Re: [Foundation-l] wikipedia Domain acquisition
Hi Lodewijk, 2010/9/8 Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org: Hi Naoko, Thanks for clarifying. That indeed helps a bit more than just the original text. I guess a good summary would be the domain is in safe community hands, and if the Foundation would like that to be different, they can ask so? thank you for your good summary, that is exactly what I understand. I sent a closer note to Mike Godwin, separated from this trolling, so I think there is no worry for us community. Cheers, Best, Lodewijk 2010/9/8 Aphaia aph...@gmail.com I usually give no reply to trolls, so it's just for your information as other subscribers on good faith. It's too bad English to understand what it means, so I just give you details instead. I don't know when wikipedia.jp was first acquired exactly but the first acquisition might be in 2003, when WMF had no staff nor active board members. The domain has been held by two jawiki admin/b'crats on good faith respectively. On the second acquisition some board members were informed, since there was no paid staff in the WMF office yet (it was a way long before WMF has such). So The wikipedia.jp domain acquisition was requested from User:Aphaia by the Wikimedia Foundation staff the above is a blatant lie I have no good reason to discuss further. Due to his disruption I personally advice the moderators of this list and EnWP arb to ban this user who has edited only Jimmy's talk to troll jawiki and its good users. Cheers, 2010/9/8 kigen2700...@gmail.com kigen2700...@gmail.com: The wikipedia.jp domain acquisition was requested from User:Aphaia by the Wikimedia Foundation staff. The individual User:Tietew was owned. On earth, who requested it? 山吹色の御菓子 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] wikipedia Domain acquisition
I usually give no reply to trolls, so it's just for your information as other subscribers on good faith. It's too bad English to understand what it means, so I just give you details instead. I don't know when wikipedia.jp was first acquired exactly but the first acquisition might be in 2003, when WMF had no staff nor active board members. The domain has been held by two jawiki admin/b'crats on good faith respectively. On the second acquisition some board members were informed, since there was no paid staff in the WMF office yet (it was a way long before WMF has such). So The wikipedia.jp domain acquisition was requested from User:Aphaia by the Wikimedia Foundation staff the above is a blatant lie I have no good reason to discuss further. Due to his disruption I personally advice the moderators of this list and EnWP arb to ban this user who has edited only Jimmy's talk to troll jawiki and its good users. Cheers, 2010/9/8 kigen2700...@gmail.com kigen2700...@gmail.com: The wikipedia.jp domain acquisition was requested from User:Aphaia by the Wikimedia Foundation staff. The individual User:Tietew was owned. On earth, who requested it? 山吹色の御菓子 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ru-Wikiversuty
I agree with Huib: it's no foundation matter unless you've been blocked in relation to foundation matters (like CentralNotice, enforcing Foundation policy etc.) Yaroslav, I think I can understand you are unhappy and somehow upset, but please give your consideration to that what matters if you are blocked from the wiki you haven't edited yet and have no further plan to participate? Actually from nothing you've been hindered, in particular participating into foundation matters. Keep your good editing in other projects you have been active, no worried and boldly. Cheers, On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Huib Laurens sterke...@gmail.com wrote: saying you suspend all your work untill this is resolved will not help, this is a community matter not a foundation matter. -- Regards, Huib Abigor Laurens Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011
Slightly OT, in some parts, sorry in advance, On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Mariano Cecowski marianocecow...@yahoo.com.ar wrote: Osama, I'm afraid your view is very self-centric. We Southamericans have a really hard time getting into USA; and I'm sure many couldn't go to that Wikimania because of visa problems. As many couldn't go to Thailand because because of economic reasons. And some didn't go to Egypt because of religious issues. There is always something that will prevent some people to assist to a Wikimania; that's why we rotate the host! I'd like to join Mariano and Brianna; that's why we rotate host cities and should. I'm personally concern with visa availability, since I've seen our potential good speakers hindered to attend in the last minutes, but also I think it should remain one of considerations, not the sole. Every country should have a chance to host which would make the local attendance easier. I can't believe people complaining about getting the visa in their passports that will later prevent them to visit an Arab country; 20 bucks and an hour standing in line and you have a new one!! (unless you live in Cuba, or Northern Korea). Uh-oh, i think it depends. At least in Japan, it wouldn't go so easy nor fast and it costs much higher. I suppose that if people complain, they would have good reasons and that not every thing goes in a same way in different countries. Please, let's concentrate on making life easier for those with problems who *do* want to assist to Wikimania 2011; the rest is just wining, and trying to take political advantage of the current situation. MarianoC.- --- El jue 12-ago-10, Osama Khalid osa...@gnu.org escribió: De: Osama Khalid osa...@gnu.org Asunto: Re: [Foundation-l] Partecipation in Wikimania 2011 Para: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: jueves, 12 de agosto de 2010, 8:17 On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 03:59:38AM -0700, Mariano Cecowski wrote: I beg to disagree; getting into United states is anything but easy. Maybe it depends, but I assume it won't be much harder for a European, Asian or African to get one than a Saudi. Why are we discussing this anyway? And is not that Israel won't give visas to potential attendees; in this case is the home nation of the interested ones that sets obstacles. That's not the issue I'm trying to address here. I'm saying it's difficult. Maybe Israel wants Arabs to be there (this is out of topic, but I'd assume that they surely don't like the fact that they're being disrespected for their actions). But what's important here is, again, that many, many people won't be able to come. Additionally, the current political situation between given countries should not affect the realization of this apolitical, non-religious global conference that seeks worldwide collaboration. It's not about what Wikimania is what it is not. -- Osama Khalid English-to-Arabic translator and programmer. http://osamak.wordpress.com | http://tinyogg.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Umberto Eco's interview
Great work, thanks and kudos to Italian Wikinews team! And also thank you very much for giving us English translation kindly. It helps spread this great interview ... many passages I have found stimulating. Keep up doing this, Italian Wikinewsies :) On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote: Dear all, I have checked in my in box but it seems that this mailing list has not received this news. The Italian project w...@home supported by Italian chapter and the Wikinotizie has organized an interview some months ago with Mr.Umberto Eco who is a philosopher and literary critic known outside Italy for the novel The Name of the Rose. A translation can be found here: http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/Intervista_a_Umberto_Eco/Traduzione The reaction of the Italian network has been very positive (http://stats.grok.se/it.n/201006/Intervista_a_Umberto_Eco). The interview is interesting because Mr.Eco is a big cultural point of reference in the Italian environment and he is very curious of Wikipedia's movement. Ilario ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
I've noticed many of English Wikipedia articles cite only English written articles even if the topics are of non-English world. And normally, specially in the developing world, the most comprehend sources are found in their own languages - how can those articles be assured in NPOV when they ignore the majority of reliable sources? Your logic looks simply failing to me. And Google translation fails still now, even after it is steadily improved. On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:43 AM, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to add to this that I think the worst part of this idea is the assumption that other languages should take articles from en.wp. The idea is that most of en.wp's articles are well-enough written, and written in accord with NPOV to a sufficient degree to overcome any such criticism of 'imperial encyclopedism.' Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: Nobody's arguing here that language and culture have no relationship. What I'm saying is that language does not equal culture. Many people speak French who are not part of the culture of France, for example the cities of Libreville and Abidjan in Africa. Africa is an unusual case given that it was so linguistically diverse to begin with, and that its even moreso in the post-colonial era, when Arabic, French, English, and Dutch remain prominent marks of imperialistic influence. Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: This is well suited for the dustbin of terrible ideas. It ranks right up there with the notion that the European colonization of Africa was for the sole purpose of civilizing the savages. This is the 'encyclopedic imperialism' counterargument. I thought I'd throw it out there. As Bendt noted above, Google has already been working on it for two years and has had both success and failure. It bears mentioning that their tools have been improving quite steadily. A simple test such as /English - Arabic - English/ will show that. Note that colonialism isnt the issue. It still remains for example a high priority to teach English in Africa, for the simple reason that language is almost entirely a tool for communication, and English is quite good for that purpose. Its notable that the smaller colonial powers such as the French were never going to be successful at linguistic imperialism in Africa, for the simple reason that French has not actually been the lingua franca for a long time now. Key to the growth of Wikipedias in minority languages is respect for the cultures that they encompass, not flooding them with the First-World Point of View. What might be a Neutral Point of View on the English Wikipedia is limited by the contributions of English writers. Those who do not understand English may arrive at a different neutrality. We have not yet arrived at a Metapedia that would synthesize a single neutrality from all projects. I strongly disagree. Neutral point of view has worked on en.wp because its a universalist concept. The cases where other language wikis reject English content appear to come due to POV, and thus a violation of NPOV, not because - as you seem to suggest - the POV in such countries must be considered NPOV. Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: I'm surprised to hear that coming from someone who I thought to be a student of languages. I think you might want to read an article from today's Wall Street Journal, about how language influences culture (and, one would extrapolate, Wikipedia articles). I had just a few days ago read Boroditsky's piece in Edge, and it covers a lot of interesting little bits of evidence. As Mark was saying, linguistic relativity (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for most of a century, and its wider conjectures were strongly contradicted by Chomsky et al. Yes there is compelling evidence that language does channel certain kinds of thought, but this should not be overstated. Like in other sciences, linguistics can sometimes make the mistake of making *qualitative judgments based on a field of *quantitative evidence. This was essentially important back in the 40s and 50s when people were still putting down certain quasi-scientific conjectures from the late 1800s. Still there are cultures which claim their languages to be superior in certain ways simply because they are more sonorous or emotive, or otherwise expressive, and that's the essential paradigm that some linguists are working in. -SC ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Aphaia wrote: Ah, I omitted T, and I meant Toolkit. A toolkit with garbage could be called toolkit, but it doesn't change it is useless; it cannot deal with syntax properly, i.e. conjugation etc. at this moment. Intended to be reviewed and corrected by a human doesn't assure it was really reviewed and corrected by a human to a sufficient extent. It could be enough for your target language, but not for mine. Thanks. I think then it's not just about the capabilities of the tool or the qualities of the language, but also the abilities of the human being who is counted on to intervene in the translation. As with Wikipedia editing generally, we don't really have a good mechanism to ensure that a given individual has a particular skill level, we rely on their mistakes being corrected by others. The only guarantee that the editor of an article understands its subject matter (or even, in this case, knows the language in which it is written) is for each of us to be aware of our own limitations. It's quite likely that for some languages, current translation tools are not usable. It's possible that in some cases they never will be usable. Speakers of a given language should evaluate and decide for themselves. But it's certain that some people shouldn't be using these tools, if they're not doing enough to clean up the machine translation word salad. I know that I'd hesitate to use them in languages that I've studied but am not particularly fluent in, like Spanish or Italian (not that those Wikipedias need this kind of contribution from me anyway). If the tools are being used indiscriminately, it might be best to persuade people that they should work in areas they understand, not simply reject the tool outright. True, but this thread is concerning to push articles with machine translation? And it implies to have others clean it up, not work in areas they understand as you suggested, so I'd like to point out it should never happen at least at this moment. I don't oppose node_ue or others use those Google product just for their use (it's upon them anyway), but if they recommend them (either Google Translation Toolkit or Google Translation), I would like to stress it's no snake oil for every language at this moment, and for people like stevertigo, who think Google Translation is enough, it's quite opposite of the truth. It may happen to work in some cases, but generally cleaning up Google Translation results is nothing recommendable for volunteers. Note that even Google themselves don't use Google Translation for their Wikipedia translation project. Cheers, Cheers, --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is Google translation is good for Wikipedias?
Hi, On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com wrote: I think the answer is Yes and No. As with any new project/concept/idea/trial there are pro's and there are con's. The real question is: Do the pro's outweigh the con's? From just reading what you linked (And not in any way being involved with these language projects) and my own personal experiences of how I work on Wikipedia. Yes, I think it is a good thing overall. From what I've seen, it is much easier to convince someone who has never edited, to fix grammatical, spelling or other simple mistakes. Generally people don't dive in and write/translate entire articles - it is simply too high of a barrier to entry. These pre-translated articles give people an in, they are already there, and have obvious errors that are easy to fix. In my experience at Transcom and my own as translator, people appreciate pre-translated articles only in a good quality, there are pre-translations in too bad quality which contains too many obvious errors not easy to fix in time frame. I've seen several requests, both on meta and on language projects, to delete this kind of bad quality translation which people think better to scratch a new version. And in my observation Google translation is still in this level in many languages. And even if you handle Western languages, unless one of them in English, results may be in poor quality (e.g. they cannot keep the distinction between tu/vous, du/Sie etc.) Cheers, More ok content is better than no content, at least if I have my druthers. -Jon On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 23:12, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote: Hello All, Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. The foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am not sure whether any one is interested to consult the respective language community to know their views. As far as I know only Tamil, Bengali, and Swahili Wikipedians have raised their concerns about Google's project. But, does this means that other communities are happy about Google efforts? If there is no active community in a wikipedia how can we expect response from communities? If there is no response from a community, does that mean that Google can hire some native speakers and use machine translation to create articles for that wikipedia? Now let us go back to a basic question. Does WMF require a wiki community to create wikipedia in any language? Or can they utilize the services of companies like Google to create wikipedias in N number of languages? One of the main point raised by the supporters of Google translation is that, Google's project is good *for the online version of the language*.That might be true. But no body is cared to verify whether it is good for Wikipedia. As pointed out by Ravi in his presentation in Wikimania, ( http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddpg3qwc_279ghm7kbhs), the Google translation of wikipedia articles: - will affect the biological growth of a Wikipedia article - will create copy of English wikipedia article in local wikis - it is against some of the basic philosophies of wikipedia The people outside wiki will definitely benefit from this tool, if Google translation tool is developed for each language. I saw the working example of this in Poland during Wikimania, when some people who are not good in English used google translator to communicate with us. :) Apart from the points raised by Ravi in his presentation, this will affect the community growth.If there is no active wiki community, how can we expect them to look after all these junk articles uploaded to wiki every day. When all the important article links are already turned blue, how we can expect any future potential editors. So according to me, Google's project is killing the growth of an active wiki community. Of course, Tamil Wikipedia is trying to use Google project effectively. But only Tamil is doing that since they have an active wiki community*. Many Wiki communities are not even aware that such a project is happening in their wiki*. I do not want to point out specific language wikipedas to prove my point. But visit the wikipedias (especially wikipedias* that use non-latin scripts*) to view the status of google translation project. Loads of junk articles are uploaded to wiki every day. Most of the time the only edit in these articles is the edit by its creator and the inter language wiki bots. This effort will definitely affect community growth. Kindly see the points raised by a Swahali Wikipedian http://muddybtz.blog.com/2010/07/16/what-happened-on-the-google-challenge-the-swahili-wikipedia/ . Many Swahali users (and other language users) now expect a laptop or some other monitory benefits to write in their wikipedia. That affects the community growth. So what is
Re: [Foundation-l] Is Google translation is good for Wikipedias?
