digging into Wikipedia's logs on the changes, it's clear that the entry's gatekeepers did not handle the situation optimally, chiding Messer-Kruse for his manners and not incorporating the new research into the article, even as a minority viewpoint. But it's also worth noting that the expectation that Wikipedia would quickly reflect such a dramatic change in a well-known historical narrative is a very, very high bar. (...) we hold this massive experiment in collaborative knowledge to a standard that is higher than any other source. We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers." -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter
On 9 March 2012 14:17, Thomas Morton wrote: > We also work quite well as a filter of information. And it is improving > this that we are currently discussing. > > Improving the filtering of information is a critical facet of making it > accessible to as many people as possible. If a Muslim refuses to go to > Wikipedia because of our image policy - which we (realistically) impose on > him - then we have failed in our core objective. I had sworn off commenting on these discussions some time back, but I want to chime in to support this point - the way in which our community handles controversial content is itself a viewpoint position, and potentially a flawed one. Opposing changes to the way we handle and display this content isn't as simple as defending "neutrality"; it's arguing for retaining the status quo, and thus enforcing our communities' current systemic biases and perspectives on what is acceptable, what is normal, what is appropriate. Those perspectives may be "better" than the alternatives - sometimes I think so, sometimes I don't - but by not doing anything, we're in real danger of privileging the editing community's belief that people should be exposed to things over a reader's desire not to be exposed to them. The image filter may not be a good solution, but too much of the response involves saying "we're fine, we're neutral, we don't need to do anything" and leaving it there; this isn't the case, and we do need to think seriously about these issues without yelling "censorship!" any time someone tries to discuss the problem. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter
On 11 March 2012 00:23, David Gerard wrote: > On 10 March 2012 22:15, Andrew Gray wrote: > >> The image filter may not be a good solution, but too much of the >> response involves saying "we're fine, we're neutral, we don't need to >> do anything" and leaving it there; this isn't the case, and we do need >> to think seriously about these issues without yelling "censorship!" >> any time someone tries to discuss the problem. > > There are theoretical objections, and then there are the actual objectors: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Gay_pornography > > The objector here earnestly and repeatedly compares the words "gay > pornographic" in *text* on the page to images of child pornography. Well, yes, and everyone else involved in that discussion is (at some length) telling them they're wrong. There are *other* actual objections, and ones with some sense behind them; the unexpected Commons search results discussed ad nauseam, for example. I don't think one quixotic and mistaken complaint somehow nullifies any other objection people can make about entirely different material... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Does google favour WIkipedia?
On 20 March 2012 17:20, Fred Bauder wrote: >> The answer, evidently, is "not as much as Bing" - >> http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2161910/Bing-Not-Google-Favors-Wikipedia-More-Often-in-Search-Results-Study >> >> Thought people might find it interesting :) > > No question that we are a center of attention for Google. I've noticed > that when I create a new article, it often comes up as the first hit on > Google for the subject within 5 minutes. There is no way such positioning > is based on external links to the article. I believe Google take articles directly from the newpages feed. As to why they're the first hit, I suspect it's more to do with the way that our new articles tend to be on highly specific topics, and are very often the only page on the internet *specifically* about that thing... (The SEO people are correct that Wikipedia has a high Google ranking, and correct that this is something of an odd skew on Google's part. What always amuses me is the recurrent belief that Wikipedia deliberately tries to do this, that we're bribing Google or setting up carefully-constructed semantic traps in our articles or something - the fact that it's not a cunning ploy on our part is completely inconceivable to someone who approaches everything from this perspective.) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
On 2 October 2010 18:13, wrote: > And you've missed the point. > The entire thrust of our mission is to make readers into editors. Inasmuch as we have a mission, it is to create "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home > That is the point of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. ...which is a tool to achieve the goal above. We should be careful not to mistake the fundamental goals for the methods we choose to achieve them. Those methods are important, and we would be lost without them, but they are emphatically *not* primary goals in themselves. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to improve quality of Wikipedia?
2010/10/10 Виктория :
> *Dzień dobry, *Przykuta
>
> One of Wikipedia perennial dilemmas is quantity vs. quality. Low depth and
> low articles to non-auricles ratio usually a sign that too many articles
> were created semiautomatically, by bots and the community is spread too thin
> e.g. there is not enough people to correct and discuss these articles.
Polish doesn't seem to have more bots *editing* than other projects
do. A few months back, I graphed all the Wikipedias by number of bot
edits as proportion of total edits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proportion_of_bot_edits_on_Wikipedia_by_overall_edit_count.svg
Polish isn't marked here, but it's eighth from the right - it doesn't
seem to be a statistical outlier at all. Unless the bots are
concentrated solely on new articles, which is a possibility, this
seems normal.
So perhaps it's something about the way the Polish Wikipedia works? A
few thoughts:
* Polish doesn't host any images - unlike most other projects - so
there's no need for image pages, image talkpages, etc. On some
projects, such as German, as many as 6% of pages are in the image
namespace!
* Polish doesn't seem to use article talkpages much. I've just spent
some time hitting "Losuj artykuł", and about 10-20% of the articles I
found had talkpages. In English, this is about 85-90%, and in French,
about the same. In the other languages these may just have project
tags ("this article is part of WikiProject Something") or metadata
("this article is rated C-class and needs an image"), but they still
show up as non-article pages. There's currently ~735,000 articles and
~595,000 non-articles; if another 70% of articles were to have
talkpages - making it comparable with English and French - this would
make ~1,110,000 non-articles, or 1.5 non-articles per article.
* Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users than any of the
next three "smaller" Wikipedias - Italian, Japanese and Spanish -
which might be significant here. Fewer users talk less, so there's
fewer "natural" discussion pages.
> You can also have an "X week" where X is any topic of articles created by
> bots. People like to work together on a common goal, in the Russian
> Wikipedia thematic weeks are very successful.
English Wikipedia has had some success with a "cup" system - a hundred
Wikipedians competing over several months to improve articles, etc.
It's hard to say how much impact it's had, or how much work people
would have done *without* the contest, but I've seen estimates that a
quarter or a third of all highly-rated content over the last year has
come from participants. In some cases, it was so popular it
overwhelmed the review processes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiCup
I've not participated in theme weeks before, but I've heard pretty
good things about them. Were they usually focused on creating articles
or on "saving" existing ones?
> And lastly you can start nominating articles created by bots and not touched
> by a human hand since then for deletion. They will be either improved or
> deleted and any outcome will increase average depth. In RuWiki nobody tries
> to nominate significant bot articles like German cities but superfluous ones
> about obscure 70s C-movies and far far away galaxies NGO... are nominated
> for deletion 5 per day.
Harsh but fair!
How strict is the bot-approval process on Polish Wikipedia? If there's
a problem with mass creation of articles, you could try being stricter
about requiring community approval before the bots are allowed to run,
to check that you actually do want these topics.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
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Re: [Foundation-l] Expertise and Wikipedia redux
On 13 October 2010 14:42, Gregory Kohs wrote: > I find it interesting that some 18 hours after Gerard's notification (and my > posting a comment on The Australian's page), still not a single comment has > been approved for publication. I wonder why that is? Is there some > official policy within the "pro-Free Culture" movement that mandates > suppression of critical viewpoints of the movement? I doubt that the "pro-Free Culture" movement controls the comments section of the website of a major Australian newspaper! (If it did, they might have posted some praise of their own rather than just leaving a blank void.) The most recent of the editorial articles in the HE section to have any comments at *all*, good or bad, is from 29th September - there have been ten posted since then. I suspect the site operators are just not very responsive at approving them... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Page views
On 18 October 2010 20:05, Mathias Schindler wrote: >> If it is not a bug[1], I think it is newsworthy > > What was the day again when Google switched on the "Instant" feature? Google Instant began to be rolled out on 8 September, and I think was broadly "arrived" for most users by a week or so later - the middle of the month. If we were going to see a surge from that, we'd have had it appearing in late September, but that month doesn't seem to be particularly unusual. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Audited Financial Statements for 2009-10 Fiscal Year Now Available
On 26 October 2010 23:54, John Vandenberg wrote: > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 9:40 AM, geni wrote: >>.. >> "Wikipedia contains more than 16 million articles contributed by a >> global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people." You are >> using some non standard definitions of community here. > > I'd like to see how that figure of 100,000 was arrived at. I'm not sure of the exact working, but a quick sanity-check: Per wikistats, the total "active registered editors" hovers around 85,000 for all Wikipedia "editions". This figure represents the sum of number of active accounts on each project at any given moment; on the one hand, it overcounts, because it doesn't account for duplicate activity (someone who is "active" on both fr and de), but on the other hand, it doesn't account for people who're less active than our five-edits-per-month threshold. It also doesn't clearly account for people who're active one month and not the next - simply averaging the headline figures will treat twelve people, each active in a different month, as the same as a single person active in all twelve. Similarly, there is an open question as to whether or not our count should be entirely in the present tense. There are plenty of articles contributed by community members who've not edited in the past year or two - they may not currently be part of the community of contributors, but they certainly were then, they certainly wrote that content, and they certainly are among the X thousand people to have done so! It may be appropriate to factor these people in as well to the headline figure; this is a bit more debatable, since "community" implies an instantaneous count, but I think you can make a decent case either way. So our first estimate is 85k; polyglot users will drive the figure down, whilst "less active" users will drive the total up, as will accounting for past contributors. I don't have any estimates as to the magnitudes of those effects, but a total of 100k seems well within the realm of possibility. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age
On 18 November 2010 11:30, wrote: > Any one signed up yet? > http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135 Well, fools and their money are easily parted, I suppose. http://wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html sounds very nice - an improvement on most "online marketing consultancy" services that vaguely promise this sort of thing - but I wonder what will come of it in practice. (I have written articles on companies. I never thought to *invoice* them for it...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age
On 18 November 2010 22:40, Fred Bauder wrote: > If it is that easy, maybe it should be a feature available as a courtesy > to anyone or any organization that has an article about them. And to everyone else, too :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Smith&feed=atom&action=history All you'd need to do is produce a nice wrapper for it... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] should not web server logs (of requests) be published?
On 28 November 2010 23:08, Erik Zachte wrote: > People may not search their name in Wikipedia (although I'm not too sure > about that, many people might want to search for their surname looking for > famous ancestors). Idle thought: given how quick people sometimes are to spot changes to "their" article, how many BLPs of limited notability have the subject as the most common reader? There's certainly an issue there... That said, the most obvious problem with things like IP-article view data is that disclosing IPs (or non-IP identifiers) would make it fairly easy to reconstruct the browsing patterns of editors. Casual readers, not so much, but editors would be trivial - look for a fairly obscure page which was edited recently by a single user, look at the pageviews for that page, and you've almost certainly pinpointed the IP/identifier for that editor. At which point, you can easily discover their great fondness for reading about something embarrassing... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