Thanks for your clarification, Node.ue, I know it because I attended their presentation on Wikimania. It is an ambitious project I'd like to see it growing, but at this moment they seem to have a serious problem in its system. They seem to use English as a stem language, and assumes all translations are first done into English and then to another language. On the other hand, at least on major non-English Western language Wikipedia some amount of translations (1/3 IIRC) are not related to English. If you think it works for you, it's fine, but please be aware it might not work for non-English speakers as well as for you. Cheers, On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: Aphaia, a great deal of confusion has been created with regards to this project. I hope you'll allow me to attempt to clear it up. These are NOT articles that were translated directly by Google Translate. Rather, they were created using Google Translator Toolkit, which requires human intervention by a speaker of the language - someone to check and correct every single sentence translated, in the case of languages where Google already has machine translation, or to write entirely new _human_ translations, in the cases where no Google Translate module exists (for example, Tamil), with the aid of Translation Memory software. I currently work as a translator and have found that Google Translator Toolkit is great for speeding up and improving the consistency of translations, and at least the results of my work are usually better with it than they would be without (I'm glad for the consistency - if I'm translating a large document, I'd like to make sure to translate the same phrases the same way every time they occur rather than using slightly different wording the second time around). Since they're revised and corrected by a human, they _should_ have the same level of grammatical correctness, comprehensibility and translation quality as a pure human translation. If they don't, this is the fault of the person using the toolkit, not the software itself. -m. On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Aphaia aph...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Jon Davis w...@konsoletek.com wrote: I think the answer is Yes and No. As with any new project/concept/idea/trial there are pro's and there are con's. The real question is: Do the pro's outweigh the con's? From just reading what you linked (And not in any way being involved with these language projects) and my own personal experiences of how I work on Wikipedia. Yes, I think it is a good thing overall. From what I've seen, it is much easier to convince someone who has never edited, to fix grammatical, spelling or other simple mistakes. Generally people don't dive in and write/translate entire articles - it is simply too high of a barrier to entry. These pre-translated articles give people an in, they are already there, and have obvious errors that are easy to fix. In my experience at Transcom and my own as translator, people appreciate pre-translated articles only in a good quality, there are pre-translations in too bad quality which contains too many obvious errors not easy to fix in time frame. I've seen several requests, both on meta and on language projects, to delete this kind of bad quality translation which people think better to scratch a new version. And in my observation Google translation is still in this level in many languages. And even if you handle Western languages, unless one of them in English, results may be in poor quality (e.g. they cannot keep the distinction between tu/vous, du/Sie etc.) Cheers, More ok content is better than no content, at least if I have my druthers. -Jon On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 23:12, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote: Hello All, Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. The foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am not sure whether any one is interested to consult the respective language community to know their views. As far as I know only Tamil, Bengali, and Swahili Wikipedians have raised their concerns about Google's project. But, does this means that other communities are happy about Google efforts? If there is no active community in a wikipedia how can we expect response from communities? If there is no response from a community, does that mean that Google can hire some native speakers and use machine translation to create articles for that wikipedia? Now let us go back to a basic question. Does WMF require a wiki community to create wikipedia in any language? Or can they utilize the services of companies like Google to create wikipedias in N number of languages? One of the main point raised by the supporters of Google translation is that, Google's project is good *for the online
Re: [Foundation-l] Boycott in a...@wiki
I don't know Krishna case, nor Western Church, but according to the Tradition (or the Holy Tradition as the church says), thus not accoding to secular people, - St. Paul, his portrait is described by Eusebius, who records a 2nd century account in The History of the Church, and at least Eastern Orthodox Icon strongly has follow. - Jesus left an authentic his image as Mandylion ([[w:Image of Edessa]]), The-image-not-to-be-made-with-human hands, and that was main reason the Church accepted icons in the 2nd Council of Constantinople. The original was lost but authorized copies are left elsewhere. Summarized, icons are a part of the Tradition, authorized of Our Lord Savior, and the Church has preserved or has made her best effort to preserve authentic images of the saints and Lord Himself, hence not only acceptable but worth to venerate. Shortly it's something more than okay - it is something strongly the Church has advocated for centuries. Of course, it is point of view of Eastern Orthodox, so other people both secular and of other denominations may disagree in some of all points, and I don't want to push my POV, I'd just explain it doesn't matter. Cheers, On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 7:18 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: ... That's the issue. Displaying offensive religious images is a big problem, not a tiny little problem that can be brushed under the rug. You're doing something that outrages millions of people and saying, Hey, tough. And you don't possess, and will never possess, an authentic image of Muhammad. Are our images of Muhammad any less authentic than our images of St. Paul, Jesus or Krishna? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation
One thing we can do would be to make contributors' names more visible. Translators for WMF stuff too (Ting Chen made a good point about the latter in Alexandria). Many websites gives clear credits to contributors - not only for-profit media, but websites whose content is mainly written by volunteers, like Global Online. In TED related translations, their translators' names are on the same webpage of video or transcript, and much visible than in MediaWiki history pages. On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 12:47 AM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, I agree that thanking someone for their service to WMF projects is important, too. We need to do more to recognize the invaluable contributions that we people make to keep the various projects going. But, in addition to giving encouragement though thanks and recognition, I support introducing social features into our projects. The main benefit and focus for the on site features would be the ability for people with similar interests to connect with each other as they work together on site. See the list of ideas from the strategic planning process. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Recommendations/Community_health_1Volunteer recognition http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Recommendations/Community_health_4Social features Sydney On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.netwrote: Sydney, I agree with your thoughts here. But you are talking about activities community members can participate in. I am talking about how those community members interact with each other. Marc on 6/19/10 5:58 PM, Sydney Poore at sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: English Wikipedia has numerous contests during the year. Some people regularly participate in them and enjoy them. Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Contest is an example of one that is ongoing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MILCON Picture of the year is popular with some people on Commons. While everyone does not want to be involved in contests, they appeal to some people and I see no problem with us introducing more of them in WMF projects to see if they will draw people into the movement. I feel the same way about encouraging new ways to get different groups of people involved with WMF projects. If gaming can be used to promote an interest in WMF then that is goodness. Puzzles, board games, and even more complex fantasy games using content might be a draw for some people. If someone wants to develop them I would not stand in there way. Combining community service and socializing is very common in community organizations, and is appealing to many people. By adding more social components to WMF projects, we will most likely draw in people that otherwise would not volunteer. I see this as an important tool and one that should not be dismissed if we are going to broaden the base of our volunteers. Sydney Poore (FloNight) On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.netwrote: on 6/19/10 4:58 PM, Keegan Peterzell at keegan.w...@gmail.com wrote: snip. There was a great TED speech that I need to look up but don't have the time for at the moment. The premise of the presentation is that studies have shown time and time again that things like games, prizes, awards and other measures of gratitude are only temporary measures to increase motivation. The folks that work for you that are the truly motivated ones and believers in the process do not ask for these rewards. A pat on the back and a good job, thanks for your work because I value it very much occasionally is the only true recognition that is needed. The other fluff only inspires distraction from the goal because it's creating other little goals which, in turn, become more important than the end result. Yes! Prizes denote direct competition as in sports or, more subtly, with the science arts awards. Person-to-person affirmation goes a very long way; and is what collaboration community should be based upon. Give them the climate, and they will give you the culture. Marc Riddell ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
I know a horse, but yesterday it took for me five minutes to remember sparrows were the bird's name I would have liked to mention. . It helps to make this discussion helpful to some extent that native English speakers remind it is sometimes not so easy as you the native expect foreign learners. It's no sarcasm at all. Really. On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: When you think that Commons is bad in supporting other languages, try to find pictures of a horse on the internet in other languages like Estonian, Nepalese ... It is not the same at all as when you are looking for images in English. Don't most Internet users know enough English to be able to search for pictures of a horse in English? (According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), yes... Most Internet users speak the English language as a native or secondary language.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ 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 BadIdea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry for top-posting. Austin, think about who everyone is. The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers. The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, Sue, not personal, but I think here I say, joining to the choir which Jon and Eia began: while English Wikipedia is the most visited websites of the Wikimedia, it is only 50% and most of its readers are English Speaking. They have no good reasons I believe to representative the rest of us non-English speaking people who are 2/60 of this planet. What is the good reason usability team thought data from English Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in opposition of your statement. which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a mistake.. (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.) Aryeh Gregor has said a couple of very smart things in this thread, particularly this bit I'll quote below: Users don't explicitly complain about small things. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI. Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki. Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative. Thanks, Sue -Original Message- From: Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:56:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Austin Hair wrote: And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid. Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort). Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance. As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone). Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ 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 BadIdea, part 2
Well, I would have liked to mean, English speaking people is only 2/60 global population, it would be obvious though, I'd like to give a stat collection. Cheers, On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Aphaia aph...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry for top-posting. Austin, think about who everyone is. The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers. The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, Sue, not personal, but I think here I say, joining to the choir which Jon and Eia began: while English Wikipedia is the most visited websites of the Wikimedia, it is only 50% and most of its readers are English Speaking. They have no good reasons I believe to representative the rest of us non-English speaking people who are 2/60 of this planet. What is the good reason usability team thought data from English Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in opposition of your statement. which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a mistake.. (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.) Aryeh Gregor has said a couple of very smart things in this thread, particularly this bit I'll quote below: Users don't explicitly complain about small things. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI. Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki. Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative. Thanks, Sue -Original Message- From: Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:56:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Austin Hair wrote: And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid. Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort). Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance. As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone). Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ 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
I would like to know as follows * the data mentioned * differences between language groups: does every language group use interlanguage links rarely or some of them use it often? For instance, in a small wikis? * Is there any way to choose if those hiding-by-default boxes are visible by user preferences? Honestly I am surprised this change which wasn't so during the beta test, and personally as an multilingual, slightly annoyed by an increased number of clicks, I know it makes a sense to weigh the majority's preferences, but if there is no other options, it reduces usability for me as individual. Cheers, On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: 2010/6/2 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: Hello, For part 1, see [1]. In his reply to User experience feedback [2], Howief says: the language links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data. Is there any data about their usage since the switch to Vector? They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool. Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some foreign language box. In my opinion, the world is not best served by hyper-optimizing for the most frequent and shallow interests of the largest majorities. That's exactly my opinion, too. I am trying to back it with data. -- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
Personally I support Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch so your direction saddened me a bit, anyway On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi everyone, It looks like the discussion on the name is dying down, so I'd like to summarize what I think we've heard here: 1. There's no clear favorite out there. In addition to the two ideas we put forward (Pending Revisions and Double Check), there's been quite a bit of discussion around alternatives, for example: Revision Review and Pending Edits. 2. There's are still some that aren't comfortable changing the name away from Flagged Protection, but that doesn't appear to be a widely held view. 3. Some people like Double Check, but some people dislike it a lot. The people who like it seem to be comfortable with the colloquial use of it, whereas the people that dislike it don't like the lack of precision and the possible confusion created by the use of the word double. 4. Pending Revisions seems to be something most people would settle for. It's probably not the hands down favorite of too many people, but it doesn't seem to provoke the same dislike that Double Check does. 5. Pending Edits is a simplification of Pending Revisions that seems to have some support, as it replaces the jargony Revision with the easier Edits While I admit revisions sounds a jargon here, but MediaWiki is consistent in its terminology me thinks. What we call edits casually are revisions in this terminology. Revisions look to be used for calling each relics of editing actions, and edits seem to be preserved for this action (e.g. tab for edit). I appreciate wording consistency greatly for the sake of internationalization. MediaWiki is an international project whose internationalization/localization owes mainly non-native English speakers. Terminology inconsistency may provoke unnecessary confusion among those translators, or not. I understand this feature is designed aiming to English Wikipedia, but it doesn't mean necessarily it should be used on English Wikipedia only for decades, and anyway it'll be a subject to localization as well other MediaWiki features and their messages. Casual and colloquial expressions are sometimes rather hazard for non-native language speakers, in particular the wording is isolated from the expected terminology. I expect the team takes this aspect into consideration too, not only its main and direct target, but also users in future. 6. Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch seems to have gathered a cult following. Yes, we have a sense of humor. No, we're not going there. :-) A little background as to where we're at. Double Check had an enthusiastic following at the WMF office, but we're not inclined to push that one if it's going to be a fight (it's far from the unanimous choice at WMF anyway). Revision Review seems to be heading a bit too far into jargon land for our comfort. Pending Revisions is the compromise that seems to stand up to scrutiny. A variation such as Pending Edits or Pending Changes also seems acceptable to us. That's where we stand now. If you haven't spoken up yet, now is the time, since we're only a couple of days from making a final decision on this. Please weigh in here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions/Terminology Thanks Rob ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Renaming Flagged Protections
On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 7:30 PM, AGK wiki...@googlemail.com wrote: On 22 May 2010 02:09, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: While that is true, making up names without any real thought is what has resulted in the mess we have now where most people have no idea what the differences are between Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki, since the names are all so similar. I think taking a little bit of time to come up with a sensible name is a good idea. Not to mention Wikia. But really, only those unfamiliar with Wikipedia get confused between the three. Ahem mea culpa O Lord God and all brethren, I must confess that sometimes I made a typographcal error Wikipedia Foundation here and there including on wikimediafoundation.org ... /mea culpa I totally agree with Tango and Philippe; the more frequently used a word would be, the less confusable naming is wanted. And as this really is only a background/editorial process, the name isn't _as_ significant. Admittedly, it's new editors who are most likely to not figure out why their edits haven't appeared yet (I was told anybody could edit this site. So why hasn't my improvement showing up? Do I need to refresh the page? … Argh!!!… rage quit; we lose an editor). But I don't know if they're going to care which name we choose, so long as it's understandable to the layman. YMMV. AGK ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?
Cool. On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/ Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books? Sam. Delphine uploaded them already to Commons. By the way, you guys may be aware Extention:Book is now activated on several other projects including meta. I tested it and found it has several problems so serious as not to serve the purpose to prepare a readable pdf; wrong selection of fonts and glyphs or just failure of rendering etc. At least it doesn't work for Japanese and I suppose it may be same in other non-European/non-latin-script languages. So I'd like you to test it and file a bug for better quality. ... and here my question: Is Bugzilla the place where to file bugs at this time too? Cheers, ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Thanks for your prompt response, Ting. Fine to see we come to agreement so quickly :) On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello all, the following sentence from me is surely a very stupid sentense. I apology for it. And thanks for everyone, especially Aphaia and SJ for pointing this out to me. Ting Ting Chen wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates
Not knowing, but Commons has their own VPs (in many langs), IRC channel and mailing list. I don't see the good reason those particular things on the project are continued to discuss on this list. Cheers, On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: We are engaged in a process that will lead to some much-needed changes at Commons, including the continued deletion of some of the things that we used to host. Where? Behind the scenes? On one of the internal mailing lists? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [OT] Am I the only one...
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Ryan Lomonaco wiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:50 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: I do to, depending on how they are applied, for example I would much prefer on a case by case basis compared to everyone, since a few people are bring active and decent discussion where as some people are just trolling/omg censorship is bad type stuff. -Peachey The issue hasn't come up yet, but I would approach things on a case-by-case basis - for example, I wouldn't moderate a Wikimedia staff member who posted more than 30 times because they were answering questions from other list members. Also, if someone is moderated for hitting the limit, I would approve posts beyond their initial 30 posts if I think that the post is useful, and adds to the discussion. Is there any option to tell them commons has its own mailing list instead of adding it to the foundation-l? Cheers, If anyone has any questions about the post limit, please feel free to talk to either myself or Austin, on-list or privately. -- [[User:Ral315]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Jimbo Wales acting outside his remit
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Well, do you need a picture to explain a dildo? Well, at least it is helpful for foreign readers to some extent to have an illustration, File:Franz von Bayros 016.jpg is more or less art, but File:Félicien Rops - Sainte-Thérèse.png which is used on three Wikipedias to illustrate the use of a dildo has some real problems with being offensive to Catholics (Of course Japanese or Chinese Catholics don't matter, but they do). but, as a Japanese and orthodox-church goer, so more or less out of conflict of interest, I agree it is unnecessarily offensive to create such images. Just for illustration in general, it wasn't necessary to render an existing figure. Of course, I don't support to delete artworks specially hundred older ones as porns, used on projects for illustration in particular. . Much better to use a photo of the woman using a dildo or at least an eye-witness report published in a reliable source. The image could, of course, be used appropriately to illustrate an article on caricatures or something about anti-catholicism. Fred Bauder The foundation appears to be of the impression that Jimbo is merely attempting to encourage scrutiny, and removing clear cases. This is not true. Jimbo has speedy deleted, without discussion, historical artworks and diagrams, often edit warring with admins to keep them deleted, and has made a statement that he refuses to discuss his deletions until after he has finished deleting them all, which would only compound the problem. Examples: Artworks from the 19th century, by notable artists: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undeletetarget=File%3AF%C3%A9licien_Rops_-_Sainte-Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se.png- Wheelwarred with three different admins to try and keep it deleted. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undeletetarget=File%3AFranz_von_Bayros_016.jpg- Wheelwarred with two admins this time. Diagrams intended to illustrate articles on sexual subjects, in wide use on Wikipedia projects for that purpose: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undeletetarget=File%3AWiki-fisting.png- Edit warred with three admins http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undeletetarget=File%3AWiki-facial.svg Further, when challeged on these, he said that he refused to engage in any discussion on the deletion of artwork *until he was done deleting all of them* From http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Walesaction=historysubmitdiff=38891861oldid=38891748 I have redeleted the image for the duration of the cleanup project. We will have a solid discussion about whether Commons should ever host pornography and under what circumstances at a later day - June 1st will be a fine time to start.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|span class=signature-talktalk/span]]) 17:31, 7 May 2010 (UTC) How are such images to be found, after's he's gone and deleted them all? Are we really to sift through every single deletion several months later, to find the things that shouldn't have been deleted in the first place, and which, thanks to the Commons Delinker bot, have been automatically removed from the articles they were used in? Out of Jimbo's deletions, at the very least a third of the deletions related to diagrams and historical artwork in wide use on Wikipedia projects. This despite his initial claim ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Walesaction=historysubmitdiff=38820363oldid=38819608) that he'd only be dealing with things that violated the law that started the controversy. If the board are not aware, there was, about a year ago, a controversy related to images of Muhammed, in which Muslim readers - for whom such are horribly offensive, due to rules against depiction of the prophet - were politely informed that we could not delete material simply because it offended someone, as Wikipedia sought to show all of the world's knowledge. Jimbo's actions make that consensus deeply problematic. There is a petition for Wales' founder flag to be removed, which has gained widespread support since his actions. ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag ) -A. C. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Disagreed. Those free licensed (or sometimes public domain) content on Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource are not only cited on Wikimedia wikis but on third parties' publifications: from websites to books and magazines. They help to spread a sum of human being knowledge per se, not just repositories to other wikimedia wikis. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates
Between Wikiversity blocking and Commons ones, there is another example of Jimmy's rushes and communal nonsupport, I think. That is, on a global ban of a certain editor. While I personally don't care if that guy is banned or not, I care the Jimmy's claim he has a right to declare global ban in his individual right. Respectfully I disagree. And I saw other community members do the same: one the account of that editor in question was locked but soon unlocked. I suppose things would have gone in a different course if the first step had been a proposal, not declare. One other thing I'm concerned is that Jimmy hasn't known global user right management system - global lock in this case. It may demonstrate he is alienated from the day-by-day project housekeeping and don't know how the things are managed in this level. In general I suppose it wouldn't be a bright idea to keep someone a mop without knowledge how wikis work. In this dispute, we already have seen a general agreement (hardcore porns w/o any illustration purpose are to delete) and some disagreements in details (how such deletions are performed, if certain images should be kept or go away etc.). Let me summarize, we are happy to accord in general policy but still need to discuss in details. I sincerely wish if Jimmy had kept the line of policy discussion and taken initiative, not tipped into each controversy of corner picking. Once Jimmy said he on Wikipedia was similar to English Queen to some extent: regnat et non gubernat. I find it words of wisdom. Specially right now Jimmy is much busier and have less time to give a look to each community disputes. In other words, declaring ban an individual or deleting an individual image is not ruling, but governing. Jimmy, I wholeheartedly recommend you to be back to your past wisdom and discretion. Then you will find you are in the community, of those who have ears to you, if you speak calmly and thoughtfully. On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com wrote: On 5/9/10 1:42 AM, Svip wrote: On 9 May 2010 01:01, Florence Devouardanthe...@yahoo.com wrote: On 5/8/10 7:31 PM, Mike Godwin wrote: I'm not defending such a criterion, and I do not believe that such a criterion informed Jimmy's actions. Jimmy can speak better than I can on what he was thinking, Then let him speak by himself I think most of us would be biased to hear him speak (well, metaphorically). I too am guilty of such, by ignoring advice (even if good and useful) simply because of who the speaker is. Now, I would expect any public figure like Jimmy Wales to get a bit of shit thrown at him occasionally, even from his own ranks. But I have to say, the tone has been far away from professional here and there. So letting Godwin speaking on his behalf makes sense. Besides the fact Mike is using a language far too convoluted for many speakers on this list, I would argue that one of the implications of the abusive deletions is that Jimbo is perceived as having lost touch with base. I do not think letting someone speak on his behalf will help restore trust. It's a fresh new approach to the discussion, because we are not immediately biased by it being Wales speaking. And not to mention that Godwin has a point; this was an opportunity in disguise. And unfortunately, in retrospect, this wasn't really picked up by the community, instead it turned into another 'fight the power' rebellion. I do not condone Wales' methods of handling the whole situation (hell, I am not sure how good he is at PR!), but that is a minor issue, but since of course it becomes the classic 'tyrant' in action, people focuses on the small 'controversial' things. Opportunists, I suppose. Opportunists hmmm, I am not convinced. But maybe is it fair to remind that the original vote to support removal of founder flag was NOT started because of the porn image story, but was started because of ANOTHER ISSUE (Wikiversity) that took place less than two months ago. In the French speaking world, editors have another grunge against WMF because of the deletion of all this content on the French Wikisource a few months ago, with the argument that it was *maybe* illegal under French Law. So, it may be that the issues individually taken are small. All together... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
Re: [Foundation-l] Threading
Um, I thought it would be better to talk privately but surprised it is forgotten at all so do it: Users can burst digest format messages into separate mails locally. It means, you can scan the digest and burst them into messages only if you want to reply. Most of ancient mail user clients have this burst function. If your mailers have no such function, there is still possibilites to get a script and run. Search for burst digest messages. By the way, Gmail doesn't seem to have that burst command, sad. On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2010 01:31, Dan Rosenthal swatjes...@gmail.com wrote: Even that solution sometimes creates new threads, for reasons unbeknownst to me. This is usually related to an error in your mail client or the mailman server. It is usually a mail header (if you are using gmail, try clicking near a mail (the arrow down) and select 'show original') that tells whether it is a reply to another mail. Sophisticated clients like pine or mutt can figure out to draw an accurate tree. Of course, gmail just renders its as a conversation, which is fine too. But digest is in this case the origin of this issue. And even with gmail, using digest makes no sense, since gmail can sort it better than mailman in most cases. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Welcome to a new board member
Welcome aboard Bishaka, great to see a female activist and creator from Asia, I hope you enjoy your new role and feel comfortable in our community. Greetings warmly from Wikiquote, On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks, Michael and Ting. Look forward to this new adventure, to becoming part of the community - and to meeting up soon. Yes, I did wonder whether you'll had noticed the POV-NPOV irony - but no worries on that score. Cheers Bishakha On 05-04-2010 14:06, Ting Chen wrote: Welcome Bishakha and looking forward to meet you soon in person. Ting Michael Snow wrote: As many of you know, we have had one vacant seat left on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees for the board to appoint. We have now filled that seat by appointing Bishakha Datta, a journalist, filmmaker, and nonprofit leader from India. In the course of finding Bishakha, we met with a number of great people and had a lot of support going through the process, and I want to thank everyone who participated. I hope everyone will warmly welcome Bishakha as part of our community. By way of background, Bishakha runs a nonprofit based in Mumbai that focuses on conveying women's perspectives in culture and the media. She also has been involved in other international nonprofit work, and her knowledge of India should be a great help to us as we move forward with the strategic plan. In general, her experience will be a wonderful asset and I think she is an ideal fit for the remaining board seat. In a bit of an ironic twist, Bishakha's organization is called Point of View, but rest assured that she understands and endorses the neutral point of view approach for Wikimedia projects. Her journalistic background means she appreciates the value of an objective presentation, and throughout our conversations with her it was clear that she supports our mission and values. We will have an official press release in the next day or so with some more information. I'm excited to be able to work with Bishakha, and I know that she is looking forward to being involved as well. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos
Poor Mike. You could blog it on Wikimedia blog, even from now? Now we have the policy with a detailed FAQ though, still I guess I'll keep posting some questions - it doesn't mean the policy is poorly written, but just I'd love to see you around. /me ducks On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: masti writes: It's crazy. sv.wiki still has unfree logo on every page :) It is unfree to protect wiki identity. This is exactly right. If we had no copyright or trademark restrictions on the Wikimedia logos and marks, it would be trivial for proprietary vendors to use the unrestricted logos in association with unfree content. My experience has been that those who object to this haven't given adequate attention to the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses we operate under -- neither license is free, and each imposes restrictions and obligations on reusers of content. What we're doing with the Wikimedia trademarks is designed to reinforce this insistence on the freedom of the content we are disseminating. My guess, admittedly based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, is that the Swedish Wikipedians who created this largely artificial and unnecessary dispute have not consulted independent trademark and copyright experts with regard to the rationale for their decision. Robert Rohde writes: Personally, I also feel that it sets a bad example for a free content company like WMF not to have any formal policy on the third party use of their logos. Even within Wikimedia there is no agreement about what is allowed and what isn't, except that Mike and others have generally said they don't object to most uses by the community, even while reserving full copyright control and the right to object in the future. I feel as if the many months of work I put into developing a new, clearer, liberal trademark policy for WMF has gone to waste! It has been three or four years since I first asked members of the WMF to draft a policy on logo use that would be clear about what is allowed both in the community and for reusers. And now I really, really feel it was wasted! Given that we don't have clear policies regarding logo use, I think the Swedish Wikipedia decision is entirely defensible. Darn it! A waste, I say! And I worked so hard to give you http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [[m:Requests for comment/Remove Founder flag]]
Hello, though I always admire Wikiversity and other community members' sincere interest and effort, the RfC Remove Founder flag looks to me too rush and poorly designed. The page appears now a sort of poll that page has never been designed so (btw: I'm the one who initiated that page on meta, but it is another story). Even if it is a right thing for us to have such a vote, since Founder flag is concerned with all WMF wikis, not only of Wikiversity, should it be designed as careful as other global right related ones, like global sysop or stewards? Otherwise, it would be seen as poor overreaction people might not take it serious, and hate to even respond. Rushness won't give out any goodness. Cheers, -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Annulment declaration of Wikipedia's principles and Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines in Japanese edition.
Briefly, the page pointed out couldn't read as described, at least in my view. There is no such vote but rather just to confirm policies and guidelines said to be applied for the project currently are really such as, and this corner picking seems to be an answer to this poster who raised this as an issue because its composition are literally different from English one. Introducing such as voted for refusing authority of Jimbo Wales is more than deceptive in my humble opinion. Language barriers are no good excuse for trolling and malice intent. Wikipedia's principles and Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines resolved to refuse in Japanese edition. The Wikipedia Japanese edition community voted for refusing authority of Jimbo Wales. the formal objection to page. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%E2%80%90%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88:%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B8%E3%82%A7%E3%82%AF%E3%83%88_%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B8%E3%82%A7%E3%82%AF%E3%83%88%E9%96%A2%E9%80%A3%E6%96%87%E6%9B%B8 Money cake 利用者:山吹色の御菓子 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:%E5%B1%B1%E5%90%B9%E8%89%B2%E3%81%AE%E5%BE%A1%E8%8F%93%E5%AD%90 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Chinese languages (was: Changes in Language committee practice: ancient and constructed languages)
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 5:18 AM, Aphaia aph...@gmail.com wrote: I find here a wrong assupmtion. First wrong assumption is Written Chinese is not very different for millenniums, they aren't same, and consequently Edo period Japanese who were taught Classical Chinese already found difficulty to understand the contemporary which was similar to the modern one. Second wrong assumption is person who knows Classical Chinese has to know modern Chinese. In East Asia, Classical Chinese had been lingua franca of the literate for millenniums, and there are many written sources, the earliest of them are dated at mid 19th C. And it is still taught in some countries including Japan. I, as a highly educated Japanese, read Classical Chinese to some extent, but I don't understand modern Chinese beyond the tourist level. I know many people who can enjoy zh-classical-Wikipedia but cannot (modern) zhwiki. So I object your statement and it wouldn't be just a fork of ZhWS but preferable to be a multilingual project. Yes, we have problems with Chinese languages and it is not just about Classical Chinese. And if you have some good sinologist around, please connect me with him or her. The logic behind rejecting Classical Chinese Wikisource is: 1) Wikisource can have sources in various languages. It is useful not to duplicate efforts with living languages (and put Japanese text on French Wikisource), but, for example, the logical place for texts in Slavenoserbian [1] is Serbian Wikisource. Relation between Anglo-Saxon and English is similar. According to this premise, Classical Chinese should go to Chinese Wikisource. 2) Just those ancient languages which are significantly different structurally in *written form* (as Wikimedia projects are still about written language) should be considered for having a separate Wikisource. According to this, Slavenoserbian and Anglo-Saxon would get projects, while it will be problematic for Classical Chinese: it looks to me that native Chinese speakers treat Classical Chinese as not so different, while other East Asians treat it so. 3) Just those ancient languages which don't have modern language which speakers consist approximately a superset of those who know that classical language -- should be considered for having a separate project. Every single person who knows Slavoserbian knows Serbian, which is true for Anglo-Saxon, too. But, it is not true for Classical Chinese. 4) Just those ancient languages which had significant productions should be considered to have separate Wikisource. Anglo-Saxon had significant production, Slavoserbian had, and, of course, Classical Chinese had, too. 5) We need [default] interface in a living language. The most logical choice for Classical Chinese is modern Chinese written in Traditional Hanji. In conjunction with (1) and (2), it would create a subset-fork of Chinese Wikisource. BTW, we are in a wiki world. Everything is changeable, but we need good reasons for changes. I would like to hear answers/confirmations on the next questions/claims: a) For Chinese speakers: Do you consider Classical Chinese as a language different from your native one or you are fully able to read Classical Chinese texts? Probably, it is somewhere in the middle, but, please, explain it. b) I suppose that it is not so hard to make a link from Japanese Wikipedia to some text on Chinese Wikisource. Actually, it would be similar if it would be about a separate Classical Chinese Wikisource. c) Are Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean etc. Wikimedian are able to contribute to Chinese Wikisource. If not, what is the problem? Orthography is a big problem. I think you have known it already on Serbian language - two different scripts are used and what it evoked. We are in a similar situation. At this moment Classical Chinese sources are hosted on zhwikisource whose default is simplified Chinese. Formerly some of them were in traditional and then we at Japanese wikis had no problem, since it is quasi similar the orthography we were educated in. But with simplified we have a big problem. Please note I don't talk about default I/F. I talk about the documents themselves. I am okay which zhwiki* choose for their default, but the written way of Classical Chinese should not be determined by Chinese native speakers ony I think - rather all concerned people should be invited. Other thoughs are welcome, as well. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoserbian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] Is the consensus to the policy necessary?
Hi, I reviewed his contribs to Japanese Wikipedia and found him post raw (not translated yet) EnWP policy without any effort to building any consensus of the community, before posting to this list. Just for your information. Best, On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Does Wikipedia's principles need consensus of the community? There is not consensus of the community, but does somebody pass if filled out the page with Policy? They do. A recently created policy page is only a proposal. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Changes in Language committee practice: ancient and constructed languages
A pure question: is there any means we have a multilingual website for those Classical language rather than saying the default is English? On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: This issue was discussed a number of times here. As some changes has happened, you should know that. Requests for Wikisource in Ancient Greek and Coptic have became eligible, as well as request for Ancient Greek Wikiquote. The condition for those projects is to keep default interface in English. Rationale: Both languages have large amount of texts and it is reasonable to keep them separately. At the other side, languages are not living, which means that interface can't be written in those languages. As the heritage written in those languages belong to the whole humanity, there is no common modern language for those who use those languages in scientific or cultural purposes, and English is world's lingua franca, the default interface should be in English. Consequences: All requests will be considered on case by case basis. For some ancient languages there is a sense to have separate Wikisource and Wikiquote, for some it is reasonably to have just Wikisource, for some it is not. And it is because of various reasons. For example, request for Wikisource in Classical Chinese has been rejected. Written Chinese is not very different for millenniums and WS in Classical Chinese would have interface in modern Chinese (probably, in Traditional Hanji), as person who knows Classical Chinese has to know modern Chinese. Thus, it would be just a fork of Chinese Wikisource. I find here a wrong assupmtion. First wrong assumption is Written Chinese is not very different for millenniums, they aren't same, and consequently Edo period Japanese who were taught Classical Chinese already found difficulty to understand the contemporary which was similar to the modern one. Second wrong assumption is person who knows Classical Chinese has to know modern Chinese. In East Asia, Classical Chinese had been lingua franca of the literate for millenniums, and there are many written sources, the earliest of them are dated at mid 19th C. And it is still taught in some countries including Japan. I, as a highly educated Japanese, read Classical Chinese to some extent, but I don't understand modern Chinese beyond the tourist level. I know many people who can enjoy zh-classical-Wikipedia but cannot (modern) zhwiki. So I object your statement and it wouldn't be just a fork of ZhWS but preferable to be a multilingual project. The other example which would be rejected is Wikisource in Old Church Slavonic. There are less than 20 preserved documents written in Old Church Slavonic and thus there is no need to create a project for such amount of texts. At the other side, Church Slavonic Wikisource would have sense and the default interface would be in Russian -- as the most of those who know to read Church Slavonic, know to read Russian, too. Requests for Wikisource and Wikinews in Esperanto have became eligible, too. Esperanto projects are treated as projects in any other language, as Esperanto is a living language. Rationale: Esperanto is a living language with significant number of native speakers. Consequences: Esperanto is an exceptional case for artificial languages. It is the only artificial language which has significant culture behind itself, as well as there are numerous examples of Esperanto as a native language. As it is a living language, it can have the full set of Wikimedia projects. The only comparable case with Esperanto is Latin, although Latin is not an artificial language. As it is a living language, it can get the full set of projects. Request for Wikipedia in Ancient Hebrew has been rejected. It is not possible to have article about train in Ancient Hebrew and it is not living language, which means that article about train won't be created at all. Consequences: It is not possible to get Wikipedia in ancient language. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 10:59 AM, gopher65 gophe...@hotmail.com wrote: You know, I've actually been recently considering an idea for combining all of the Wikinews language editions into a single project. However, the code required to accomplish this in a reasonable fashion does not currently exist, and I don't think that anyone at the foundation would be willing to jump in and volunteer the significant amount of dev time that would be necessary to make such a project possible from a technical perspective... even though I can see Wikipedia benefiting immensely from the same tech. Imagine going onto a single, non-language specific Wikipedia, simply selecting your language from a list, and having every major article appear in your selected language. You switch to another language, the same article appears, with the same text, merely having been translated by users. Translation is MUCH easier than writing a Featured Article quality article from scratch (FA articles take a surprising amount of effort and time to write), Then you don't know what translation is, or just you are no translator at all. It is bridging one culture to another, and as creative and productive as writing from scratch. I think I don't need to speak how it is time-consuming work. so this would significantly decrease the current duplication of effort that is taking place in the separate but equal multiple-languages version of the mediawiki software that we currently use. In such a model of Wikipedia much more emphasis would be placed on the translation of other language's articles into every language than is currently the case. (For instance, a while ago I was looking up some special type of Russian Perogie. The article I wanted doesn't exist on English Wikipedia, but it does exist on Russian Wikipedia... which was useless to me, because I don't speak Russian. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue... sorta.) ;-) Back to Wikinews and the issue at hand. As a Wikinews specific example of how this could eventually work: you have an article about something that happened in France, investigated by French Wikinewies, originally written in French, and then translated into Dutch, English, German, and Mandarin by other Wikinewsies. That type of coordination is currently *possible*, but it's much more difficult to manage than it would be in a better designed, multi-frontpage, auto-language selection multi-lingual site (based on your preferences for logged in users, or a per-visit dropdown language selection system (for non-logged in users)). Right now if you try to do that kind of thing you're attempting to coordinate 20 different people spread across 10 different sites; it's nigh-on impossible in practice, unfortunately. Because of the technical issues that would need to be addressed, at the present time I'd have to say that a multi-lingual version of Wikinews simply isn't practical. Combining the efforts of Wikinewies everywhere and reducing our duplication of effort via translation of locally investigated and written articles would be a great idea, but it's not something that will happen soon. That's something for the far future (10 or 15 years from now maybe), not for the immediate future. Wikinews as a whole has bigger things to worry about than that, for the moment. Maybe though, Wikipedia doesn't? Gopher65 -- From: Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:32 AM To: Wikinews mailing list wikinew...@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews I am cleaning Requests for new languages [1] at Meta. Some of the requests are clearly out of the Language committee scope, and they need wider discussion for concluding them. One of such requests is for multilingual Wikinews [2]. Please, discuss here (at foundation-l; I am sending this message to wikinews-l to poke those who are not at foundation-l) or on wiki at the page [2]. [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages [2] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikinews_multilingual ___ Wikinews-l mailing list wikinew...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l ___ Wikinews-l mailing list wikinew...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Extension of user experience work
Great news. Congrats for the team which gets now a broaden opportunity to spread their strength. I'm thrilled to look forward to see this initiative go further, and experience the website renewed by the team, as both an editor and an user. On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hello all, our very positive revenue perspective (we have already exceeded our fundraising targets for the fiscal year, and received the additional $2M from Google) allows us to do something we've hoped to be able to do: make our investment in user experience work permanent, as opposed to releasing most of the current user experience team and ending the project. It makes obvious sense for any major website to have a permanent team focused on user experience improvements in the broadest sense. This includes eliminating obvious barriers to entry, but beyond that, we want to improve the experience as a whole for both readers and editors. We're now referring to this work as user experience (UX) work, which includes usability. Naoko will be Head of UX Programs, while Trevor will be the lead front-end developer on the team. Congratulations to both of them. :-) Naoko is currently assessing the remaining contracts and will share further information as these decisions are finalized. In the immediate future post-April, we'll be concerned with tying up loose ends from the usability initiative, and finishing functionality that we had to put in the parking lot. We'll work on a roadmap and staffing plan for 2010-11 and beyond as part of our business planning process. Our long-term focus will be determined in significant part based on the recommendations from the strategic planning process; see especially the community health recommendations: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Recommendations/Community_health While we haven't finalized priorities, the single biggest piece of work is likely going to be the transition to a rich-text editor as the default editing environment for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis. But, user experience to us also means assessing how people self-organize and communicate in Wikimedia projects, how they get stuff done, and how they read and navigate our projects. Even among the areas of work we've already identified, there's enough to keep us busy for many years. :-) Please note that the original usability initiative hasn't concluded yet. The team is working on its final release, which will include some of the most-anticipated changes, including collapsing of templates to simplify the editing interface, and the production release of the new feature-set to all users. As always, we'll continue to communicate progress through http://blog.wikimedia.org/ and http://techblog.wikimedia.org/, and feedback and participation is welcome at http://usability.wikimedia.org/. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] �lliam Pietri: Where is Flagge dRevisions?
Not a sarcasm, but I would like to point out SUL, single user login took years to implement to the project wikis, and we even called once it Godot. FlaggedRevs implementation also - it took years to realize. Months are relatively shorter, and I hope you guys could wait for in a less pain. On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Mike.lifeguard mike.lifegu...@gmail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, William Pietri wrote: The thing we're working on right now is moving flaggedrevs.labs to different hardware. OK, but hasn't it been *months*?! Isn't there a dedicated team for this rollout?! What work are they actually doing? What relevant SVN commits from this team have I missed? - -Mike PS: FWIW, I agree that hiding your progress tracker on a third-party site that sucks pretty bad is not helpful. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkuLPjoACgkQst0AR/DaKHt+gwCgo8dVyxHBALMY3Ppxb5w0GZ8x eLoAn3tE56CX3tpCUUctqKwibmsgGc8h =gkOb -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)
Till some moment, all updates were assumed under GFDL ... or it was said you agree to release your upload under GFDL with your pushing this button or something alike. No tagged old images could be legacy from that era. For more details, see related mediawiki files' past revisions. Cheers, On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 4:47 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com Date: 19 February 2010 21:19 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent) To: wikipedi...@lists.wikimedia.org An editor on META is having the crazy idea of tagging all historical logo propositions made during the Wikipedia logo contest back in 2003 with a template This image has no license information attached to it. This means that it has an unknown copyright status. Unless the copyright status is provided and a license is given, the image will be deleted one week after this template was added. Example:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EloquenceSunflowerBlue-Small.png Please help save Wikipedia history and weight in to avoid all those images being deleted. We are reaching the limits of non sense. Ant ___ Wikipedia-l mailing list wikipedi...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I know the actual logos are trademarked, but the proposals aren't. If these are creations by Wikimedians, then hopefully they are under a free license. They should be uploaded to Commons and organized, if so! -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] List summary service
Thanks for your efforts, Phoebe. I'm very benefited /me struggles w/ a some-month backlog On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:08 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: So after a rather lengthier than planned delay, I posted two new foundation-l list summaries for posterity: December: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_December_1-31 January: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2010_January_1-31 I'll try to keep up with it in future; if anyone wants to help out just dive in :) -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet
Brion, congrats on your new opportunity and project and I'm bit on a relief to hear you would like to stay on our community, and I still remember the days you was a volunteer developer with great devotion (in those days e started to celebrate Brion Vibber Day) but still you won't be surprised I think your departure a loss in the project and you'll be greatly missed, though still your future is fully blessed by your friend Wikipedians. Dankon Brion for your all commitments until now and hopefully also in advance. Cheers, On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'd like to share some exciting news with you all... After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I'm going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites. I've been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I'm really excited at the opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings. StatusNet was born in the same free-culture and free-software community that brought me to Wikipedia; many of you probably already know founder Evan Prodromou from his longtime work in the wiki community, launching the awesome Wikitravel and helping out with MediaWiki development on various fronts. The big idea driving StatusNet is rebalancing power in the modern social web -- pushing data portability and open protocols to protect your autonomy from siloed proprietary services... People need the ability to control their own presence on the web instead of hoping Facebook or Twitter always treat you the way you want. This does unfortunately mean that I'll have less time for MediaWiki as I'll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally anticipated, but that doesn't mean I'm leaving the Wikimedia community or MediaWiki development! Just as I was in the MediaWiki development community before Wikimedia hired me, you'll all see me in the same IRC channels and on the same mailing lists... I know this is also a busy time with our fundraiser coming up and lots of cool ongoing developments, so to help ease the transition I've worked out a commitment to come into the WMF office one day a week through the end of December to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are. ;) We've got a great tech team here at Wikimedia, and we've done so much with so little over the last few years. A lot of really good work is going on now, modernizing both our infrastructure and our user interface... I have every confidence that Wikipedia and friends will continue to thrive! I'll start full-time at StatusNet on October 12. My key priorities until then are getting some of our key software rollouts going, supporting the Usability Initiative's next scheduled update and getting a useful but minimally-disruptive Flagged Revisions configuration going on English Wikipedia. I'm also hoping to make further improvements to our code review process, based on my experience with our recent big updates as well as the git-based workflow we're using at StatusNet -- I've got a lot of great ideas for improving the CodeReview extension... Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I'll support the hiring process as much as I can, and we're hoping to have a candidate in the door by the end of the year. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) CTO, Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Congratulations to Gdansk!
Congrats to the Polish team, and poor committee, it's always a tough decision but this year one seems one of toughest since ever. Thank you for everyone involved and hope to see you all in Gdansk next year. Again, congrats! On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 5:46 PM, Dedalus deda...@wikipedia.be wrote: Congratulations to the Poland team for winning the Wikimania 2010 bid! Dedalus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
As another historical note from Wikimania 2008 ... In our session (of mine and Arria Belli) which focused on translation, a girl who seemed to be Arabic but not known to me from where she came asked me if there would be a possibility of āmmiyya Wikipedias. I don't know which āmmiyya she cared for and don't know if she has joined the Egyptian Arabic. But it could be a sign some literal people thought it serious ... despites of other folks' questionable attitude. I am rather inclined to Alsebaey's position. If they think it the best aim they could achive, just give them a chance and blessings. It won't ruin other projects at worst, hopefully. On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Jimmy Wales jwa...@wikia-inc.com wrote: Mohamed Magdy wrote: (I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!). I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid. It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken. --Jimbo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraiser update
Not really, if you give your eyes to blogosphere global and hence multingual, including mine. I hope some would go through mine to the fundraising page, and some of trackbacks to my entry were clearly positive (I've donated them, you can do too) too. It is still anectodal, but I think it good to show your commitment to the project on your blog, not only through your editing. A blog entry which reads I love Wikipedia because xxx and will appreciate every support, specially financial one has worked well, at least in Japanophone blogosphere. On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: Supposing every blog post that mentioned 'wikipedia' and 'fundraiser' was negative, there would be 69,978. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=wikipedia+fundraiser On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Mathias Schindler mathias.schind...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: I challenge you to find 1% as many negative blog posts regarding the fundraiser as there are positive comments left by donors. Apart from that interesting debate between you and geni, I had the personal impression that this year's fundraising drive created a bit more negative responses for example in the OTRS (both relative and absolute) than last year's. I don't have numbers to prove it, so it remains an anecdote. Mathias ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- You have successfully failed! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraiser update
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Anders Wegge Keller we...@wegge.dk wrote: geni geni...@gmail.com writes: 2009/1/7 Anders Wegge Keller we...@wegge.dk: Now we can agree that fundraising banners that size are apparently effective which is good but thankyou banners that size less so. If a thank you is required one the size of the collapsed banner would appear to suffice. I don't agree on that point. Having extorted 6+ million $ out of the readers with a Jesus headline, and then switching the thank you note to leagal flyspeck, would send the wrong signal. If we NEED Joe Bloggs meney, we'd better THANK him in the same way. Otherwise he may OVERLOOK the plea next time it comes around. Or in the more emphasized way, I from Japan say. In some cultures people think of appreciation expression quite seriously. Lack or shortage of that may be taken as a sign of rudeness and would cause a huge negative reactions. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And, in fact, wikimediafoundation.org says nonprofit charitable organization. I don't know why people generally say non-profit instead of charity, then - charity would be more precise and would probably be better perceived. I'm afraid I disagree with you here. Non-profit vs for-profit is a distinction in taxation and precise. Charity vs not being charity may 1) no legal distinction in some cases and 2) Wikimedia Foundation could be no charity in some definition of non-US jurisdiction (and at worse it may be taken as deceitful). I am for adding charitable etc. but against replacing charity etc. with non-profit. I would say being charitable and being a charity mean the same thing (in reference to an organisation). Under the UK definitions (I expect other jurisdictions are similar), a charity is a non-profit whose objects and activities fit the definition of charitable objects and activities (that definition may vary from place to place). Since the WMF is described as a charitable organisation on the official webpage, I assume it is correct to call it such, so charity is a more precise term than non-profit. I don't think there is a jurisdictional problem - as long as it is a charity in its own jurisdiction, it should be fine to call it a charity on its own webpages. The issue of varying cultural perceptions of the term charity (or literal translations) is a more serious one - we should give translators sufficient leeway to deal with such localisation issues. That is why I prefer to keep calling it non-profit. During translation I met some translators who strongly hesitate to use the equivalent charity in their languages since WMF type organization couldn't be in the scope of those equivalent. As far as I know non-profit has caused no such problem. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Site Notices Phase 2 - Annual Fundraiser 2008
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:40 AM, Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/11/27 David Gerard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 2008/11/27 Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia is a charity ? People always say non-profit when describing WMF, is it a charity? The two terms are different. (In the UK, the WMF would probably be considered charitable, I don't know what the requirements are in the US.) The bottom of every page on en:wp says it's a charity! (I put that text there, after precise phrasing was worked out on the comcom list. If it's wrong we should change it ...) And, in fact, wikimediafoundation.org says nonprofit charitable organization. I don't know why people generally say non-profit instead of charity, then - charity would be more precise and would probably be better perceived. I'm afraid I disagree with you here. Non-profit vs for-profit is a distinction in taxation and precise. Charity vs not being charity may 1) no legal distinction in some cases and 2) Wikimedia Foundation could be no charity in some definition of non-US jurisdiction (and at worse it may be taken as deceitful). I am for adding charitable etc. but against replacing charity etc. with non-profit. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A local chapter without Wikimedians
Geoffrey, I have been working with Luis and other guys as translators for years. Their devotion is much appreciated and I know them thoughtful, patient and experience Wikimedians who are deeply concerned about their project and thus its relationship to the real world. Personally I am afraid Jimmy is too relying on his personal recent experience and tend to weigh less those people from the lusophone editing community than it should be, specially in the circumstance no objection toward them and support for the chapter guys has come from the editing community. Believe me, he is a good guy is no strong argument at least for me which esteem those wikipedian's long experience, devotion and their usual patient attitude to deal with things. Cheers, On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:44 AM, Geoffrey Plourde [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you are convinced that this is not personal, and that there is an issue, then please provide evidence. Otherwise, this looks like bunch of people who are unhappy because their proposal wasn't passed. Geoffrey Plourde From: Porantim [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 2:40:29 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A local chapter without Wikimedians Jimmy, again, the problem isn't personal. Please, dont't try to take this way. -- Porantim 2008/11/25 Jimmy Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] Porantim wrote: The point here is: Thomas is one of the people who deny the debate. This is the fact. Of course I want Thomas close to us, fighting with us, but I cant't believe in dictatorship. If you really want to help us, you can speak with your friend Thomas about those problemas. What do you think? In my experience with Thomas, he does not seem like the kind of person who would be denying the opportunity for people to debate, and indeed, he was quite clear with me that he's not a dictator (indeed, I got quite the opposite idea from him, that he's a believer in lots of independent action loosely coordinated... the wiki way). I am meeting Thomas on Friday, and of course this will be our main topic of conversation. I really think these issues should be quite easy to resolve. --Jimbo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
